How a $65 guitar gave The Smashing Pumpkins a classic track
Whilst The Smashing Pumpkins have maintained impressive consistency in the face of numerous lineup changes and the changing of the musical zeitgeist, most fans would agree that their first three albums remain their finest. It was a period when the band and their leader, Billy Corgan, were at their creative peak.
There’s a strong case that 1993’s Siamese Dream is the Chicago group’s masterpiece. It saw the band perfect their formula, fusing their metal and punk influences with shoegaze, psychedelia and other genres into one pulsating mass that cemented their position as one of the most important acts of their era. Featuring classics such as ‘Cherub Rock’, ‘Today’ and ‘Disarm’, from start to finish, it’s an incredible sonic journey that has maintained its freshness for three decades.
One fascinating aspect of Billy Corgan’s distinctive songwriting came to the fore on Siamese Dream: his ability to write about a host of different subjects without ever losing sight of himself as an artist. One of the most controversial is that the single ‘Disarm’ was written because he couldn’t bring himself to kill his parents.
“The reason I wrote ‘Disarm’ was because I didn’t have the guts to kill my parents, so I thought I’d get back at them through song,” Corgan once explained. “And rather than have an angry, angry, angry, violent song, I’d thought I’d write something beautiful and make them realise what tender feelings I have in my heart and make them feel really bad for treating me like shit.”
However, one of the other album’s best-loved moments was inspired by a much more mundane experience: Corgan looking inside his refrigerator. As you might have guessed, this is the indomitable anthem, ‘Mayonaise’, one of his ultimate compositions. Regarding the curious titles of some of his songs, Corgan once explained how he gets them: “Say you write a song about a chandelier, and the chandelier gives off light. And the light is the colour red and red reminds you of the colour you’re not supposed to wear around a bull. So you name the song ‘Cow’.”
Regarding ‘Mayonaise’, whilst several factors make it stand out – including the title – one of the most notable is the guitar’s squeak that occurs regularly after the fuzz pedals have been stomped on. Whilst it might seem like a relatively insignificant part of the song’s makeup, it was a subtle flash of genius that added extra bite to counterbalance its broadly introspective and melodic nature. ‘Mayonaise’ would feel completely different without it.
According to Corgan, this was because of the $65 guitar it was played on. Every time he stopped playing, it would naturally whistle, so when the band penned the track, they purposefully wrote in the stops that would accentuate the sound. He said: “The origin of the squealing high note was, I bought this guitar for $65, and it was such a cheap guitar that every time I’d stop playing it would make that whistle. So when we wrote the song, we wrote in these parts that would stop so the whistle became part of the song because every time I would stop it would whistle.”
Listen to ‘Mayonnaise’ below.
