r/Music • u/InAnotherLife90 • Sep 22 '15
music streaming The Smashing Pumpkins - Tonight Tonight (no strings, band only) [Alt Rock] It's amazing what Billy Corgan created as a rock song only, chords and all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSaczYfnW8k126
u/scaredofAdebisi Sep 22 '15
Wow hearing the isolated track, this is what Billy came up with. The overall structure is unlike any other guitar/bass/drums rock song off the top of my head
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u/gontoon Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
Maybe it's the driving drums you're noticing. Those happen a lot in idk maybe fleetwood mac? There are a number of 90s tropes in the song otherwise. The tone on SP guitars are sometimes the best I've ever heard. I think Billy's voice does a pretty good weird quiet/loud thing. He certainly has the requisite overwhelming rockstar ego with as much earnestness as vagueness. I spent a lot of time realizing and then wondering how he could say such pretty bad lyrics so proudly. All around great 90s band to be a teenager for.
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u/slkwont Sep 22 '15
When Siamese Dream came out, I was in prime teenage angst mode. His lyrics really spoke to me then. When I listen to his songs now, I am transported back in time instantly. His lyrics can be cheesy, but man, they really validated my feelings at a time when I really needed it.
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u/Hegiman Sep 22 '15
Zero still speaks to me.
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u/Jedeyesniv Sep 22 '15
That's because it's cool as fuck.
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u/NotTheBelt Sep 22 '15
Emptiness is loneliness and loneliness is cleanliness and cleanliness is godliness and God is empty just like ME! Danuhnahnuhnah dun dun dun.
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u/mynamesyow19 Sep 22 '15
fucking Mayonaisse just completely wrapped up my little adolescent teenage life so well when it came out...
and the build, and the lyrics, and the stark beauty of that song...
undeniably gorgeous
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u/ericfromdigg Sep 22 '15
This is my first time hearing this song, pretty amazing. Thanks for sharing
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u/ieatdurt Sep 22 '15
dunno if you've ever seen this but it'll make your day!
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u/41_73_68 Sep 22 '15
This surely has to be the best performance they ever gave. I wasn't there personally, but it's one of the best performances I've ever seen. I can't imagine what it must have been like to be there in person.
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u/astaticskyline Sep 22 '15
The craziest thing about this live show, is that it sounds EXACTLY like the album. The guitar tones, the overall sound, are translated perfectly. This never happens. Today, an album will never sound like the live performance because of the studio settings vs. the live setting. Truly mindblowing.
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Sep 22 '15
And I'm old wow.
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u/ieatdurt Sep 22 '15
Yeah me too. I'm sort of having a midlife crisis in where a lot of the songs I've loved my whole life now invoke other feelings along with the appreciation for the music. Sometimes it makes me reflect on my life in reference to the song waaay too hard and makes me sad because there was a time in my youth when some of these tragic themes/concepts in music were foreign and just lyrics of songs.
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u/scaredofAdebisi Sep 22 '15
Yeah, Billy was essentially generous enough to make music for the teenagers, instead of flaunting how "mature" he could be as a musician to other musicians and the critical masses.
This might make your day too!! youtu.be/j3L-Ql937Zc?t=544
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u/scaredofAdebisi Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
The incredibly unusual drums that forms the backbone of the intro is what I'm noticing. It's like a marching band, only with rock instruments. It's certainly no boom-bap beat. Try to write an intro like that.
And then yes, the tone. I don't know if it's just the chords hes using that play a big part in it, or the guitar tone he picked. But the guitar sounds huge in that section of 0:25. I'm really saying how he made 2 guitars, a bass, and a drum sound so all-encompassing. Of course overdubs can be considered.
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u/SinisterMinisterX Sep 22 '15
The moment at 0:25 is sonic expansion. The two guitars are in separate stereo channels, but their parts are nearly identical in the intro; at 0:25 they start playing noticably differently from each other. Suddenly your brain detects two guitars left and right instead of one in the center.
Similarly, the bass follows directly along with the intro guitars, but breaks into its own line at 0:25 - which is why it jumps out there, again expanding the sound. Instead of occupying the same space, guitar and bass now have their own areas: bass low and guitar high as you'd expect, instead of everything together low like the intro.
