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Sunday, August 09, 2009 Billy, Billy: Can I Love You Again?  Me, building our house, 1984. From here. Right now I am at home and electively listening to--and enjoying!-- the Smashing Pumpkins in a non-nostalgic way for the first time in so many years--early college, at a minimum, and even that seems maybe not true. And it feels mighty strange. It seems to have all started with me Luckily, in wanting to listen to more Smashing Pumpkins, I didn't have to really "get" anything--I owned most of their "worthwhile" albums (up through Mellon Collie singles) and still have the discs tucked away in some never-ever-ever-flipped through cd binders under my bed. Still, I'm pretty sure (though I might be wrong!) that even with the openest of minds, I would have trouble right now getting into Siamese Dream or, especially, Mellon Collie. I listened to each of those records way too many times as a developing teen and anytime I've put them on since then has felt mostly awkward and/or unenjoyable. Less "experienced" for me though, are debut record Gish and the Gish/Siamese era b-sides collection Pisces Iscariot, and so I decided that they would be the best place to start. In particular, I had a feeling I would enjoy the latter as I recalled it being a more fully formed peak-era Pumpkins than the more gestational efforts of Gish. In just thinking about it, I could already hear "Obscured" playing in my head... zap zap zap zap zap.  zap zap zap zap zap. One amazing thing about being a kid vs. being a crazed adult music obsessive is how as a youth I would get into groups through one or two records and listen the shit out of those records--blam blam every day: blasting on my boombox at home, my Walkmen/Discmen on the schoolbus/bike/streets, on poorly recorded cassettes played in my parents' cars. I bled with them and they bled me. Unfortunately, with most of those discs--the aforementioned Pumpkins, Nevermind, Vs., Joshua Tree, Automatic for the People, Sgt. Peppers, Led Zeppelin's II, IV, Houses of the Holy, and a million other classic rock records--my relationship with most of them was not as a farmer tending to his crops and periodically picking fruit, but one where I ate every bit of the plant until there was nothing left to grow again. Growing out of this kind of behavior is part of growing up as a music devotee, but it means that an overhead glance of the fields of my musical landscape includes many patches of dry leaves and scorched earth. This way of singular listening was fueled admittedly by a limitation of funds and a coming of age in a pre-broadband world where everything wasn't easily available for free download (or even brain awareness). I knew some kids who could just head down to their local record store and pick up whatever they felt like, but I wasn't one of them--and anyway, again, even if I could have, I didn't even know how to find out about stuff that wasn't known by my parents or written up in Rolling Stone. Which meant that despite listening to Siamese Dream more from 1993-1999 than any other record in my collection (and Mellon Collie to a similar albeit lesser extent from 96-99), I had never even heard either Gish--or known about Pisces Iscariot--up to that point. In today's world of instant knowledge accumulation, pondering the ramifications of this fact sort of astonishes me: there was a point, just very recently, when I was even beyond childhood, when not only could I not find "anything" out instantly, but when I might not even attempt to try. For a voracious truth-seeker like myself, I have to give a little laugh. Especially when I think about myself and the fact that at age 16 I was way more obsessed with Truth than the "truths" I am intrigued by now. In any event, it meant that by the point in time in which I'd finally purchased these two records, I'd already moved beyond my Love for the Smashing Pumpkins, and the process of tearing them apart to discover their secrets no longer appealed to me. But to be clear: this non-exploration is not to be confused with, say, loving U2 or Led Zeppelin and getting a Pop or In Through the Out Door, shallow/mediocre records not worth exploring. Therefore, unopened--or rather, opened and then re-wrapped--Christmas presents they became, sitting on my proverbial and literal shelves gathering dust. And now, here I am in August 2009 listening to them again and trying to care for the first time. zap zap zap zap zap.  High on drugs, always, 1997. From here. zap zap zap zap zap. As I began my first listening of Pisces Iscariot, I was sort of shocked at how much I was not bothered by Billy Corgan, an arrogant and whiny-voiced man who probably should have always annoyed me more than he did. Sorry, Billy, but your antics are trying and your act tired. In later periods of Smashing Pumpkins (beginning with Mellon Collie, but especially so after that), Corgan's singing began to take on less of a "lead singer" and more of a "wannabe ominous godhead" tenor. Thankfully, on these early records, he's just a man who wants to be heard, and it's largely ok (minus one truly cringeworthy moment on his cover of the Fleetwood Mac standard "Landslide"). But overall? Yeah, I dig. Most of Pisces is still pretty great. There's a handful of throwaway thrashers, but many these songs--especially "Obscured", "Whir" and "La Dolly Vita"--are largely good enough to continue standing up today, and