Smashing Pumpkins -- Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

9/10

Nostalgia bias. Get ready for it. I am haunted.
It's the summer of 1996, and I am riding with my dad to Grand Isle, Louisiana, to our trailer camp on the Gulf of Mexico, so we can go fishing for a week. We make this drive every summer. I'm about to start high school. My dad has the rock station on in his truck, and the DJ announces that the Smashing Pumpkins' touring keyboardist and drummer have OD'd on heroin. The keyboardist is dead and the drummer has been arrested.
"Idiots," my dad says in the way only a guy who went from growing and selling pot out of his house with his young wife, to growing and selling corn, soy beans, and sugar on several hundred acres of farmland while raising three children can say. I've been wishing for a chance to post this picture my parents took of one of their weed harvests in the 70's, where for some reason they dumped it all on a bed with some kittens, so here's that picture.

Meow...cough...cough. Meow.

Having had my parents' rolling papers fall out of random record sleeves (particularly in the Jethro Tull ones) and into my lap while I combed their collection, my dad's Hank Hill-esque "damn hippies" tirades never failed to crack me up. However, as the DJ immediately followed the Smashing Pumpkins news brief with "Tonight, Tonight," a Smashing Pumpkins song, my dad said, "Alright, it's scratchy voice," and turned it up.
My dad has told me I love you twice since 1996. Once when I left on a school trip for Washington D.C. in 1997, before my first plane ride (where I also received an unexpected hug), and once at my wedding after my wife and I lit the unity candle and greeted our parents, in 2006. At that point, he started to cry. Then, as my wife and I walked up the isle together as husband and wife, and the DJ blasted "Tonight, Tonight," my dad's face contorted into ugly cry sobs. It's all on video. When someone mentioned this to my dad later, he simply said, "I was sad because I realized I'm old now." Sure, Pop.

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I jammed all the singles to Smashing Pumpkins' double-album opus, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, around the time it was released in 1995. I enjoyed the songs, enjoyed the videos, enjoyed that period in history and in my own life. Despite this, I never picked up the album, or any Smashing Pumpkins album. However, that music is inextricably intertwined into the fabric of my memories of that time along with Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Alice and Chain's tunes (my dad was particularly partial to "Rooster"), along with countless others. I enjoyed that time in music, but I also hit puberty then, so I was probably going to deeply connect on a chemical level to anything that came out of some speakers.

I didn't hear Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness in its entirety until years later, when I checked it out at the library. That was the fall of 2005 (there's gonna be a quiz at the end of this review), a truly special year in itself, and the first true year of The Nicsperiment...meaning that I documented that experience here. Wow, but that's been 14 years ago, though I still feel like I just made that starry, rural Mississippi River levee drive the other day. Needless to say, that first full listen of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was magical. All of those singles I enjoyed before became magically linked together into one incredible experience. It is little wonder that I wanted to use the incredible "Tonight, Tonight" to close out my wedding ceremony late the next year. After all, its video, still fresh in my mind from years before, is about undertaking a strange, fantastical, and perilous starbourne journey.

This video reminds me that my dad also referred to Billy Corgan as "baldy." Back in Pointe Coupee Parish, everybody's gotta have a nickname.
Anyway, I hate to keep using the word magical, but my wife and I went on a magical honeymoon to Hawaii. I never thought I'd ever get to go there, but my parents must have had some "for when the kids get married" rainy day fund, because they sent my wife and I to Maui for a week.
The honeymoon was everything a honeymoon is supposed to be. We did everything you do on a honeymoon, and everything you do when you're touring Maui. Ironically, the main road along Maui's coast is just like the one around the Mississippi River levee, winding and twisting, except instead of being bordered by a small ongoing length of raised earth, it's bordered by sheer cliffs over the Pacific--absolutely incredible vistas. On the last night of the honeymoon, which still seems unreal, we were driving through a landscape where the stars were so bright they cast shadows, perfectly illuminating the Pacific far below, seemingly stretching on and on forever, with only distant Lanai Island gently rising in silhouette under the light of galaxies.
"I always want to remember you exactly how you are now," my wife said.

The final morning, on the drive back to the airport, with Maalaea Bay behind us.

When we arrived home, the expression "The Honeymoon is over" proved horribly true, and I am surprised we didn't either divorce or die before the first six months had passed. During that time period, I felt exactly like Gunn in the Angel episode "Origins," and that I was going to die (Gunn is trapped in a suburban hell dimension which appears as domestic bliss, but he is strapped to a table in a fiery basement and tortured every night). Anyway, during that time, I thought about how magical and removed from reality the honeymoon was, and how it matched the artistic imagery of Mellon Collie... Weird.

The mystical, unreachable Lanai.