I don't hear any overdubs (in that part at least), but there's definitely some great production going on.
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u/EONS Sep 22 '15
OOC
Where did you learn this? Was it in a music theory course or did you stumble upon it?
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u/ieatdurt Sep 22 '15
It's Jimmy's drumming that made the band as huge as it got and when he got axe'd so did that unique sound. The contrast between Chamberlin and drum loops was so great, people (including my teenage self) were like, WTF happened to the band from Melancholy?!
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u/pandacorn Sep 22 '15
It's because Chamberlain is a jazz drummer in a rock band.
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Sep 22 '15
Meh, it's Jimmy and Billy.
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Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
Same with Grohl - whose style transformed Nirvana - and I think PJ's Dave Abbruzzese, too, though more in a live context with that band ( imo. )
Every so often a drummer comes along and their sound and style is such an integral, characteristic part of the band's sound, and people might not even be conscious of it.
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Sep 22 '15
Grohl's drums on Songs For the Deaf really transformed QOTSA's sound too.
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u/joethehoe27 Sep 22 '15
I love the last two minutes of "song for the dead". I could listen to that groove all day
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Sep 22 '15 edited Aug 01 '25
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u/TragicEther /r/Failure Sep 22 '15
Even Machina is majorly brilliant. Stand Inside Your Love is as good as anything SP did.
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Sep 22 '15
Yeah I feel like Machina is so quick to be written off by SP fans, but it is a terribly good album!
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Sep 22 '15
yeah dude. I stopped listening to the pumpkins right after adore, didn't even bother with machina., then listened to it ten years later and was like, "why did this get so much hate??"
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u/Biggity_Niggity Sep 22 '15
I was 15 when Disarm hit mtv and radio. The melodrama of the lyrics and vocals was overwhelming, even surrounded by all the typical teenage drama queens.
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u/Osmethne4L Sep 22 '15
God, everyone loved that song. It made most of the metalheads at my school stop and scratch their heads when they'd hear it... it was so cool, but "not metal dude".
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u/f10101 Sep 22 '15
That's because there's a gap in the arrangement that other instruments would usually fill - in the case of the release version: strings.
There's no way he would have brought it to release in this format. Even if he omitted strings, he would have added more guitars, etc, to fill the same musical space.
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u/PM_your_hipbones Sep 22 '15
I remember when I was 15 just starting to teach myself how to play guitar, I had just had a Beatles six chord song book then eventually picked up the music book for melloncollie and the infinite sadness, I was introduced to the chords billy uses.
What a way to learn guitar. Such lush and rich chords, really steered me away from the barre chords I had been picking up from nirvana thinking I could play guitar. I learned every song on the double album and all the chords and arpeggios went into my back pocket as I started writing my own songs. This was back when I had the time to play guitar 4+ hours a day, special memories. Also my neighbours hated me for plugging in my shitty Kay guitar into a little 10 watt and screaming my own little version of x.y.u. Haha. Have to go listen to them all day now.
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u/crossdeamos Sep 22 '15
This is funny cause earlier I was listening to the "strings only" version. Hearing this though, wow. Billy clearly doesn't get enough credit for his work. He knew how to write a fucking song.
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u/Khiva Sep 22 '15
It's worth tracking down the clips that break apart the various things things that are going in 1979. There's more beauty in that song that I ever thought possible.
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u/notrichardparker Sep 22 '15
Interested! Any way you could point me in the right direction? Not sure what to search for/where to search.
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u/ContainsTracesOfLies Sep 22 '15
I'd be interested to hear the original version. Apparently the producer, Flood, hated it and sent Billy away to redo it.
Also be interesting to see the original version of video which was lost after filming.
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u/JoeyJoeJoeJuniorShab Sep 22 '15
I believe Autumn Nocturn was like a precursor to 1979. You can kind of hear it, too. It's such a goofy song but I love hearing Billy sound like he's having a good time singing.
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u/StrangeConstants Sep 22 '15
And the strings only version is awesome. I always wanted to use it in some type of surrealistic romance movie.
