The Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 30th anniversary

Ferreting through a swathe of music paraphernalia in anticipation of moving flat, and I stumbled across a part of one of the first cassettes I bought. That part, side-B of The Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Where was side-A? Damaged beyond repair and discarded 27 years ago having been played too much.

Barely 10 minutes after I’d found the cassette, it came to my attention that Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness would soon be celebrating its thirtieth birthday. Some would see this as a sign, but it was no real surprise, considering the mystical powers this album has had throughout my life.

Never mind that The Smashing Pumpkins have been an irrelevant force since the turn of century (Machina / The Machines of God, in my opinion, their last hurrah). A hero to some, insufferable to others, Billy Corgan has always been a divisive character, but that really is beside the point here. We all have artists that we choose (or not) to freeze in time, and The Smashing Pumpkins are mine. Why? Because as a wide-eyed teenager growing up in the backwaters of regional Australia, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was the first record that found its way into my home and spoke to me. It was only record I needed in my life.

Given today’s listening trends, it’s hard to imagine living with one album for years on end, but that’s exactly how it was, and I’m sure many others from the same generation experienced something similar. It wouldn’t shift from my Walkman (resulting in the demise of my above-noted side-A, of course). While it was the first life-changing album I would encounter, thirty years on, and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness hasn’t faded one bit.

Following Siamese Dream, Corgan, James Iha, D’arcy Wretzky and Jimmy Chamberlin had the world at their feet. Many couldn’t have envisaged the sharp pivot they would take next, but it started by the band moving on from producer, Butch Vig, enlisting Alan Moulder and Flood as co-producers. The latter being the catalyst in a new approach, suggesting the band record in a rehearsal space where rhythm tracks were captured before entering the studio. (Those same tracks, ending up on the album.)

While the arduous recording sessions of Siamese Dream would have, at best, put any other band into therapy, at worst, tear it apart completely, the Mellon Collie recording sessions were a vastly different experience – Corgan and Flood working in one room, while Iha and Wretzky worked with Moulder in another, while Chamberlin did what Chamberlin always did, adding his own musical language to everything he touched. It was this democratic approach that not only led to greater roles for each band member, but made Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness the wholesome, all-encompassing work of art it truly is.

Like a portal through the history of rock music, it was a bombastic masterpiece that demanded to be written. Remarkable in scope and vision, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness didn’t sound like something from Chicago, London or New York. It sounded like The Smashing Pumpkins. In their own way, true outliers, led by a fierce, almost unhealthy work ethic that resulted in something rich and evocative, as each individual voice of the band was beautifully (and finally) exposed.

With sides A and B billed as Dawn to Dusk and Twilight to Starlight, this vague notion still presents its own mysteries. Thematic contrast is all throughout Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and as Corgan oscillates between darkness and light, perhaps the true representation can be attributed to the above-noted belief that it was the only album one needed in their life. Indeed, from Dawn to Dusk and Twilight to Starlight.

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From the opening notes of the title track, it’s evident that The Smashing Pumpkins were about to take their audience on a journey vastly different from anything before. The piano led title track, piercing through the consciousness of pop, leading into Tonight, Tonight – orchestral grandeur led by Iha’s gentle riff and Chamberlin’s drum patterns that move from a trot to a gallop. The Smashing Pumpkins had never written anything like it, which would be the running theme during the next 26 songs.

With guitars tuned down a half-step, it was the ultimate move that gave certain songs the extra weight they commanded. The gale-force intensity of Jellybelly and nihilistic low-end assault of Zero, smashing through the borders of alt-rock. With lines like, “Intoxicated with the madness / I’m in love with my sadness” (Zero) and “I disconnect the me in me” (the dark-hearted An Ode to No One), it’s this angsty, sloganeering bluster that – depending on which side of the fence you’re on – crystallised both the love and hate for The Smashing Pumpkins.

The alt-rock acrobatics would continue to surge through the mainlines. Here Is No Why, the moment where ’70s classic rock and grunge converge. Bullet with Butterfly Wings, the post-grunge anthem for society’s downtrodden and misunderstood, cannoning through the speakers into millions of households across the world. To Forgive, droning downer blues at half-speed with haunting synths and strings giving the song an extra layer of emotional heft. The thinly barbed Love, another curve ball where Corgan professes that, “Love, it’s who you know”, flippantly calling it out as some hollow transactional exchange. And all these years later, he’s not far off the mark.

