Mar-Aug 1995 – Pumpkinland and Chicago Recording Company

Produced by Flood,
Alan Moulder, and Billy Corgan

* Beautiful
* Beautiful (loop version)
* Bodies
* Bullet with Butterfly Wings
* By Starlight
* By Starlight (Flood rough mix)
* Cherry
* Cupid de Locke
* Farewell and Goodnight
* Farewell and Goodnight (rough)
* Fuck You
* Fuck You (rough mix)
* Galapogos
* God
* Here Is No Why
* In the Arms of Sleep
* In The Arms of Sleep (early live demo)
* Isolation
* Jellybelly
* Jellybelly (instrumental pit mix)
* Jupiter’s Lament (barbershop version)
* Knuckles
* Lily (My One and Only)
* Love
* Love (rough mix)
* Lover, Lover (acoustic demo)
* Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
* Mellon Collie (Nighttime Version 1)
* Muzzle
* One and Two
* Porcelina of the Vast Oceans
* Porcelina of the Vast Oceans (rough mix)
* Set the Ray to Jerry
* Set The Ray To Jerry (vocal rough)
* Speed
* Star Song
* Take Me Down
* Take Me Down (instrumental)
* Tales of a Scorched Earth
* Tales of a Scorched Earth (pit mix)
* Thirty-Three
* Thru the Eyes of Ruby
* Thru The Eyes of Ruby (take 7)
* Thru The Eyes of Ruby (pit mix 3)
* Thru The Eyes of Ruby (acoustic)
* To Forgive
* Tonight, Tonight
* Tonight, Tonight (band only)
* Tonight, Tonight (strings only)
* Tonight, Tonight (acoustic inst)
* Tonite Reprise
* Tonite Reprise (Version 1)
* Tribute to Johnny
* Ugly
* We Only Come Out At Night
* Where Boys Fear To Tread
* XYU
* XYU (take 11)
* Zero
* Zero (synth mix)
* Zoom
* 1979
* **Cupid de Locke (instrumental)**
* **In The Arms of Sheep** [clip appears in Pastichio Medley]
* **Envelope Woman (take 1)**
* **Envelope Woman (take 2)** [clip appears in Pastichio Medley]
* **Muzzle (rough vocal)**
* **One and Two (Billy vocal)**
* **The Tracer** [clip appears in Pastichio Medley]
* **Where Boys Fear To Tread (alternate take)**
* **XYU (take 1)**
* **XYU (take 2)**
* *A Dog's Prayer*
* *Feelium*
* *Keep It*
* *Methusela*
* *Mouths of Babes*
* *Phang*
* *Rock Me*
* *Spazmatazz*
* *Speed Racer*
* *Ugly (3 alternate versions)*

Massive recording sessions proper for the massive Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness album. Sessions initially began at the band's rehearsal space Pumpkinland, largely tracking the songs live. Sessions were later moved to Chicago Recording Company for further tracking and overdubs. Many songs were recorded, aside from the 28 album tracks: "Cherry", "God", "Set The Ray To Jerry", "Tonite Reprise", Tribute To Johnny" and "Ugly" were all released as b-sides; snippets of "Knuckles", "Speed", "Star Song" and "Zoom" all appeared in the Pasticio Medley. The full-length "In The Arms of Sheep", a rough vocal version of "Muzzle", "One and Two" with a Billy Corgan lead vocal, two takes of Envelope Woman, two takes of XYU, an instrumental Cupid de Locke, an alternate take of "Where Boys Fear To Tread" and a full-length "The Tracer" leaked as mp3s on the internet in 2010.

“People don’t always articulate their expectations,” says Corgan. “I
think whenever we would work with producers, they would do their best to
 try and balance those forces between what somebody would want, what I
would want, and what was best for the record.”

Before a single
note was recorded, Corgan knew he wanted the next release to be a double
 album. Flood and Alan Moulder, friends since their early days at the
prestigious Trident Studios in London, were tapped to co-produce. The
band began rehearsing at Pumpkinland, their Chicago recording space, and
 Billy began funneling cassette demos to Flood for review. Roughly
two-thirds of Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness was tracked at
Pumpkinland on an Otari MTR-90 MKII, while the remaining portion was
tracked at the Chicago Recording Company on Studer A820s.

