Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream

Geek U.S.A.

From my 16th birthday to my 18th, I listened to Geek U.S.A. about three times as often as my second most frequently heard song (I think it was either the Beatles’ A Day In The Life or the Cure’s A Forest). I’d scroll down to number fifty-something (54, I think?) on a playlist named ‘the greatest guitar solos of all time – hq’ and there it’d be: 'Smashing Pumpkins – Geek U.S.A.' I’d air drum along with the greatest alt-rock drummer of the 90s, Jimmy Chamberlin. I’d air guitar and wail along with Billy Corgan and James Iha. I’d air bass along with D’arcy Wretzky. I never bothered figuring out what the song was about, something to do with geeks and America, I assumed. But it was angsty, angry, shaky, just the kind of thing I wanted to hear.

It was also around this time that I started to truly understand an album as more than just a collection of songs, as an artform related to, but distinct from, a song. Siamese Dream, the album that contained my biggest teenage music obsession, Geek U.S.A. soon became a benchmark for what I expected from an alt-rock album – all killer, no filler.

Cherub Rock

The first three albums from the Pumpkins represents the platinum standard of nineties alt-rock – the sleeper hit debut, followed by a tightly produced, honing of the band’s ‘sound’ (in the case of the Pumpkins – shoegaze and goth infused alternative rock that provided a loud-quiet-loud alternative to grunge) followed by a creatively ambitious third (double) album attempting to cement the band’s stature as critical darlings and the masters of the mope (I don’t mean that as criticism, everybody mopes every so often, and a soundtrack helps). 

That the three-album run also yielded some of the era’s most successful singles is proof of the immense songwriting chops of the first iteration of the band. Rhinoceros – Cherub Rock – Today – Disarm – Bullet with Butterfly Wings – 1979 – Tonight, Tonight – Zero. All these years later, while Gish sounds to me a very interesting debut album, and Mellon Collie sounds like an ambitious but ultimately bloated double album that contains some of my favourite songs about caged rodents and numbers discovered by ancient Indians. But Siamese Dream remains what it was even then – the platinum standard for a solid alt-rock record – great from Chamberlin’s first drumroll on Cherub Rock to Iha’s final chord on Luna.