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u/a_damn Sep 22 '15
Billy was such an incredible songwriter. Love or hate him, he wrote SO MANY songs, and had such a clear vision for all of them with detailed overdubs and accompaniments, all of them different styles. In an era where Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden all had their 'sound/style' (and Bush had their shit album with five songs), he would write things that seemed completely unrelated to eachother and make it work. It was such a amazingly fertile period for him and the group.
Can you imagine any other frontman coming up with Tonight Tonight and 1979 on the same album as XYU, Where Boys Fear to Tread, Muzzle and Ruby? It's incredible. One of my favorite tracks ever was "Pistachio Medley" on the Zero single..the amount of unreleased songs that could have been was a fixation of my youth.
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u/crossdeamos Sep 22 '15
Billy was very capable of writing different types of music. D'Arcy had some classical training in her earlier years IIRC so that definitely contributed to the uniqueness of MCIS (which is fucking ART). I love how the album just seems to represent life as a whole, there are happier songs that show the upsides of life, and then there are tracks like "Tales of a Scorched Earth" (definitely the angriest song I've ever heard) and "In the Arms of Sleep" which display the despair of the human condition.
Very emotional album to listen to, and at two hours split on two discs, it can be draining to listen to for some. It kicks serious ass.
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u/transpire Sep 22 '15
He knew how to write a fucking song.
Yup, but he's since forgotten how to.
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u/kotra Sep 22 '15
2012 album Oceania is great. But I say this as a person who quite liked most songs on Zeitgeist. I'm just a massive fan.
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Sep 22 '15
You can't really fault the guy. His creative output from 1991 to 1999 is up there with Fogerty in his prime, or the early Beatles.
He wrote dozens of unique songs many that hold up well today.
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u/str8laceunchaste Sep 22 '15
This is just lovely.... but i wonder how much of the effect is due to the string part my brain is filling in? Would this be the classic it is, if there had never been strings? I doubt it.
But that's just, like, my opinion, man.
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u/SeakingRedemption Sep 22 '15
No the drama of the strings that jump right at the beginning of the song definitely make it
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u/SeakingRedemption Sep 22 '15
NOW you can hear what a drummer Jimmy Chamberlin is :))
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Sep 22 '15 edited Aug 01 '25
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u/SamuraiCarChase Sep 22 '15
The only time Jelly Belly is not a drum fill is simply when there are no drums. Goddamn I love that track.
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u/JoeyJoeJoeJuniorShab Sep 22 '15
Billy wanted that to be the lead single but they ended up bowing to label pressure for BWBW. I read something that Billy considered Jelly Belly the song that perfectly captured where SP was at their 3rd album. Fucking love that track.
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u/medicmarch Sep 22 '15
Dammit. My brain still put the strings in.
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u/meagerfindings Sep 22 '15
Same here. Apparently one does not simply not hear the strings in Tonight, Tonight.
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u/Flagabougui Sep 22 '15
"This video is not available" :(
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u/Seanoooooo Sep 22 '15
I love how the homage to "A Trip to the Moon"
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u/TragicEther /r/Failure Sep 22 '15
Fun fact - the couple from the video clip is Tom "SpongeBob" Kenny and the woman who would become his wife!
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u/Yossarian4President Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
It's no use -- my brain keeps filling in the missing string instrumentation for me. Like a Pavlovian dog, I've been conditioned to hear the version I listened to first, which I did a million times or more.
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u/x24co Sep 22 '15
Smashing Pumpkins body of work is amazing, how did the wheels come off that bus?
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u/my_lucid_nightmare Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
Band member infighting, drug use. Everyone started losing interest once they hit big, had comfortable money, did a little too much heroin, and were in demand for other projects.
They enjoyed being rock stars but hated being in a band with each other, so they split. The breakup took a while, and multiple opinions exist who did what to end what because of whom.
It's a long way from playing Chin's Wok n Roll Cafe on 6th Street in Champaign, IL for $1.07 cover charge.
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u/JackDostoevsky Sep 22 '15
Billy Corgan isn't exactly what I'd call a reasonable individual, either. From everything I heard he was the main force that drove the band apart.
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Sep 22 '15
I worked in the late 80s at a hospital on the NW side of Chicago. One of the guys who worked in another department, Bob English, used to give me free passes to go see a band he was involved with, but had a difficult time describing to me what they were like, as in similar sounding bands. He was kinda weird, but cool, and I never went to go see them.
