I was 14, happy that the Berlin Wall was gone, that I don’t have to grow up in a dictatorship. My brother watched a lot MTV, which was absolutely new to us kids from the GDR. It was a Saturday, I was sleeping in, waking up to the midday sun, stumbling into the room of my big brother who was as always watching TV. And there I heard the voice of Billy Corgan for the first time. 1979 hit me as hard as music never hit me before. It was just right, it felt kind of perfect. I begged my parents for money so I can buy the album. So I went to that strange smelling record store in my former GDR-Hometown packed with vinyls from the late 80ies like Karat and Puhdys and Peter Maffay. I hated that stuff. The owner didn’t know Smashing Pumpkins and told me, what he doesn’t know never existed… Long story short…. It took me two weeks, twenty hours of train and bus drive to get to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness…. It was the best trip of my life meeting so many crazy people in the mid 90ies of a country and it’s people meeting the world… Since that it always fells like home to listen to SP or Billy Corgan…. Thank you, you can’t image how much this album means to me…