I blame/credit the Smashing Pumpkins for this. It wasn't until I saw them on MTV's 120 Minutes when I was 13 that I developed this behavior. They were the first band I discovered that I actually gave a shit about. Their music meant everything to me. Billy Corgan's lyrics spoke to my teenage heart and still do today. Everyday. The way the Pumpkins dressed, the things they said in interviews, the stories in their videos, their cover art, everything. It all inspired me as a teenage girl to make music, write music, write about music, listen to music, collect music, tell people about music, and go see shows. It ruled my life. To this day, music rules my life. Ask my grandma, my bandmates, my boss at the Gap. I live/consume/create/theorize about music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
So this Friday night, I came face to face with the biggest band of my past. I begged and pleaded with my editor Ricardo to let me review the show. Originally, he was set to cover it, but plans changed and he graciously offered the Smashing Pumpkins show at the Ogden Theater to me. At first, I wasn't sure what I got myself into. I hadn't seen the Pumpkins in 11 or 12 years. I had vowed not to see them ever again.
I vowed never to see them again because this band, the band I loved had betrayed me. After Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness they went in a direction I couldn't comprehend. I know we can't all stay the same forever, but it wasn't just that. It wasn't that they were making weird electronic music, or that bros had started to like them. It was that Billy just didn't give a shit about us anymore. He didn't give a shit about his fans. He didn't give a shit that we bought Siamese Dream, the record that almost killed him to make, while simultaneously making him a commercial success. He didn't care that we identified with him and James and D'Arcy and Jimmy in a way that others outside of this album could understand.
Once the show began, I was excited. I had been nervous and nauseous the whole week, not sure if this was really what I wanted. Did I want to see the Smashing Pumpkins without James and D'Arcy? Did I want to hear songs I couldn't even bring myself to listen to outside of a show? Did I want to see what Billy was all about these days, still bitter and raging out at the people who loved him the most? Yes. I did. And I was ready.
I never wanted to fall into a trap like this. I never wanted to be so emotionally jerked around by a band that was this big. I wished sometimes that the Smashing Pumpkins could have died, or broken up for a reason that could never be reversed. Like Nirvana. We can only speculate what Kurt would be like now, or what kind of music would have been made by him and them at this time. But sadly, he is dead, so their catalog has an endpoint. A good one. And even if Courtney still does terrible things like sell his diaries to Converse, at least there is an end. But I sigh, and I digress.
The three-hour set by Billy and his backing band was well executed. The sound was incredible. His voice sounded clearer and more searing than ever. He hunched the same way he used to, and hung back under the microphone, exposing his crooked teeth with every scream just like I remembered. He paced and posed and and gestured with his over-sized hands, the hands I had dreamed about. The lights flashed, everything booming and mixing just right as SP shrapnel spun out into the air, some of it recognizable, but most of it not. And Jimmy, the only other original member of the band, he was like a Detroit machine, his drumming unchanged by age or drugs or anything else I could speculate effecting his ability to expend such taut energy.
Ginger Reyes and Jeff Schroeder sounded good too. They sounded like they should. But was I supposed to believe that this wasn't some kind of joke by the tyrant, Billy Corgan, a scam to make us think these people where the members they had replaced? Yes, they have been around in SP for a while. Yes, Melissa Auf Demaur had come and gone in between the old and the current line-up. But was I supposed to ignore the fact that Reyes had the blond hair, the misguided outfit, and even the doll-like rock-back and stare of of D'Arcy? I would be a liar if I didn't say it felt like a ploy.
The same for Schroeder. Although the fact that he and James are both Asian and that is the most obvious connection (which can be easily dismissed because that is a pretty blanket generalization about a person), it could be said that he too was fighting a bit harder for a little of the spotlight, much like James used to. But Billy would have none of it. Billy would have none of anyone's shit, not theirs or ours. He stated that he "didn't take requests" so "stop fucking asking." He claimed to be too old at 41 to do anything for anyone else, never realizing that we didn't choose this path for him. He had chosen it. He even claimed we wanted "the hits," and even worse, he claimed to to have played them.
As I stood drowning in a pool of ignorant jocks lining the stage, I had had enough. It was gone. They didn't fucking get it, and Billy sure as hell didn't care anymore if they did or not. As they TALKED and checked their Facebooks on brightly illuminated iPhones through the two Siamese Dream songs Billy so graciously gave to me live, I burned up inside. Without Siamese Dream, an album that brought the Smashing Pumpkins to the most-hyped time of their success and gave the band (and Billy mostly) the resources, the chance, and the reason to make the music they (he) create now, these ignorant, ungrateful jocks wouldn't have their heavy metal Corgan shit to sway to.
There would be no Zero, no Ava Adore, no Tarantula for them to bang their heads to or play air guitar to (both activities occurring directly in front of me at the show). There would be no bullshit Billy Corgan Empire where the dark sorcerer’s black and silver spangled flags could whip in the wind. Without the best songs, there wouldn't be the bad ones for the idiots to love up to.
But I gave up. I resigned to watching Corgan through the thick slabs of meat barricades that stood between me and the man who broke my heart. As the show came to an end, I wanted to weep. I didn't want to weep out of movement. I wanted to weep because I didn't feel a thing. The charge was dead at the root of me. I didn't hear or see anything I wanted to remember. I wanted to forget it all. I wanted to seal my SP heart back up, and drop it back deep in my closet. I wanted to focus my energy and devotion on bands who were real and gave a fuck.
Billy Corgan, you don't give a fuck. And to anyone who might read my review of their show here and wonder why I said it wasn't good, now you know why. And if you want to question my integrity as a fan and a listener, and want to know where I'm coming from, look at that picture below. Because it is a picture of me at 16, in 1997, sitting in my bedroom. And there, behind me, is how I feel about the Smashing Pumpkins.
