Image: Brian Rasic / Getty Images Triumph into disaster Corgan knits the whole thing together with a sense of howling bombast, from the guitar freakouts of Jellybelly to the sweeping To Forgive, which knows precisely how affecting it is and lays it on real thick.ĭ’arcy Wretzky of Smashing Pumpkins. The singles are all hall of famers, and yet it’s impossible to discount the raw power of Here Is No Why (the Lemonheads with a violent streak) or singsong weirdness of We Only Come Out at Night (listen again with the Shins in mind, remarkable). Mellon Collie is not a concept piece, and neither is it prone to meandering instrumentals or empty statements, but it is big. There is the temptation to cut off disc one at the knees (or after the monstrous Bullet With Butterfly Wings) and draft in tracks like 1979, Stumbleine and X.Y.U. from disc two to create one all killer-no filler record, but that would betray the scope of the undertaking. It’s instructive, for example, to note how much of Tonight, Tonight’s pomp carries over to its guitar-bass-drums demo, with its majestic strings cast almost as the icing on the cake rather than a crucial structural element. There are a lot of bells and whistles on Mellon Collie but it’s saved from the double album scrapheap by the clear-eyed purpose of Corgan’s writing. “In a weird kind of way music has afforded me an idealism and perfectionism that I could never attain as me,” he said. Later, things got forensic at Chicago Recording Company and the Village Recorder in Los Angeles, with Corgan famously telling Rolling Stone’s David Fricke about splicing together vocal takes for Zero in search of a flawless Frankenstein’s monster. Your ears, your emotional resistance, would wear down.”īilly Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins. There was so much SPL in the room that it was physically uncomfortable. “So a lot of Mellon Collie was tracked by the band at deafening volumes. “Flood felt like the band he would see live wasn’t really captured on record,” Corgan said. In an interview with MusicRadar Corgan detailed the live rig that was called upon for Mellon Collie, with his Strats and a Gibson ES-335 augmented by Marshall 1960A cabinets, a Mesa/Boogie Strategy 500, a Marshall JMP-1 preamp and an Alesis 3630 compressor. Recording at the band’s Pumpkinland rehearsal space was conducted simultaneously across multiple rooms as guitarist James Iha and bassist D’arcy Wretzky took on more responsibility due to the colossal workload. That meant the cottage industry approach of their early albums – where Corgan and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin played almost every note – falling by the wayside. Flood and Alan Moulder, past collaborators with U2, Nick Cave and New Order, were drafted in and attention turned to replicating some of the band’s live power amid a slate of stylistic diversions and out and out curveballs.
Having tracked Gish and Siamese Dream with producer Butch Vig (who balanced the former with work on a little record called Nevermind) Corgan tore up a successful set of blueprints for Mellon Collie. For the record, from my point of view, I wasn’t trying to say that I had written my Wall … what I meant was that we were trying to reach for something expansive like Pink Floyd achieved with The Wall, as opposed to making a double album like The White Album by the Beatles, which was basically a wider collection of great songs by a group.” A change is as good as a rest “And, of course, jerks in the media still take me to task for saying that. “I went around saying I was inspired by Pink Floyd‘s The Wall to try to create that kind of big, ambitious thing,” Corgan told David Wild in the liner notes for Mellon Collie’s 2012 reissue. Split across two CDs that represented day and night, Mellon Collie’s sprawl was startling by comparison: 28 songs (totalling two hours) made the cut, and three times as many were written in a spree that recalled Bruce Springsteen’s feverish hot streak in the build up to Darkness On The Edge Of Town. But it’s easy to forget that both Gish and Siamese Dream were defined in part by their succinctness – shoegaze-literate hit after shoegaze-literate hit. Lacking the slash and burn punk streak of Nirvana and the cinematic dourness of Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and the wider Seattle set, Corgan’s music always felt more classic, more florid, less deliberately of the moment.
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