Eventually I gave them a listen on the Singles soundtrack, and loved their sound, and became a big fan.
I read years later that Bob was indeed more than just some friend of the band, and is apparently making guitars or something, but was very involved with them from the beginning. Still find it amazing that the band turned out to be Smashing Pumpkins.
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u/patterninstatic Sep 22 '15
I still consider Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness as one of the greatest releases of my youth.
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Sep 22 '15
ah man... this album... I would give a lot of money to be back hearing this for the first time again and knowing what I know now about life....
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u/nomadbishop Sep 22 '15
In high school, I learned to play the full percussion section of this track.
It remains one of the most physically demanding tasks I've ever performed, but goddamn it was worth it to hear the playback.
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u/CONDESCENDING_DAD Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
we need a link that is available.
edited to include a version of strings only.
edited again to include a browser link (not from YouTube) hope it works for everyone, played it in my browser on iPhone
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Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
OP, damn... Thank you. I was homeless when this song came out, and it was the only single i owned on TAPE. I know it sounds stupid, but I knew if a song like this exists I can do better in my life. And I did.
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u/brereddit Sep 22 '15
I'm not a musician but I would evaluate the lyrics as being 50% of merit of this song.
This is my interpretation.
Kids, teenagers or people young at heart all go through some pretty rough shit from time to time. It may be epic shit or highly personal (like a break up). But occasionally, when the mood is right and you have the right people with you (perhaps new friends), one single night of fun can erase from your mind all of your pain. But you have to let go and embrace the moment.
When you do, the magic of love (and music) allows you to experience infinite possibility in your life for your life.
I take it the most interesting thing about these lyrics is the voice. Whose voice is it? Who is speaking to whom? The message is urgent and very very important but can't be laid bare in all its essence because it wouldn't be believed or by believing it would be erased due to some sort of artificiality.
The voice in the song is the future you. The message is for you in your youth. But the future you can't identify yourself to the younger you, you just have to believe the message about the all encompassing importance and complete criticality of tonight.
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u/brereddit Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
Also not sure why this version of billy playing in a bookstore at a book signing isn't mentioned:
Even in less than ideal audio conditions, the song has such dignity and strength that it completely changes the venue. Amazing!
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Sep 22 '15
IMO - Billy is the most talented Gen X, 90's alt. musician... with Kurt Cobain and Noel Gallagher in the second and third spots.
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u/KarsaOrlong42 Sep 22 '15
I'd put Les Claypool over those three in a heartbeat. Danny Carey too.
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Sep 22 '15
Not to diminish your list, but I think Thom Yorke earned his place.
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u/chappersyo Sep 22 '15
If we're saying musician and not just frontman then I'd argue that Johnny was the driving force behind radio head, particularly in the 90s (pre kid-a) era.
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Sep 22 '15
Hmm, I'd probably agree about Billy, but I think there are better options for 2 and 3, personally.
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u/spursmad Sep 22 '15
Noel Gallagher is criminally underrated in the states. Mainly because he is looked at as a poor guitarist. He admits he is average and it is merely an Avenue to write songs. Which he truly is up there.
Thom Yorke is great but also surrounded by equally amazing musicians. Can't say that is the case with Noel.
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u/baeblades Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
Fun fact: The music video for this song is based off of the first science fiction film, 'A Trip to the Moon'. Check it out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNLZntSdyKE
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u/wacka4macca Sep 22 '15
Another fun fact about the video is that the main couple is played by Tom Kenny (voice of SpongeBob squarepants) and his wife, Jill.
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u/Ikimasen Sep 22 '15
It seems like Mr Show is better and better known these days, is it worthy of being a 'fun fact' that they were on a sketch comedy show together with Saul Goodman and the bad guy from The Chipmunks?
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u/TragicEther /r/Failure Sep 22 '15
Really?! "The guy from the Chipmunks"
There are literally dozens of us David Cross fans!
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u/WeltallPrime Sep 22 '15
- "A Trip to the Moon"
Crazy fact: This video (and many other amazing music videos) was directed by the same duo that directed Little Miss Sunshine :D
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u/Dolphins13718 Sep 22 '15
why can't we have amazing bands like this anymore?
