Smashing Pumpkins

The anniversary: thirty years of a blockbuster

Over the top, unique and unmistakable, today as it was thirty years ago. When it hit stores on October 23, 1995, “Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness” felt almost like the final act of alternative rock. A blockbuster that packed into two hours the mood of the entire Nineties and of Generation X: rage, melancholy, confusion, oversized dreams destined to be shattered. Today, thirty years on, the Smashing Pumpkins' masterpiece still sounds like a total journey through the emotions of youth, and through the hypertrophic ambition of its author, Billy Corgan. It's no coincidence that Corgan himself called it “The Wall for Generation X”. The comparison with Pink Floyd was deliberately provocative, but not entirely far-fetched: “Mellon Collie” is a kind of plotless concept album, a rock symphony about youth and its decline. There's no character, no story to follow, but there is a powerful emotional thread holding everything together: the awareness that growing up means losing a piece of yourself forever. “Time is never time at all/ you can never ever leave without leaving a piece of youth”, sings Corgan in “Tonight, Tonight”, and in those lines lies the purest essence of the record.

In the year of our Lord 1995, the Smashing Pumpkins arrived off the back of two cult albums: “Gish” and, above all, “Siamese Dream”. They could have milked that formula forever, but in doing so they would have, in essence, had everything to lose. Instead of repeating themselves, they chose the maddest possible path: recording 57 songs, trimming them down to 28, and releasing them as a double album (a triple LP on vinyl) that resembled nothing heard before. With Flood and Alan Moulder helping out on production, Corgan built a sonic universe blending opposite genres and moods: from the orchestral pop of “Tonight, Tonight” to the metal fury of “X.Y.U.”, from the scratchy grunge of the hit “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” to the rarefied dream of “In The Arms Of Sleep”. Though tied to the grunge era, the Smashing Pumpkins' leader understood that rage alone was no longer enough. He wanted to merge the visceral rawness of grunge with the monumentality of pop, the sensitivity of art rock with the energy of alternative metal.

“Mellon Collie” is an extreme demonstration of the band's ability to shift from “infinite sadness” to bursts of pure adrenaline, from dreamy contemplation to virulent invective. It's all arranged in a fairly grandiose fashion, recalling at times the progressive symphonies of Genesis and the glam-rock swoons of Bowie. The result is an album that is at once overflowing and cohesive, where each track opens a different door onto the same universe.

The lead single is “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”, destined to become one of the anthems of the entire decade with its knockout chorus: “The world is a vampire, sent to drain/ Secret destroyers, hold you up to the flames/ And what do I get, for my pain/ Betrayed desires, and a piece of the game”. A howl of generational frustration (“Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage”) that stands alongside “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana among Gen X's undisputed anthems. “Tonight, Tonight” is an ode to lost innocence, “1979” a memory suspended between nostalgia and freedom in three minutes of pop perfection, “Zero” nihilism translated into a slogan, “Thirty-Three” an intimate confession. And then there's everything else: the psychedelic fury of “X.Y.U.”, the ethereal sweetness of “In The Arms Of Sleep”, the dreamlike drift of “Thru The Eyes Of Ruby”.

Into Corgan's melting pot goes a multitude of sounds and moods that capture everything Nineties rock had to offer: art rock, alternative metal, dream-pop, psychedelia, electric folk. A mirror of adolescent turmoil through a directionless journey that also winds through the nursery-rhyme charm of “We Only Come Out At Night”, with its player-piano and harpsichord accompaniment, and “Cupid De Locke”, with its soft harp immersed in psychedelic atmospheres not unlike those of Syd Barrett and the early Pink Floyd, all the way to the poignant ballad “By Starlight”, whose dreamy atmosphere lets through all the “infinite sadness” of the title.

“Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness” is the portrait of a transitional age, made of extremes and sudden swings, where tenderness and rage coexist without balance. It is also, perhaps, Corgan's first true attempt to portray himself in all his characteristic complexity: megalomaniacal and vulnerable, brilliant and insecure, capable of swinging from delusions of grandeur to the depths of sadness within a single verse.

