The classic Smashing Pumpkins line-up were so dysfunctional that they couldn’t even split up properly. It was in the wake of the response to 1998’s Adore, a muted album that got a muted response, that the band’s imperious Commander-in-Chief Billy Corgan decided it was time to go out with a bang. What actually happened is that the frontman ended up with sparks flying all over the place, the odd firework landing on a house and setting it on fire. That pretty much sums up the tale of their 2000 album Machina/The Machines Of God, which turned 25 this week. Things were never straightforward with the 90s iteration of The Smashing Pumpkins.
“I finished Adore and went, ‘Right, I want off this sinking ship’,” Corgan told Uncut a few years ago. “I was determined to sink it my way.” To stage this little voyage to the bottom of the ocean, though, Corgan wanted everyone on board and that would mean the return of totemic drummer Jimmy Chamberlin.
Chamberlin had been sacked during what should’ve been the triumphant tour to support 1995’s mega-selling Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, the victory lap cut short when Chamberlin and live keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin overdose in New York resulting in the latter’s tragic death. But now Corgan wanted his dream drummer back in.
“I reached out to Jimmy, we hadn’t spoken in three years?” he explained. “I said, ‘I’d like you to return to the band for one album. Let’s get the four of us in a room, make a good album, tour, and then put it to bed.’.”
Early signs that the Pumpkins could rediscover the exhilarating alchemy that made the Chicago quartet so exciting in the first place looked promising. In April 1999, Corgan, guitarist James Iha, bassist D’Arcy Wretsky and the returning Chamberlin embarked on a short, nine-date US tour taking in some of the smallest shows they’d played in years. At venues including the 9.30 Club in Washington, New York’s 300-capacity Tramps, and LA’s Roxy, they delivered sets featuring a mix of old classics and new cuts. They were shows that reminded everyone what a fierce and thrilling rock band they were, a complete U-turn on the over-loaded, confused shows to support Adore. The Pumpkins were back!
Well, until they got home from the tour anyway. That was when D’Arcy, who might not have been musically key to the group but was a crucial member when it came to their look and feel, handed in her notice. She was off.
“D’Arcy left, so my perfect plan blew up,” recalled Corgan. “So now this album also becomes about the sorrow of who’s not there. You’ve got two albums in a row now about death, loss, the end of the band.”
That the band almost immediately installed a crack replacement in Hole’s Melissa Auf Der Maur, a figure who might have lacked D’Arcy’s icy cool but had bucketloads of rock’n’roll charisma, wasn’t enough. Corgan’s plan to get the band to the finish line now had a lot of hurdles in front of it. “I was just looking at a calendar going, ‘Can I make it nine more months?’,” he said.
Wretsky is credited as playing on the finished album, but it’s not known exactly how many of her recorded takes are featured, if any. Producer Flood has alluded to how the direction of the album changed in the wake of that upheaval. “We pretty much went back to the drawing board,” he said. “Certain songs on the record are survivors from that first period, but it meant a shift in the way the songs had to be formed.”
What is certain is that the end result was unnecessarily bloated and a little all over the place. If this was a record with an MO of reclaiming their brilliance (Corgan joked with MTV2 that he wanted it to be called Resume The Pose) then they would’ve done well to remember that in amongst the epic, multi-layered ambition of their first two records, there was something lean and finely tuned about Gish and Siamese Dream. Mellon Collie… might have sprawling – course it was sprawling, it was a double album – but the relentless quality of the songwriting on that album never made it feel like a trudge.
Machina/The Machines Of God was released on February 29, 2000. Reviews were decent if a little mixed, whilst sales were low. The idea of going out with a bang was beginning to look like one of Corgan’s more outlandish desires. Listen to Machina now, though, and you can hear a very, very good Pumpkins record in there. It’s just not one that needs to be 15 tracks long.
The Everlasting Gaze is a storming opener, armed with a riff that sounds like lightning, the yearning, avalanching Stand Inside Your Love is their last classic single, whilst Raindrops + Sunshowers melds Adore’s digi-pop experimentation to forward-facing rock grooves. There’s melancholic pop (This Time), Pumpkins do R.E.M. (Wound and Age Of Innocence) and airy, beatific balladry (With Every Light). But then there’s the rest.
The prog bombast of Glass And The Ghost Children is a better idea than it is a song, The Imploding Voice would be a decent B-side if it didn’t sound like the band were playing two streets away and The Crying Tree Of Mercury is a dirge-y mess. Planted right in the middle of the record, Heavy Metal Machine sounded like the Pumpkins trying to write the sort of song people would make up on the spot to take the piss out of the Pumpkins. A low point.
But there was lots in there that could've been rescued from the wreckage. That could still actually happen, too - a purported reissue has been languishing on the shelf for the past decade due to a label dispute.
“What makes me laugh is that it doesn’t surprise me that it’s Machina… that’s the problem,” Corgan said in a fan Q&A in 2015, referring to the fact that all of the band’s previous records had no problems with their deluxe edition reissues. “That record has always had a weird cloud around it. I very seriously had to make a decision at some point about whether I was going to continue because every sign was, ‘Get off the island, quit the band, get the fuck out of there’. Every indication, where your senses are screaming and for whatever reason I over-rode those instincts and finished the record and found something in that record that I wouldn’t have found if I didn’t stick to it. Out of all the records I made, that’s the one where it’s a coin flip as to whether or not it should’ve been finished. I have total confidence in the material… there’s layers and layers and layers in that record that you can only get to if you listen to that record.”
The frontman went on to say that he still didn’t consider Machina… to be finished. “I don’t think it was produced to a point of completion, it’s like looking at an unfinished film,” he continued. “But that’s the story of the album, me trying to hold something together that had no more organic reason to hold together other than the name above the door, the record contract, a point of destination, the tour, it was probably as hollow as saying, and I’ve had friends say this to me, ‘You’re not in love with your wife, why are you staying in the marriage’ and I say, ‘Well, I stayed with her cos of the kids’. It had that same hollow feeling to it, where I probably should leave but I’m staying in it for the kids. Until I do the reissue, I can’t work out what the last component is and exorcise the ghost of the record.”
But rather than suggest Machina’s problem might be the fact it contains one or two songs too many that are a bit crap, Corgan said the perception of the album as being below-par was down to the fact that Pumpkins diehards just didn’t get it. “It has pissed me off over and over again through the years that most fans who are real fans don’t really get the record, nor have they listened to it enough to get the record,” he declared. “Because if they did, they would understand it’s just as powerful, just as potent a work as all the other ones. It pisses me off. It’s almost like the record didn’t happen, it’s very weird. We’ve even had it where the record company would approach us and say, ‘We want to reissue your albums’ and you read the email and the album is not even listed. I don’t know what it is about that fucking record. The record company that owns the record doesn’t even acknowledge that the record exists, that’s a weird thing!”
But Machina… does exist, as does its sister album Machina II..., released for free in September, 2000. Again, that record contained songs that would’ve improved Machina…, but that’s a story for another day. Here’s the record that marked the beginning of the end for the Pumpkins Mark One. They had lost their way and Billy Corgan was never the sort to ask for directions.