“I love
recording at 15 ips NAB, but with Dolby SR, because it just adds a whole
 different dimension to the sound,” says Flood. “Apart from the obvious
benefits of Dolby, if you tweak the Dolby unit really, really well, it’s
 a bit like adding an Aphex and a dbx sub-harmonic bass enhancer on
every channel. Also, the way that tape changes the sound or modifies the
 sound, 15 ips is technically not correct, but I find it to be so
musical, particularly on the bottom end. This was very much a conscious
decision, and very much a part of the album’s sound.”

Another
 conscious decision was to change up the manner in which the group
recorded. In the past, the band had only used one room to track, which
of course meant only one thing could be going on at a time. Hours spent
waiting for one person to finish up their part led to frustration. For
Mellon Collie, Flood would generally work with Corgan in the A room on
the Otari and an MCI board, while Moulder worked with Wretzky and Iha in
 the B room on a Pro Tools rig slaved to both TASCAM DA-88 digital
recorders and two-inch tape. The combination of analog and digital
opened up a world of recording possibilities, and played to the creative
 strengths of Mellon Collie’s adventurous spirit. A track like “Thru The
 Eyes Of Ruby,” which contains approximately 70 guitar tracks, would
have been nearly impossible to do with tape alone. Likewise, “Porcelina
Of The Vast Oceans” contains roughly six sections that were all recorded
 at different times with different instrument and microphone
configurations and then fused together—another beneficial byproduct of
editing in Pro Tools.

Guitar and amplification choices were the
key differences between Siamese and Mellon Collie. For the bass, Wretzky
 switched up from the P-Bass to a ’60s era Fender Jazz Bass reissue with
 Ampeg and Mesa Boogie amps. For Corgan, what sounded great about the
Siamese fuzz pedal setup in the studio made it sound horrible live. He
still had his Marshall 1960A cabinets, but Corgan shifted to a Mesa
Boogie Strategy 500 and a Marshall JMP-1 preamp (Corgan also notes that
he used an Alesis 3630 to drive extra gain into a Marshall). As the
ultimate goal for Mellon Collie was to capture the band’s live,
unbridled sound, Billy largely used this touring rig to record.

“Flood
 felt like the band he would see live wasn’t really captured on record,”
 says Corgan. “So a lot of Mellon Collie was tracked by the band at
deafening volumes. I mean deafening. There was so much SPL in the room
that it was physically uncomfortable. Your ears, your emotional
resistance, would wear down.”

Flood also discovered that Corgan
was a much better singer pitch-wise when he didn’t use headphones, so he
 switched Corgan up to a Shure SM58 and had him sing in front of open
speakers.

“My experience with U2 taught me that a lot of things
you’d expect to become problematic with monitors in the room aren’t, and
 by careful use of screening, by positioning the monitors and what you
put in the monitors you can actually get a lot of benefits,” says Flood.
 “For instance, Jimmy used to love having the kick drum and a bit of
snare going through his wedges, which were directly behind him. So if
you’ve got a kit that’s lacking a bit of bottom end, you pump the kick
and the snare through the wedges and you start to tweak them to get
extra weight. We also developed this system whereby we had what was
called ‘rehearsal mode’ and ‘tape mode.’ In rehearsal mode, everybody
was on the floor, the amps were blaring, and you wouldn’t have to worry
about spills. We had the speakers inside these big coffin flight cases
in the back of the room and miked them close up, then miked them about
six feet away. Then we’d close the lid. When you were tracking in tape
mode, everybody could flick over at the flick of a footswitch and their
amps would be quietly purring away in the corner. When you’d give a
little bit back to them in their own respective monitors, automatically
the sound of the room cut right back and you’d get the vibe of four
people playing on top of each other.”

For the drums, Chamberlin’s
core Mellon Collie kit was a Yamaha Maple Custom with a 16x22-inch kick,
 a 22-inch ride, 18-inch and 19-inch Zildjian A Custom crashes, 22-inch
swish knockers, and 10-inch and 15-inch fast crashes. Because of his big
 band background, he frequently changed out his snares, building his kit
 around the snare and the ride as opposed to the kick. The familiar drum
 rolls all throughout “Tonight, Tonight” can be attributed to Jimmy’s
classic 5 1/2x14- inch Ludwig Supra-Phonic.

“From
 there I go to microphones as far as how I want the drums to sit
dimensionally in the track,” Chamberlin informs. “If I want the drums up
 front and aggressive, I’ll use a lot of AKG C 414s so they sit in front
 of things dimensionally. If I want the drums to sit in a rhythm section
 configuration, I’ll lean back towards the 414s and maybe some Shure
SM98s. Then maybe go for Shure 12As on the bigger drums.”