Anyway, we not only made it through that time period alive and still married, but 13 years later, I'm mentally healthy enough to stay out of that kind of mind dungeon. All throughout that, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness still exists. If I get stabbed to death walking to my car after work tomorrow, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness will still exist. If I live another 60 years, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness will exist for all of them, and all of the years after. Life always goes on, with or without you.
While you're alive, that's a fresh perspective--it's helps keep you from feeling too self-important. With that perspective, I can somehow listen to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and say that much like my parent's old 70's rock LP's that rained joints down on me every time I opened them up when I was a kid, too much is too much. A 28-track double-album is always going to be generally exhausting. Double-albums almost never work. Its a wonder that Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness works as well as it does.
Yes, it helps that the singles are magnificent. "Tonight, Tonight"'s orchestral swells, and eager, rolling drums are wondrous in both building and paying off anticipation. "Zero"'s guitar riff feels as timeless as granite. The angry "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" is still as propulsive as ever. The drum machine and dreamy synth drive of "1979" is still as brilliant a combination of joy and wistful nostalgia as ever. Of course, those only account for 1/7 of of Mellon Collie's songs, and three of those come within the first six tracks. What holds the album together is a sheer force of will and generally strong songwriting.
There isn't necessarily one lyrical theme tying all of the album together, but the individual discs' titles ring true musically. The first, Dawn to Dusk, starts off with the hopeful yet melancholy album-titled, piano-led instrumental, and moves into the optimistic, yet wistful "Tonight, Tonight." From there, the songs get heavier and heavier, though the first disc begins to chill and relax in its final stretch...just like the sunlight leading up to dusk. The second disc, Twilight to Starlight, has some absolute barnburners in its first half, with "Bodies" and "Tales of a Scorched Earth" featuring molten guitar riffs by Corgan and James Iha, and insane drum grooves by the virtuosic, octopus-armed Jimmy Chamberlin. However, these are balanced with more gentle tracks like "In the Arms of Sleep" and "1979." The push and pull between heavy and gentle continues with the second disc's midsection, featuring the loud-to-quiet dynamics of "Thru the Eyes of Ruby" and "X.Y.U." sandwiching the acoustic lullaby of "Stumbleine." After "X.Y.U."'s heavy metal breakdown ending, Twilight to Starlight leaves the Earth completely with five tracks of peaceful cosmic bliss. The band gets weird, playing around with electronic elements and a lighter mood. Turns out this would be the sound they'd pursue over the next few albums (sans, perhaps, the lighter mood), hence the band ending this, their magnum opus, with them. Strangely, the closing songs' gentle, soothing, dreamy nature is the perfect sort of catharsis for this particular album. All four band members singing a verse in the closer, "Farewell and Goodnight," is absolute perfection.
Hence, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness' only true flaws are the pockets of exhaustion inherent in any album that's more than two hours long. These pockets will likely be different for each listener. For me, they usually come at moments during the second half of Dawn to Dusk, and in the first half of Twilight to Starlight. A straight listen to this album is a true commitment on par with watching a lengthy feature film, only with this, the imagery has to be created in your mind. The conviction and commitment in the voice of vocalist, Billy Corgan, certainly helps keep things together.
Rather ironically, in the post I linked to above about listening to Mellon Collie all the way through for the first time, I talk about my frustration at being terrible at Karaoke Revolution. My friend Jordan, with whom more than 13 years later I now co-host Filmshake, encouraged me with the reminder that Billy Corgan himself doesn't exactly have the greatest voice--it's the character in his voice that makes it special--and helps make Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness special, as well.
Feels strange to review this album 24 years after its release. I've listened to it four times through in the last several weeks, a couple times at my desk at work while doing some seemingly infinite accounting work. Every time, no matter the setting, the album worked. I'm not a 14-year old kid riding with my dad in his pickup anymore. I'm not the 23-year old driving around the levee looking at the stars anymore. I'm not a newlywed running back down the isle with my new bride anymore. I'm not the guy who was sure he was going to have to send back the wedding gifts a few weeks after the wedding anymore. I'm not the guy sitting at my desk listening to this two weeks ago anymore. I'm not the guy who played "Tonight, Tonight" in the car after having a serious conversation with my son about being a man on the way to go camping last weekend anymore. I'm not even the guy who began writing this review a couple hours ago anymore. I'm me, right now. Now, I'm not even the guy who typed the previous sentence two seconds ago. I keep changing and changing, and life keeps changing, and when I'm decomposing in the ground, people who never even knew I existed, and who were never in any way affected by my existence will be listening to and enjoying Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

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"Tonight, Tonight" lyrics by Billy Corgan

Time is never time at all 
You can never ever leave 
Without leaving a piece of youth 
And our lives are forever changed 
We will never be the same 
The more you change, the less you feel 

Believe, believe in me, believe, believe 

That life can change that you're not stuck in vain 
We're not the same, we're different 
Tonight, tonight, tonight 
So bright Tonight, tonight 

And you know you're never sure 
But you're sure you could be right 
If you held yourself up to the light 
And the embers never fade 
In your city by the lake 
The place where you were born

Believe, believe in me, believe, believe 

In the resolute urgency of now 
And if you believe there's not a chance 
Tonight, tonight, tonight 
So bright Tonight, tonight 

We'll crucify the insincere tonight (Tonight) 
We'll make things right, we'll feel it all tonight (Tonight) 
We'll find a way to offer up the night (Tonight) 
The indescribable moments of your life (Tonight) 
The impossible is possible tonight (Tonight) 
Believe in me as I believe in you 

Tonight, tonight, tonight Tonight, tonight

1995 Virgin Records

Disc One – Dawn to Dusk
1. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (Instrumental) 2:52
2. Tonight, Tonight 4:14
3. Jellybelly 3:01
4. Zero 2:41
5. Here Is No Why 3:45
6. Bullet with Butterfly Wings 4:18
7. To Forgive 4:17
8. Fuck You (An Ode to No One) 4:51
9. Love 4:21
10. Cupid de Locke 2:50
11. Galapogos 4:47
12. Muzzle 3:44
13. Porcelina of the Vast Oceans 9:21
14. Take Me Down 2:52

Disc Two – Twilight to Starlight
1. Where Boys Fear to Tread 4:22
2. Bodies 4:12
3. Thirty-Three 4:10
4. In the Arms of Sleep 4:12
5. 1979 4:25
6. Tales of a Scorched Earth 3:46
7. Thru the Eyes of Ruby 7:38
8. Stumbleine 2:54
9. X.Y.U. 7:07
10. We Only Come Out at Night 4:05
11. Beautiful 4:18
12. Lily (My One and Only) 3:31
13. By Starlight 4:48
14. Farewell and Goodnight 4:22