Let’s can the mock suspense and acknowledge the absurdity of this rerelease as a starting point rather than a conclusion. The Aeroplane Flies High is not a beloved obscurity, nor is it a canonical album celebrating a milestone anniversary. It’s not even an album: it’s a widely available, 16-year old collection of B-sides from a double album. Granted, the Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was more judiciously edited than the title would lead you to believe. It was a 28-song double album all the same, and now Aeroplane nearly quadruples in size with 90 additional tracks on top of its original 33, with a bonus DVD to boot. But while the numbers make The Aeroplane Flies High the most difficult Smashing Pumpkins reissue to endure, it’s actually the easiest to revisit. For most listeners, Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie are inseparable from the memories of living with those records at a certain age; it’s tough to rehear “Disarm” or “X.Y.U.” without recalling the specific sensory triggers of your parents' house or the details of a particularly shitty day in 10th grade when [INSERT NAME HERE] didn’t reciprocate your crush on them. Aeroplane simply reminds the listener of what it was like to be a Smashing Pumpkins fan when people were expected to pay money for music.
It was equally exhilarating and exhausting during the band’s prime. If you caught the videos on MTV and chose to take your Pumpkins fanship to the next level by exploring the deep cuts, the bootlegs, the formative guitar tablature sites, and so forth, you realized that Billy Corgan was every bit as excited about the music of Smashing Pumpkins as his audience. In fact, that probably strikes at the root of everything you’ve come to loathe about Corgan as well: he’s the biggest Smashing Pumpkins fan on earth.
So while Aeroplane was always meant as a collector’s item, Corgan made it worth your while. Even if you bought it out of obligation and never even listened to the thing, it was one of the 90s’ most handsome and unique physical packages: five CD singles with their own art design, delivered in a hypno-swirled carrying case. It was a keepsake and a conversation piece, a vinyl era throwback for kids who assumed the CD era would last forever. So even if the songs themselves were dashed off (Corgan claimed “Pennies” took literally minutes to write) or slapped together (the very literal 23-minute guitar collage “Pastichio Medley”), there was nothing half-assed about the actual product.
Separating the B-sides onto five separate CDs ensured that the collection was no mere data dump in terms of quality and presentation. If you let your ears go slack a little, every EP retains some important characteristic of its linchpin Mellon Collie single. It’s not an exact fit; with the exception of the country and western curio “Said Sadly”, Bullet With Butterfly Wings is the “covers” EP and the selections brought the new wave genealogy of that song to the fore. The keeper of the bunch is their take on Blondie’s “Dreaming”; not only does it feature a rare lead vocal from bassist D’arcy, but the requisitely light, billowy arrangement distinguishes it from their competent Cars and Alice Cooper karaoke and a fumbled cover of the Cure’s “A Night Like This” where James Iha can’t decide if he wants to perform it as a country, slowcore, or shoegaze song.
Tonight, Tonight is technically the “ballad” single-- it is the one with the strings and all. Yet, its sumptuous studio arrangement bares no similarity to its attendant outtakes which are mostly solo, acoustic performances from Corgan. Even compared to the spare and wistful lullabies from their previous odds-and-ends collection Pisces Iscariot such as “Whir” and “Obscured”, the songs here sound incomplete rather than realized minimalism. If you’re trying to fashion a four-star Smashing Pumpkins album out of the original B-sides-- and really, that seems like the entire point-- you can skip those two EPs altogether.
On the other side, everything on the 1979 single warrants inclusion. The most-beloved Smashing Pumpkins single gives these songs a certain halo effect, of course. Beyond that, the lightly carbonated college rock of “The Boy” is easily the best thing James Iha has ever written, while the whispered restraint lent to the could-be power ballad “Believe” puts it as the runner up. More intriguing is how in 20 minutes, the fluorescent and fizzy 1979 lays out an intriguing “what if?” for the Smashing Pumpkins. While Adore is known as their synth album and a sonic outlier amidst Corgan’s ambitions for Sistine Chapel art-rock, it’s still a 70-minute opus draped in black and smeared with kohl eyeliner. “Ugly” and “Set the Ray to Jerry” are two sides of a coin and together they present a fascinating alternative to Adore: the former a self-hate song driven by palm-muted, bristling guitar and the latter a love song of swirling, phased ambience. Is it possible they could’ve made a minimalist, melody-driven new wave album following in that vein? I have my doubts-- for all his generosity in the realm of B-sides and miscellany, albums are a huge event for Corgan and we’ll never know if “Set the Ray” would’ve included triple-guitar harmonies or if Jimmy Chamberlin’s barnstorming drum rolls would’ve found a way onto “Cherry”.
