Smashing Pumpkins – Adore

The music press have been cruel to Billy Corgan and the hostility between the man and the media is a product of 1998’s commercial disaster that was Adore.

After the wild success of 1995’s six times platinum masterpiece Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness, the Smashing Pumpkins were easily the biggest band in the world. They were playing the largest arenas in America, they were selling out tours in Japan, and Europe was like a second home for one of the few American bands who enjoyed rich, critical acclaim and loyal support from countries like the UK who normally lavished praise upon their domestic bands that were incapable of selling a record outside their own territory but still existed as a major force in their small, self-righteous world.

Taking the bruising guitar riffs of Black Sabbath and combining this brutality with a sensitive pop sparkle never seen before, though, it is simple to see why Billy Corgan had made it into that magic circle of Rock music’s elite. Whether you were French or Canadian, it was easy to see how important a band like the Smashing Pumpkins were at a time when a complacent music scene had been shattered and devastated by Kurt Cobain’s unexpected suicide.

Essentially, Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness had been a gigantic step forward in the evolution of 1990s Alternative Rock culture. Their epic 28-song, double album had finally laid the ghost of Grunge to rest and immortalized the sub-genre as a cultural phenomena and revolutionary turning point in popular music. Like any great album, their 1995 effort had simply obliterated anything before or after it with its distinctive blend of psychedelic rock, electronica, thrash-metal, pop melody and sombre folk tunings; it was here where Grunge could be archived and left behind by a band who were offering the future to a sentimental audience, and credit to the record buying public, they embraced it like a national treasure.

But there was a price to pay for world domination, and just like one of those stupid moral tales from Hollywood, the world of the Smashing Pumpkins crumbled apart in the most excessive circumstances when drummer Jimmy Chamberlain was fired for his part in the tragic death of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvolin. Chamberlain had been shooting up in a New York hotel and not only was he there when Melvolin overdosed on heroin; he was also arrested for possession, disgraced in the music press and subsequently fired by the furious Billy Corgan.

The world tour went on regardless, though, the band (now a three piece) went on to collect seven awards at the 1996 MTV Music Awards and everything seemed to settle down for a year.

But the pressure of a new album finally brought Billy Corgan, D’arcy Wretzky and James Iha back together in 1998 to put out another rock album to keep the decade’s most important American sub-genre alive.

However, the mass appeal of Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness had created a huge burden on Billy Corgan to keep his sales on a par with the likes of Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson, for when the time came for the band to start writing Adore something had inevitably changed.

Billy’s mother had been diagnosed with cancer and died during the making of the album, the band decided to use a drum machine rather than replace the power-house, snare bruiser Jimmy Chamberlain and, Corgan had made his now infamous quote that “Rock is dead.”

In a dying music scene where Pearl Jam had degenerated into an AOR cliché, Soundgarden had split, Alice In Chains had self-destructed in candid drug binges and Kurt Cobain was posthumously topping the Billboard chart, it was inconceivable at the time to see the Smashing Pumpkins making a semi-electronic album that had completely emancipated from its heavy roots.

For some reason the music press thought a standard rock album would have been the answer to revitalize a music scene that had already died, and when they looked to the Smashing Pumpkins camp for some gratification, unbeknown to them, they were ensnaring the band in their sentimental world where banality was more important than innovation.

Even so, not many people could have predicted that Chicago’s most famous band would turn into a unique hybrid of The Cure, Depeche Mode and The Beatles whilst the guitars gathered dust in the corner of the studio and Corgan’s collection of effects pedals remained at home.

When people first heard Adore they were asking the question “where are the rock songs?” rather than “why is this album so refreshing?” Like most human beings, we seem to be chronically pessimistic and resistant to change in our comfortable worlds of tradition, but as Woody Allen says in his film Deconstructing Harry, “tradition is the illusion of permanence”

Old Woody might have a point there, although the Pumpkins were clearly in charge of their own destiny, and even though there are no guitar solos, no snare triplets, no screams, not even much guitar on this album, the irony is, it might just be the greatest Smashing Pumpkins album of all time.

One listen to the Gothic charm of ‘Ava Adore’ – a bombastic blast of vintage Depeche Mode circa ‘Barrel of A Gun’ – or the gut wrenching anguish of Tear will ensure you that what we have here is the most powerful album of the 1990s in terms of emotion and introspection.

