Memories | The Smashing Pumpkins

A refelction on the time that once was

Andrew Melbourne, Australia, AU

Sitting, wallowing in the state which youth was, trying to understand those around me, astounded at the narrow mindedness of adulthood, tonight, tonight. I’ve purchased, lost, and repurchased this album 4 times already, almost as many times as I’ve had to start over. My favorite album of all time – Thank you Billly and the other band members who have contributed over the years.

Melancholy of 90s Generation X

Katherine Ikard Midland, Tx, US

It was the best and worst of times. Living in an isolated Texas town with absolutely nothing to do. So, we rebelled against society and rules. I went to school with the rich kids and felt like I was in a twisted 90s version of The Outsiders. I had Smashing Pumpkins posters all over my room, and Disarm was my anthem. When Mellon Collie came out, it was if pieces of my soul had been extracted and placed into lyrics and music. It was a masterpiece and something I listened to to get myself out of the darkness. In my adult years, some drunk asshole hit my car and totalled it including all my cd’s; this included my original Mellon Collie album and I will be forever sad about it. It forged the strength of my character and let me know it was okay to be who I was. Thank you, SP.

Highschool theme songs

Cloud PH

Ever since I tasted Mellon collie and the infinite sadness 3 years ago I never stopped listening, I still religiously listen to this album and never get tired of hearing it. This album kept me going from my highschool years and long trips to places and thus gave me so much memories attached to it, Here is no why easily turned to be one of my absolute favorites so I covered it.

8/30/96

JP Pueblo, CO, US

My best friend waited in line at the record store starting at 5am and scored 3rd row seats for the show in Denver. During the show, a girl had worked her way up to our seats and was dancing with us. She was the first person I ever kissed. My friend was killed in a car accident less than a year later. We played Jupiter’s Lament during his funeral. I gave my first eulogy at 15. I miss him everyday but MCIS makes still feel his presence in my life. Thank you SP.

Inspired

Shaun hirsch Hermiston or, US

Hi I have severe bipolar disorder and I was 14 when this album came out and it was only thing I could listen to for years, my smashing pumpkins is The other half of my soul this album inspired me to be a musician and all of my songs are inspired by Billys song writing and now I have Lil peep infections too, Zero was the first song I learned to play on guitar and now I am writing my own songs and uploading them and living my best life thanks to this album and my idol and hero WPC

As far as you take me

Ryan Stamford, CT, US

It’s 1995 and I’m on the school bus with the soccer team. I had a quick opportunity to buy MCIS at my local record store a few hours before the trip up to play some other high school team. Put the disc in my player and remember being transported. That was it. The full climax from all the Cherub Rocks and the Sivas. It’s was happening. Fell asleep that night to Poreclina and Beautiful. So much to absorb. Remember being at high school parties playing along with the CD on my guitar to By Starlight. Much love and Praise to WPC, JI, DW, JC. Most blessings. MCIS keeps me going to this day. I put my kids to sleep with this record to this day. Much love and respect

And I learned, the distance to the sun

Chris London/Hamilton, CA

In 1995 I was making mix tapes from CD and radio. I would sneak downstairs into my uncles en suite apartment and riffle through the albums for new tapes. After I listened to mellon collie, im almost positive I never made a mixed tape again. In this body of work, I had found all the mix I would ever need. I ended becoming a very good guitarist because of Billy and James. I have fond memories of playing my candle apple squier stratocaster through a big muff at band practise (it took me a couple of years to figure out I had the wrong pickups lol) omg that combo was noisy. But to our little 3 piece band, I had unlocked a vital part of sounding like corgan. 25 years later, I still measure my guitar tone to this album.. I still mostly tune to Eb.. and I still find peace, answers, resolution and solace in the lyrics on this record. It touched me then, and still today, makes me feel elated as well as bringing all those initial emotions. From the minute I heard the pumpkins, they’ve been my favourite band. And I’ve yet to skip an album. Saw them play on the Oceania tour in Toronto… Best night of my life- still my favourite concert. Love ya Billy,

Slumberland

Ignacio Buenos Aires, AR

Tonight I’m reminiscing about this album. I often do lately in these weird times. The first time I listened to this album was in 2015, when I was 14 and going through a really, really rough time personally, like most teenagers do. I would go nuts to the rock songs on the record and scream them in class with my friends back then. Now, 19, I find myself more fascinated by the artwork of the record and its imagery. It reminds me of when I was a child and those space-ish wallpapers that my mum put in my bedroom and that careless magic in the air that I used to feel. Now I’m becoming an adult and about to face real life and I tend to rely on the more soft, nostalgic songs on this record like Tonight Tonight, the beautiful title track, 33, Cupid de Locke and so. Every time I feel like going to a mental paradise outside real life I put on that record and fly, feel. I look at the artwork and it makes me think of space, night, and it kinda reminds me of that beautiful gag on The Simpsons where Homer falls asleep in his car and goes to a magic place called Slumberland. I’m more sensitive now than I was then I guess (and with a whole lot of sleeping problems lol). This is one of the albums of my life and a safe place for me for sure. Happy anniversary! I’ll carry it with me forever.