Having thrashed out
the basics of the album in a month and a half at their own rehearsal
facility in the band's native Chicago, the Pumpkins moved into a
recording studio proper. Or rather, two of them. Moulder and Iha in one
room, Flood and Corgan in the other, the days were crammed with constant
 dicking around with guitar sounds.

"The main difference between Siamese Dream was very methodically
recorded: drums, bass, guitar, vocals, everything was overdubbed. But on
this record everything varied from song to song. We did anything from
overdub overload to-Thru the Eyes of Ruby has something like 25 separate
guitar tracks-to actually recording all live at the same time as a band.
The time in our practice space was well spent, cos we didn't have to
feel
self conscious and we didn't have the clock ticking over our heads we
just got the band rocking!"

Although Iha wrote the music for two of
Siamese Dream's most memorable tracks, Soma and Mayonaise ("I get my
George Harrison allocation!"), the record seemed very much the work of
one man. Corgan's perfectionism looms above everything, while the lyricist played 90m percent of the guitar solos. This time Corgan and
Iha lead guitar split is closer to 50/50, and the whole record has a
looser spontaneous ambiance. "I think that the fact that we had two
rooms
going gave us the scope to say whatever works, works, " muses Iha. "It
was studied, but it was less perfectionistic. And we were less inclined
to
revert to a formula-like here's the Big muff pedal and let's triple
track
it.
This time it was, Oh one guitar sounds okay let's go with that. I
used the Digitech Whammy pedal a lot on the record, and I used an E-bow
a lot too, which is something we haven't used for five years or
something. Flood helped a lot. His thing is not going for the perfect
take but the take that feels best. There was less technical
obsessiveness
and more feeling-which was totally refreshing. And the producers kept
everyone busy. Flood would ask Jimmy (Chamberlin drums) to come in a
little earlier, just so they could work on a bunch of drum loops before
the rest of the band arrived. I'd go and check out D'arcy recording her
bass and them later on I would just fuck around with the guitar. It was
just "funner", and we ended up learning a lot of cockney slang and
discovering
Reeves and Mortimer."

**Billy Corgan:** Flood, I felt, understood what I was
trying to get at. My sense of it is Flood came to see us play live and
said, "I want to record that band." Flood being Flood, would be way more
 attracted to the band as we really were, as opposed to the shiny
version. He's more than capable of doing the shiny version, but I think
he thought the other version was going to be a lot more fun.

**Flood:** When you watched them live, at that time,
during Mellon Collie..., I don't think I've recorded a better band. They
 were so amazing, but it had to be all four of them there. They all
needed each other in different ways. The groove and the feel of the
combination of all of them; when they were really on it, nailed it, and
knew what they were doing, it was amazing. Jimmy and Billy are so
creative. Sometimes Jimmy might come up with guitar bits, or Billy might
 a have technical idea, so it was a really special time because no one
was really overbearing ego-wise at all. As co-producers, Billy was one
of those artists I've worked with who just had creativity coming out of
every pore and he wanted to push; he never wanted to stagnate. He had
ambition and he was always pushing. They'd rehearse a song until it felt
 right. You could say "genius," or you could just say somebody's found
their calling and they're not frightened by it. They wanted to embrace
it and push it as far as they possibly could.

**Alan Moulder:** Flood and I, as a team, both have the
same sensibility about what we want from a record. We both want
excitement and passion, so the same things get us excited. We work very
well together that way, and we're free to argue without fear of anything
 being personal. We always know if we're arguing that it's a creative
argument. We actually enjoy arguing, because it's more like you
understand what the other person's hearing and it makes you hear the
song in another way you might not have thought of. So we're free to say
what we think without having to worry about each other's feelings,
because we know nothing we say is meant to hurt that person's feelings.
It's purely the creative war, if you like. It was the same way with
Billy, making that record, and he would be an absolute fraud if he was
not a co-producer. The team of the three of us was great, and a similar
thing; where nothing was ever taken personally from what was said. We
all felt everyone was confident in each other, and nobody knows how the
Pumpkins should sound more than Billy. He was ahead of the charge, in
terms of the vision and headspace where things came from.