Then there’s the majestically arranged Cupid de Lock. Corgan’s carefully picked autoharp, glittering with every note like something from another orbit, and the same could be said of Galapagos. A fantastical lullaby taking its musical cues from Disarm, it’s this sweeping epic that reveals Mellon Collie’s ocean-sized scale. The communal euphoria of Muzzle, a goosebumps-from-head-to-toe moment, with Porcelina of Vast Oceans being the perfect foil. The quiet / loud dynamics that emerged from the belly of America’s underground, just as pivotal in its polished manifestation.

Finishing side-A with the Iha’s Take Me Down, Greg Leisz pedal and lap steel guitar gives the song a hushed alt-country vibe in what sounds like a lost transmission in the world of AM radio.

It’s hard to know where The Smashing Pumpkins would go to from here, and over years, I’ve often wondered how the world would have viewed Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness had it only possessed these 14 songs. Because in many ways, side-B is just as much its own thing, and on reflection, the one release I’ve drawn a vague line to is Tom Waits’ 2006 rarities boxset, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards. Whilst not in that particular order, Mellon Collie’s side-B possesses similar traits. The tough, the tender, and everything in between.

The thick sheet of static of Where Boys Fear to Tread, something only a song like Bodies could breach, as Wretzky’s droning bass chords smash into Corgan and Iha’s down-tuned guitars. A roaring pillar of menace that would see the band flex in the world of proto-metal, flanked by Tale of A Scorched Earth and the sludge-laden epic, X.Y.U., here The Smashing Pumpkins took major label music to its most extreme frontiers, and no one has bettered it since.

To the tender, and a what is a precursor to 1979 – a timeless hit where The Smashing Pumpkins melt the past into present – Thirty-Three is every bit as good as it. Underpinned by a simple piano line, as Corgan parts with the chorus, “Tomorrow’s just an excuse away”, while 1979 will always be considered the shiniest jewel in the band’s crown, Thirty-Three occupies a space not far from it.

Then there’s the acoustic-led one-two of In the Arms of Sleep and Stumbleine. The former, a spidery number with all the atmosphere of storm clouds rolling in, a jittery Corgan parts with a rushed, needy lament, as love once again slips from his grasp; the latter, illuminated by Flood and Moulder’s unvarnished production, picking up every squeak up and down Corgan’s fretboard. The protagonist of the same name, featuring in the preceding floaty dream-rock of Thru the Eyes of Ruby, where both songs form a rare correlation.

Elsewhere, and with Wretzky on backing vocals, Beautiful is an open love letter of simplicity stitched together by Corgan’s subtle piano line. A similar aesthetic the band would explore on their follow-up release, Adore, By Starlight is mined through the same seam – an off-kilter piece that blurs the lines of AM and FM radio. So too We Only Come Out at Night and Lily. Akin to narrations from a children’s book, with autoharp chords and a mélange of other studio embellishments, the arrangements thrust these songs into their own enclave within the Mellon Collie sound world.

The Smashing Pumpkins don’t stay there for too long with Farewell and Good Night. Featuring all members on vocals, it’s perfect book end to all masterpieces, as the song is eventually eclipsed by Corgan’s beautiful piano line that fades out into the ether. The only logical destination after two hours, one minute, and four seconds.

In an interview with Triple J’s Richard Kingsmill in May 1996, Corgan claimed that “The Smashing Pumpkins, as we speak today, are going to be irrelevant in three years. That format of band has been explored as well as it possible can be. How could anyone do it better than what’s been done already?”

He was right of course, but perhaps not in the way he intended. Chamberlin would be kicked out of the band in July 1996 following a heroin overdose alongside touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin, who subsequently died. Wretzky would also leave the band at the end of the decade following the release of Adore, and from there, The Smashing Pumpkins were never the same.

So Corgan was right. Each song on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, its own celebration towards the end of something. It was an album simply designed to blow young minds, and while the Internet continues to be a gateway of discovery for a younger generation to stumble across double-albums that have come close to its alchemy and vision (Polvo’s Exploded Drawing, which was released six months later in 1996, and more recently Holy Sons’ Raw & Disfigured in 2020), all these years later, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness remains a true one off that will never be replicated.