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Smashing Pumpkins engage in bizarre ‘therapy session’ just for laffs
05.01.2017
10:29 am
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I’ve long had a somewhat…. allergic reaction to Smashing Pumpkins. I think it all comes down to Billy Corgan, every little thing he does tends to drive me up the wall. I will grant his talent, but just don’t make me listen to his stuff too much.

Anyway, in 1994 the band released a videocassette item called Vieuphoria (ouch…. even the title makes me cringe), and it generally received positive notices. For instance, in the October 29, 1994, issue of Billboard, it was singled out as “a treat” that would serve as “a fine complement to the Pumpkins’ new B-side collection, Pisces Iscariot.”

This was a good moment for Smashing Pumpkins, by any definition. Siamese Dream came out in 1993 and was a massive success, and the ambitious double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness would be released a year later. Pavement may have been snarking about the Pumpkins in “Range Life,” but the Pumpkins were clearly winning the game Pavement was ostensibly playing.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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05.01.2017
10:29 am
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I was a 15-year-old Billy Corgan impersonator
12.14.2016
02:53 pm
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Before the “World Wide Web” became a thing and only AOL and CompuServe existed for games and chat rooms, Sierra On-line (the software company responsible for such classic adventure games as King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry) developed a highly imaginative and groundbreaking environment known as The ImagiNation Network. Initially launched on May 6th, 1991 as “The Sierra Network,” this friendly, graphics-heavy interface was so simple, advertising promised that even your grandmother would find it easy to “play games, make friends and have fun.” As a teenage computer geek I was instantly hooked after being introduced by my friend Brad Warner and spent hundreds of hours using the service: running up my parents credit card bill, holding up my families landline for several hours at a time, and experimenting with fake profiles when the internet was so new that you could effortlessly fool just about anybody.
 
Before entering ImagiNation you’d use the FaceMaker to create your appearance choosing your skin color, facial features, glasses, clothes, and hairstyle. There were enough variables built in to create over 84 million unique personas. Then you’d walk through the virtual gates and let the fun begin: Red Baron, Mini Golf, Paintball, or Boogers in SierraLand. Gambling at the casino and exchanging lewd late night talk in LarryLand (for adults only), or slaying dragons with strangers in MedievaLand. Before anybody had heard of an email address there was a post office where you could purchase “Sierra Stamps” and send messages to other users.

Through a alternative music chatroom, I befriended a cool 13-year-old Korean girl from Houston named Judy Suh who had purple hair and owned an electric guitar. We both had tickets to see the Smashing Pumpkins headline Lollapalooza ‘94 in our respective cities that summer and agreed to share our photos from the concert. Technology had yet to find a way to share photos on the internet so we made photocopies at Kinko’s and snail mailed them to each other.
 

 
In 1995 Judy suddenly disappeared from the ImagiNation Network without a trace, a few weeks later I found out that her parents banned her from using the service after running up their credit card bill. At that time the pricing structure was incredibly expensive: $9.95 per month for only 4 hours plus $3.50 for each additional hour, or $120 a month for unlimited time. Shortly after that my parents also banned me from the service because I was using their dial-up modem and holding up our six person household landline. Friends and family members complained that they received a busy signal over and over for hours and were furious when they couldn’t get through.
 
Heartbroken, and not yet ready to give up my addiction I took to desperate measures to get back on-line. I went over to Brad Warner’s house with a floppy disc, found the directory where his password file was stored and successfully copied it into the same directory on my computer enabling me to sign onto ImagiNation with Brad’s account. This illegal and back-stabbing act gave me so much confidence that soon I wanted to know what else I could get away with. I began secretly signing on late at night after my parents went to bed. Using the FaceMaker to create a new persona, I started posing as Smashing Pumpkins frontman, Billy Corgan. I had read every Alternative Press, SPIN, and Melody Maker interview that had been published up until that point and felt strongly that I knew enough about Billy Corgan that I could convince people that I was him. The April 1994 Rolling Stone cover story I purchased at Sam Goody proved to be a particularly detailed profile and helped me understand Billy’s troubled childhood and upbringing in a time before background information on celebrities was easily accessible on websites like Wikipedia. I was successful in fooling dozens of fans: answering questions from growing up in Glendale Heights, Illinois, to D’arcy Wretzky’s sisters photography on Smashing Pumpkins single covers, to dispelling rumors that I played the little brother on the TV show Small Wonder. After about a week I was called out for falsely claiming that the Mike Mills who played piano on the song “Soma” off the album Siamese Dream was not the same guy as the bassist from R.E.M. My cover was blown.
 

