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While other ‘90s alt-rock bands were leaning in a more stripped-down direction, the Smashing Pumpkins were barreling headlong into maximalism with Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Comprising two volumes of 14 tracks each, this sprawling double album explored the breadth of frontman Billy Corgan’s writing and pushed the limits of what was possible in the studio.
Aside from mega-hits like “1979”, “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”, and “Tonight, Tonight”, the album delivers vulnerable acoustic ballads, heavy rockers that border on metal, and a nine-minute progressive odyssey that would make Pink Floyd jealous (in fact, Corgan once called the album “The Wall for Generation X”).
As you can imagine, making the Pumpkins’ third studio album was an intense endeavor for all involved. From basic tracking at full concert volume to string sessions with a 30-piece orchestra, home-recorded demos that made the album, and songs that came together under last-minute pressure, the story of Mellon Collie… is just as interesting as the music itself.
“Dead Set” on a Double Album
After Siamese Dream, Corgan felt creatively and emotionally exhausted, even going so far as to say he saw “no future” for the band. “We were reaching the end of a creative cycle,” as the formula of loud-to-quiet guitars and pounding drums became formulaic, he told Rolling Stone’s David Fricke in 1995. “So I said, ‘Let's approach this like it's our last album.’ Because it either will be our last album, or it will be our last album as people know the Smashing Pumpkins.”
An extremely prolific writer, Corgan almost had enough songs to make Siamese Dream a double album; and this time around, he had his heart set on it. To his fans’ delight and his record label’s chagrin, Corgan announced the plan for the next album live on MTV while headlining Lollapalooza.
“Making a double album was my idea, and I was dead set on it,” Corgan writes in the liner notes of the 2012 reissue. “Virgin tried to talk me out of it, but when they realized that I couldn't be swayed, they tried to convince us to take the Guns N' Roses' strategy and release it as two different CDs. I refused and dug my heels in, and eventually, they agreed.”
After Lollapalooza (which Corgan called “Absolutely, positively the most draining experience of my life”), the lead Pumpkin took a few days to recuperate and then refocused on writing six days a week, mostly on acoustic guitar and a 1920s piano at his Sadlands home studio. The phrase “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” had come to him during a trip to Coney Island in 1991, and although he didn’t know what it meant at the time, the concept began to evolve as the songs poured out.
Finding a Producer (or Two)
Although Butch Vig had produced both of the Pumpkins’ previous albums (a collaboration that started right around the time of Nirvana’s Nevermind), Corgan decided a change was needed to get the band out of their creative rut and unhealthy interpersonal dynamic. Apparently, a double album calls for double the producers, because they ended up with the British duo of Mark “Flood” Ellis (who at that point had worked with U2, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails) and Alan Moulder (who had recorded three My Bloody Valentine records and mixed Siamese Dream).
“Flood, I felt, understood what I was trying to get at,” Corgan says in a 2016 Tape Op feature. “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 was the one who suggested bringing in Moulder, whom he had met at Trident Studios in the ‘80s and worked closely with ever since. “Flood and I, as a team, both have the same sensibility about what we want from a record,” Moulder told Tape Op. “We work very well together that way, and we're free to argue without fear of anything being personal.”
Early Sessions at Pumpkinland
After testing out some of the new material over four nights at the Double Door in Chicago in February 1995, the Smashing Pumpkins commenced full-band songwriting sessions at their rehearsal studio, Pumpkinland. Keen to capture the band’s live energy, Flood made the decision to start recording at Pumpkinland even though they already had sessions booked at Chicago Recording Company later that spring.
“When you watched them live, at that time, during Mellon Collie..., I don't think I've recorded a better band,” Flood explains in the Tape Op piece. “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.”
To capture that live sound, the band set up in Pumpkinland’s large main room with brick walls and a high, vaulted wooden ceiling. They set up for rehearsals just like they normally would (complete with monitor wedges), and Flood devised a footswitch system for quickly flipping between full volume and tape-friendly levels. “In rehearsal mode, everybody was on the floor, the amps were blaring, and you wouldn’t have to worry about spills,” Flood told Electronic Musician. “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.”
Between full-band takes, Flood and Corgan worked together in the studio’s main control room on an MCI console and Otari MTR-90 MKII tape machine running at 15 inches per second. “I love recording at 15 ips NAB, but with Dolby SR, because it just adds a whole different dimension to the sound,” the producer adds. “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.”
Meanwhile, Moulder worked separately with guitarist James Iha and bassist D’Arcy Wretzky in a B room equipped with a Pro Tools rig synched to analog and digital tape to accommodate the dozens of tracks that were piling up. This was a deliberate change of pace from the Siamese Dream sessions, where Corgan ended up recording almost all of the guitar and bass himself.
In the end, about two-thirds of the album was recorded that spring at Pumpkinland, including rough mixes of “Tonight, Tonight”, “Love”, “By Starlight”, and “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans”, along with basic tracks for many others. Corgan and co. even found time to do some freeform experimentation on “Cupid de Locke”, which features samples of aerosol cans and rusty scissors along with dreamy synthesizer and autoharp parts. According to Corgan in the reissue, “Not a note is played by a human as it were, each part being fed through a phalanx of mystery boxes, which when twisted and turned just right spit back out a different set of warbles than the funny marbles you'd put in.”
