Rock band

Critics hear endless lists of influences in the songs of the Chicago-based Smashing Pumpkins—Black Sabbath, Queen, Boston, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie—and use countless hard-edged adjectives to describe the Smashing Pumpkins' sound. Murray Englehart in RIP observed, "The collage that makes up the Pumpkins—ranging from a Hüsker Dü guitar onslaught to a sometime Hendrix-like fret dynamism and flashes of dreamy ambience—also features slabs of Sabbath, the band Henry Rollins once called 'the ultimate lonely man's music.'" And lead singersongwriter Billy Corgan, whose "lonely guy" persona has been much explored by the media, admitted to Englehart that he did indeed listen to Sabbath at a young age.

While many suspect that Corgan is the band—and no one denies that he is the major contributor of time, art, and effort—the other members do their share to bring this alternative rock and roll to full, impassioned life. Corgan got the band together in 1988 after warming up with a band in Florida called the Marked—so named because of Corgan's strawberry-colored birthmark on his arm and a similar mark on another band member's face. He and D'Arcy Wretzky, who usually goes without her last name, met in an argument in a parking lot outside of a concert; when he discovered she played the bass, they joined forces and brought in guitarist James lha, who was a student at Chicago's Loyola University, and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin.

Functioned Dysfunctionals

Though many critics spend their energy describing Corgan, the personalities—social and musical—of the other Smashing Pumpkins members has made its way into the press. Jim Greer offered this summary for Spin: "D'Arcy (thumbnail sketch: likes to wear sunglasses and act cool), lha (shy, friendly, big fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation), and Chamberlin (madman)." Alluding to various personal problems, including the end of D'Arcy and lha's long-term relationship, Chamberlin's drug problems, and Corgan's emotional problems, D'Arcy told Michael Azerrad of Rolling Stone, "It's really a dysfunctional band."

But their performances suggest otherwise. Michael C. Harris described one Chicago event for Rolling Stone at which the band "worked the crowd into a moshing, body-surfing frenzy, guitarists Corgan and James lha urging each other on to spastic heights while the seemingly unmoved D'Arcy worked a bass groove deep enough to maintain the dueling guitarists. And drummer Jimmy Chamberlin forged an unwavering rhythm bed augmented by original, jazzed-up fills."

However, Billy Corgan's philosophies, personal and musical, give the band its shape and purpose. His angst pervades their full-length debut album, Gish, and follow-up, Siamese Dream, which was named for Corgan's longing for the perfect companionship of a siamese twin attached at the wrist. He describes his childhood as "terrible." After his parents' divorce, Corgan lived first with his great-grandmother, then his father, who was a musician often on the road, and his stepmother. He has always felt himself to be an outcast, he told Request's Bill Wyman. "People consistently make me feel that there's something wrong with me. That I'm an incorrect person.... Even today, the music community has not exactly opened its arms up to my ideology."

But these profound insecurities have in no way come between Corgan and his commitment to musical progress. To the contrary, he clarified, "The simplest thing I can say about it is that if I'd had a decent childhood, I definitely wouldn't do this. There's definitely something about that hole in my life that pushed me to need acceptance from a thousand people at a time."

Intense Lyrics, Innovative Guitar Work

While "acceptance" may be forefront in Corgan's thoughts, he does not cater to his audience. He challenges himself, his band, and his audience with consistent conviction and hard work. His lyrics are deeply intimate and revealing. "These are very personal songs.

I sing them because they mean something to me, and in that sense, I think they will signify things to other people," he told S. L. Duff of RIP. In addition, "a frightening amount of time was spent" in search of the right guitar sounds, Corgan told Brett Milano in Pulse! "Everybody's already heard every guitar sound ever, so we wanted to come up with something as new as it could possibly be when you're still using guitars, foot pedals and an amp."

For Gish, Corgan explained to Mike Mettler of Guitar Player, "I wanted the rideout to sound like World War I airplanes divebombing around your head." The band's ambitious goals can be summed up in Corgan's typically aggressive and simultaneously understated stance: "I've always thought we could do something that's basically stupid, which is playing rock music, but to take it to a level that's something of a higher art form, as daunting a task as that might be, and to do it with some intelligence and class." D'Arcy made clear how prevalent a philosophy that is for the band when she told Azerrad, "Perfection is not an easy thing to do. We're trying to do something that's great and beautiful and will last, that is a piece of art."

Indie or Not Indie?

Smashing Pumpkins have inspired awe from critics since the release of Gish. Chris Mundy in Rolling Stone wrote that Gish "smacks ... of the opening of an alternative universe." But Smashing Pumpkins, its members have noted with a certain bitterness, were not received too warmly by the independent label music world: they were too successful at selling albums and booking shows; they simply did not suffer enough. For Billy Corgan, however, an indie label was the only way to go with their first album, even though they were actively pursued by major labels. The goal was to retain creative license, Corgan told Mundy. "What the band does is so specific that we couldn't dilute it in any way. We couldn't put ourselves in the position where we were powerless."

Smashing Pumpkins' adamant stance has paid off. Lorraine AN of Rolling Stone wrote, "Even the most chaotic pileups of distortion are painstakingly orchestrated." Entertainment Weekly's David Browne remarked that the band's 1993 release, Siamese Dream, "represents the great lost link between alternative, pop, and metal." Mark J. Petracca, also of Entertainment Weekly, elaborated, "This psychedelic pop masterpiece is one of the most important rock records of the year. [They] probe emotional depths while pummeling you with grungy guitar riffs, then rescue you with a delicate acoustic-guitar arpeggio." And Billboard spotlighted the album as "a stupendous, brilliantly produced album that combines brute force with strong melodic sense."

Christopher John Farley of Time noted that the band's 1993 album Siamese Dream "relies heavily on Hendrixera musical scores, but manages to transcend most of them and create a lush sound the Pumpkins call their own." In Stereo Review, one writer exclaimed, "Bombastic riffing—newly minted from the archives of Hendrix, Zeppelin, and others—gets reconfigured by this Chicago quartet into jagged shards and clumsy arpeggios. They've taken the beauty of heavy metal's obsessive hooking and messed with it." Praising Siamese Dream, the writer concluded that the album "kicks you in the solar plexus and leaves you gasping for more."

These "slackers with vision," as Entertainment Weekly's David Browne called Smashing Pumpkins, released a third album in late 1994 that was quite a departure for the group. Pisces Iscariot is a collection of B-sides and "songs never meant to come out," Corgan noted in the LP's liner notes, as quoted in Entertainment Weekly. "It's easy to see why these songs didn't make the cut for Siamese Dream or even Gish, "commented Jim Greer in Spin. Pointing out the element of humor in the eclectic blend of tunes on Pisces Iscariot, which includes a remake of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide," Greer found that "Great Pumpkin Corgan rarely disappoints."

Change, experimentation, and irreverence are some of the qualities that have made the Smashing Pumpkins one of the most admired alternative bands even while they burst out from that rubric. As Kevin Kerslake, who filmed their video for "Cherub Rock," told Deborah Russell in Billboard, "I think of angels when I hear the Smashing Pumpkins music." And the band's many fans would agree that their music does seem transcendent.

—Diane Moroff