Ignacio

Steeple guide me to my heart and home

Pam New Orleans, LA, US

The Smashing Pumpkins were already my favorite band when Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was released 25 years ago. My friends and I went to the release show at the Riviera in Chicago and then to Tower Records to buy the album. We drove to the lake to listen for the first time, excitedly reacting as each song played. It felt monumental, like a real moment in time, an album that would change each of our lives, and a first listen that we’d all remember forever. After we went our separate ways, I sat in my car to listen again alone, really letting each song sink in. I ended up driving around, listening on repeat until the sun came up. While I loved the albums that came before with all my heart, the lyrics on Mellon Collie grabbed me like nothing I had ever heard before. It was like WPC knew my soul, like someone was speaking to me in a language I could hear, for the very first time. I fell hard and fast for Thirty-three and it remains the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard. I recently visited that steeple (pictured) and it moved me to tears. I can only imagine how many times I’ve listened to MCIS since that first night. Must be in the tens of thousands. But still, after all these years and after all those listens, it takes my breath away.

Mellon collie and me.

Alexander Moscow, RU

Hi all! Sorry for my terrible english 🙂 I was in army, in Vladivostok city, this city is far away from my home town on 8000 km. In the end of 1995 or early 1996 i was listening local radiostation and there was story about SP and their new album Mellon collie. I never heard about SP before. Of course, it was not only story but and few songs from album. Not sure, but maybe it was Butterfly, 1979. Then was little story in local newspaper and “pirate” tape with Deep Purple’s album and between “bonus tracks” was Butterly 🙂 After i came home i bought full album, “pirate” tape again, i think it was fall of 1996 and finally listened in entirely. And by 2020 year Mellon collie is still my favorite SP album! And i hope will hear it in entirely alive one day 😉 Oh, and i really love SP tour with Mellon collie in 1995-1997, it was really amazing! I have lost of gigs from this tour.

Cool kids never have the time

Sophia Stamford, CT, US

Throughout the years, our taste in music may change and our favorite songs come and go as we expand our listening, but for me, there’s only one song that will forever remain my favorite song. It’s a song that’s timeless, though as I’ve grown older I’ve come to appreciate it in different ways. As a 13 year old girl I looked at the song as what my life would soon be, running around doing stupid things with my friends before we were forced to care about the world. Getting older, my friends and I became the kids in the song, and the sense of nostalgia that I would soon feel for these moments was being created all around me, before I even had time to realize it. All of the heartbreaks and losses, feelings of excitement, of newness, of learning and growth. We were the “cool kids who never had the time,” or so I felt, and it isn’t until these moments in time are through that we can understand what they meant and who we truly were at that time. You really do at this age feel that an end to all of this will never come, that you’ll be a child in this city that you grew up in forever, living the same years over and over again.

As I move on to new stages in my life, move to new cities, make new friends, gain new perspectives on life, 1979 stands as a reminder of all of these nostalgic moments in my life. Every time I listen to it, I feel grateful for all of the stupid, trivial, ridiculous moments I made growing up, ones I still experience I must say. It stands as a time machine to years that I can never get back, yet ones that live so vividly in my mind. At 19 years old, I know many of these years are still to come, but the innocence of living at home and growing up for me seems to already have faded, sentiments brought to life in the lyrics and sound of the song that I yearn for each time I hear it or play it on the guitar.

But time moves on, faster than we can ever imagine, as the song explains. The people we love change, despite our memories of the people they used to be, and at some point, you’re going to have to sit and accept that life is always going to moving, changing, evolving before you can even appreciate it for what it was. The last line of the song, “The streets heat the urgency of now, as you see there’s no one around,” has always reminded me of a breath of fresh air when you wake up early in the morning and look outside at the place where you’re living at the moment. Here, you can reflect, truly, on all that your life has been, all the ways that it’s changed and rewritten itself, yet through all of these changes, you’re still here, standing as a culmination of your youth, your friends, your family, your loves, and your losses. I play 1979 at moments of extreme change in my life, when I want to sit and take that morning air in before a new chapter of my life begins: before I graduate, before I say goodbye to a friend, before I leave home, before I move to cities far from where I grew up. I come to appreciate time and the immense speed at which it moves life along, remembering all that has gone and anticipate all that is to come.

