The Smashing Pumpkins

[Shadaloo]

Ever since I missed seeing the Smashing Pumpkins on their final tour prior to their initial breakup in 2000 - a result of a birthday party commitment, a lot of drinking, absentmindedness and being completely unaware of the fact that they were parting ways that year, I've been haunted by the fact that I never got to see any form of the original band play together. I eavesdropped from outside Osheaga in 2007 while Billy and Jimmy started out with their new lineup, and I attended the lugubrious Oceania tour in 2012, and the slightly more enthusiastic End TImes show in 2015.
The show last night, I'm pleased to say, blew all of those out of the water and made them look embarrassing by comparison. Mostly.

See, for years, Billy Corgan, The Great And Powerful Oz, has been adamant that he'd never do a greatest hits tour and he was very very confident that the world would recognize his greatness far and beyond SP's legacy. But that didn't happen for a variety of reasons - slagging off old bandmates, berating fans on stage, and releasing a series of middling-to-terrible albums under the SP name with a revolving cast of musicians. And that's basically the story of how SP slid into 90's footnote status, remembered for their prime years when remembered at all.
And that has never sat well with ol' WPC. So when you're out of options, you bite the bullet and do what you said you'd never do - give the people what they want. But that comes with a catch - a greatest hits tour on his terms is going to be everything he thinks the people wanted, and then some. And so we are treated to a three-hour spectacle, almost every big single from the band's heyday barring I Am One and Perfect. And what we get is a show more or less at odds with itself, that serves up equal parts excellent performances and overwrought pageantry.
We kick things off right off the bat with Disarm, performed solo by BC while the screens behind him display a series of defaced pictures and video footage from his broken youth. As the song is directly about the abuse he suffered, it's fitting imagery. It set the stage just right. It worked for this song, and I was concerned that there'd be too much focus on his visage, and for the next little while all was well, the band powered through Rocket and Siva, flooring the audience.

And then Rhinoceros came on, and snippets from the music video played in the background screens, edited to remove any visual reference of D'Arcy Wretzky, beloved former bass player. There's been a lot of back-and-foth about how she wanted to be part of this but Billy froze her out, or that the band tried to include her but she wouldn't commit or meet with them so they all decided to move on. I'm not going to speculate on any of that here, but what I will say is this - the display of her absence seems to be a profoundly calculated move. She's still loved and missed by much of the fanbase, myself included, and it would have better and more tasteful for all involved to have simply not used the footage at all. Maybe that's the message - you can't really go home again - but it came across in really poor taste.

That aside, the performance was a good one, followed by a rendition of Space Oddity that after a costume change - one of many during the evening - saw Corgan ascend to mid-screen level on a staircase against a rather pretty montage of interstellar and solar imagery. It was much better executed than the version on the Oceania tour. Drown followed, and we were treated to guitar work which brought back into focus the real reason I came to see this band - to watch them play and play well. They always did, but this was the point where I began to wish there were no backdrops of any kind. Which is when BC appeared in immense size on the screen, looking for all the world like Big Brother writ large and reciting a few lines of awkward, over-wrought poetry as an introduction to Zero which then tore the house down.

We moved through personal favorites of mine, The Everlasting Gaze which followed right on the heels of Zero and had everyone in my vicinity grooving. Stand Inside Your Love was next, to a mildly enthusiastic reaction which reminded me that very few people outside of SP fans remember the Machina album(s). We segued into Thirty-Three, and lyrics appeared on-screen for the crowd to sing along to. I tuned it out and focused on the stage - the performance was subdued but earnest. Billy, James and Jimmy moved in close and played together, while Jeff Schroeder and Jack Bates continued off to the side. This would be a common sight through the evening.

From the Lost Highway Soundtrack, Eye followed, one of a few inclusions ostensibly for the diehard fans. Corgan pattered around the stage sans guitar, focused on singing, while on the background screen footage played of him in black eye makeup and hooded costume, seemingly wandering through and outside a shack with a flashlight, bewildered expression on his face, looking like he was searching for a contact lens or a port-a-potty. It seemed to go over well wih the crowd, so...okay then.

