Siamese Dream was a rock dream come true — and a bit of a nightmare too.
Far from any dreaded sophomore slump, Siamese Dream would represent The Smashing Pumpkins' wildly successful second coming — and become an acknowledged classic album, a characteristically idiosyncratic yet strangely accessible masterpiece in the midst of a historic sea change in rock.
"We were coming from an alternative universe where if you got lucky, you became Sonic Youth and could sell out a club like the Metro," Corgan remembers. "And if you were really lucky, you were Echo & The Bunnymen or Depeche Mode and could play to 3000 people. That was the world we were living in and understood. Then suddenly, Nirvana's blowing up and Pearl Jam's blowing up — and don't forget we've been on tour with Red Hot Chili Peppers with Pearl Jam opening up for us. We saw what was happening and suddenly you saw this massive tide coming in — or going out, depending on how you look at it. I'm not a stupid guy, so I thought, I better learn how to write some pop songs now. You could see that the bands that survived were the ones that had actual good songs. My attitude was, I'm not going back to work at the record store."
Such was the intensity of that time in alternative rock that right before Siamese Dream was recorded, Corgan found himself summoned to a big label meeting at Virgin Records in Los Angeles. "They all gathered and gave me this big speech. They saw what was happening and wanted to do a complete re-release of Gish on Virgin and blow it up to another level." Recorded for the independent Caroline Records, Gish had become an unlikely hit. "The people at Virgin told me that this was our moment and basically offered us the keys to the kingdom. I listen to this whole spiel, and then I said, 'No.'" There was a screeching silence. I told them, 'Gish isn't the record you want. There are no hit songs on that album. Let me go back to the studio and make a different kind of album.' They seemed stunned I'd say no. Then I'll never forget it — the head of radio there Phil Costello, who was coming off working like four #1 Paula Abdul hits said, "The kid's right." After that, they all backed off, and we went on to make Siamese Dream."
"I immediately went into a major depression and writing block," Corgan recalls. "I was whacked out of my mind for eight months. I was whacked out of my mind by whatever we were taking — like copious amounts of LSD and mushrooms. I just thought, I can't do this." Corgan says the turning point came when he was in a bookstore and found the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. "That book changed my life. She suggested you do these affirmations — like write 'I Am An Artist' three times, and I couldn't do it. I'm not even joking. It was hard for me to go through the transition from thinking I'm a musician to saying I'm an artist. That's how messed up in the head I was. So I went through a massive suicidal depression where I came within a hair's breadth of tossing myself out of a window. The next day I sat down on my bed in the morning and wrote "Disarm" and "Today" within twenty-four hours — and that was when I knew I had something different to say. I finally submitted to whatever was my own voice inside. If you listen to Gish, I wanted to be someone else like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., The Cure or Led Zeppelin, or Black Sabbath. I didn't want to be this whiny sad guy, but that's who I was. So I decided to be myself, and that's when these songs poured out of me."
Siamese Dream — which once again found The Pumpkins working with producer Butch Vig — was recorded not in Chicago, or Madison, Wisconsin where Gish had been cut, but rather at Triclops Studios in Marietta, Georgia. As Corgan explains it today, "That was about trying to keep the band out of Chicago, and in particular it was a way to keep Jimmy away from Chicago. We felt it was important to keep Jimmy away from his bad influences at home, but of course he could find as many bad influences in Georgia. The infamous story is that Jimmy disappeared for a week in Georgia, and we went on the radio and said, "If anyone sees our drummer, can you send him back? We need to finish our album." True story. "Back then, Jimmy had some major issues with his life, but he was never inebriated in the studio. None of us ever were."
This is not to say that band relations between The Pumpkins were even remotely dreamy during the Siamese Dream sessions. "This is where things went wrong," Corgan explains. "This is where there was maximum pressure. We all felt it. Butch felt it too. I became very intense. There was a feeling of walking in a room and thinking, if things don't go right here, my dream will never come true. You worry if you're going to be a one hit wonder. So I don't know what positive spin I can put on it for you because after a period of time I end up essentially working on the album alone with Butch. That's where my friendship with James ended because he was so furious with the way the whole thing worked out. Jimmy went off the deep end and ended up in rehab during the making of the record. And D'arcy quit the band for a time during the making of the record. It's amazing we all survived it somehow."
