The year was 1995, and Smashing Pumpkins had already surged to become one of the biggest bands in the world from the impact of 1993’s sensational sophomore release, Siamese Dream. It was an album that dropped like an atomic bomb of grunge power, winning the hearts and minds of the masses while vaulting the group to the top of the alternative rock revolution.
The sonic grandeur of songs like “Cherub Rock” and “Today” ruled the airwaves, much like Nirvana‘s Nevermind had in 1991-1992 (with ace producer Butch Vig behind the boards on both albums). The Smashing Pumpkins were called upon to re-open San Francisco’s fabled Fillmore Auditorium in the spring of 1994, then headlined that summer’s Lollapalooza tour. The sky was the limit for Billy Corgan, who had earned the creative power to indulge his full artistic vision.
Corgan used that creative license to craft the ambitious double album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It was another huge triumph, elevating the Smashing Pumpkins to global icons on 1996’s world tour. This past November saw the release of a special deluxe vinyl box set of the album, featuring the original album across four LPs plus 80 minutes of previously unreleased tracks from the 1996 tour on two more LPs (also available as a four-CD box set).
The deluxe packaging is worthy of the 30th anniversary and the majestic music within, featuring new liner notes on the songs by Corgan in a hardbound book, a custom Smashing Pumpkins tarot card deck (!), and seven frameable lithographs, all contained in a velvet slipcase with a decorated cloth carrying bag. The tarot cards from the Major Arcana feature beautiful artwork in the theme of the original album art, with each card also connected to a song. “To fully experience the message, listen to the song(s) connected to the card and reflect on how the themes resonate with your own life,” reads the deck’s manual.
It’s a trip for a Gen-Xer to look back on this instant classic double album 30 years later, the same time frame from 1995-1996, back to the Beatles‘ Help and Revolver albums in 1965-66. Mellon Collie also traces its lineage back to the Beatles’ “White Album” from 1968, arguably the most influential double album in rock history and one that helped inspire the creativity seen in the Smashing Pumpkins here.
The box set’s packaging is gorgeous, yet it’s the incendiary live recordings that really put this release over the top. Apparently rediscovered only recently, the live tracks really do “showcase the original lineup at the height of their powers”. This box set is a special gift from the music gods, since few bands have ever rocked in the epic fashion that the Smashing Pumpkins brought to the stage in the early to mid-1990s.
“Unearthing these live recordings from the original lineup’s true, last large-scale tour was a labour of love, and for me certainly a bittersweet as once we blew apart in 1996, we were never quite the same: be it emotionally, or spiritually,” Corgan reflected in a press release.
It was at a spectacular show at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater on the Siamese Dream Tour in the fall of 1993 when Corgan gave a half tongue-in-cheek “rock power” shoutout to a fan who was apparently rocking out quite energetically. Such was the effect of the multi-dimensional music the Smashing Pumpkins were cranking out, blending guitar-driven hard rock with melodic hooks and a glorious psychedelia to generate a truly intoxicating effect. The 1996 tour featured all that and more, with the double-sized batch of new material. There were also a handful of smaller shows in the early part of the year that preceded the larger arena tour, represented here with three tracks from SOMA San Diego and three tracks from the Palace in Hollywood.
“Geek U.S.A” from the San Diego show is five minutes of blistering alt-rock energy, a tour de force for renowned drummer Jimmy Chamberlin. “X.Y.U” stretches out further, with fierce riffage and Corgan’s urgent vocals over the high-octane groove. Corgan may have played most of the parts in the studio, but guitarist James Iha and bassist D’arcy Wretzky were rock monsters of their own at the live shows. The romantic “Cupid De Locke” shows off Mellon Collie’s dreamier side, with a melodic psychedelia that makes a great compliment to the heavier material.
This reporter had graduated from San Francisco State University, relocated to Los Angeles at the end of 1994, and was in attendance at the Palace show on 4 February 1996, a small theater where the next three tracks were culled from. Capacity at the Palace in Hollywood was around 1,250, making it a hot ticket for an eager audience ready to rock out for a night to remember. The night almost turned into a personal calamity early in the show, when a fellow patron in the pit passed over a glass bowl with some weed in it.
It was just a couple of moments later when a security guard yanked us both outside for the crime of puffing. Pleading innocence while explaining that it wasn’t mine and that I wasn’t holding it, I convinced the guard to let me back into the show (where I promptly went up to the top of the balcony and puffed the joint I did in fact possess).
The cannabis greatly enhanced the psych-rock hooks in “Here is No Why”, a uniquely catchy yet still grungey tune for which Corgan provides intriguing commentary in the box set liner notes. Thematically, the song is sort of a “teenage wasteland” exploration. Corgan says the title was taken from an article he’d read on the anniversary of the first nuclear attacks in Japan, with a survivor of the devastation remarking, “Here is no why.” He goes on to note that he felt a similar sense of loss and confusion looking back “at the twisted remnants” of his own childhood memories and hid some of his sorrow in “this glimmed up tart that rings neither happy nor sad”.
