Smashing Pumpkins
Fillmore, San Francisco
July/August 2007
About half way through the Smashing Pumpkins' first of twelve shows at the Fillmore in San Francisco, the answers to all the "why?"s became abundantly clear. Why bother pretending to have a band at this point? Why act as if Zwan or The Future Embrace (Corgan's lone "solo" effort) were released as Pumpkins records they would have been any different, or better received? Why go through the motions of breaking up the band in the first place? It was a line in the song "Untitled," a song billed as the "final" Smashing Pumpkins song, released as a gift to the fans before the second-to-last "last show" in Chicago, 2000, that held the answer: "To know your wish, hold it true, to slay the things that trouble you."
Considering the Rage Against The Machine reunion for a handful of shows this year, a Pumpkins re-start signals a flare to some minor population of former "disenchanted youth" who look back at the early 90's and still pine for a shot at the missed opportunities, those who look around now, as we as a society find ourselves in some of the most horrifying situations perpetrated by ourselves, and wonder, could we have avoided all of this? As the mainstream threatens to steal the life out of all creativity, at least a few of the people who thought they could make a difference back then are willing to say they still believe. Since we lost all of those people to drugs, death and indifference in the first place, Billy Corgan knows it is going to take a lot for us to have any kind of faith in what he says these days. Putting himself up for three hours every night at the Fillmore for two weeks offering the most raw and naked Corgan we've ever seen is a good start.
From the start, the difference in Corgan with seven years away from the Pumpkins was obvious. More defiant in his glare than ever, Corgan took the stage cloaked in white, clearly owning this band. With the new members Ginger Reyes, Lisa Harriton and Jeff Schroeder as visible as ghosts, and veteran Pumpkin Jimmy Chamberlin, the only one to have truly gone through Corgan hell and back, having once been fired from the Pumpkins and an album made in his absence, to be the only one he really shared the spotlight with, Billy Corgan seems to have finally embraced the Smashing Pumpkins moniker to be himself. And as such, the songs, new and old, shine with the luster of a kid who has just discovered he can paint his room any color he wants.
For the purists, myself included, Corgan appears to be offering a hand to those who look on stage and miss the vapid disconnectedness of D'arcy, and the inherently chic beauty of James Iha balancing Corgan's huge ego. The attitude on stage was "Well, you know that I did most everything anyway, and since James and D'arcy aren't here, I'll give you everything I've got." Perhaps as a further gesture, more Iha oriented songs like "I Am One" and "Soma,"obvious live picks, have been noticeably absent from the set lists. Reyes and Schroeder to an excellent job at filling the very big shoes and expectations. They do so with a little imitation and a lot of grace, but most of all, inconspicuousness. The overall vibe suggests D'arcy and Iha have a home if they want it, but since it'll be the same home they used to have, they probably won't take it.
The purpose of these residency shows then, was to allow Corgan to give us a vision of this home, this giant pumpkin he has been constructing over all these years. And so, at the risk of his credibility, or of missing an opportunity to regain it, Billy Corgan appears to be wanting to bring his home and throw a big party everywhere he goes. It comes as no surprise still when people are always taken a-back when the refreshments are nothing (and everything) like you'd expect. It's the Smashing Pumpkins after all, it's still all those contradictions Billy was always best at delivering: obtuse but honest, full of belief but a constant cynic, exaggeratedly hard then whimper quiet.
To that end, the shows at the Fillmore were a rousing flurry of creativity with a lot of generated love and honest excitement to bury some hatchets and burn some houses down, and the hopes that this kind of display of artistry can inspire all our favorite artists to open up this much access to the world of nirvana they claim to inhabit. Every moment in each of the three hour plus sets were all about trying to unlock that place. During extended guitar delay feedback jams in the glacial Pink Floyd monster, "Gossamer," Billy would often drift off to the side of the stage, sit on an amplifier and get lost in the sound of his band in full throttle. Safe inside his pumpkin of sound, you could see him secretly pining for something, the thing that the artist always searches for, the truth that's always just out of reach, but trying hard to not let that get to him and just let it take him away from the people that stood with their arms folded at the idea of a thirty minute song.
Occasionally, trying to manage the balancing act would result in a kind of spastic upheaval. During one show he started in on a rant which started about file sharing controversies, and ended up with laying on some pretty thick criticism against the anti-global warming concert they had recently taken part in, Live Earth, and festival bill-mates The Police with sarcastic quips like, "Yeah, like Live Earth, that was all about the music. And the Police reunion... all about the music." But after letting it all out with heavy handed hard rockers, he tried to reclaim himself by saying, "Since I've been known to be misunderstood, let me clarify by saying it is all about the music, because that's the best thing we've got on this earth." And with that, his declarations to "know your wish and hold it true" were coming to fruition.
Through the varied set lists from night to night, the theme of the songs that were chosen from the old catalog tended to be from that kind of perspective, the ones that spoke to the hopeless daydreamer and the tired cynic: "Hummer" ("I chased the charmed, but I don't want them anymore"), "Muzzle" ("In my dream as I was floating, far above the clouds..."), "Rocket" ("I miss everything I'll never be"), highlighting the pack. Some of the obligatory hits, "Today" and "Bullet With Butterfly Wings," most notably, seemed out of place with the more earnest and less ironic chimes of "Stand Inside Your Love" and anything off Zeitgeist, the band's current album, which both set the stage and fit in perfectly with the rest of the Pumpkin's canon. The set lists also often included a modest share of indulgence into the mostly forgotten Machina and Machina II eras of the band.
While three and a half hour shows ran the gamut of classics and new experimentations, and still managed to leave people unsatisfied, Corgan was not secretive about the fact that he had pushed his band to learn over sixty songs in the time they've been together, and the looks on their tired faces as they rounded out encores two and three on some nights showed beyond any doubt how much energy it took to learn each and every one of them to Billy's satisfaction. If one could look Jeff Schroeder in his weepy tired eyes after punching the final, final, final power chord in "Gossamer" which ended most shows and say "What? No Geek USA?," then one could say it wasn't a definitively awesome show. But short of that response, I think everybody walked away with their money's worth.
by RD Mauzy
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