Corgan did share two co-writes on the album with Iha. As Corgan explains, "The way we worked back then was James would make riff demos and play stuff for me, and those ones stuck out. I remember 'Mayonaise,' James played for me in Japan. I put on headphones, and as soon as I heard it I started singing the melody, which was weird. 'Soma' was this beautiful riff from James that was the kind of thing I would never have written on my own, but it was so lovely that I completely connected to it. In fact, it was such a beautiful riff that I thought I've got to build a really beautiful song around it. So we worked really hard on 'Soma' for around four months." Asked what songs on Siamese Dream mean the most to him today, Corgan thinks for a moment then answers. "I think you have a couple things that stand out," he says. "We start the album out with 'Cherub Rock' which is basically my big F.U. to the indie world. If you read the lyrics, that was basically me railing against the hipper-than-thou NYC indie mentality. 'Today' sticks out because it's basically a really happy song about suicide — which suits me somehow. 'Disarm' stands out because it's basically about being abused as a child, and it represents something that was bottled up in me for years. Those songs stood out for a lot of people, and they stood out for me too."
Corgan is quick to add that Butch Vig deserves tremendous credit for the enduring sonic power of Siamese Dream. "The record I wanted to make was completely unruly," Corgan says today. "It was this massive sound using fuzz pedals and stuff that are really hard to record well. But Butch was really patient for me. He's not a guy who would ever subvert you or play head games with you. Butch supported me all the way in this crazy vision. So if you listen to Gish and then listen to Siamese Dream, that's a pretty vast sonic leap to make. Butch was really on me to sing and play my best. He drove us crazy with all the takes, and made Jimmy do like nine hundred takes. Basically, he really insisted that we step up and make an A-level record. Put it this way: Butch was the only person who could have made that record with us because we respected him so much to live up to his high standards."
Revisiting Siamese Dream again for this expanded reissue nearly two decades later has only made Corgan appreciate it more. "This is probably the only record I'll ever make that is that perfect in its intention," he says. "I was just listening to the remastered version and it sounds beautiful. I was thinking about it today and now it's like I have at least one thing in my life that is that shiny. I'm by nature a deconstructionist. As a rule, messy records make more sense to me than this shiny Cadillac of an album. But I'm really happy because it's not like I'm sitting here at 44 thinking, I should have done "the" one. At the time, I was happy Siamese Dream was successful, but I worried it was too rigid because the band was very ferocious. I felt like we neutered the ferocity in search of perfection. But now Siamese Dream makes total sense to me. You listen to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and that's more The Pumpkins as we were, which was very dark. But now in retrospect, I love both because one's the ideal of the band, and the other is the reality of the band."
David Wild
September 2011
__________________________________________________________
Siamese Dream - Track By Track
Far from any dreaded sophomore slump, Siamese Dream would represent The Smashing Pumpkins' wildly successful second coming — and become an acknowledged classic album, a characteristically idiosyncratic yet strangely accessible masterpiece in the midst of a historic sea change in rock.
"We were coming from an alternative universe where if you got lucky, you became Sonic Youth and could sell out a club like the Metro," Corgan remembers. "And if you were really lucky, you were Echo & The Bunnymen or Depeche Mode and could play to 3000 people. That was the world we were living in and understood. Then suddenly, Nirvana's blowing up and Pearl Jam's blowing up — and don't forget we've been on tour with Red Hot Chili Peppers with Pearl Jam opening up for us. We saw what was happening and suddenly you saw this massive tide coming in — or going out, depending on how you look at it. I'm not a stupid guy, so I thought, I better learn how to write some pop songs now. You could see that the bands that survived were the ones that had actual good songs. My attitude was, I'm not going back to work at the record store."
Such was the intensity of that time in alternative rock that right before Siamese Dream was recorded, Corgan found himself summoned to a big label meeting at Virgin Records in Los Angeles. "They all gathered and gave me this big speech. They saw what was happening and wanted to do a complete re-release of Gish on Virgin and blow it up to another level." Recorded for the independent Caroline Records, Gish had become an unlikely hit. "The people at Virgin told me that this was our moment and basically offered us the keys to the kingdom. I listen to this whole spiel, and then I said, 'No.'" There was a screeching silence. I told them, 'Gish isn't the record you want. There are no hit songs on that album. Let me go back to the studio and make a different kind of album.' They seemed stunned I'd say no. Then I'll never forget it — the head of radio there Phil Costello, who was coming off working like four #1 Paula Abdul hits said, "The kid's right." After that, they all backed off, and we went on to make Siamese Dream."
