Artist Overview: Smashing Pumpkins - Page 3

The band spent nearly a year on the road in support of Gish, and landed opening spots for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam over the course of the year. While the band was gaining notoriety and praise, internally things were in grave danger of imploding; D'Arcy and Iha ended a romantic liason that had gone on for years, putting tension into the band dynamics. Chamberlin began using hard drugs, including heroin. Corgan was clinically depressed much of the time. It was in this mindset that the band entered the studio to record Siamese Dream, their sophomore effort.

Corgan's depression led him to take a non-stop workaholic approach to Siamese Dream. He played many of the instruments himself, painstakingly overdubbing them, with Chamberlin providing the percussion. Butch Vig again produced, and gave the band his by-then trademark crystalline sound. The album displays all the tendencies Gish demonstrated, but pushed them to the edge. Kicking off with "Cerub Rock", a riff-driven hard rocker embedded in a multi-layered guitar wall-of-sound, the album is arresting right from the start. "Today" is a cross between dream pop and Black Sabbath, a place even fools would fear to tread; Smashing Pumpkins pulls it off and makes it a trademark sound. "Disarm" is symphonic rock bordering on art-rock, "Soma" and "Rocket" are early masterpieces of a new kind of grandiose hard rock, "Luna" and "Spaceboy" are lulls in the storm. In many respects, it's a nearly flawless album. It peaked at #10 on Billboard in 1993 and achieved heavy airplay; in retrospect, Siamese Dream is one on a short-list of the most influential and important albums of the 1990's; it's also one of the best.

The band continued to tour incessently, visiting Europe and Japan, and were greeted enthusiastically. In 1994 they were Lollapalooza headliners. They made the covers of magazines, and for much of the year they were the biggest band in America, especially after Nirvana's sudden demise. They re-entered the studio to record an ambitious 2-disc followup. In the interim, a collection of singles, B-sides and rarities was released in October as Pisces Iscariot. Despite the hodgepodge nature of the album, it is actually an excellent collection, and holds up nearly as well as Siamese Dream. A touchingly nervous Fleetwood Mac cover, "Landslide", was a radio hit; the album peaked at #4.

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, when it appeared in 1995, was a tough swallow at first. It was long, at two discs and 28 cuts, and displays some of the same indulgency and excess as Corgan's 70's heroes had been capable of. Yet, after the first listen, it is an album that reveals its charms with each subsequent listen. The album benefits from the full band's involvement in the recording, giving the songs a beefier, more organic sound, as on "Zero" and "Jellybelly". On other cuts, the sound is tender and fragile, as on "1979". Between the hard and soft is a remarkable array of styles and influences, neither aped nor copied, but integrated into an overall Pumpkins sound. There are also huge epic-sounding numbers like the irresistable "Tonight Tonight". Flood and Alan Moulder replace Butch Vig as producer, which gives this album a more ethereal vibe than Vig gave them, for better and worse. But overall, the album is excellent and challenging; it never fails to engage on one level or another, and displays a growing range of avenues for the band to follow. The album went to #1 and spawned four top-40 singles; it made them stadium headliners as well. It represented the peak of the band's career; the rest of the story gets a little more muddled.

Disaster struck on July 12, 1996 in New York City, prior to a two show engagement at Madison Square Garden. After a night of shooting up in a hotel room, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin and touring keyboard player Jonathan Melvoin overdosed on heroin. Hours later, Chamberlin came to again; Melvoin was dead. Chamberlin was summarily fired, and the band spent two months in limbo until a new drummer was found. Matt Walker of Filter filled in for the rest of the tour.

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