At the time, the rock world was still reeling from the revolution of “Nevermind”. Grunge had swept away the colorful euphoria of the Eighties, bringing anger, disillusionment and realism back to the forefront. But Corgan didn't want to stop there. He wanted to take that energy and turn it into something bigger, almost symphonic. “Mellon Collie” is, in effect, the first great post-grunge album: it keeps the urgency and unease of Seattle, but reworks them with a melodic sense and a production polish that look beyond.

An unexpected bestseller (with more than ten million copies sold worldwide), the album received seven Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year, and has long been universally recognized as one of the greatest rock records of the Nineties.

For all its excesses and its sound unmistakably tied to a specific era, “Mellon Collie” remains a cornerstone even thirty years later. One of those albums that define an era and, at the same time, transcend it. Perhaps because behind the distorted guitars and the grandiose orchestrations lies a universal story: the end of youth, seen through the eyes of someone still living it. “Our lives are forever changed, we will never be the same”, sings Corgan – and listening to it again today, it seems to speak to anyone who has ever been young.

It was also a paradoxical turning point in the Pumpkins' saga. While the Smashing Pumpkins were reaching the peak of their success, their leader felt on the verge of collapse. His obsession with control – he wrote, arranged and played almost everything himself – had isolated him; internal tension within the band kept growing, a prelude to an inevitable decline, which would arrive after one last extraordinary surge of energy called “Adore”, the album in which Corgan blended 90s alternative rock with the most magnetic languages of the previous decade's darkwave.

At the same time, “Mellon Collie” was the album that brought an end to a certain idea of rock as total art form. In the years that followed, the genre would begin to splinter into countless offshoots, chasing other languages. But in 1995, for one instant, it seemed that everything could still be held together within those overflowing hymns to infinite sadness.

Listening to it again today means returning to that moment, but with a different gaze. Those guitars no longer exude rage, but nostalgia, and even the orchestrations, which back then seemed monumental, now feel a bit more naive. Thirty years on, “Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness” remains what it has always been: an album that reflects on the end of youth and that, paradoxically, never stops being reborn. (Claudio Fabretti)

The celebration: reissue and opera

Billy Corgan has decided to celebrate the album's thirtieth anniversary with a project that's ambitious even by his standards: turning “Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness” into an opera. From November 21 to 30, at Chicago's Lyric Opera, he'll stage “A Night Of Mellon Collie And Infinite Sadness”, seven performances with the Lyric Opera of Chicago and its chorus, conducted by James Lowe. On stage, alongside Corgan, will be soprano Sydney Mancasola, mezzo-soprano Zoie Reams, tenor Dominick Chenes and baritone Edward Parks, for an experience that will merge opera, rock and performance art. “Opera and rock both tell amplified emotions,” the Smashing Pumpkins leader explained, “and I want to honor both traditions in the most inspired way possible”. A wild, outsized idea, but ultimately perfectly in keeping with the story of an album that, back in '95, already aimed to be more than just a record.

Alongside the opera will come a monumental reissue: a collector's box set on six vinyl records (or four CDs), featuring over eighty minutes of unreleased recordings from the 1996 Infinite Sadness Tour, a hardbound book with new liner notes penned by Corgan, lithographs, custom tarot cards and a velvet pouch.

The reissue will be available from November 21 in two deluxe editions – 6LP and 4CD – both featuring 80 minutes of previously unreleased live recordings from the 1996 tour.

The new deluxe editions will be on sale on the Universal Music Italy store.

The 4CD version will include new biographical and discographical liner notes written by Billy Corgan, while the 6LP vinyl box set will feature the same tracklist (the original album plus live tracks from the '96 Infinite Sadness tour), accompanied by:

• a bound book,
• a custom tarot deck,
• seven framable lithographs,
• all housed in a velvet box with a fabric carrying bag.

All the material, including the 1996 live tracks, will also be available in digital format.

The unreleased recordings, considered by many fans to be a sort of Holy Grail, show the band's original lineup at the peak of its powers.

“Bringing these recordings to light from the last true large-scale tour with the original lineup was truly a labor of love,” says Billy Corgan. “Listening back to them was bittersweet, considering that after the 1996 breakup we were never quite the same, either emotionally or spiritually. But today, just as then, the band is full of energy, and you can hear all of our willpower in these tapes”.