"I immediately went into a major depression and writing block," Corgan recalls. "I was whacked out of my mind for eight months. I was whacked out of my mind by whatever we were taking — like copious amounts of LSD and mushrooms. I just thought, I can't do this." Corgan says the turning point came when he was in a bookstore and found the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. "That book changed my life. She suggested you do these affirmations — like write 'I Am An Artist' three times, and I couldn't do it. I'm not even joking. It was hard for me to go through the transition from thinking I'm a musician to saying I'm an artist. That's how messed up in the head I was. So I went through a massive suicidal depression where I came within a hair's breadth of tossing myself out of a window. The next day I sat down on my bed in the morning and wrote "Disarm" and "Today" within twenty-four hours — and that was when I knew I had something different to say. I finally submitted to whatever was my own voice inside. If you listen to Gish, I wanted to be someone else like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., The Cure or Led Zeppelin, or Black Sabbath. I didn't want to be this whiny sad guy, but that's who I was. So I decided to be myself, and that's when these songs poured out of me."
Siamese Dream — which once again found The Pumpkins working with producer Butch Vig — was recorded not in Chicago, or Madison, Wisconsin where Gish had been cut, but rather at Triclops Studios in Marietta, Georgia. As Corgan explains it today, "That was about trying to keep the band out of Chicago, and in particular it was a way to keep Jimmy away from Chicago. We felt it was important to keep Jimmy away from his bad influences at home, but of course he could find as many bad influences in Georgia. The infamous story is that Jimmy disappeared for a week in Georgia, and we went on the radio and said, "If anyone sees our drummer, can you send him back? We need to finish our album." True story. "Back then, Jimmy had some major issues with his life, but he was never inebriated in the studio. None of us ever were."
This is not to say that band relations between The Pumpkins were even remotely dreamy during the Siamese Dream sessions. "This is where things went wrong," Corgan explains. "This is where there was maximum pressure. We all felt it. Butch felt it too. I became very intense. There was a feeling of walking in a room and thinking, if things don't go right here, my dream will never come true. You worry if you're going to be a one hit wonder. So I don't know what positive spin I can put on it for you because after a period of time I end up essentially working on the album alone with Butch. That's where my friendship with James ended because he was so furious with the way the whole thing worked out. Jimmy went off the deep end and ended up in rehab during the making of the record. And D'arcy quit the band for a time during the making of the record. It's amazing we all survived it somehow."
Corgan did share two co-writes on the album with Iha. As Corgan explains, "The way we worked back then was James would make riff demos and play stuff for me, and those ones stuck out. I remember 'Mayonaise,' James played for me in Japan. I put on headphones, and as soon as I heard it I started singing the melody, which was weird. 'Soma' was this beautiful riff from James that was the kind of thing I would never have written on my own, but it was so lovely that I completely connected to it. In fact, it was such a beautiful riff that I thought I've got to build a really beautiful song around it. So we worked really hard on 'Soma' for around four months." Asked what songs on Siamese Dream mean the most to him today, Corgan thinks for a moment then answers. "I think you have a couple things that stand out," he says. "We start the album out with 'Cherub Rock' which is basically my big F.U. to the indie world. If you read the lyrics, that was basically me railing against the hipper-than-thou NYC indie mentality. 'Today' sticks out because it's basically a really happy song about suicide — which suits me somehow. 'Disarm' stands out because it's basically about being abused as a child, and it represents something that was bottled up in me for years. Those songs stood out for a lot of people, and they stood out for me too."
Corgan is quick to add that Butch Vig deserves tremendous credit for the enduring sonic power of Siamese Dream. "The record I wanted to make was completely unruly," Corgan says today. "It was this massive sound using fuzz pedals and stuff that are really hard to record well. But Butch was really patient for me. He's not a guy who would ever subvert you or play head games with you. Butch supported me all the way in this crazy vision. So if you listen to Gish and then listen to Siamese Dream, that's a pretty vast sonic leap to make. Butch was really on me to sing and play my best. He drove us crazy with all the takes, and made Jimmy do like nine hundred takes. Basically, he really insisted that we step up and make an A-level record. Put it this way: Butch was the only person who could have made that record with us because we respected him so much to live up to his high standards."
Revisiting Siamese Dream again for this expanded reissue nearly two decades later has only made Corgan appreciate it more. "This is probably the only record I'll ever make that is that perfect in its intention," he says. "I was just listening to the remastered version and it sounds beautiful. I was thinking about it today and now it's like I have at least one thing in my life that is that shiny. I'm by nature a deconstructionist. As a rule, messy records make more sense to me than this shiny Cadillac of an album. But I'm really happy because it's not like I'm sitting here at 44 thinking, I should have done "the" one. At the time, I was happy Siamese Dream was successful, but I worried it was too rigid because the band was very ferocious. I felt like we neutered the ferocity in search of perfection. But now Siamese Dream makes total sense to me. You listen to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and that's more The Pumpkins as we were, which was very dark. But now in retrospect, I love both because one's the ideal of the band, and the other is the reality of the band."
David Wild
September 2011
__________________________________________________________
Siamese Dream - Track By Track
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