 
Soon after I was outed as an imposter by the ImagiNation community I received a call from Brad who wanted to know why there was a message from Chris Williams in his virtual Post Office box. I had forgotten that I reached out to Sierra On-Line founders Ken & Roberta Williams’ son Chris (also 15-years-old) on the network, totally not expecting him to reply. I confessed to Brad that I had stolen his password and I had been signing on under his account. That was the end of our friendship and the last time I ever used the service. In 1996 ImagiNation was purchased and then ultimately shut down forever by America Online. In 2007 there was a brief attempt to revive ImagiNation through reverse engineering and use of DOSBox, but there wasn’t enough interest in the emulator for it to take off. One fan on the “Return of Talking Time” message board, however, fondly remembered his experience on ImagiNation over 20 years later:
 

“I had a ridiculous experience with ImagiNation Network when I was 14. I was spending the night at my friend’s house, and I brought the free ImagiNation install disk with me. After his parents went to bed, we got his mom’s credit card from her purse and used it to create an account. (IIRC, you were given a certain number of free hours to try it out, but you had to provide credit card info to get started). We tooled around for a bit, and eventually ended up in one of the chat areas. Somehow or another we started chatting with a guy who had us 100% convinced that he was Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins. Seriously. We weren’t dumb kids, but holy crap does that sound profoundly moronic in hindsight. Anyhow, we stayed up all night talking to Billy C, and ended up surpassing our free trial. When the credit card bill came later that month, my friend had to fess up to his mom. She wasn’t buying the Billy Corgan story, and I was never allowed to spend the night at his house again.”

 
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Posted by Doug Jones
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12.14.2016
02:53 pm
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Trent Reznor and Robert Smith talk about the Jesus and Mary Chain’s ‘Psychocandy’


 
A lot of now-classic albums have grown into their reputations over the course of years or decades, but the Jesus and Mary Chain’s debut Psychocandy was one of those whose epochal nature was screamingly obvious right out of the starting gate. Because so many bands in the last 30 years have copped JaMC’s move of burying SoCal pop and surf tropes under layers of reverb, noise, and darkness, it might be hard to convey just how INSANE they sounded when they were upstarts. I’m going to date myself pretty seriously here, but the first time I heard them, I was 15, delivering my paper route (laugh all you want, it was money for records), and listening to college radio on my Walkman. The song “Never Understand” came on, and I don’t know how the hell I didn’t fall off my bike. It seemed amazingly assaultive—full of ugly squealing feedback and guitars that could just as well have been broken vacuum cleaners, propelled at a nervous clip by caveman drumming that somehow sounded like it was stalking you, and yet it was catchy as hell, sporting laid-back, almost drowsy vocals that didn’t belong anywhere near that out-of-control musical mess, but it all clicked perfectly, like there was nothing weird about it at all. These young noise-abusers from Scotland had managed the feat of making themselves the Velvet Underground’s second coming. Even if they’d done nothing else worth hearing (and that’s decidedly not the case, of course, they churned out a lot of very cool stuff), Psychocandy would have cemented their legend.
 
Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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04.28.2015
09:25 am
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Smashing Pumpkins, live acoustic in Cleveland, 1991
08.04.2014
08:54 am
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I wish I could give you any kind of deep background on how this came to be. A friend shared it on Facebook yesterday, and it caught my eye not just because it’s Smashing Pumpkins in the worthy Gish era, well before Billy Corgan became an insufferable, bloated ego making insufferable, bloated albums, but because it was taped in my neighborhood.

I moved to Cleveland’s Tremont district a few years after this was shot, when it was still a cheap rent haven well on its way to becoming a hip arts district. It’s now neither, particularly. The gazebo they’re playing in still stands in Lincoln Park, where it’s now MUCH more difficult to get murdered than it used to be. (Also, some self-referential trivia: sometime Dangerous Minds contributor Jason Schafer got married in that gazebo.) The band sings “Blue,” from the 1991 Lull EP—the song later turned up on Pisces Iscariot—before they goofily riff on BÖC’s “Godzilla” while guitarist James Iha thanks the academy. An edited version of this exists, but I much prefer the raw footage.
 

 
Many, many thanks to Alan Madej for this find.

Previously on Dangerous Minds
Literal version of the Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Today’
Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins wants to sell you furniture

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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08.04.2014
08:54 am
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Literal version of the Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Today’
03.24.2011
02:26 pm
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I’ve never really cared for the Smashing Pumpkins, but this literal version of “Today” by Dustin McLean is amusing. Dustin’s vocals are spot-on, too.

 
(via HYST)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.24.2011
02:26 pm
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