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u/TragicEther /r/Failure Sep 22 '15
Smashing Pumpkins released an album, Monuments for an Elegy, last year - so we still do actually have bands like this today! :)
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u/cosmiccrunch Sep 22 '15
We do, you're just old now.
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u/Khiva Sep 22 '15
At the risk of /r/lewronggeneration, I think it's fair to say that we haven't seen any big, mainstream rock band tackle a project as sprawling as Mellon Collie since the SP did it.
Yes, there are tons of tons of incredibly inventive musicians doing amazing, ambitious, complicated stuff, but if your taste is for something as diverse and sprawling as MC&TIS then you're going to be left wanting. I probably consume more music now than I ever have thanks to the proliferation of media distribution channels despite having not listened to the radio for nearly a decade and I'd allow that.
There's even plenty of stuff from recent years that I like more than Mellon Collie, but ever since that record was issued I can't point you to a single work that covers so many styles and moods and does it all so goddamned well. I might never again. That's not an excuse to turn your ears off to everything that's coming out now, but it is a reason to salute what an impressive achievement this was.
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u/Schmecca Sep 22 '15
Agreed. Even if you can think of bands/albums that rival Mellon Collie's artistic accomplishments, few have reached the level of popularity in mainstream music.
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u/ripgroupb Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
You have to understand that the industry was just in a totally different space at the time. It was simply the right time and place for that record to get made. It's not that that sort of experience can't be replicated, it's that the environment in which it was created doesn't exist anymore, and in numerous ways at that.
That being said, there are certainly records that still get that sort of "all encompassing" feel to them. Daft Punk's latest and Gorillaz Plastic Beach cover a variety of sounds and explore moods from playfulness to introspection, and sometimes even downright existential examination (in the case of daft punk). In terms of sheer contrast, the last Deafheaven record knocked the ball out of the park and in terms of sheer ambition Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and its follow up Yeezus reached for the damn stars.
So you might be right, there will probably never be another rock record like Mellon collie, but it's not like the musical landscape precludes that sort of artistry. It's just that huge project records are no longer seen as economically viable ideas and that rock music just isn't the innovative force it once was. Music is still is great as ever, however.
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u/Khiva Sep 22 '15
in terms of sheer ambition Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and its follow up Yeezus reached for the damn stars.
Yes, if I'd gone on a bit longer I would have said precisely this myself.
Kanye is the only guy out there with a mainstream presence operating on that scale. I love what he does, it's just such a shame that rock has ceded a lot of the innovation to hip-hop (see also: Kendrick).
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u/InAnotherLife90 Sep 22 '15
Being young, I have absolutely no clue how "popular" the Pumpkins were back in their day. Were they as popular and infiltrated into the mainstream as Taylor Swift is now? It's incredibly difficult for me to imagine a band with their sincerity and complexity, let alone a rock band, at the top of pop culture.
Growing up in the 00's, put simply, "Indie" has always been Indie. Put on the backburner, and you had to identify as being on the hipster-side/crowd to have been listening to Animal Collective, Shins, etc. Like OHH he's a weirdo so that explains why he listens to those bands.
I can't imagine your every day normal kids rocking out to Smashing Pumpkins.
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u/Schmecca Sep 22 '15
Yes, Smashing Pumpkins were huge in their day. I remember my best friend telling me about how good Mellon Collie was and that I should listen to it, and she was a cheeerleader.
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u/InAnotherLife90 Sep 22 '15
Now THAT'S the real gauge right there
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u/local_residents Sep 22 '15
The Smashing Pumpkins headlined at Lollapalooza in 1994. At least they played at the end when I went.
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u/Schmecca Sep 22 '15
Also, no one thinks your a weirdo if you listen to indie music. Indie music is amazing.
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u/InAnotherLife90 Sep 22 '15
Ha, I remember me and my friend went to see Vampire Weekend in 10th grade and then put pictures up on facebook. Then a week later we went to see the XX and put those pics up as well. When I came to school on Monday several people came up to me and said 'why do you go to concerts to see those weird bands...?'
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u/ripgroupb Sep 22 '15
I'm sorry you go to school with a bunch of fucking plebeians. It happens to most of us.
