I am an Indiana farm boy almost as cliche as they come. I literally grew up in a small farm house surrounded by cornfields on all sides but one which was a small woods with you guessed it a cornfield behind it. From the age 13 or so to 18 I had two things on my person at all times. One was a basketball because well it’s Indiana and as I said I was as cliche as they come. The second was a Walkman to play music. That music sometimes included Lynyrd Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet, and AC/DC among many others due to my parents influence but it always included the Smashing Pumpkins. Describing my family as poor is an understatement. I’m talking government cheese if lucky and mayonnaise sandwiches if not. So my basketball goal was nothing but couple of wood posts that ran side by side up to where a few two by fours were joined across and hammered in to make a backboard. It was finished off by a rim nailed in. The court that started as grass was nothing but dirt in the form of a large circle with edges worn on the sides where I shot from deeper out.
I would spend hours day and night spring, summer, fall and yes winter out there shooting by myself. If you ask me then why I would have told you I did it to get better. Now I know it was much deeper and mainly was to get away from the classic dysfunctional home life a lot of us knew all to well.
Smashing Pumpkins and the Mellon Collie albums where the soundtrack to those long hours outside by myself shooting the basketball and dreaming about all the things I could be and all the things I would never let myself be.
I would love to tell you how things came to be to make this a fairytale but you can probably guess things didn’t work out like that. My life like everyone else’s has had its highs and lows since those early days but there isn’t a note to that album that doesn’t bring back an exact memory from that time in my life and I sometimes put it on and just let them flood in for better or worse. It literally was the soundtrack of my life at one of the most pivotal times of my life. Thanks for creating it. Truly art.