**Billy Corgan:** When we played particularly difficult
songs, like "Fuck You (An Ode to No One)," Flood would have us practice
the song every day, first thing in. So we started every workday with an
hour of band practice, and afterwards we would do two or three takes of
"Fuck You," or whatever was the crazy, prog- gy, heavy song of that day.
 "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" is another song that comes to mind. So we
 would get in a really good, almost live, frame of mind. Then he would
track it, and sometimes he would say, "Ehhh, wasn't very good. We'll do
it again tomorrow." We would never get too stuck on anything.

**Flood:** With "Bullet...," really early on when we
were going through all the demos, it was quite obvious that the great
thing about working with the Pumpkins was that it was obvious which
tracks were going to be the real main players. That was most definitely
one of them, and we all knew it because it had the energy we wanted to
capture.

**Billy Corgan:** Most producers usually get out of the
way with me with guitars. They know that I'm a charging bull there. They
 don't have a whole lot to work to do with me on the guitar, so one
could argue I've rarely been produced on the guitar. Vocally, however, I
 think I've benefited from working with great producers like Flood,
who've gotten the best out of me as a vocalist. I probably haven't done
as good a job when I've produced myself. That's probably the hardest
thing to do, is to have a critical eye, because I don't know any singers
 who love their voice. I hear that all the time. It's really hard to
hear your voice and hear it the way other people hear it. So, for
instance, early on, Flood realized that recording me with headphones was
 not only a challenge for pitch, but it was taking away some of the
nuances in the personality of my singing; which he wanted more of, not
less. So he freed me up to sing with a handheld [Shure SM]58 and the
speakers on full-blast in the control room. By doing so, he got the
singer that he saw on stage. Obviously we wanted the best version of
that.

**Flood:** "1979" had been running around for a long
time, and it had started to turn into one of these songs that every
album has – where you just grind, and grind, and grind away, and it just
 won't turn any other color except for gray. You spend all your time on
that one song, and it usually doesn't make the album. So it got to
almost the last day of recording at Pumpkinland [the band's rehearsal
complex] before we were going to swap over into CRC [Chicago Recording
Company], and I went, "Alright, that's it. You've got one more day."
We'd spent a load of time going through the song again and it just
wasn't happening, and I said, "One more day. That's all this song's got,
 and then I'm gonna chalk it. I'm gonna drown the child." And everybody
was going, "No, you can't do that!" And I said, "I can. I'm so bored of
it."

**Billy Corgan:** I still remember the fateful day,
sometime during the last week in the studio, when Flood turned to me,
looked at the song, and in a very professorial way said, "You've got 24
hours." Meaning, "If you do not come in here tomorrow and have that song
 figured out, it's off the record. We don't have time to fuck around
with these things anymore. We need to focus on things that need
attention, because they're gonna be on the record." So I went home. I
don't remember working on it all night, other than when you listen to
the demo, the demo sounds remarkably like the record. So much so that we
 even took the drum beat: the exact tempo and exact programming from
that machine – and that became the foundational basis of where we
started. Then Flood and I worked basically alone, throughout the day,
and added little pieces of prog rock and little new wave punches. We
built this painting of a track. There was no sense of rules or, "It's
gotta be like this." There was no sense of even, "Does this fit on the
record?" We just got really excited by the version that we were into.
Everything you hear on the track – except for the vocals – is from that
one 12-hour span. We built the track up with just the drum machine. But
then it was like, "Should we have Jimmy play on it?" We had Jimmy go in,
 and I think he played for four minutes to a click; just played the same
 beat, over, and over, and over again. Then we took the one bar that I
liked, put it in the Kurzweil K2600, fucked it up, laid it in the track,
 and were like, "Oh, that works!"

**Billy Corgan:** Then the famous "no one knows what I'm
 saying" thing at the beginning; I heard that in my head, picked up a
58, sang it into the Kurzweil, fucked that up, and looped it in. We
thought, "We'll replace that later with a keyboard," because I heard it
more as a melody idea, and then it just stuck. When we went to take it
off, and they were like, "No, this is too good." It was like a beautiful
 day of weird stuff.

**Alan Moulder:** That's a classic Flood production: the
 vocal effects and the Kurzweil distortion on the drums. I think once
they decided how to do it, it came together rather quickly. That was a
special song.

