A live podcast recording from The Big Romance about the Smashing Pumpkins’ second album, the 1993 record that was made in hard mode.
Nialler9 is joined by guest Mark O’Brien (Royal Yellow, Enemies) for this live album listening party / podcast episode.
I don’t indulge it too often, but it’s really nice when these listening parties speak to the inner teenager in us, and that’s certainly the case with Siamese Dream.
It wasn’t my first Smashing Pumpkins record. That was 1995’s double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which I bought on cassette from Eddie O’Connor’s shop in Newbridge on the way to school at the age of 14, in 1996 or thereabouts. I was already paying attention to the band because of MTV and “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”, “1979” and “Tonight, Tonight”, but I knew of them before that because my sister had a cassette of Siamese Dream that fascinated me. I didn’t know what the music was called, but I was thrilled by it, and I loved the artwork and the font.
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Siamese Dream is one of defining alt-rock albums of the ’90s but it almost didn’t happen. The Pumpkins were barely functioning: Corgan was depressed and in ribbons; Jimmy Chamberlin was deep in heroin; Iha and D’arcy’s romance had ended. Corgan eventually played nearly everything himself apart from the drums vowing to end the band if the album flopped. Somehow, this strife and tension helped make Siamese Dream one of the finest alt-rock albums of all time.
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5 Things You Might Not Know About Siamese Dream
1. Billy Corgan played most of it himself
Corgan overdubbed most of Iha’s and Wretzky’s guitar and bass parts, a decision he has since said cut away the gut of his band, even if the album sounds the way he heard it in his head. Chamberlin, who was sent to rehab at Corgan’s urging, still played every drum part on the record, and it’s his drumming that gives the album its air.
2. They went to Georgia to escape temptation
The band left Chicago to get away from friends, hangers-on and the media, and to get Chamberlin away from his drug connections. According to Butch Vig, it took the drummer about 24 hours to find every dealer in Atlanta. The sessions ran 12-hour days, six days a week, for around three months, and finished four months over schedule and $250,000 over budget.
3. “Soma” has a special guest
Corgan says the song has up to forty overdubbed guitar parts, and Vig had to draw a literal map of the tracks, then flip the track sheet over to carry on. R.E.M.’s Mike Mills plays the piano, credited on the sleeve as appearing courtesy of Warner Bros, a detail plenty of people who’ve owned the album for 30 years still don’t know.
4. The girls on the cover aren’t conjoined
Given the title and the lyric in ‘Geek U.S.A.’, everyone assumed the two girls in white dresses and fairy wings were twins. They were California child models, Ali Laenger and Lysandra Roberts, who had never met before the shoot.
5. The mix came from the Loveless man
By the end, Corgan and Vig were too headwrecked to mix the record, so Corgan asked for Alan Moulder specifically because of his work on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, the famous shoegaze band formed in Dublin in 1983. Moulder booked two weeks and it took him 36 days.
Siamese Dream was our vinyl listening party in the Listen Closely series, and the next one is Burial’s Untrue.
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
