How MC&tIS Changed My Life

Life is all about high water marks.  Birth of a child, wedding day, first kiss, first real paycheck, first performance and finding your first real best friend are often high water marks for a lot of people.  Listening to this album for the first time was a high water mark for me.  This album literally changed my life.  

MC&IS was released in ’95.  I was 13 years old and in 8th grade.  I was unknowingly making a transition from awkward bookworm to social butterfly; I had a solid friend group, the core of which remains today.  I had spent the majority of my 6th grade year avoiding people wherever possible.  I kept my nose in fantasy and Star Wars novels.  I attempted to make friends with my classmates with little success.  The one high point is my mother forced me to take band as an elective.  We had an old trumpet laying around and that is the instrument I learned on.  I spent the weekends reading, playing video games and I remember every Sunday morning playing with Lego and listening to Casey Kasem count down the PoP hits of the day.  7th grade got a little better.  I had discovered the opposite sex through band and I recieved my first CD player for XMas that year.  The first albums I bought?  Nirvana Unplugged in New York (so I could be cool) and Hootie and the Blowfish Cracked Rear View.  I was wearing a lot of clothes that was popular with the counter culture at the time (the flannel grunge look) and doing what I could to fit in.  It wasn’t really working.

I continued to be a poseur for the end of 7th grade, determined to be one of the cool kids when 8th grade started.  I tried to expand my friend group and wiggle into the cool kids club.  I failed at that too.  However I remember that I did strike up a decent relationship with one of the cool skater kids.  He had better taste in music than I did, knew how to ‘aggressive in-line skate’, was an artist and frankly, was cool.  I remember him asking me if I was getting the new Pumpkins album.  Of course i said yes.  I didn’t know who the Smashing Pumpkins were.  I hadn’t heard a single song of theirs.  My musical tastes were rooted in my dad’s record collection and the music I heard from Casey.  I had no connection to anything, really.  I knew I liked the Beatles but I wasn’t exactly sure why.  If you would’ve asked me I would have told you that Aerosmith was my favorite band (they’re still pretty nifty).  Music was a complete afterthought for me.

I had to ask my mother to drive me to the mall to buy a CD.  I also had to convince her that I needed $25 to buy it.  I couldn’t really explain why I needed it, telling your parents you need a new record so people at school would think you were cool isn’t the most watertight or persuasive of arguments, ya know?  I managed to pick it up and bring it home.  Blue case with the weird writing and turn of the century-esq woman on the front.  I didn’t even have a proper CD player, I was still using last Christmases walkman with an old headset from my parents old tube stereo system.  This headset could’ve swallowed a set of beats whole.  They were large, loud and clear.  Which is exactly what I needed for what was about to happen to me.  

I would go to sleep every night listening to that CD player through those headphones.  I cracked the case and pulled out a stylized pink CD.  As the CD started spooling up I wondered exactly what type of music “the Smashing Pumpkins” were and if they were so awesome why hadn’t I heard of them before.  Imagine my surprise when the title track started playing.  I distinctly remember wondering why my cool skater friend at school was so excited for soft piano music.  The transition to Tonight, Tonight didn’t really do anything for me either.  Violins, acoustic guitars, drums that reminded me of marches that we played in school band, I was starting to become really confused.  This didn’t seem like some cool alterna-rock band.  It sounded like b sides to that shitty hits from the 70s, 80s and today radionstation I hated so much growing up.

Then it happened.  Jellybelly.  The entrance of the Flood produced, Corgan and Iha led guitar army hit me square between the eyes.  3 1/2 minutes of fierce and distorted guitars that were driven by a maniacal drum beat and accented with a surreal voice drove me upright in bed.  I had never heard anything quite like Jellybelly before in my life.  It wasn’t my father’s rock and roll.  Zepplin and AC/DC didn’t have the sheer intensity that this song offered.  It wasn’t my mother’s rock and roll either, CSN and Fleetwood Mac didn’t have a sonic landscape that was quite as complex as what Corgan and company were able to pull off with their overly loud and driven guitars.  Jellybelly is nothing more than a climax that never quite resolves.  The song ends in feedback and I got a breath and a heartbeat before Zero hit.  That unmistakable groove hit and built until the breakdown “…..God is empty, just like me”.  I had never before heard such sentiment come out of music.  I had no idea that artists used music as a form of self expression and therapy.  The lyrics to Zero came through loud and clear to an angsty, insecure kid who just wanted to be popular.  The rest of that disc was a complete roller coaster of discovery for me.  The pink album is a beautiful mix of uptempo killers and very lush and complex ballads like Galapagos and Porcelina.  An Ode to No One in particular was a brutal sonic assault..

The pink album comes to a close and I’m wide awake.  I’m completely driven to the blue album, still unsure of what I’m about to listen to.  Where Boys Fear to Tread is instantly colder in tone than anything on the pink album, I’m aware that this is going to be a different experience.  As the song closes I hear an incredible hiss and static.  I’m instantly pissed…now is not the time for my walkman to crap out.  In the most perfect musical troll imagine my surprise as the static clears to the most perfect love song on the album.  Bodies is the unsung hero of the album, quite possibly MC&IS best track.  I listen, wrapped up in the synthesizers and loops of 1979,  the brutal assault of XYU and the gentle end of it all with the soft voice of the other guitarist.

I had simply never heard music like this before.  If you know me you know I’ve never suckled at the teat of Cobain and the idea that 90s music exists because of Nirvana.  In MC&IS I found music that was modern and angry but was beautiful and complex.  This was Zepplin, Floyd, Crue, the Beatles and Nirvana smashed together where nothing but the important parts were salvaged.  Loud guitars didn’t have to equate to the overly machismo that metal exuded (I would not find my love of metal for several years yet) and music that garnered an emotional response didn’t have to be sappy love songs.  

I changed instantly that night.  I started going out of my way to find counter culture music that was similar to this.  Siamese Dream was purchased not long after MC&IS.  I sought to replicate the emotions and feelings I got when I listened to this album: I sought out the guitar.  The rest is history.  I started devouring music in large quantities from almost all genres.  I started looking for emotional responses from the music I listened to instead of having it play in the background.  The counterculture drove my social life.  I became more social, first with the goths and freaks then the theatrical kids and free spirits and finally with everybody.  My newfound love of music drove me, gave me confidence and allowed me to sort the troubled emotions that teenagers typically have.  

It has shaped my own musical sensibilities.  Anybody who has ever had the misfortune of letting me corner them with copies of music that any of my various projects has written can tell you, everything I’ve ever written could be a discarded guitar part or song idea from the Pumpkins.  

I’m now 33.  Married, 2 kids, corporate sales job.  I’m white bread in every meaning of the phrase.  But without MC&IS I wouldn’t be here now, aging music snob with a ridiculous knowledge of who plays what guitar, who sings on what track and the spiritual influences of m83s Midnight City.  I wouldn’t have the confidence built from years of performance and wouldnt have the social skills borne from interacting with a completly varied group of kids growing up.