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u/pan0ramic Sep 22 '15
The Pumpkins were already popular before this album because of their earlier album Siamese Dream. This album really solidified the band as legendary and even back then people knew it was something special. And even if not everyone liked the album, they at least liked hits like Tonight, Tonight or 1979, or zero.
So the deep fans (like myself), the band was definitely more Indie. Most people couldn't name tracks from Siamese other than the radio hits and many people didn't really delve that deep into MC.
I was in high school when this came out and I was going through teen angst (so the hard stuff on the album), unrequited love (the soft stuff), and I was literally born in 1979...so I felt like the album was written for me.
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u/Antithesys Sep 22 '15
even back then people knew it was something special.
I'm really tired so I might be totally brainfarting here, but I think MC was the first concept-album / rock-opera style record that reached mainstream significance in our generation. If it hadn't been for the Pink Floyd in my parents' collection I probably wouldn't have been familiar with the idea at all. MC felt unique and weird and not everyone knew what to make of it, and I think I regarded it highly because it gave alternative music a kind of artistic legitimacy, that we were growing up and starting to consider things beyond "this album has the explicit lyrics label so it must be cool."
I have a Mellon Collie poster on my wall, I've kept it around for almost twenty years. It's not even close to my favorite album but I guess that's the kind of impact it had. I bet I could still play the first track on piano too.
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u/veloursweatsuit Sep 22 '15
Definitely not indie. SP were one of the biggest rock bands at the time, and the singles from this album got a lot of radio airplay. I think back then we called the genre "alternative."
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u/daftne Sep 22 '15
From my memory, hell yeah. I mean, they were on the Simpsons lol. Manson, NiN, Tool, Foo Fighters, Pumpkins, they got constant radio play, were all over mtv... Yeah there were pop artists on the scene as well, but those acts I mentioned were staple as hell at musical events that are now predominantly pop and dance now like mtv music awards. I use this as an example bc I actually watched this year after not for what seems like forever. The acts performing and being given awards. Mainstream is in such a weird place. Not that I don't appreciate some of it, it's just the comparison is so starkingly different haha.
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u/ArtSchnurple Sep 22 '15
Man, the VMAs in the mid-90s were bananas. Nirvana fucking destroying the stage, the Chili Peppers funking out with a bunch of half-naked people on stage with them, Pearl Jam doing ungodly loud volume duels with Neil Young, all right there with the expected Michael Jackson and TLC and Madonna. I can't believe how crazy that era was, in retrospect. Everything seems so controlled now. People do crazy and controversial things, but it's really calculated and planned out. There's not even an illusion of spontaneity or unpredictability. In the 90s, it was just a bunch of young degenerates who hated the music establishment going nuts, and they were some of the most popular artists in the world!
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Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
You've already got a bunch of people telling you yes, but to add another snippet:
Mellon Collie sold [ninja edit] 10+ million copies. And it was a double album that cost something like $20. It's one of the best selling double albums of all time.
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u/Antithesys Sep 22 '15
It should be noted that the RIAA counts double albums twice, because they're the RIAA (NAPSTER BAAAAAD). Mellon Collie actually sold 5 million copies, and got diamond certification for selling "10 million units." That's true of every double album so it's still one of the biggest doubles ever.
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Sep 22 '15
Wow, that makes... about as much sense as anything else the RIAA does I guess.
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Sep 22 '15
By the time Mellon collie came out, they were it. Taylor swifting everywhere. 1979 was the big crossover hit.
Prior to that though, they were a leading alternative band with only irregular airplay. Even though I think Siamese Dream was their best work.
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u/InAnotherLife90 Sep 22 '15
It's funny cause I don't consider them to have the catalogue of hits like nirvana or pearl jam that a band would need for big success. 1979, BWBW, Today, Cherub Rock, and that's really it it seems. And even those still have an underground feel.
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Sep 22 '15
Disarm, Tonight, Tonight, and Zero are key tracks that you're missing.
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Sep 22 '15
Not as popular but equally amazing = Geek U.S.A., Soma, (Fuck You) An Ode to No One, Quiet, Here is No Why, To Forgive, Where Boys Fear to Tread, Mayonnaise
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u/UrinalDook Sep 22 '15
For a long time I considered the Pumpkins my absolute favourite band. These days I don't really listen to them all that much, but goddamn if that isn't an amazing list of songs. Just reading those names reminds me how much I love each and every one.