Corgan also offers ironic commentary on the rock power of “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”, another peak moment in the Palace show documented here. He relates how he waffled between viewing the song as “both powerful and stupid” and was shocked when the record label informed him it had chosen it as the first single. “I had to be talked into letting it happen by one cigar-chomping CEO who declared brazenly over my phone, ‘Kid, it’s a smash!”
“Galapagos”, from the Hollywood show, features the album’s theatrical vibe on a tune Corgan notes is related to the existential isolation stemming from his crumbling marriage, which apparently informed much of the album. “Bodies” from 25 June 1996 in Saginaw, Michigan, moves into the summer tour tracks, showcasing the quartet’s full-tilt rock sound with a wall of distorted guitar over a furious rhythm.
“Where Boys Fear to Tread” from 6/29/96 Detroit is even more powerful, with sharp fuzzy riffs over a heavy groove that inherently conjures headbanging. We also get the incendiary “Zero” from the Detroit show, a glorious track that crystalized the Smashing Pumpkins’ dynamic sound in a three-minute banger. Corgan notes that when he synchronistically presented the song to the band on his 27th birthday, he “did not know then that I would become the song and the song would become part of my assumed identity.”
The Detroit tracks also include the short but sweet and fuzzy melodic rock of “Muzzle”, with Corgan noting that the title came from the idea of “thinking my life would be far simpler if I just kept my trap shut”. Then it’s on to a “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans / Beautiful / Rocket” combo from the 3 July 1996 show at Cleveland’s Gund Arena. One of the Smashing Pumpkins’ most elaborate songs, the psychedelic distortion and sustain with an underwater sonic landscape here bring the influence of Jimi Hendrix to mind. An extended jam features the dueling melodic guitars of Corgan and Iha, reminiscent of the memorable “Drown” jam on the Singles soundtrack from 1992 that brought the group to a much wider audience.
“Siva” from 30 June 1996 in Detroit harkens back to the Gish era of 1991, with the quartet’s signature collective sound as guitars and bass sync with the drums for a mesmerizing sonic attack. “An Ode to No One” from the Cleveland show features more furious percussion from Chamberlin on another incendiary example of the Smashing Pumpkins’ stunning hard rock power, which Corgan highlights in the liner notes about the song.
“The more we traveled the heavier we got, and the heavier we got the bigger the audience grew until it was a monster tipping over into those once safe spaces,” Corgan writes. “Like the circus coming to town, we brought with us all the shadow elephants into the room, asking that they dance nice nightly for the amusement of all. Songs like this rode the razor’s edge between nascent attraction and violence, where the blood of a split lip tastes good in your mouth. It took us forever to find and harness this kind of raw power, but once located and applied, it had the effect of separating the shades of each night into different radical hues.”
The live tracks close with “Through the Eyes of Ruby / Starlight” from the 5 July 1996 Philadelphia show, one of Mellon Collie’s most epic tunes, plus a closing coda of sorts. The Smashing Pumpkins have been on a resurgence since Chamberlin rejoined the band in 2015, followed by reconnecting with Iha in 2016. These live tracks from 1996 will, however, remain a testament to the peaks the group reached at the pinnacle of the original quartet’s sonic journey. The Mellon Collie album as a whole stands as a testament to that golden age of alternative rock, with an enduring staying power as one of the most ambitious efforts in rock history.
The Smashing Pumpkins became so influential in the wake of Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness that they would pop up in Hollywood 15 years later. The protagonist of director Edgar Wright’s hit 2010 film Scott Pilgrim vs the World is a young bassist whose identity largely revolves around wearing Smashing Pumpkins’ T-shirts while playing a Rickenbacker bass in his indie rock band.
The action-filled romantic comedy even had a section subtitled “Infinite Sadness”, when Pilgrim was experiencing depression over the trials and tribulations he faced in trying win the hand of romantic interest Ramona Flowers by having to defeat her seven evil-exes in combat There is indeed a cinematic quality to the Mellon Collie album, with Corgan starring as a seemingly larger than life rock star dealing with rapid fame and fortune while still trying to figure out his own life in the mid-1990s. Yet the existential melancholy is offset by the uplifting rock power.
The fact that the album would have such an influence on a film that came out 15 years later is a testament to the high-water mark the Smashing Pumpkins reached in pop culture, likewise, for the fact that songs like “1979”, “Tonight, Tonight”, “Zero” and “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” have all been covered by younger groups. Now, 15 years later, the album and movie still resonate as creative high-water marks of their respective eras.
Corgan attempted to author an alleged sequel to Mellon Collie with 2023’s rock opera double album ATUM, a concept which didn’t quite connect with the masses. Modern music fans may well wonder if it’s even possible for an album to connect with the masses in the 2020s in the same way a band could in the 1990s, when MTV videos offered a level of engagement that’s simply no longer available at the same scale.
Perhaps some enterprising band can pull it off, with Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness cited as an influence, as the Beatles were for the Smashing Pumpkins. It’s an unlikely prospect at this point, but so was that of a Chicago indie rock band soaring to the top of the alt-rock world.