If you want those aspects of Smashing Pumpkins, you can head straight to the Zero EP, which, like the titular single, is the most immediately satisfying of the bunch and the quickest to lose its appeal. “God” rages with such Neanderthal impulses, it’s actually fun; it’s basically “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” if you fast forward straight to the avalanche of its coda. The relatively raw glam-grunge of “Mouths of Babes” and “Marquis in Spades” has an underdog appeal if you somehow thought Mellon Collie was hindered by its concept album ambitions or ever mistook Smashing Pumpkins as being a punk or indie band at some point; but as far as riffs or melodies or dynamics go, they’re all second-tier Corgan compositions.
That leaves us with Thirty-Three, the oft-forgotten single from Mellon Collie and the least typical of the lot. The rest of the EP follows suit, as it bears the collection’s most risky and disparate offerings; you get the prettiest cover (“My Blue Heaven”) and the sludgiest, slowest guitar workout (“The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left Looks Right)”). The electro-spazz of “Transformer” segues into Iha’s ornate, porcelain art-pop offering “The Bells”. And it’s all preceded by the showstopping closer on your hypothetical Aeroplane single-CD; containing one of Corgan’s most sweet and yearning vocal performances as well as guitar solo from his father, “The Last Song” feels too crucial to be ignored and too personal to make it onto an album with Mellon Collie’s overt commercial ambitions.
And those are all things you can surmise from buying the original version of Aeroplane Flies High; the tracks have been remastered here, though liars and professional audio engineers are the only people who will claim to notice the effect. Like every Pumpkins reissue, Aeroplane is stocked with extras; the difference here is that they’re jammed onto each single seemingly at random, rather than separated into bonus discs. As a result, the tasteful and accessible arrangement of the original is compromised, negating one of its best qualities. For example, why are 15 tracks of instrumental jamming slapped onto Bullet With Butterfly Wings? And these aren’t snippets either, some go on for five minutes, and mostly prove that while Smashing Pumpkins songs are pantheon material, Smashing Pumpkins riffs are fairly easy to come by. As works in progress, they’re nothing particularly special; it’d be more interesting if Corgan granted a Creative Commons License as part of the purchase price and allowed fans to use his scraps to come up with their best Smashing Pumpkins imitation.
Otherwise, do we need the Smashing Pumpkins’ July 1995 performance at Chicago’s Double Door and their rehearsal? The DD rehearsal is spirited and ragged, notable for Corgan cracking up during “By Starlight” of all things and reconfiguring the lyrics of “God”. As far as the actual performance, you almost wish Corgan would get all Patton Oswalt on the dude who’s yelling in the middle of “Stumbleine”. Forget all of those-- head straight to “Special Winner’s Song”, which is five minutes of interactive crowd participation and an improvised rap by James Iha who is presumably drunk as shit. Hearing him yell, “D’arcy Wretzky on the motherfucking bass!” makes the whole endeavor somehow worth it because it’s one of the few times you might imagine the Smashing Pumpkins being four people who enjoyed each other’s company.
With all that said, Aeroplane gives you insight to what a tremendous strain it must’ve been to be a member of the Smashing Pumpkins-- if listening to everything on Aeroplane Flies High seems taxing, imagine playing it. And imagine that what ended up on this still somehow isn’t the sum total of their recorded output at the time. On a basic level, the supersizing of Aeroplane magnifies what it was back in 1996, a point where Corgan’s giving nature felt more like neediness, where the generosity started to lose its altruism and became an oppressive act. The deluxe reissuing of Smashing Pumpkins’ heyday has resulted in upwards of 200 bonus tracks and the ones on Aeroplane are almost entirely inessential. You learn from the eight-track demo of “Zero” that it needs vocals and it needs Jimmy Chamberlain. You learn from the live version that it doesn’t need 50% more whammy pedal soloing. If it’s easy to revisit Aeroplane without getting emotionally attached, it’s harder to talk about for the same reason. But it gets us one step closer to reevaluating Adore, the first Pumpkins record that underperformed commercially and critically, whose legacy is still somewhat in flux. And that’s a worthy cause even if Aeroplane couldn’t possibly justify its price tag.