perhaps most importantly, don't sound sonically dated. It's true that listening makes you think "90s" but I have to believe that has more to do with the powerful psychological associations people have with Corgan's voice than anything else. Compare that to literally ANYTHING pre-95 by Pearl Jam, Soundgarden or other early 90s alt-mainstream leaders (save In Utero), all of which are timestamped forever, and you have to hand it to Billy--he may have been a crazy asshole (especially in the studio), but he relied on different techniques and sounds than he's peers and thus made music that can live on a little longer without aggressively connoting a dark-haired Bill Clinton. Even on Gish, which I put on after Pisces, I was surprised at how great and fully-formed they sound. The songwriting is a little weaker than his later efforts, but the musicianship and sound are excellent. I'm still surprised that I skipped right past this disc, even after digesting Siamese Dream$$$, but that was the way of things in 1994 before the world wide web existed for normal people. Anyway, there's some thoughts on revisiting Billy & Co. Below make sure to check out a few of those I particularly enjoyed. LISTEN: Smashing Pumpkins - "Obscured", from Pisces Iscariot Smashing Pumpkins - "La Dolly Vita", from Pisces Iscariot Smashing Pumpkins - "Whir", from Pisces Iscariot Smashing Pumpkins - "Rhinoceros", from Gish Smashing Pumpkins - "Suffer", from Gish Smashing Pumpkins - "Let Me Give The World To You", from Machina II (download directly from thepumpkins.net) BONUS LISTEN: Smashing Pumpkins - "Sweet Sweet" > "Luna", from Siamese Dream I once felt that "Sweet Sweet">"Luna" was the greatest one-two punch of sappy alternative rock sweetness I thought I would EVER hear. In high school I was once in love with a girl named Amy (not the girl whom my parents let me name my sister after***) and I felt triumphant as a placed these numbers at the end--She's GONNA like this! Now, haa, well, yeah. I still swoon a little but I guess I'm also a little older. NOTES: $$$ -- Oddly enough I didn't even pick up Siamese Dream through my own volition--my grandmother actually bought up for me together with Pearl Jam's Vs. on a Saturday afternoon in October 1993. I remember coming home from playing at a friend's after a morning soccer match and finding both cds sitting on my kitchen table with a note from my grandmother (who was in town visiting) saying that she'd read about Vs. in the papers as being a cd "all the kids are onto" and asked the store clerk to recommend another one as well (hence Siamese Dream). To this day, the fact that this ever happened completely bewilders me--after years and years of sweaters and sweatpants and strange gifts given to me before and after this point, I still fail to understand how on this one afternoon my grandma somehow just nailed it. Life is crazy sometimes, isn't it? *** -- No joke--my parents really did let their five and a half year old son name their newborn daughter. This story probably deserves its own post but here goes: I was in love with a girl in my kindergarten class named Amy Lott-Webb and when my sister was about to be born that December, my parents were bandying about the name Amelia for my sister if she turned out to be a girl. As the greedy logical tyrant that I am, I actually went to them to convince them that despite the fact that Amy is not technically an official shortening of Amelia, it ought to be (more so than Bill for William or Jack for John). For reasons that I am too young to remember and to this day will probably never understand, they actually bought my argument and even went one step further by choosing to only refer to her as Amy. Her birth certificate technically says Amelia, but the only time I ever remember hearing it is when my parents got mad at her (which, people, was practically never). Incidentally, Amy Lott-Webb moved out of my hometown at the end of the next year, and outside of one chance meeting when we were nine years old, I never saw her again. However, two years ago when I went back to Oneonta to get a tattoo, I learned amidst of having his needle pound in my chest that my tattoo artist Taylor, a young man who'd moved up from Alabama the year before, was engaged to be married to a pregnant Amy Lott-Webb, who had apparently moved back to Oneonta and met him and fell in love. The realization was so crazy to me that I flinched and caused him to almost stab me with the needle; leading him to ask what was wrong, at which point I told him and pointed to my sister lying on the table next to me, at which point he flinched and almost stabbed me again. What craziness. And somehow completing the cosmic silliness of it all, he gave us a painting he'd made of a Ringo Starr as gift (Zooey Deschanel, it's right here if you're bored). Life, I love you. Labels: 1990s, memories, mp3, music, old flames, re-appraisals posted by Nihilist Loves Hate, Hates Everything at 8/09/2009 03:15:00 PM 2 comments |
GET BEHIND ME DEAD MAN
Hey, I'm just some random guy who found this post and enjoyed reading it. Thanks for posting, and yeah, Pumpkins mostly rule. I love the 90s.
Thanks, Matt, glad you enjoyed and much appreciated. I'm all about revisiting the past. And speaking of which, pretty sure we used to have a link up to your site I think back in the ole 2004-05 Slang groupblog days. I'll get 'er back up.
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