The Beginning of Everything

Dani US

In 1994 I started listening to Pisces Iscariot on repeat after a friend told me it was his favorite album. It was such a “different” sound for me, loud and soft, nostalgic and innovative, it didn’t sound like anything else I’d ever heard.

On a dreary Tuesday in October, I skipped school, took a public bus across town, and bought MCIS on the day it was released. It was AMAZING. Who starts off an “alternative” double album with a piano? There were all these feelings that I couldn’t stop listening to. Back then, you didn’t get immediate updates every time a band you liked took a breath. You had to work for it, find magazine articles, read liner notes, listen to those notes they were playing, decipher the lyrics. The book that came with MCIS was so worn from my studying it over and over. I somehow talked my mom into letting me go to a concert at UMASS Amherst to see this enormous tour from a band that was somehow now known all over the world. My band. Billy in the famous “zero” t-shirt. I was surrounded by people who didn’t know the songs that really tore into me like “To Forgive,” but they were there to see my favorite band. After MCIS a lot changed. I met a group of friends from what is now “The Internet.” We goofed off and traveled around different states and even internationally, meeting up to see SP through various tours. We’re now old, some of us with teenage kids of our own, some of whom are second generation fans.

A journey into space and time…

Joshua Campbell Oviedo, Fl, US

It was November 1995. The album had only been out for a few weeks, back in those days, if you didn’t have the money to buy it, and a friend didn’t have a copy, you didn’t get to hear it. Finally a week before my 16th birthday, my buddy came through with a copy. That night my two friends and I split up a ten strip, listened to both sides and still can’t be saved…🤙

NSA School desk – 1997

Angela Johannesburg , ZA

In high school, one of the classrooms was a staggered like a lecture room. We sat on the same individual wooden desks each lesson. I was suitably obsessed with MCIS and one tedious lesson from a substitute teacher left me gazing unfocused, I decided to write part of the lyrics of ‘Where boys fear to tread’ on the desk and draw some SP album artwork. The lesson finished and I returned the next day to the same classroom, to the same desk. Someone had continued the lyrics! But who? This carried on for the entire year, song by song. I’d walk past the class, hoping to catch a glimpse of who it was, my fellow SP fan, but the door was always closed until the lesson was over. By then everyone was walking out.

I’ll never know who that person was but it was a magical connection I’ll never forget and a lasting memory of MCIS.

Music for healing

Gaspar Insfran Asunción, Central, PY

I was 10 years old back in 95. My grandpa called me to his office. He was like a father to me. Always giving me so much love. He told that he wanted to give me a gift and asked what it could be. From all things I chose the Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness album.

I was going trough tough times and when I listened to the album everything just seemed to be right. The loving ballads and the intense rock songs just shook my soul and made me feel so alive. It was definitely one of the inflection points in my life.

Tonight Tonight

Mitch Indianapolis, IN, US

Having traveled nationwide to more shows than I can remember, We were certain the final Metro show was truly the end of days for the Smashing Pumpkins. What better way to pay homage to our rock gods than to recreate the costumes from the iconic Tonight Tonight video at the place where it all began. Here we were. 12/02/2000 Cabaret Metro…

And the embers never fade in your city by the lake. The place where you were born

17 in a boring music scene

John Williamson Hebron,Maryland , US

I remember skipping school to go buy MCIS, I had enough money to get the double cassette version my local Walmart. The Bullet w/ Butterfly Wings video totally blew away as I wasn’t prepared the heaviness of the song. 1995 was not a good year for rock music and The Smashing Pumpkins came out swinging on this one and helped save the genre. I became enamored with it and still believe at age 42 it is “The Wall” for my generation. Listening to Zero, Tales of a Scorched Earth, By Star Light and even b-sides like Said Sadly, Tribute to Johnny and God take me back to being a carefree Senior in High School. Thank you for providing to the soundtrack of my life.” Farewell goodnight last one out turn out the lights”

The Usual with a Side of Jellybelly

Anne Crofford Falls Church, VA, US

I attended college in NYC from 1999-2003. There was a deli around the corner from campus on 8th Ave between 26th and 27th owned by a sweet family that was always so kind to the F.I.T. community. The son and I realized we had a shared love of Smashing Pumpkins and would often talk about music. I would go there several times a week for lunch and would always order the same thing. When I’d walk through the door, he’d shout out to me, “The usual with a side of Jellybelly, coming right up!” Shortly after 9/11, the deli burned down and we never saw the family again, as they chose not to rebuild. I often think of the deli whenever I hear Jellybelly and wonder how the family is doing, now.

An Amazing Journey

Jessica Canton, US

It was the winter of 1995. The first song I heard him sing that night in was Rocket off of Siamese Dreams. He had this way of staring at you like you were the only thing that existed. Bright green intensity framed by jet black hair and gorgeous cheekbones.