**James Iha**: I think Flood helped the band...to not
repeat the way we recorded before. In comparison, the last record was a
lot more produced, there's less of a live feel - I mean, it's really
good, just more produced I suppose. The thing about the new record is
that on a lot of songs we went for more of a live feel. Like on
"Bullet"...it's a lot more stripped down than how we would've approached
it before. I mean, there's a lot of guitars on there, but, they weren't
done just for the sake of it, like we can overdub twenty-four guitars or
whatever. It's just two rhythm guitars.

At some point there are one or two other guitars that come in...there's
a lot of drop in sort of stuff. In the second verse there's this wah-wah
sort of thing. It was just this mistake I made on the guitar and we
ended up sampling it. We degraded the sound with distortion and I ended
up playing it on the keyboard in time with the music. So there's neat
things like that on the record. There's more space to do stuff like that
because there isn't 24 rhythm guitars.

A lot of that is because we used
a lot of Marshall amplifier distortion. It's a cleaner sound, but more
powerful. It has a lot more "throw"
to the sound. The fuzz pedals sound so washy, you can't tell what you're
playing. You could just be fucking off and it would sound good. I think
that's what a lot of bands do now. The Big Muff distortion pedals are
like the DX-7 keyboard of the 90's - everybody uses it. It's like
Nirvana, clean during the verse, step on it for the chorus. I mean,
Nirvana were awesome, totally amazing rock band, but everyone's just
stealing their formula. It's kinda lame.

**Billy Corgan**: On much of the album, I used my old 1984 Marshall JCM 800
100-watt top, which is my favorite amp; it's on every Pumpkins record. I
bought the amp with a 4x12 bottom-I don't even know what kind of speakers
are in it-and used the bottom for most of the guitar tracks. My other
main rig is the Marshall JMP-1 rack preamp, which goes into an Alesis
compressor and then into a mesa is its "half amp" thing, which allows
you to cut the wattage in half. That helps the way the sound hits the
power section of the amp and gives it a certain kind of compression,
which sounds really good. I like the amp's "presence" control, too.
Power amps don't give you much in the way of controls a lot of the time.
But I don't use the Mesa in stereo because I think stereo guitar sounds
like shit.

"Jellybelly" is a good example of the Marshall rack and Alesis
compressor guitar sound, which is the basic "fat" rhythm sound I use. I used the JCM 800 for most all of the overdubs on the record.
That's the JCM at work it kicks in really heavy [at :23] during "Thru
the Eyes of Ruby," That amp has a certain cut to it that sounds great. Because of the total differences between the two setups, I tend
to use the JCM 800 more for leads, solos and overdubs than for rythem.
Using two setups together makes the different guitar parts work
better together-to "sit" better. On Siamese Dream I did everything with
that JCM head, so it was harder to get tonal differences on each guitar
part.

On "To Forgive," I used a Fender Bassman that I bought during
the recording of Siamese Dream. It's an old, fucked-up amp, one of those
"silver face" models from the late Sixties or early Seventies. I paid to
get it fixed, but it still doesn't work right. The amp makes this weird
sound, like a storm coming. While we rehearsed the song, the sound got
worse, and then started to go away,at which point we started to record.
Right about the time we did the rake that's on the album,the sound
started to come back. If you listen closely, you can hear a little bit
of the storm sound coming again. No, it's more like KKKkkkccchhhHHH, like something's definitely
wrong with the amp. I've had problems with tubes going harmonic, but
this is something else altogether. I've tried kicking that head as hard
as I can, and sometimes that makes the sound go away. But other times it
makes it get worse, so you have to know just when and how to kick it!
[laughs]

I can pretty much get everything I want from my rack
setup. James has a Fender Twin, which we used on some tracks for
cleaner tones. Come to think of it, we did use a Vox AC-30 on a lot of tracks.
It's a
'64 that someone lent us, and it sounded fuckin' great. I used it on
"Tonight, Tonight" and "By Starlight." At the very end of "By
Starlight," there's a feedback and octave thing I do [beginning roughly
at 4:12], and it's just me standing in front of the amp and cranking it
up. I double-tracked it, so I'm getting different feedback on each
track. It was difficult because I wasn't used to playing with "Vox"
feedback. It was hard to get the guitar to feed back in the range I
wanted. When I went back and double-tracked it, I went for feedback in a
higher range, which created weird dissonance when I put the two tracks
together. Also, when I used that amp, I
mostly played a '72 Gibson 335 instead of my standard '57 reissue Strat.

