“Hey, kids, rock and roll. Rock on.” Glam rock wannabe David Essex’s hit single was recorded in 1973, and it’s a song that Smashing Pumpkins have dropped into setlists every now and then—a flabby, empty rock tune that manages to sustain itself on an easy dub chorus and glitter paint guitars. But in the middle of the tune, Essex drops an unexpected bomb of rock star disillusionment: “Where do we go from here? Which is the way that’s clear?”
It’s a fitting question for Smashing Pumpkins, who in 20 or so years have tried on a slew of musical hats and lost a handful of musicians for reasons ranging from drug use to various conflicts with bandleader Billy Corgan. But for all of the band’s genre wanderings and half-formed records, Corgan and company—ah, who are we kidding here, Corgan himself—entered more brilliant musical moments into the modern rock consciousness of the ’90s than most of the alternative generation, from the dirge of a bass riff in “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” to the sunshine-and-scars lyrics of “Today.”
 A particularly smashing Pumpkin: Harrowing frontman Billy Corgan resurrected a few classics for a brutally heavy and energetic set with his band at the Charlottesville Pavilion. |
Of course, as the singular creative force behind the Pumpkins, Corgan can also seem restless and reluctant to play the hits. Sure, kids, rock and roll, but where do we go from here, anyways? Maybe you don’t have to go anywhere.
The lanky Nosferatu of the ’90s showed no signs of age when Smashing Pumpkins took the Pavilion stage on Saturday night. Dressed a bit like Pinhead from the Hellraiser films in a long-sleeved shirt and a mirrored skirt, Corgan’s sheer ferocity carried the band through the first quarter of its set, from the muted thrash of “Tarantula” to the foggy distortion of “Mayonaise.” And while the rest of the Pumpkins’ touring ensemble—keyboards, a gothy guitarist and another in a long line of female bassists—seemed happy to amplify their leader’s wreckage, the night belonged to the SP core of drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, now more wrecking ball than wreck, and Corgan, alternative rock’s Jack Skellington, as much an icon of the alt-rock ’90s as musician.
It feels a bit overboard to praise the Pumpkins so enthusiastically long after their biggest commercial successes, but the band never stopped making great songs; Corgan simply put out a lot of half-baked grunge that obscured the finer material. During the evening’s two-hour set—heavy on material from 2007’s Zeitgeist and a few recent singles—the Pumpkins called up tunes from at least half of their catalogue of albums, including the recently resurrected b-side, “The Beginning is the End is the Beginning,” a scuzzy club meltdown, and a set-defining version of “Tonight, Tonight,” with Chamberlin sweating out his past sins in penitent drum fills that propelled the song. A few tunes, particularly new track “United States,” felt downright overindulgent and suggested Corgan isn’t done wandering, but an acoustic set reeled the band in before the big finale.
Then, depending on which Zero-shirted fan you ask, the show either fell apart or offered a long, pale middle finger to the pace of the rest of the evening. After a ripping version of “Heavy Metal Machine” chopped up with bits of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”—“Remember what your good friend William Patrick Corgan said!”—the gourd chuckers left the remainder of the evening to a few cover songs. A 20-minute or so version of Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” started strong but fizzled out well before the band stopped playing, and a kazoo-heavy encore of “In the Summertime,” in which Jack Skellington turned all Captain Jack Sparrow and began mincing around the stage, felt purposefully alienating.
I’ll leave it to longtime Pumpkins fans to decide whether the end of the evening validated the recent portion of the band’s career, but I arrived at the show with few expectations and left positively thrilled. In the least, the Pumpkins are still a phenomenal live band to catch and, in a world where record sales are ending a lot faster than they’re beginning, maybe a touring band is the real direction for Corgan.
