Late 1988 – Schwa Productions

## Late 1988 - Schwa Productions, Chicago

Produced by: Quentin Sanbria; Engineered by: Paul Chabala

* **East**
* **Jennifer Ever**

* **Jennifer Ever (acoustic)**

* **Nothing and Everything**

* **Spiteface**

   Sessions for the first demo tape, aptly titled The Smashing Pumpkins.  Also included was a live version of She and a

remixed version of Sun from the previous Ignoffo Sessions.  The master tapes of this session have
apparently been lost, as they are no longer in the band's possession. A
reproduction of the tape was included in the 2012 Pisces Iscariot
Remaster.  An alternate mix of Jennifer
Ever featuring just guitar and vocals was found on a bootleg mixtape that at once
belonged to Mark Ignoffo (hence the name of the bootleg is The Ignoffo Tape).

In February of 1989, Billy Corgan gave me a copy of a self-titled,
eight-track mini-release Smashing Pumpkins had just put out in Chicago.
I was in a Champaign, Illinois-based band called Stark at the time, and
we played with the Pumpkins occasionally. Smashing Pumpkins was a cheesy-looking
cassette with
hand-drawn flowers by Corgan on the cover of a flimsy insert, and a
copyright symbol scribbled under a line of text crediting Schwa
Productions (a.k.a. someone’s home studio) with producing the six-song
tape. Corgan said they’d only made about 600 copies. A pitcher of beer
later, Corgan became more tractable and said he’d hook D’arcy up with a
few music lessons.

The early songs on the tape have never appeared on
any
other Pumpkins release, including the collection of odds and ends
assembled for 1994’s Pisces Iscariot. Its mood is brisk, but haunted by
Corgan’s
reverb-tinged vocals lamenting the complexities of love. Corgan’s
obsession with traumas of the head and heart is already apparent, as is
his search for metaphysical guidance
and antisocial tendencies.

On “Nothing and Everything,” the singer comes
off trapped and disgusted: “I hide behind my hair today/Wishing I was
far away/Standing with you mannequins/I try to hold my breath.” The
band’s melodramatic impulses--including the lines “Walking in the sun I
know that I never feel alive/Walking in the sun I never feel”--are
checked by James Iha’s and Corgan’s killer guitar chops and less
indulgent lyrics. The mix of chiming melodies and psychedelic outbursts
is intriguing, as
though Jimi Hendrix and the Sisters of Mercy (sans the swank production
values) were tied together at the tail and trying to run in opposite
directions, only to keep slamming into one another.

On one live cut
titled “She,” Iha’s hoarse back-up vocals fight to keep pace with Corgan
as both guitarists are locked in a duel of solos. Despite the blistering
licks Corgan claimed he learned at Juilliard, Iha is better, creating
aural washes so visceral they pool at your feet. The track ends with
about five
people applauding weakly. By the time Corgan gave me that tape, I’d
known the
Smashing Pumpkins for several months, since Stark had teamed up with
them for a spate of shows in cultural hotbeds like Champaign-Urbana and
Carbondale, Illinois.

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1. ↑ Matt Golosinski, "Remembering Billy Back in the Day", unknown Phoenix magazine, December 1996