When I recorded the rhythm guitar tracks to "Fuck You," it was the first
time I tracked with the album's co-producer, Alan Moulder. Flood, whom
I'd been tracking with, had left town. I recorded the first rythem track
and did a little neck pull at the end. Then I did the other track
without listening to the first track, which is how I always do guitar
double tracking. At the end of the second track, I pulled the neck again and said to
Alan, "Okay, watch this." The I played them both back, without the
drums, and we listened for discrepancies. Alan absolutely could not
believe I did the neck pull-out of time, no less-at exactly the same
moment, It's kind of a tribute to Alan, really, 'cause I did it to
freak him out. I've double-tracked for so long now that I know all of my
little idiosyncrasies. I knew from the "feel" in my body when to do the
pull.

I just took a driving trip,
and listened to the whole album for the first time in a couple of
months, and stuff jumped out at me that's hadn't before. Like "Tales of
a Scorched Earth," which is just a bit about teenage nihilism. When I
recorded the song, I had mixed feelings about putting it on the album,
but when I just got away from the intellectualizing and just listened to
it, I enjoyed it. It's total bombast. Within the context of the whole
record, it fits nicely. It's a nice opposing ice cream flavor. I overdubbed an unusually tuned guitar part on the chorus. The G
string goes up one half step to G# and the high E strings goes up one
whole step to F# [all pitches actually sound on half step lower, as all
the guitars are tuned down one half step]. Then the guitar is run
through a kind of envelope filter, so it sounds strange. There's a lot of different things going on during the bridge: there's a
regular bass, there's a Fender P-bass played with a pick [playing a
different line and sounding like a six-string bass], there's a few
guitars played through envelopes, and there's a real scratchy guitar,
too. There are about six or seven different instruments happening in
there.

Using computer technology, it seems that Corgan and Iha have confronted
their post-guitar challenge. For Mellon Collie, the band employed Studio
Vision Pro with Pro Tools running on a Macintosh 8100 to do loop samples
and manipulate basic tracks. The techno-rig has potential: the Pro Tools
application an handle up to 128 tracks. But because Corgan didn't learn
about the technology until midway through the recording process, he and
Iha applied their newly learned techniques only during post-production.
For all their previous work on the album, the band used a 24-track
analog
machine and an additional 16 tracks on Pro Tools. (The new setup will
likely be used to its full advantage on their next project.)

Commenting on his initial exposure to the digital technology, Corgan
says,
"At first it was like, 'What a bunch of f\*\*\*\*\*' dry s\*\*\*.' But once you
learn it,
you stop thinking about it. I really feel I can finally go in a field
where no
one's been." Iha feels the same. "I think it's a great tool. There's a
big
misconception about samplers. You don't have to use it like Nine Inch
Nails
to make an impact. It should be just like using a different guitar
pedal."

Corgan explains that the track "Keep It" on the new record is a good
example of the way his new machines have provided him with a different
recording technique. "We recorded the rhythm-section part of the song
first then I had Jimmy & D'Arcy [bass] play the bridge for a few
minutes.

Later, I'd go back and find the best two to four bars of the bridge,
sample
it, and run it through the song. We did that for each section of 'Keep
It,'
and then I assembled them--the rhythm section and the guitar
loops--then I manipulated the sounds by running them through high-pass
filters. Suddenly you have something that doesn't sound like anything
you've done before." Corgan's eyes light up with the thought of having a
new and infinite spectrum of creative possibilities. If it wasn't clear
on
earlier records like Gish and Siamese Dream, it's obvious now that he
thrives on new ideas.

Newfound admiration for technology aside, Corgan and Iha used their
traditional setup when laying down most of the basic tracks for Mellon
Collie. Corgan played predominantly through his super-tweaked live
setup: an Alesis compressor, a Marshall rack preamp and a Mesa/Boogie
500 Series power amp. For pedals, Iha and Corgan layered it on thick:
Big
Muff Fuzz, Fender Blender, a DigiTech Whammy, Eventide harmonizers,
wah--you name it. They sometimes laid down 8 or 10 guitar tracks at a
stretch. For their guitars of choice, the simple formula remained as it
has
since the beginning: Strats and Les Pauls.

**Billy Corgan on "Bullet with Butterfly Wings"**: Believe it or not, the original riff from this song came to me during
one of the Siamese Dream recording sessions. Somewhere, I have a tape of
us from 1993 endlessly playing the "world is a vampire" part over and
over. But it wasn't until a year and a half later that I finished the
song, writing the "rat in the cage" part on an acoustic guitar at the
BBC studios in London on the same day that "Landslide" was recorded.

