PRESS RELEASES

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 25, 1996

CD Five: Thirty-Three, Transformer, The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right), The Last Song, The Bells, My Blue Heaven

SMASHING PUMPKINS BOOT DRUMMER

OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE: Smashing Pumpkins Boot Heroine Addict Drummer

Statement from the Smashing Pumpkins

July 17, 1996:

"Today we are very sorry to tell our friends and fans that we have decided to sever our relationship with our friend and drummer Jimmy Chamberlain. This may come as a shock to some, to others not, but to us it is devastating. For 9 years we have battled with Jimmy's struggles with the insidious disease of drug and alcohol addiction. It has nearly destroyed everything we are and stand for. We have decided to carry on without him, and we wish him the best that we have to offer. The three of us plan to seek an immediate replacement and to finish the touring that we started at the beginning of this year. We would like to thank everyone for all of the support.

Intensely beautiful music, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness offers 28 songs - more than two hours of overwhelming aural experience. With it, The Smashing Pumpkins clinch their status as one of the most inventive of pioneering bands - their new double CD is epic in scope. Yet, its triumph of technique - a product of 10 months of 12-hour days spent in studio seclusion - is only one aspect of its success. The complex interplay of Billy Corgan's and James Iha's crafty guitars, the intricate rhythms spun by D'Arcy's bass and Jimmy Chamberlin's drums - the musicianship displayed is dazzling. But the true marvel is the range of rich, raw feeling these breathtaking songs provoke. Speaking generally of "the excitement of expression," singer/guitarist Billy Corgan nails it: "My whole thinking is to try to get everything about life in." Infinite sadness, yes. But also joy, fury, ambivalence, and wonder.

Such ambition typifies a songwriter whose only limits are those of creativity itself. "Starting out," Corgan says, "I'd consider this astonishing legacy of music, and, being held to this great flame, I'd wonder; How do you do something different or better or new? Or, how do you not be so specific that you just appeal to five people?" Gish, Siamese Dream, and last year's B-sides and Rarities set, Pisces Iscariot, each album either a gold or platinum seller, testify that The Smashing Pumpkins have already realized Corgan's dream. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness expands the dream, rendering it in wide-screen breadth. Of such an exhausting, exhilarating undertaking Corgan comments: "We were lucky. A lot of people supported the idea of a double album. And, it's hard to explain without sounding like you're completely insane, but making it was like feeling that you're looking at a distant horizon and knowing that, if you stay focused and true to yourself, you'll get there."

"Getting there" began nearly eight years ago when The Smashing Pumpkins came to be. His father a guitarist in Chicago R&B bands, Corgan had started playing in his teens after exposure to "just about everything." He recalls, "Around the house, there were records by the Delfonics and Stevie Wonder. Later, Led Zeppelin, Hendrix, and The Beatles. And I was hearing '70s radio: Cheap Trick, the Raspberries, etc." Working in record stores also helped him to "detect parallels between Hendrix and John Coltrane, or Sinatra and Miles Davis." Soon he'd arrived at a crucial truth; "Great music completely obliterates any conceptions of genre." Such genre-busting, the deliberate erasure of stylistic boundaries, would characterize Corgan's own sound.

After heading The Marked, A Windy City rock band, Billy woodshedded, making demos until hooking up with fellow Midwesterners Iha, D'Arcy and Chamberlin in 1988. With Iha's flip-side six-string prowess ("His approach to guitar is angular," Corgan says, "where mine is fluid,") D'Arcy's punk grit ("She's a total groove player"), and Chamberlin's jazz-based chops, the quartet's skills were impressive, their collaboration unique. Gish, their 1990 debut, erupted into global sales that now top a million; tracks like "Siva" and "Rhinoceros" broadcast a startling fusion of hi-amp power and indelible melody. And inside the thunder there was wisdom, wit and candor. Corgan's lyrics, no matter how densely poetic, aimed for the heart. "Around then," Billy remembers, "I felt we'd really hit on something. When we toured, the band became ultra-aggressive. By early '92, we'd become this lean, mean, on-the-edge, completely rocking machine. With a little bit of wizardry and a little of sheer will, we were either blowing people's minds...or they hated us."

Then came 1993's Siamese Dream, fully reaping the early promise. The triple-platinum record, "Cherub Rock", "Disarm," and "Today" among its standout cuts, was "alternative music" that justified the designation: remarkably original and heartfelt. "With that album," Corgan says, "working out of this strange isolation I felt, a weird sonic kingdom was created that no other band could sound like. Siamese Dream stands apart because of its extremely distinctive aural signature."

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, begun shortly after The Smashing Pumpkins' headlining tour of Lollapalooza 1994, stands even farther, more bravely, apart. Recorded in Chicago and L.A., half of its songs composed on guitar, half on the piano that Corgan only about a year before began to play, it's produced by Corgan, Flood (U2, Nine Inch Nails), and Alan Moulder, the engineer who mixed Siamese Dream. Multi-textured, the album sound terrific; among its surprises are pedal and lap steel guitar, string parts (composed by Corgan on computer) rendered by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and a wealth of novel samples.

In mood, musicianship and attack, there's tremendous variety - from the lush "Beautiful," which came to Corgan in a dream, to the frontal guitar attack of "Bodies," "Tale of a Scorched Earth" and Fuck You (An Ode to No One)." Again and again, Billy delivers word-play lyrics ripe with images as fresh and gripping as the music he creates ("lonely towers of long mistakes," "graceful swans of never," "The world is a vampire, set to drain...") Contrast the grace of "Cupid De Locke," with its 18th century diction (the lyrics were originally a love poem Corgan penned), to the fierce immediacy of "Where Boys Fear to Tread" and "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" "Porcelina of the Vast Oceans," a nine-minute tour-de-force, alternates between slow, soft reverie and absolute artful noise. James Iha's "Take Me Down" is piercingly tender, the lush "Farewell and Goodnight," co-written by Corgan and Iha, draw the album to an elegant, memorable close.

A milestone achievement, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is the masterwork the Smashing Pumpkins were destined to make. And with other new songs already recorded, with yet more musical trails to blaze these visionaries will continue, in the words of the new song "Tonight, Tonight," rocking "in the resolute urgency of now."

Copyright © 1997 Matt Bland and ALT-MUSIC® Inc. All rights reserved.

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