Absolutely everything surrounding the Smashing Pumpkins show this past Saturday at Moda Center seemed to be structured to assuage the limitless ego of the band’s majordomo, Billy Corgan. Nearly every animated clip and video and photo montage that played on huge screens behind and around the group during their three-and-a-half hour performance featured some variation of his bald pate. At one point, as the Pumpkins traipsed through a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” roadies dressed like monks slowly pushed a statue of Corgan, made up to look like a Catholic icon through the venue.
But more to the point of the evening, when the show kicked off, the big video screens that were running through an animated selection of recognizable images from the band’s history, up to and including 2000’s Machina, split apart to reveal Corgan alone. After drinking in the applause and taking center stage, he played a solo version of “Disarm” as childhood photos and home videos flickered behind him. Despite all his rage, he is still just an angsty teen trying to find his place in the world, apparently.
As Corgan has spent the entirety of his musical and non-musical life directing attention to his unarguable talent and often sketchy political views, this was to be expected. Yet, it rubbed roughly against the narrative surrounding the Pumpkins’ summer tour, which saw original guitarist James Iha returning the fold to perform a long set of tunes from his tenure with the band (from 1988 to 2000). If ever there was a moment to project some group unity, this would have been it.
At times, that did bubble to the surface. Corgan gamely ceded the spotlight to Iha so the latter could take lead vocals on “Blew Away,” a B-side from the Siamese Dream years. Early on, a montage of ’90s-era videos of the band rolled along, giving Iha and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin plenty of screen time. (Noticeably, all the clips cropped out original bassist D’Arcy Wretzky, who was not invited to the reunion party.) There was a gentle bit of stage banter between the two men and plenty of smiles beaming from everyone’s faces between songs. But once the music started, it was Billy’s show.
For much of the night, that was easy enough to swallow. Corgan may be a Alex Jones-enabling oddball, but the man can write the hell out of a song and plays lead guitar with a rare ferocity. The requisite performances of new classic rock favorites like “Today,” “Cherub Rock,” and “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” felt enormous in the sometimes unforgiving acoustics of the Moda Center. And for the serious acolytes, Corgan and the band pulled some deep cuts out of the songbook, including “The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning,” a tune originally released on the 1997 Batman & Robin soundtrack, and fan favorite “Muzzle.”
Yet for a show that ran a full 90 minutes longer than the entirety of their CD-era data dump Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, there were long momentum killing stretches. Guaranteed audience freakout tunes turned into bookends for excursions into snoozy ballads from the 1998 album Adore and odd choices, like the aforementioned Led Zep cover and an unnecessary take on David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”
There was also a strange narrative threaded throughout the night, spelled out in bits and pieces through the videos playing during the set, and best expressed by, of all people, Mark McGrath. The Sugar Ray vocalist appeared onscreen as a kind of carnival barker to draw focus from the crowd so Corgan could change outfits and the road crew could move some gear around. As he introduced “1979,” he said something along the lines of the Pumpkins’ music being “part of a cultural and artistic revolution that was co-opted by the machine.”
If we’re to assume that Corgan wrote those lines, that’s a pretty sizeable chunk of horseshit coming from someone who signed with one of the biggest major labels around back in the early ’90s and spent the decade steering his art straight at the masses. And to have that come from the mouth of one of the biggest fame-hungry folks around only dilutes the message more. Play it off as ironic all you want, the price tag for the evening (upwards of $200 for the best seats) tells a much different story.
