I first discovered the band catching one of the local Chicago station’s late-night concert series shows when they aired the Siamese Dream show from the Aragon Ballroom. I instantly fell in love and bought SD and Gish on cd that weekend. Fast-forward to October 1995 and after wearing out SD, Gish AND Pisces Iscariot cds, I saved up more allowances to make the $20 for the double album (it was a fortune back then) because I was making sure I was the first one to listen to MY band’s new album as soon as it came out. (I asked the local record store owner about every detail of the release incessantly for months anxiously awaiting the day! He hated me but loved all my allowance money I spent in there on SP Merch…) Not only did I wait outside the record store to get the album immediately upon the store opening, but I opened it and started listening on my cd walkman before I even left the store. It was like I was on DMT before anyone even knew what DMT was! MCIS, WAS my drug of choice, not only because the whole world of sound that even the first six songs of From Dawn to Dusk put me on, literally changed my DNA, but it was a piece of art that I had never experienced before. I had listened to The Wall, Band of Gypsys, Sgt. Pepper’s, etc. and even those to my ears were not as dense, layered and powerful as the variety-rich epic that MCIS was. I was 15 years old and I had in my mind, my soul, and my hands, the greatest piece of music ever created. Little did I know how I would be made fun of, then applauded and everything else, for championing that “weird guy” with the strange band from Chicago (as many kids my age still thought of them as, while they were all mainstream hip hop and “punk” fans) until 1979 came out and it was them cool to like the Pumpkins. I learned all the songs on guitar and wore out many a discmans, as almost exactly a year from the MCIS release date was consumed by listening to 99% only Mellon Collie, until October 10th of 1996 when I saw the Pumpkins live for the first time at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee, WI. I still have that bootleg, now in mp3 form. I can close my eyes and be in the arena, in my seat, and see the band and remember the rumble of the Silver fuck/Space Jam that seemed to go on forever. I started a band after the MCIS concert and we played, well, tried to play as much MCIS as possible. I was Zero, I was Glass and June and Ruby and Porcelina and I stumbleined along with the Pumpkins through the rest of my life because Mellon Collie changed the world.