And then he picked up his guitar again and the band launched into Soma. the triangle formed. Billy and James played up close, and in tandem. Inoffensive footage of Monarch butterflies and chrysalises played. Lighters came out. Crowd sang along. Loud cheers from the stadium. And then for reasons I will never understand apart from giving Billiam time to leave the stage and switch outfits again, we were treated to Mark McGrath - you may remember him as the guy from Sugar Ray - in a vaudeville outfit as a ringmaster, giving a hammy introduction to the next song and performer - James Iha then came on for a sweet rendition of Blew Away, Katie Cole on backup, during which people started taking bathroom breaks. James's songs have never particularly stood out as equal to BC's - it's when they wrote together that some of their best material was formed - but his return was definitely being trotted out as a selling point to to this tour, and the song is an okay one to my ears. I just hope he's having fun up there.

The next two songs were Adore's For Martha and To Sheila. Billy was mid-screen again, on an elevated piano for these. The footage shown during the former displayed a woman dancing before a small child in a top hat - one which Corgan was also wearing at this point (and from my point of view, really oversized and kind of hideously garish. I had a hard time looking away). She pivoted, twirled, performed, and touched the boy's hands beore slowly, mournfully ascending a staircase into the clouds. It was quite touching. The band played excellently. But I'm sitting here trying to immerse myself in a beautiful song BC wrote when his mother died, and I can't stop thinking that subjecting an intimate work like this to all of this pomp and glamour is ill-fitting. I realize soon after that that's the whole point. It's a big show for people who want a big show out of SP, and they're going to get it. And we're only halfway through.

The next half an hour was the evening's peak for me. Bill grabbed his axe again and the band launched into Mayonaise, and you could tell this was a house that lived, or once lived, for Siamese Dream. Lighters came out again. Applause thunderous. And then Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans kicked in, the grey, watery visuals actually really suiting the song, and Bill launched into a blistering three-minute guitar solo that reinforced my decision to attend this show, if that were ever a question. It was everything I had always wanted to see, everything that I had missed for so many years. From the period through Mayonaise, Porcelina, and through Landslide and Tonight, Tonight, I really felt like I was watching the band I'd loved for over twenty years for the first time, with no second-guessing.

And then they covered Stairway to Heaven, and there was so much going on here I could barely concentrate on the performance. Onscreen and through most of the remainder of the evening, a story borrowed from the band's halfway-realized Machina concept albums played out - a girl named June meets a rockstar god named Glass / Zero - BC's larger-than life 'persona', they hook up, the relationship goes sour, she descends into drug use, and, taking a turn from the album concept where she dies in a car crash, instead appears at the end to be saved by her faith in Zero. The experience where this was depicted theough the songs in question would probably have been much more tolerable were I unaware of that bit of history. As it is, it marked a conscious decision for me to tune all of it out and just focus on the band, and I'm one of the weirdos who wants to see that concept album come out. But back to Stairway - as June apparently has some form of rapturous sexual experience with a religious icon bearing Glass/Zero/BC's likeness, that very same icon is brought out by employees of the band in monk outfits and paraded around the outskirts of the floor.

And that's BC's underlying message of the show for those of us who can take this display for more than just Corgan's usual narcissism - "You want us to be a greatest hits legacy band? Fine, but I'm going to openly mock all of the deification of rock stardom and legacy acts while I do it for you. If I have to be a great big rock and roll cliche, I'll go all in and we'll cover the biggest cliche of a rock and roll song we can, so you can get your jollies. Fuck you. Enjoy the pedestal."

