Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness

Certain Songs #2277: The Smashing Pumpkins – “1979”

January 26, 2022 by Jim Connelly

Album: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Year: 1995

. . .

The thing, of course, about sprawling double-albums — especially in the CD era where they were off the equivalent of a 3-disc vinyl record — is that you get a chance to stretch out, do tracks that aren’t necessarily what the fans expect.

And so with that freedom Billy Corgan wrote an absolutely tremendous pop single, which literally sounded like nothing his band had yet done, a song that was comparable to The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” especially in how it restricted a world-class inventive drummer to playing the simplest 4/4.

Certain Songs #2276: The Smashing Pumpkins – “Muzzle”

January 25, 2022 by Jim Connelly

Album: Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness
Year: 1995

. . .

Probably because they’d written and recorded nearly 60 songs for Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness, it was a much more organic recording process than when they made Siamese Dream, as James Iha and D’arcy Wretzky got to contribute their own guitar and bass parts, though Billy Corgan would still obsessively overdub a zillion guitars on every song.

Certain Songs #2275: The Smashing Pumpkins – “Tonight, Tonight”

January 24, 2022 by Jim Connelly

Album: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Year: 1995

. . .

And so Siamese Dream was a smashing success, making it to #10 on the U.S. charts and #4 in the U.K. charts, and Billy Corgan became the latest of that early-90s trend of reluctant rock stars, who railed against the success they were having. All I can say is thank the gods for Oasis, who blew that shit right out of the water, but in the years before that, it was a real trend: artists selling millions of records getting really pissed off at the people who bought their records, even as they were taking full advantage of the artistic freedom all of those sales brought them.