The first time I ever heard of the Smashing Pumpkins I was twelve years old and we had just got cable for the first time and I happened to be

watching a little unknown channel that used to play music videos, MTV, I think it was called, suddenly I see this guy with a top hat singing a love song in a starry sky in the midst of what was to my mind as a recreation of an old silent movie, which was weird but charming at the same time. This wasn’t  rock music which was ‘cool’ but a epic orchestral ballad that I thought was unabashedly earnest and sentimental which I didn’t quite understand so I made a dismissive remark about it, not unlike what our MTV heroes Beavis and Butthead would say, to which my older brother, who was the absolute authority of what was cool in music at the time said “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I like it” I was baffled. But then I had heard their heavy songs “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” and “Zero” and again I was like “How the hell does a band do something so heavy and then turn around and do a song like “Tonight, Tonight”? I bought the double album “Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness” and it seemed like a Herculean task listening to all this music but I did it and suddenly I was touched in a way that was both familiar and completely alien to me. Emotions I wasn’t quite used to. The anger and the heartbreak and the ecstasy. I was swept away by poetry of Billy Corgan lyrics. The vocabulary so sophisticated I had to look up the definitions of words he was singing but the universal feeling was always evident. All the freaks and all the ghouls hogged down together in ritual and ceremony. The notion of star crossed lovers. The idea of true love out there somewhere waiting for me to discover it and discover it years later I did and suddenly all the songs took on a different shade once which was black and white now coated in startling gray. This album, this band was responsible for opening up a third eye of artistic and creative expression that at first burned slowly and steadily into a fiery blaze that still engulfs my heart and my soul.