The Hit That Almost Wasn’t
The most famous story from the Pumpkinland sessions is that of “1979”, the band’s highest-charting single that almost didn’t make the cut. “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,” Flood told Tape Op. “It got to almost the last day of recording at Pumpkinland before we were going to swap over into CRC, and I went, ‘Alright, that's it. You've got one more day.’”
That night, Corgan went home and made a demo using a drum machine, then came into the studio and spent the last day putting the pieces together. “Everything you hear on the track—except for the vocals—is from that one 12-hour span,” Corgan adds. “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!’”
The vocal sample that repeats through the verses was recorded by Corgan through a Shure SM58 into the same Kurzweil sampling keyboard and processed with effects to the point of unintelligibility. It was intended to be replaced by a keyboard, but by that point it was an integral part of the track, and it stayed.
Chicago Recording Company Sessions
In late spring 1995, production moved to Chicago Recording Company (CRC), where the final third of the album was recorded on tape and Pro Tools. But before starting on vocals and overdubs, several more songs still needed rhythm tracks. For “Bodies”, one of the album’s heaviest tracks, Flood had the band play even louder than at Pumpkinland and put subwoofers in the room to create a physical tension that translated to a palpable intensity on the recording. “There was so much SPL in the room that it was physically uncomfortable,” Corgan told Electronic Musician. “Your ears, your emotional resistance, would wear down.”
The heavy guitars were mainly recorded with a 1984 Marshall JCM800 and Electro-Harmonix Big Muff fuzz pedal or a Marshall JMP-1 preamp into a Mesa/Boogie power amp with an Alesis compressor between them. On the bridge of “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”, Corgan used a rare Fender Blender fuzz pedal that was recommended to him by Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine.
Many songs feature several layers of guitars, maxing out at a reported 50 to 70 parts on “Thru the Eyes of Ruby”. Corgan and Iha used dozens of effects pedals to achieve a wide range of tones across the album, from the DigiTech Whammy pitch-shifter used on Iha’s “Zero” solo to the Ebow tracks on “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans” which were treated with reverb, flanger, tremolo, and other digital effects.
For “Tonight, Tonight”, a 30-piece orchestra was packed into two rooms at CRC to record string parts written by Corgan and arranged by cellist Audrey Riley. “I have to say that recording to a 30-piece string section was probably one of the most exciting recording experiences I have ever had,” Corgan says in a 1997 Guitar World interview.
But not every song was a massive production with tons of overdubs. For instance, Corgan grew bored of trying to record “Stumbleine” in the studio and decided his home demo already had the right feel and sounded good enough to put on the record. After many attempts to work out the arrangement and lyrics of “X.Y.U.”, the band ended up tracking it completely live (including vocals). According to Corgan’s 2012 liner notes, Moulder called this “the single most exciting moment he'd ever had in a studio.”
Mixing
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was mixed later that summer at The Village Recorder in Los Angeles, but even at that stage, things were still in flux. “Tales of a Scorched Earth” was still not set in stone, and the vocals had to be recorded over the fully mixed instrumental (and heavily distorted to help them blend in). Throughout the process, nearly 60 potential songs were whittled down to 31, and then the 28 best tracks were sequenced across two “volumes.”
In the studio, Corgan and the two producers mixed as a team, with Iha joining for “Take Me Down” and “Farewell and Goodnight”. The final product is a combination of everyone’s influences, masterminded by Corgan but heavily shaped by Flood and Moulder, who also ensured that the other members got more opportunity to contribute than on the previous album.
Corgan’s songwriting is unmistakable, alternating between his trademark angsty vocals over sludgy guitars and a softer side that comes out on songs like “To Forgive” and “Galapogos”. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin keeps up with it all, pummeling the kit one moment and switching to brushes the next, all the while locked in with Wretzky and Iha.
Flood’s bold creative choices had a huge impact on the record, from pushing the band to play like they were on stage to putting the pressure on Corgan to finish “1979” in one day. Moulder’s touch is apparent on songs like “Jellybelly” and “Thru The Eyes of Ruby”, which echo My Bloody Valentine with thick stacks of guitars that meld together in a shoegazy blur.
Out of the Cocoon
The album’s lead single, “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”, came out October 16, 1995 and has remained in constant rotation on alternative radio stations ever since. After a pre-release show at the Riviera Theater in Chicago, the full album hit record stores on October 23rd in the UK and other countries, followed by the US on October 24th.
Released on two CDs and three LPs, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness surprised everyone when it debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 and sold nearly 250,000 copies in the first week. A year later, it had sold 6 million copies, becoming Diamond certified in the US and Canada. At the 1997 Grammy Awards, the Pumpkins received seven nominations and took home the award for Best Hard Rock Performance for the lead single. “1979”, “Tonight, Tonight”, and “Zero” remain some of the band’s most beloved songs.
Few double albums have performed that well in the modern era, and the legacy of Mellon Collie… speaks to Corgan’s boundless creativity, the band’s incredible work ethic, and the dream team of producers who made it a reality. Whether you think it holds a candle to The Wall is up to you, but it’s safe to say an album like this only comes around every few decades.
