The album Billy Corgan called “a painful experience” to make
The Smashing Pumpkins have always had a bit of a rough reputation in the world of alternative rock. Even though Billy Corgan may have made music that people may have been able to relate to, they were always on the fringes of the music industry, constantly at odds with the sounds of grunge happening on the other side of the country. While Corgan could still spin his work into solid gold whenever the time called for it, he thought that the makings of their colossal album Adore was borderline torturous.
At the same time, to say that any Smashing Pumpkins album was an unpleasant experience would be drastically underselling it. Although the band were known for having a distinct sound when working on their debut Gish, Corgan was becoming increasingly obsessive over his instrument, making sure that everything on the record came out exactly how he heard it in his head.
Once the band started to get traction off songs like ‘Siva’, the pressure was on to get another just as big. While the grunge acolytes were trying their hand at making songs about their angst and pain, Corgan made that sentiment have the same resonance as an AOR record from decades past on Siamese Dream, featuring amazing pieces of pop-rock like ‘Today’.
Although Corgan would come under fire for playing most of the instruments on the album himself, that was just the tip of the iceberg for the next phase of The Pumpkins. If Siamese Dream was the answer to Boston, then Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was Corgan’s answer to Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
Spreading out over two discs, the entire album feels like a massive piece of existential angst, at one moment sounding ferocious on songs like ‘Zero’ and the other triumphant on ‘1979’. Even though the band could rightfully take their place among the Nirvanas of the world, Corgan probably knew that the bubble was going to burst by the time he got to Adore.
Absorbing the sounds emerging from the electronic rock movement, songs like ‘Ava Adore’ felt closer to the sounds that Depeche Mode was doing a decade earlier. While it may have been far from a bad record, it was a record at just the wrong time, with every one of the band’s rock fans complaining that they had sold out.
While Corgan may have stuck by the record after the fact, he admitted that it was far from a perfect album, saying, “[I] made the mistake of telling people it was a techno record. [If I] would have told everyone Adore was the Pumpkins’ acoustic album, we would have never had the problems that we had. The very act of making this record (and writing these sad songs) is really one of the most painful experiences of my life”.
Even though an acoustic Pumpkins record might not have done the songs justice, it does give fans a look at the more mellow side of their sound. Outside of the lead single, songs like ‘Perfect’ paint a picture of Corgan’s lighthearted side, talking about embracing one’s imperfections to make up the bigger picture.
Then again, no amount of goodwill towards the record was enough to convince the rest of the band today, with James Iha and D’Arcy Wretsky leaving after being treated like session players. Adore might not have been the right record at the time, but it was instrumental in killing off the camaraderie among the Pumpkins.
