I generally try to get to a venue at the time listed on the ticket, even though it often leads to two hours of standing around in the dark, especially unpleasant now that I often go to concerts alone. But on Thursday I was enjoying a nice dinner with friends; I wanted to take my time. So we got to United Palace at 8:45, only to find out that the band had been playing since 8. I felt a little disappointed, but more guilty than anything else. Like I'd let down an old friend I hadn't seen in a long time.
The last time I saw the Smashing Pumpkins was at their supposed last concert on December 2, 2000, at the Metro. I was 16. I wore a white ballgown and a blonde wig - someone at one point claimed they had mistaken me for Courtney Love, which seems neither likely nor a compliment - and improbably tall shoes that cut off all circulation to my feet. At one point I asked a security guard to lift me out of the crowd because I thought I was going to faint; after I'd guzzled a few bottles of water, a kind cocktail waitress led me back to my space near the front of the small venue. Everyone hated me. Pumpkins fans, myself included, are a notoriously difficult bunch.
I wasn't expecting terribly much on Thursday night. I like the reformed SP album Zeitgeist okay. I've never developed a disdain for Billy Corgan's nasal snarl, even after years of listening to the music less and less. I still like the way he sounds. His voice was the least of my troubles on Thursday. I had missed most of the first half of the setlist, which was a shame, considering they played "Eye," my favorite weird SP b-side.
This Idolator post sums up what I did see pretty well:
Now, it’s bad enough to subject your audience to about 40 minutes of abrasive, deliberately off-putting music, but it’s even more uncool to come back for an encore that mocks them for not being 100% with you, and feeling disappointed for not hearing more of what they expected to hear from a show billed as a 20th anniversary concert. In conventional show biz logic, if you’re going to go that far, you should at least leave the audience with a crowd-pleaser. In Billy Corgan logic, you come out and perform one of the lesser songs from your best-selling album, and then finish off with a song that mixes disingenuous hippy-dippy “everyone is beautiful!” lyrics with improvised sarcastic rants that outright diss the city you’re playing in, mock the fans for paying to see your band, and tell your visibly disappointed audience that you’ll see them in hell. It was full-on douche-tastic passive-aggression.
(This is a quote from Matthew Perpetua's review.)
I just felt old. I don't mind, nor am I surprised, that Corgan is an ego-driven jerk. This is the man, after all, whose lamest noodlings I used to thrill to, whose music was the sole soundtrack to a different life I imagined for myself when I was twelve years old. Jesus, I still feel guilty for being late! Despite my determination to enjoy whatever the band trotted out, even one of the awful new songs ("G.L.O.W.", anyone?) I just found myself irritated by everything. Including Billy's outfit:
He spent most of the evening in a fringed skirt made out of what looked like white duct tape, white Nike dunks, and a white Zero shirt with some sort of Elizabethan collar. Forgive the terrible picture quality:
For the encore, he put on a different shirt:
Yeah, Billy, that was totally the item of clothing you needed to change.
I don't know. I guess this post doesn't include any big surprises. It's basically a poorly-written meditation on the reasons my friend Daniel doesn't read Postsecret anymore. I can't find the actual post he made on the subject, but his reasoning was something like "Well, when you can tell me a deep human truth that's not that life is hard and loss is sad, I'll be happy to read." You could probably say that about my blog tonight.
There's a silver lining, though. I came home and got all of my Pumpkins discography back on my computer. I had never uploaded most of it; I haven't listened to this music consistently for years. And it's wonderful. I'm especially enjoying Machina II, an album I never spent much time with when it came out in 2000. Listening to these songs again reminds me why I have loved this band so deeply.
Robert Lowell once wrote that the work of Sylvia Plath "makes one feel at first reading that almost all other poetry is about nothing," That's about how I feel about Billy Corgan's music. It's demanding, too emotional, yet it always makes me feel like I'm twelve again, lying on my bed and hearing the songs for the first time.
This was my favorite picture of Billy Corgan when I was thirteen years old. Note the birthmark on his left arm and hand.
1 comment:
ya know, i was an absolute Pumpkins maniac back during my adolescence between about 15 and 18. I liked a lot of music back then but i was captivated by the pumpkins. One of my most enduring memories about their music is the day i bought Mellon Collie and played it on my cd player with headphones and listened to it every night for weeks...I was 15 and completely enthralled. They didn't sound like anyone of the time. i don't really do that anymore for any other band i listen to or even get close to the same feeling as when i listened to Mellon Collie or Siamese Dream.
Anyway, i too have been largely disappointed by the Pumpkins since they have been back. But at least we still have those really great Albums like Siamese, Mellon Collie, and Adore.
Post a Comment