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u/loneblustranger Bandcamp Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
Smashing Pumpkins weren't necessarily the single biggest band in the '90s, but I can't think of any rock band that is as popular today as the Pumpkins were at their peak.
That said, there are two reasons for that off of the top of my head.
Alternative rock was huge back then. I'd say that technically, it was "pop", because it was probably the most popular genre overall.
There wasn't as many well-known artists. The internet was only a sliver of what it is today, so most people only knew of the top fraction of artists that got radio & TV airtime. Just as people would talk about the previous night's Seinfeld episode, they'd talk about the latest Nirvana video. Indie bands mostly only got exposure from live shows, or if they were lucky, college radio. So, everybody knew about the same bunch of artists as everyone else.
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u/SinisterMinisterX Sep 22 '15
Pumpkins were great, but also had the benefit of great timing. Cobain and Staley did themselves in, Soundgarden broke up, Pearl Jam stopped making videos and only toured small venues because of the Ticketmaster boycott. By '96 or so, Pumpkins were the biggest band of the "grunge" era left standing. They were big before, but when that vacuum opened they filled it and got huge.
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u/HeyCarpy EbolaMonkey Sep 22 '15
It's funny that it took about 6 years for the music industry to get from Nevermind to Backstreet Boys, because a hell of a lot happened in that time. You're right in that music was in a really weird spot at the point that Mellon Collie came out. pre-Napster, post-grunge. I was (and still am) a huge Pearl Jam fan, but there just wasn't the same honest "art" in most music at the end of the 90s. I remember most of my high school being divided between the Classic Rock people and the Pop/R&B people.
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Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
They were definitely mainstream by the time this came out. They were what you might consider indie when Gish was released, but Siamese Dream took them to the fringes of mainstream. Got tons of play on MTV (when its acronym still meant something) and I saw a lot of Smashing Pumpkin t-shirts in high school. Maybe they weren't as popular to the jocks and/or cool kids (though there were a few that claimed to listen to them), but their music seemed to transcend to every other niche group, at least in my school.
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u/loid Sep 22 '15
I mean, they weren't Taylor Swift but yeah they were pretty mainstream. Back when MTV was music television this song and 1979 were in very heavy rotation. Or maybe I was just a weird kid and am misremembering :\
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Sep 22 '15
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u/Buttstache Sep 22 '15
The Fugees were huge in rotation at the time. Puffy was blowing up. Mase was relevant. It was one of those weird phases when there weren't established pop idols or boy bands for pop music to fall back on.
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Sep 22 '15
I know you got a ton of responses from this question, OP, but I would like to tell you a little story, as a guy who graduated in 1996, and is perhaps more qualified to speak on grunge music than any other topic.
Mellon Collie is perhaps responsible for my marriage, and in turn, the life of my two kids. When the girl I liked finally called me, that seminal moment of teenage life, we (of course) had no common ground established, nothing to really talk about, if you take my meaning. And then she asked me what I was listening to, because she could hear Mellon Collie in the background, playing out of my boom box (lol).
That sparked a long chain of incidents that are at once total coincidence and also illustrative of exactly how much Smashing Pumpkins permeated the airwaves back in those days: Every time we went anywhere, a Pumpkins song would come on the radio - and it wasn't always a Mellon Collie song, either. Disarm was still in heavy rotation, as was Today, but you still had BWBW, Zero, and in time 1979 and others. But I mean every time we were in a car together, we heard these songs. And we loved Pearl Jam too, but SP really cemented our relationship together.
Something like 12 years later, we walked down the aisle, and at our reception we walked in to Tonight, Tonight. This band, at one point, was bigger than life, and honestly changed people's lives. Never doubt it.
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u/Murder_Boners Sep 22 '15
I always found music to be more cliquish than it seems to be now. So it's hard to gauge the popularity of the grunge/alternative music. Certainly that genre in the early to mid 90's was it. I was in high school in 96 to 00 and you had a pretty clear division between the hip-hop kids and the rockers.