It was a really tacky, ghastly moment; the whole show of pomp and spectacle writ large, and it could only take a bruised ego like Corgan's to do it. I'm really glad I knew this was going to happen coming in, because at this point I really had an urge to sit down and sigh at the cynicism. But we weren't done yet. Cherub Rock brought the drifting audience back from the brink and got the show grounded again. Bill shredded the house down and hammed up some rockstar poses. This was followed by another Mark McGrath (WHY?) intro segment, at which point someone nearby expressed their desire for him to SHUT THE FUCK UP quite audibly, and I nodded in agreement. 1979 kicked in, as onscreen Billy-as-Zero/Glass and June ignored each other in a car, a distorted capture of Billy's smiling face from the music video shifted in the rear window. It was a really, really sad moment, partially because of the imagery and partially because of the inherently nostalgic theme of the song. It worked, but I could have done without the intentional punch to the heart. I was really wishing there were no screens at this point but I couldn't help but look.

Bill took to vamping around the stage again for Ava Adore in a great big brown jacket that wouldn't have been out of place in Coppola's Dracula, but the audience ate it up and the band was really into it. After this came Try, Try Try - and it didn't quite get there. The audience was passive, the single long since forgotten by almost everyone, and Bill's vocals sounded really strained at the end, but he plainly didn't care. They've done better renditions of it and though I like the song okay, it was the one too much as on-screen, the heroine shot up heroin. Then we kicked right back into high gear with a great take on The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning that sounded halfway between it and its guitar-driven counterpart, which helped make it a definite highlight of the night. From there, we went into the final stretch with Hummer and Today to really get the audience pumped again.

Bullet With Butterfly Wings was wisely chosen to start closing things down, and the floor, myself included, started surging and moving forward mostly heedless of security. On some nights there's apparently been a pre-recorded final scream of "CAGE!" as BC's vocal chords can't handle the scream anymore, but not on this night. He let the audience handle it and they all delivered, and this is when people really began filing out. The faithful were rewarded for their stay with Muzzle, the lighters came out again. Cliche encore break. New single, Solara, sounded much better than the studio take. Doomier atmosphere and I heard a few people on the way out conversing over how it was way better live. And while they played that one, samples of some text which appeared against a burning sun backdrop: "Love Is Not All You Need, I Am All You Need, Can't You See I'm Special, I Stand Out In A Crowd, I'm So Afraid Of Tomorrow, I No Longer See Flowers". There's the time-worn narcissism at work there, sure, but it's hard for me not to read that as WPC finally accepting that his glory days are past and dreading the concept of being a legacy act, really.

And drive the point home that this is all a big circus act, the band convenes together centre stage, Jimmy strums a ukulele, and Billy looms forward in a ludicrous circus ringmaster outfit of his own, and covers Dumbo's "Baby Mine". It's really, really easy to look at this closer as just being a self-absorbed moment where Billy aims to remind his audience that he's worth loving, should be adored, and not to be taken for granted. That's a part of it, sure, because to Billy Corgan, he IS SP. But it's also a statement about the band's history at large - the last cynical slap on a neatly wrapped giftbox, packaged for mass consumption the only way it will be accepted, a grudging reminder that the band - and Billy - is worth celebrating in all of its forms, flawed or otherwise, its forgettable periods as well as its highs.

It was very much worth it for me, after eighteen years wishing I'd seen the original band, that I'd put up on that same kind of pedestal Bill's taking the piss out of. In spite of all the cynicism, pomp, spectacle, ludicrousness and posturing, I still had a great time. There's nothing here for die-hards who've seen the band countless times in their prime already, but if you can justify the steep cost of a ticket, or score a cheap one, it's definitely worth your time if you never got to see them in the old days. If you came to see Billy, James and Jimmy play together, like I did, that's right there for you, while Jeff and Jack stick to their side - nothing against them. I have no doubt those are calculated positions for the benefit of the show, but it really doesn't matter - from the expressions on their faces, it's evident to me they're having a good time and enjoying being together again. That's what I hoped to one day see. And if that opens the door to more intimate or in-your-face performances, I'd love nothing more. This lineup is proving they can still pretty much play whatever they want and for the most part nail it.

Just do yourself a favor and don't look at the screens more than you have to.

-Shad