It's already possible to presave the album and listen to the newly unearthed live track, “Geek U.S.A. (The Infinite Sadness Tour '96)”, available here.

Below is the music video for the track.

The review

It's 1995: the so-called Seattle scene is showing increasingly obvious signs of rigor mortis, its standard-bearers Nirvana are now a memory, and what will soon be (horribly) dubbed “nu-metal” is just being born… but for now, MTV is going wild for the video of a song with a classically crowd-pleasing grunge structure, quiet verse-angry chorus: it's called “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” and it's by Smashing Pumpkins, the Chicago quartet formed six years earlier around leader Billy Corgan. The song, with its immediate emotional impact, bolstered by the lyrics “despite all my rage I’m still just a rat in a cage” that Billy screams in the chorus, perfectly plays its role as bait for millions of kids who rush out to buy the album containing it, eager to fill the void left by Cobain and co.; but what these unwary buyers find in their hands is far more than a simple collection of pop songs seasoned with punk-metal sounds (not that this was all a Nirvana album contained, but just to give an idea…). Even the title, “Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness”, and the decadent, romantic cover art should already hint at that.

In this double album, which follows an immature but promising debut ("Gish", 1991), an absolute masterpiece capable of dismantling and rebuilding the coordinates of a new kind of rock ("Siamese Dream", 1993: in some ways close to the shoegazing movement, it's a record built on walls of heavily saturated guitars oscillating between metal and noise, alternated with oases of pure melodic serenity, over which Corgan grafts dreamy, sweet vocal lullabies), and a fascinating collection of rarities ("Pisces Iscariot", 1994), Corgan's uncontrollable ego is finally set free to roam every corner of the musical universe orbiting around the word "rock", even where it takes considerable force to bend things back into the genre's typical shape: the result is a collection of twenty-eight songs, split into two sections with the evocative titles "Dawn To Dusk" and "Twilight To Starlight", almost all of them stunning in their excessive, overflowing theatricality, and able to shift between wildly different styles and genres with disarming nonchalance.

It moves from the grunge-rock of the already mentioned "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" to the symphonic pop of the gorgeous "Tonight, Tonight", from proto-industrial experiments ("Love", "Tales From A Scorched Earth" - the latter decidedly Nine Inch Nails) to sad, semi-acoustic ballads like "In The Arms Of Sleep", "Galapagos", "By Starlight"; and again, from minor jokes like "Beautiful" or "We Only Come Out At Night" to radio-friendly rock (but with such class...) like "Here Is No Why" or "Muzzle"; from the hardcore of "X.Y.U." to the "Siamese Dream"-style rock of "Jellybelly", from tracks unmistakably progressive from their titles alone ("Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans", "Thru The Eyes Of Ruby") to the wonderful pop-wave of "1979", from metal ("Fuck You") to dream-pop ("Cupid De Locke"), in a bubbling cauldron of sounds, guitars, melodies, words. Over it all, Corgan's acidic voice, always pushing the limits of tolerability with that highly distinctive, nasal timbre that also serves as his trademark.

It's impossible to cover the entire musical range traced in this album by Corgan at the (despotic) helm of his pumpkins: the subject matter is too vast, the territories explored too far-reaching. Just as it's impossible to single out one masterpiece or one representative track - not by chance, six singles were pulled from the double CD, each released alongside several previously unreleased tracks (many of which, incidentally, are of great interest), testament to a moment of unstoppable creative grace.

The record's only trait d'union, as its title suggests, is an aura of decadent melancholy running through every track, sublimated into depressive rage in the more guitar-driven songs or diluted into languid romanticism in the more atmospheric ones; this element too helps make the final result unique, saving it from the risk of being merely a hodgepodge of disparate musical scraps and turning it instead into a complete, self-contained work.

After exhaustively exploring every corner of rock, Corgan had nothing left to conquer in his own backyard and had to change course. The results didn't live up to the man's reputation, and Billy's musical agony was (is it still?) long and painful, first with the final Smashing Pumpkins records and then with the Zwan project. What's certain is that with this double album, Corgan and co. left behind a monument to rock music, a summation of the genre (more or less mainstream) that, alongside a handful of other records, could serve as a primer or compendium for getting to know the countless facets it evolved through from the Seventies to the Nineties. (Emiliano Merlin)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google