**Billy Corgan on "Cherry"**: Of all the B-sides, this song is probably my biggest regret. I never
spent as much time on it as it probably deserved, with this version
showing very little improvement from the demo. This one probably should
have made the album. I love its feeling and atmosphere, the warbly
guitar courtesy of an effect that changes oscillation in ratio to
signal input (the harder you hit it, the faster it goes). The basic
tracks were recorder during the Mellon Collie sessions.

**Billy Corgan on "God"**: Forever slated as a Mellon Collie song-to-be "God" just couldn't cut it
in the end. The beat was probably a little to close to "Bullet," but it
still rocks hard. It was tracked during the Mellon Collie sessions, with
overdubs and vocals added much later.

**Billy Corgan on "1979"**: The most frequently asked question about "1979" is, "What is the
'ooh-ahh-ahh' sound at the end of every phrase?" Flood and I were
tracking the song, and I started humming the "oohs" like a melody line.
I sang them to tape, we sampled the pertinent ones, electronically manipulated them, and looped them against the drum beat. One of my
favorite songs from the album.

**Billy Corgan on "Set the Ray to Jerry"**: Another remnant of a distant Siamese Dream past, "Set the Ray to Jerry"
was first written somewhere during the Gish tour. It's always been a
band favorite, and seemingly only the band's, because no one ever
mentions it. A sweet, simple song featuring only bass, drums, and some
delayed James guitar. One night Flood and I put everything we had on a
couple of tapes (about 40 songs) and just drove around Chicago until
3:30 in the morning deciding what was on or off the album. When we
listened to "Set the Ray," it really moved me, but when I looked over to
Flood he just shook his head no. That was the end of "Set the Ray" on the
album, because I trust Flood's opinion so much.

**Billy Corgan on "Thirty-Three"**: A simple song in a country tuning, "Thirty-Three" was the first song the
I wrote when I came home from all the Siamese Dream touring. I took three
days off, and this was literally the first thing that came out of my
hands when I sat down. I was living in my new house for the first time,
and this song conveys all of that. The "cha-cha-cha" sound is my drum
machine through a flanger, and what you hear is the same one right off
the demo because I couldn't remember how to recreate it. The stringly
sounds are part Vocoder, plus five slide guitars tuned to one note each
to create the chords.

**Billy Corgan on "Tonite Reprise"**: Originally slated to go on towards the end of the Mellon Collie album,
this one was hacked off in the name of "When is enough too much?" I had
just come back from the Chicago Bulls' tragic loss to the Orlando Magic
in the playoffs [May 18th, 1995], and was very depressed. My voice was hoarse from so
much shouting. Flood threw up his famous mikes, and I just did it live.
I used my trusty Gibson acoustic, with the rusty strings.

**Billy Corgan on "Tribute to Johnny"**: Our tribute to Johnny Winter, circa 1974; a true original, and one of my
favorite guitarists.

**Billy Corgan on "Ugly"**:
Started as an album song until the very last moment, when Mellon
Collies\ was cut from 31 to 28 songs, this is an interesting
interpretation of what had essentially been an acoustic song. Flood and
I tried about four different versions before settling on this one [see
Queen's Hot Space album]. One version that I liked was just me and a
distorted guitar. But in the end this version won, only to be mixed into
eternal obscurity as a B-side.

**Billy Corgan on "Zero"**: We like to call this style of our music "Cybermetal." "Zero" has six
rhythm guitars, with two line-in 12-string acoustics, plus those wacky
Iha leads. Tracked live with overdubs added later, this is a true mover
as well as the first song that was recorded for Mellon Collie, James has
always said this reminds him of Judas Priest.

Return to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

1. ↑ Richard Thomas, "Signal To Noise: The Sonic Diary Of The Smashing Pumpkins", Electronic Musician, October 1st, 2008
2. ↑ Danny Eccleston, "Gourd Vibrations", TGM Magazine, December 1995
3. ↑ Jake Brown, "Smashing Pumpkins: A Studio History", Tape-Op, Sept/Oct 2016
4. ↑ James Iha, Interview with Paul Bernstein, September 1995
5. ↑ "Orange Crunch", Guitar School, April 1996
6. ↑ "No More Guitars", Big O, 1995
7. ↑ Billy Corgan, "King Bs", Guitar World, January 1997