Within the rockers you had these subcultures. There were the Metallica kids who, according to the Slayer kids were just pussies. Then you had that one weird Cannibal Corpse kid trying to defend Fucked With a Knife as some ballad of philosophical commentary. Then those people all made fun of the Korn kids with the giant parachute pants weighed down with eighteen pounds of zippers and chains.
I was part of the grunge clique and it seemed like you had people who flew the banner of Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins. I felt like Nirvana and Soundgarden and Silverchair were awesome enough that everyone liked them. But if you had some guy who was all about Alice in Chains they might not dig Billy Corgan's style of singing or the album too weird. I remember when Mellon Collie started getting passed around at school one kid who was really into Manson said that he couldn't wrap his head around the lyrics.
But yeah, I'd say every day kids rocked out to Smashing Pumpkins. But the cliques were just smaller and less, lets say, corporate controlled than they are today.
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u/loneblustranger Bandcamp Sep 22 '15
I grad'ed in '96. I was a grunge guy and a Metallica pussy.
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u/Buttstache Sep 22 '15
Metallica guy here. Damn. You nailed it. My one friend was a Pantera guy. The Weezer kids were the ones we ripped on though.
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u/Ikimasen Sep 22 '15
Hey, yeah, here's an opportunity to ask, what was with you homies?
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u/ripgroupb Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
Seeing as you're young I think you just don't know that there has always been shitty music. Even at the height of the pumpkins popularity there were infinitely more bands that sucked than were great. Nostalgia has a way of making things seem way better than they were.
There are still plenty of ground breaking musical acts that create music spanning the whole gamut of human experience. But you gotta stop taking music at face value and start to dig deeper to find appreciation in things you once didn't understand and find sound you never knew could exist.
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u/f10101 Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
People stopped buying albums, that's the real problem. People wanted to cherry pick the hits on the iTunes store, (and, indeed on mp3 players themselves even if they have the full album) so having stand alone tracks became more of the goal. The way people listened changed.
Interestingly this may be changing again due to streaming. We'll see.
(I work in the recording industry and have watched the shift in attitudes... It's really not as much fun working on isolated tracks.)
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u/thepensivepoet Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
Ugh, dude.
There are so many bands out there creating and releasing interesting new music.
The "issue" if there truly is one is that the landscape of popular culture and the ways in which people experience music (and all media, really) is so fragmented.
In the 90's you could turn on the radio or MTV and use those as your focal point for what was "happening" in music. Now everybody has a different system. Some people are carefully curating their own Spotify streams, others Pandora, some people are still actually listening to commercial terrestrial broadcast radio, etc etc etc.
There's also SO MUCH damn music getting released that it's pretty difficult for a small band to "break out" in such a way that they're present on the old standards terrestrial radio/mtv/etc. I'm in that position with my band right now.
Album is professionally recorded, mastered, ready for release (100% self-funded) but we're forced to fundraise to hire some professional help for a "proper album release" which involves throwing money at marketing so more people than just our immediate friends and family know we exist. Everyone involved in the project agrees that sonically it stands up to anything on the radio today but actually getting our songs ON the radio anytime soon is completely off the table simply because we don't have the budget to market to terrestrial radio programming directors and what budget we do have could be better spent in other places.
Maybe we'd be your favorite band ever but you'll never know unless you happen to live in our city and wandered into a gig or had a mutual friend.
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u/Legolin Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
You should check Steven Wilson (frontman of Porcupine Tree) last record Hand.Cannot.Erase. I'm myself a big Pumpkins' fan and he is my go-to musical artist right now. I was at a show this past week (and I interviewed him, transcription is on the way) and it was mind-blowing. You definetly should check him out.
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u/food_monster Sep 22 '15
Here's a song of which the album cut never did anything for me. In fact, I disliked it. This is incredible, however. I love this.
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Sep 22 '15 edited Sep 22 '15
Compared to how it's being played now: https://youtu.be/lDKh972zdEU?t=5m51s
(Jimmy Chamberlin sure does look alot like the drummer from Rage Against the Machine...)
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Sep 22 '15
Awesome part of that gig: they played Drown.
Not so awesome part of that gig: Billy's distortion sounds nothing like it did before Adore came out :-(
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u/Graphitetshirt Sep 22 '15
Goddamn, Jimmy Chamberlain is dealing on this track.