Smashing Pumpkins - "Cherub Rock"
1993
In those heady days of my Z-Rock obsession they played grunge, which was sweet because grunge was a great subgenre of metal: bottom-heavy, Sabbath-influenced, and played by guys who guzzled beer and wore flannel shirts. Hell, the Pearl Jam guys even loved sports - thereby reinforcing grunge's populist appeal.
On 1992's Singles soundtrack, the one that you swore up and down was "going to be a mainstay of everybody’s album collection in twenty years”, Smashing Pumpkins' “Drown” dropped into all the grunge so beautifully. The following year, I debated buying the Pumpkins' second album, Siamese Dream. The first single, "Cherub Rock" was exhuberant, anthemic. The second single, "Today", had an annoying chorus that was childlike and not in a good way. The sinker was that the third single, "Disarm", it had the “I used to be a little boy” line sung so whinily by frontman Billy Corgan. Along with this was the increasing realization that this Corgan character was something of a dork.
This realization was vindicated after reading an article in the April 1994 issue of Spin on Soundgarden that had major moments of levity, all inadvertently provided by Corgan. To wit:
- Soundgarden's Chris Cornell and Kim Thayil drink beers, while Corgan orders a strawberry margarita.
- Corgan riffs on Jungian therapy, then actually asks Thayil what astrological sign he is.
- "Ooh," Thayil says a little too loudly as Corgan walks away, "I'll bet he's going to call his therapist in Chicago, wake her up at four in the morning, and tell her about that big, mean bear who made fun of him."
- Corgan walks past wearing a long-sleeved Superman T-shirt like the one your four-year-old nephew probably owns."You hurt me deeply," Corgan says, touching the giant S on his chest and pouting. "You hurt me deeply in my heart."
(At this point I must say I imagine that Jim Parsons - Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory - of course plays Corgan in the Smashing Pumpins biopic.)
As a music fan, it seemed you had to take the Corgan drama queen nonsense with the anthemic, surging guitars. I couldn’t get my head around that, especially at that age when I had an idealized view of rockers. I spent the rest of the nineties chuckling at Billy Corgan. The next Smashing Pumpkins album was titled - get this: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and had lyrics like "The world is a vampire" and "God is empty … just like me." Whoah, deep stuff there William! After that, there was the inevitable dabbling with electronica and when they put out an album titled MACHINA/The Machines of God I figured laughing at Corgan wasn't even worth the effort any more. Ryan Adams - an equally annoying whiner had appeared and The White Stripes were on the horizon to provide hope and optimism in rock 'n' roll as I entered my late thirties.
These days, I play some Smashing Pumpkins and have fun with nineties nostalgia. I remember the odd moment of seeing Billy Corgan as a panel member on Midwest Sports Channel on the Chicago-based cult favorite The Sports Writers on TV, which meant he wasn't one hundred percent dork. I can hit "skip" any time "Disarm" is played on a device and it's not like I have to hang out with Corgan. And every once in a while, I dwell on that time when “Cherub Rock” was an indicator that Smashing Pumpkins could be the next fave band - I remember what street I was driving on and what the weather was like when I first heard its opening chords - and the oncoming unraveling of the knowledge that their brand of alt rock wasn't exactly the Little Richard funhouse rock 'n' roll that I revel in.