I had seen him before, we went to the same school. I had felt that stare before but I thought there was no way that stare was meant for me. Besides, I was there that night because I was dating his drummer.

My cousin occasionally played in one of his bands

and called me one day on his behalf. That weekend we went night sledding with my cousin and some of his other band mates. He sat behind me on a sled, spoke something softly into my ear about holding on and I was hooked for the rest of my life.

I spent the next five years consumed by him. It was intense, volatile, mesmerizing, magnetizing… fucking magical. Even time itself bent for us. We could spend hours talking only to realize that a mere hour had passed. I could feel his presence without looking. In a room with a hundred other people, I’d know he was there.

We spent a lot of our alone time listening to Mellon Collie. I could spend a life time running my hands over his gorgeous curves and angles, letting the music speak for us. I used to fantazise about walking down the aisle to the Tonight, Tonight instrumental.

But it was also toxic. The constant push/pull, hot/cold. The fights, the misunderstandings, the other girls. We were so young, such stupid kids. Both out on our own for the first time and I was a trainwreck of undiagnosed CPTSD.

We were the highest highs but also the lowest lows and ,eventually, I needed it to end. Our association ended badly and we went out separate ways like we never knew each other at all.

I stayed friends, and even family, with his band mates whom had become some of my closest and dearest friends over the course of our madness. I dated others who I was find of.I got married and had a family. But I never loved anyone else again.

In 2018, our friend died unexpectedly and it drew us back into the same orbit again. I put on a benefit for our friends daughter with all his old bands reuniting to play in his honor.

I hadn’t seen him in close to twenty years. He was still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I could still feel him in the room. I could still feel the tension of not being able to touch him.

I was very unhappily married and, unbeknownst to me, so was he. I eventually broke and reached out to him regarding the second benefit. I had every intention of remaining friendly and proper. I did. But that connection, that undeniable magmatism was still there like a freight train that couldn’t be knocked off course.

I thought it was impossible to change my lot. I had no idea how to escape my marriage, I had settled into the idea that that was what my life was going to be and so did he. But I knew I couldn’t go back to life as I knew it, I was still in love with him after all those years.

So, we moved mountains. We broke the whole world. We did the impossible. We had a million complications thrown at us along the way, not to mention a word wide pandemic, but here we are. Together again where we belong.

He’s an amazing step father to my children, and, as I sit here writing this, our new baby daughter is upstairs dreaming.

Our improbable, miracle baby that was conjured up and born through sheer will and the kind of love that few are ever lucky enough to have.

And The Smashing Pumpkins, especially Mellon Collie, have traveled with us on our journey the whole way.

Christmas -95

Aapo Helsinki, FI

Got MCIS as a christmas present. Had heard Tonight Tonight and Bullet, but nothing else. Started listening with headphones on with the rest of my family in the same room – I skipped Tonight Tonight ’cause I knew it already, but then Jellybelly started and when the main groove kicks in, it was the most powerful feeling any song has ever given me, a perfect wall of guitars, a perfect groove, a perfect chorus… I won’t forget that ever and the song (and album) still gives me chills after thousands of repeats.

Their Passion was my World

Matthew Johannesburg, ZA

Smashing Pumpkins poster in the window, with a CD shop full of people – oh how things are changing. This was the era of VHS and CD’s – and how I remember how tape-cassette became uncool.

I was a teenager as I walked into the CD shop, mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday and SP MCIS was def on that list. I was already hooked from Gish and Siamese Dream so this was a no brainer.

The sound created was amazing, the heaviness and yet creative ooze that pulsated from my sound system was too much. I remember how my dad hated the noise, but I didn’t care and why would I, I was a teenager. This album and I became one as I would listen to it everywhere, I tried to learn the chords for songs but the technical wowness was far beyond my skills.

As teenagers, our group would listen to MCIS drink and smoke a spliff walking around at night in the streets with nothing to do but sing MCIS songs fresh in our memory and shout out the world is a vampire while kicking out street lights.

I wouldn’t want to have grown up in a world without Pumpkins!

How MCIS started a personal revolution

Vanessa Desloires Melbourne, Victoria , AU

MCIS is a seminal album for me. I was introduced to it in the classic way by a friend’s old sister. As a 13 year old in 1996 with no real sense of self, it was transporting. I could retreat to different songs as I tried to navigate the uncertainty of transition. D’Arcy was particularly influential. I saw a role model, and naturally picked up a bass, which consumed my teenage years. I wore her Bullet-era blue lipstick to my confirmation. I later turned my back on my painful teenage years, but in 2020 am slowly reclaiming it as foundational to my current strength. I only wish I’d kept my Zero T-shirt.

Smashing Pumpkins - Memories!

Purgatorio

Holdeeni Port Saint Lucie, FL, US