Well, I promised i'd put up the article, here it is. This article was given to me by [email protected]. I'd like to say thank you very much, Marquette.
ON THEIR FORTHCOMING ALBUM, "ADORE," THE SMASHING PUMPKINS GET
MOODY AND LEAVE THE GUITAR NOISE BEHIND - BY DAVID FRICKE
The performance is simple and tender - just Billy Corgan crooning
his pinched tenor over the solitary shimmer of his acoustic guitar.
Circular in its chord patterns, straightforward, at least on the
surface, in its romantic sentiment, "Let Me Give the World to You"
is the last song to be recorded for the Smashing Pumpkins'
forthcoming album, Adore. But for all the naked clarity of this
first take, the singer and guitarist senses deeper, stranger
possibilities in the tune as he listens to a playback, his white,
shaved head bent deep in thought in Studio A at Sound City in Van
Nuys, California - the same room, coincidentally, where Nirvana
recorded Nevermind.
"I can see where this is going," Corgan says sharply as the tape
ends; he turns to producer Rick Rubin: "It's a nice Pumpkins pop
song. But I can see it somewhere else, breaking up into something
different." Corgan illustrates his point by swinging his arms to
one side, as if he's throwing pieces of the song around the control
room.
"Do you have any idea what that something is?" Rubin asks. "We
can do something basic, just you and a click track. Then you can
add and subtract ideas." Rubin has been invited by Corgan, who
produced other trakcs on Adore, to take the reins for this final
number. And Rubin does so with sunny patience, gently prodding the
chief Pumpkin to be more explicit about his ambitions for "Let Me
Give the World to You."
Corgan, dressed in black from neck to toe, fishes for a reference
point and comes up with the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever."
"It's a pop song," he says, "but then all this strange stuff goes
on in it, things dropping in and out. I know what we have can be
a good pop song. I want to see how fucked-up it can be."
That has been the Pumpkins' modus operandi for the past year.
Since their first round of demo sessions for Adore back in February
of '97, Corgan, guitarist James Iha and bassist D'arcy have sorely
tested their own sanity as a band and the promise and durability of
Corgan's material: More than thirty new originals where whittled
down to about fourteen for the album, which is set to be released
at the end of May. They've used multiple drummers and scrapped
weeks of inconclusive work, including sessions held last fall in
Chicago with producer Brad Wood. They've cut some songs live in
the studio and built others on tape, overdub by overdub. They've
gone the unplugged route and jammed with drum machines. In short,
the Pumpkins have made Adore, their fourth studio album, the hard
way - by trial and error.
So it is with "Let Me Give the World to You." It takes three
hours of going nowhere fast - including Corgan's aborted passes at
the song on piano and unsuccessful experiments with tape speed and
echo - to persuade Corgan, Iha and D'arcy to try the obvious:
playing together in real time. As Iha threads the melody with
ethereal fills on a Hammond organ and guest drummer Joey Waronker,
from Beck's band, hits a tribal pulse, "Let Me Give the World to You"
quickly ripens into something special. The spooky pneumatic tension
of the group's attack fleshes out the melancholy and irony lacing
Corgan's lyrics.
One night and fifty-eight takes later, the Pumpkins decide they've
played the song to near perfection; they end up editing a composite
track from the best performances. But Rubin figures the initial
false starts were worth the trouble. "If you have a great song,
you can make twenty records out of it," he says smiling through his
long, thick beard.
"It could have been more of an acoustic record," Iha says of Adore.
"It could have been more electronic. Or it could have been done
live, with more of a band sound. This album is just an amalagamation
of those things."
"I explored every possible avenue one could explore," Corgan
declares, taking a breather one night before tackling vocal overdubs.
"But it all adds up in your resolve and your understanding of what
you're trying to accomplish.
"What's amazing about James and D'arcy," he notes with bona fide
pride, "is that they almost never question what I want to do. I
don't think there's one song on that album I've been questioned about.
In fact, the questions usually come about the songs I don't want to
put out. There are three songs that D'arcy really likes that probably
won't make the album. She thinks I'm a fucking idiot for not putting
them out."
Even in rough-mix form, Adore is a bold kiss-off to the guitar-
overload extremes of 1993's Siamese Dream and the 1995 double-CD beast
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, combining New Wave style
electronics and intimate Beatlesque pop in varied, startling measure.
The understated guitars, night-mood keyboards and maching-generated
beats in "To Shiela," "Ava Adore" and "Apples and Oranges" suggest
"1979," the Pumpkins' synth-pop hit from Mellon Collie, crossed with
the art-folk radiance of R.E.M.'s Out of Time. Even "Tear" - dense,
stormy, and drenched in Mellotron - and the mantralike "Shame,"
the two songs on Adore closest to outright rock, don't need monster-
guitar breaks to be heavy.
Corgan attributes much of Adore's color and character to the
Pumpkins' prolonged difficulty in adjusting to the absence of drummer
Jimmy Chamberlain, who was fired in July 1996 for repeated drug use
and for his part in the fatal overdose of keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin.
Chamberlin's touring replacement, Matt Walker, was let go during the
Chicago sessions last year; ex-Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron played
on several songs but appears on only one album track, "For Martha."
"It took letting go of the concept of bass, two guitars and drums to
actually move forward," claims Corgan. "We're literally back to where
we started, which was me, James, D'arcy and a drum machine. We played
gigs like that. The strangest things was, as soon as we stopped playing
with Matt [Walker] and started playing with a drum machine, we started
to play like ourselves again."
Iha points out that one song, "Pug" was initially recorded with Cameron
as "a minor-key death march. Then Billy put it up on the computer, got
a good drum-machine program going, put on synths, and I did maybe three guitar
overdubs on it. It doesn't sound like anything you can quite put
your finger on. It just sounds cool."
"Shame" also features a drum machine but was actually recorded live.
"I was feeling really sad one morning," Corgan explains. "I got up,
wrote the song. We went in that day and did it in three hours. What
you're hearing is what I felt that day."
Strangely enough, Coran says a pivotal, if unlikely, inspiration for
the sound and quirky immediacy of Adore was the early-1950's Sun
recordings of Howlin' Wolf: "I was really blown away by the visceral energy.
There's other things I was listening to: Son House, Muddy Waters.
But I wasn't attracted to the song form per se. I was attracted to the
spirit in the music. It seemed more rock & roll to me than any other
rock & roll I could listen to." Corgan was so taken with the notion of
a roots 'n' groove Pumpkins record that at one point he talked to both
Daniel Lanois and T-Bone Burnett about producing Adore.
"If I played all these songs for you on piano or on acoustic guitar, it
would make more sense," Corgan continues. "But I didn't feel comfortable
in that skin. I wasn't offering anything new until I took it into my own
space and colored it with my own crayons."
The Pumpkins are just starting to confront the issue of touring as a trio,
especially behind an album as offbeat as Adore. There is talk of limiting
road work to two months - the band did fourteen months on behalf of Mellon
Collie - and of using extra musicians in lieu of tapes and samplers. Corgan
says he also wants to do a solo acoustic tour this year as an outlet for all
the new songs that didn't make Adore: "I'm not even going to release them
as B sides. The idea is to start working on a solo acoustic record over
time."
But, Corgan insists, "the energy around the new record is going to dictate
what happens. Fuck, everybody might hate it. I don't know. I'd be lying if
I said, 'The record company hates it, the fans hate it - right, I'm going to
go out on tour.' I'll just stay home."
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