Smashing Pumpkins • Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. 26 years ago today, October 24, 1995, Smashing Pumpkins released what many pundits refer to as their masterpiece.

In fact on that same busy day, Oct. 24, 1995, five different rock artists, released notable rock albums. They were Smashing Pumpkins, Ozzy Osborne, the Pretenders, Bob Seger and Anthrax. But none was as successful or significant as Smashing Pumpkins, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. 25 years later, fans celebrate this work with great nostalgia.

Smashing Pumpkins is an American alternative rock band from Chicago, formed in 1988. Billy Corgan is the group's primary songwriter; his musical ambitions and cathartic lyrics have shaped the band's albums and songs, which William Shaun described as "...anguished, bruised reports from Billy Corgan's nightmare-land.”

I love mostly their more obvious, commercially popular hits, so I will need to lean some on a few music reviewers to help me out. For instance, Louder Sound has an interesting observation about this record, “The resultant album was Smashing Pumpkins’ masterpiece. A double-disc made up of 28 songs, it swerved gracefully from symphonic rock to barbed-wire riffs to electronic art-pop to acoustic balladry and back again and then finished with a song that sounded like the sort of thing you might hear during CBeebies bedtime hour. Has there been a rock record with so many different sorts of songs that were hits too? On the face of it, Corgan’s drawl is the only thing connecting Bullet with Butterfly Wings, 1979 and Tonight Tonight but, somehow, they all sound like Smashing Pumpkins. Mellon Collie was Billy Corgan’s grand artistic statement, a record that reflected the mercurial genius of the Pumpkins leader. He knew it too. “We’ve talked about it as a band,” Corgan said soon after the record’s completion. “It’s a pretty amazing war horse, a great accomplishment.”

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is a double album, with 28 tracks. That’s a lot of creative material to produce, assuming that it is actually creative. But the critics are in agreement - the album managed to exceed all expectations.

The record label didn’t want to do a double album, insisting that 2 disc records don’t sell anymore. However, frontman Billy Corgan held fast to his determination to make the record. The group didn’t shy away from their ambitious goals, afterward comparing this, their magnum opus, to no lesser classic rock predecessors than Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and the Beatles’ White Album.

The concern that doubles didn’t sell lingered, however, with Corgan saying he’d rather split up the group than have an epic folly hanging over them for the rest of their career. He needn’t have worried. Mellon Collie went to Number 1 on the Billboard 200 and went on to sell over 10 million copies.

So Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness earned the rare diamond status from the RIAA (selling more than 10 million copies), and the album received seven Grammy nominations, earning Album and Record of the Year.

The release spawned multiple hit singles including Bullet With Butterfly Wings, 1979, Zero and Tonight, Tonight.The band kept up their status as MTV darlings, with their videos ranking among the decade’s most popular clips and earning two Video Music Awards in the process.

With 30 million albums sold worldwide, The Smashing Pumpkins were one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed bands of the 1990s. However, internal fighting, drug use, and diminishing record sales led to a 2000 break-up.

Niall Doherty writes, this album “...Was the last truly great rock album of the 90s. It could never be replicated, however – not even by the Pumpkins themselves. Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness may have been the end of an era, but Smashing Pumpkins had captured lightning in a bottle. A quarter of a century on, its brilliance endures.”