The stripped down beauty of songs such as ‘Behold! The Nightmare’ shine with radiance, loss, hope, devotion and, what’s more, the lyrics are probably as good as anything by a contemporary poet.

Exquisite lines such as “I’ve faced the fathoms of your deep, withstood the suitors quiet siege/ Pulled down the heavens just to please you – appease you” are shrouded in mourning for Billy’s mother. The extent of this can be very unsettling, almost to the point where you know you are intruding upon somebody else’s tacit scene of bereavement.

The chorus to ‘Behold! The Nightmare’ is surprisingly magnanimous, though, as Corgan looks for the positives in a personal tragedy. The nasal wail of his voice is devastatingly beautiful and the execution of the music is on the same monumental scale as The Cure’s ‘Disintegration’.

Very much like The Cure’s 1981 album Faith – where Robert Smith’s grandmother and Lol Tolhurst’s mother died during the making of the record –Adore is an audio document of rare beauty, a record that captures that indefinable sense of loss that can only be immortalized when we are confronted with the true reality of death.

Perhaps the most spectacular example of this is the piano-driven rock progression of ‘For Martha’, the album’s standout track and immediate tear jerker. Not surprisingly this is the one song that is personally addressed to Mrs Corgan, and in all honesty there is nothing like it in the annals of popular music.

Starting off with a slow piano passage and layered with mellotron, the drums slowly build up and pace themselves with the reminiscence of Corgan’s spell binding voice. Lines as personal as “if you have to go, don’t say goodbye/ I will follow you some day and see you on the other side” reverberate like the imagined sound of a dead person’s soul leaving the room.

A mute response is all that is possible after these nine minutes of remorse are surmounted and replaced by philosophical reflection. The incredible triumph of looking to the future is what really impresses the listener here, because the intensity of the music will make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

It’s a shame this example of rare sincerity could not stop the Rock audience from turning their backs on the Pumpkins, though; because Billy’s personal crisis was buried beneath the storm of the media onslaught that had gathered round the “rock is dead” eulogy.

In the liberal western world we like to think that we offer rehabilitation, exoneration and second chances to people who have been punished for their mistakes, but the way the Pumpkins suffered after the commercial failure of this album suggests that you don’t get another chance with a fickle audience who want the same products in different doses.

The audience who bought Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness just couldn’t comprehend the idea of a band switching from Rock to electronica, which is a shame, because the Gothic synthesisers of Pug and the sombre keyboard melodies of Crestfallen pulsate with rich, sensual vibes that were begging to assault the air waves of mainstream radio.

Furthermore, the breath taking pop melody of Perfect and the haunting refrain of the Lennon-esque ‘Blank Page’ show just why the Smashing Pumpkins sold millions of records; it was clear to see back in 1993 with the classic album Siamese Dream, that the Pumpkins were more than just a heavy Rock band with a few good riffs.

In retrospect, then, Adore feels like something that was ahead of its time and originally misconstrued. The stripped down use of minimal electronics, occasional experimentation with guitars and great use of vocal reverb really give the album a timeless feel. This is basic song writing put through the grinder of an emotional pandemonium where nothing is predictable except the everlasting triumph of beauty.

The acoustic delicacy of opener ‘To Sheila’ typifies the cold beauty of the whole album. Here the guitar strings are plucked gently, the croon of Corgan is delivered with an unusual amount of fragility, and the gradual build up of bass and sampled drums climax in an epic cacophony of human clarity. There seems to be a clear human presence before any of the words have been spoken because of the atmospheric recording of audible background tension. Imagine being hidden underneath the bed of your ex-lover, trying not to be observed and you will know what I mean.

The fact that the album failed miserably also adds an ironic charm to this record, because six years later it finally seems to be getting the same treatment Woody Allen’s quintessential film Stardust Memories now receives. Essentially, the current opinion of Adore is surprisingly warm and as you get older you will realise that this is the one Pumpkins album you keep coming back to.

What the Hell do the masses know about anything, anyway? After all, the masses contributed to the rise of Nazism, led cultural revolutions for Mao Zedong and overthrew the bourgeois in Russia. Just remind me how many lives these decisions claimed…