Here we have the little, lovesick album where the caged rat sings and alienates Smashing Pumpkins fans by the millions—you know, the one that’s 73 minutes long and whose first single begins with the lyric, “It’s you that I adore/ You’ll always be my whore.” The one that’s called "underrated" so often that, by definition, it can’t actually be true. It’s also the one that should be held in highest regard by indie musicians—it features a highly stylized gothic cover, lacks anything resembling an Almighty Riff, features drum programming from a guy from Nitzer Ebb, and shares a producer with Exile in Guyville. And yet, Billy Corgan made an album nearly as diverse, sprawling, confounding and compelling as the diamond-selling, massively influential prog-pop masterwork Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness—which was the exact opposite of what he set out to do with Adore.
The tortuous dualities that inspired Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie—most notably, grandiose ego and bottomless self-loathing—were clearly encoded in their titles, but these qualities are harder to spot here. The title would be read for its amorous overtones and an allusion to Prince’s own intimate, lovesick record, when it’s actually a homophone for “a door”—as in, a way out. So the main tension here is between the album Corgan was compelled to make and the one he felt Smashing Pumpkins were compelled to make.
Billy Corgan is Smashing Pumpkins—it’s hard to remember the last time anyone had illusions otherwise—but the two are not synonymous. The even-numbered Pumpkins LPs in the project's discography tend to be autobiographical, and opener “To Sheila” is Corgan talking directly to the listener as someone who just experienced the loss of his mother, his marriage, and his “musical soul mate” after firing drummer Jimmy Chamberlin. During the Mellon Collie tour, keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin died of a heroin overdose in a hotel room with the drummer; from most accounts, due to his struggles with addiction, it could’ve just as easily have been Chamberlin. There have been Smashing Pumpkins songs like this one before—spare and acoustic, Corgan’s unmistakable soft-palate vocals high in the mix, proving he could actually write poetic lyrics rather than diary simulacra. “To Sheila” is a salvo in its own way, albeit one whose tone isn’t sustained throughout Adore.
Somewhere deep within the five bonus discs of material is a live version of “For Sheila” where the banjo is inaudible amidst orgiastic crowd noise that negates the opening lyric,“Twilight fades on blistered Avalon.” And it’s there you sense that Corgan may have had that Dark Knight feeling where he wanted to streamline his operation, but not by that much. He empathized with Batman while recording “The End is the Beginning is the End” for that franchise’s very own MACHINA/The Machines of God (Batman & Robin), and why not—we’re talking about a guy driven by childhood trauma and lifelong grudges, with no real superpowers outside of his alter ego and available weaponry. Corgan always took his fans into consideration, and that crowd noise may have talked him out of his Nebraska; how could he go there when Smashing Pumpkins were his sole means of smiting enemies both real and imagined?
But 1998 was a strange and unstable time for alt-rock superheroes—as hard as it is to picture in 2014, the record industry literally had more money than they knew what to do with, but the big names of years past were finding themselves crowded out by rap-metal, post-Disney pop, and hip-hop. That much hasn’t changed, and on the other side—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—a critic-instigated push for electronic musicians as the new rock stars forced actual rock stars to pay lip service to the obsolescence of guitars (more so than* OK Computer did*). And that’s how you got, amongst many others, Nine Inch Nails’ baroque, Debussy-quoting double-album The Fragile, Marilyn Manson going glam, Chris Cornell and Scott Weiland making neo-psychedelic solo records, and the closest analog to Adore, R.E.M.’s Up, which is also way too long, missing their original drummer, and has a rightfully loathed electro-rock single.
This is how we likely ended up with “Ava Adore”, the closest thing to a “rock” song that still honored Corgan’s ambitions—there are discernible chords, a braying chorus, and a guitar solo (albeit one that only lasts four bars). But “Ava Adore” didn’t build on the promise of “The End is the Beginning is the End” or “Eye”; rubbing elbows with Bon Harris must’ve convinced Billy Corgan that he got a little closer to Trent Reznor vibe-wise, though most people who related to Smashing Pumpkins don’t do “menacing” or “sexy”. Corgan doesn’t either—the song never gets as bad as its first lyric, but the video is the least sexy “sexy” alt-rock clip next to “Lakini’s Juice”. It somehow holds up less than the unearthed “Puff Daddy Remix”, which unsurprisingly sounds like the two never once spent time in the same room. (I mean, Corgan couldn’t handle the egos of James Iha and D’arcy, imagine how we would've gotten on with post-No Way OutPuffy.) Nevertheless, the remix sounds like it could’ve fit next to that “Kashmir” reboot on the Godzilla soundtrack and while I’m not sure if that means it’s any good, it does mean it achieved exactly what it set out to do.
Adore’s commercial fate may have been sealed anyway—perhaps it was a sign of the times that a band whose last record sold 10 million debuted at #2 right behind MP Da Last Don, which could be considered Master P’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. But “Ava Adore” was a bad stumble at a time when the Pumpkins could ill afford one, and while the luminous follow-up “Perfect” was a logical extension of “1979”, the Pumpkins overplayed their hand—the video is literally a sequel, albeit with John Mellencamp’s bald drummer and Corgan wearing a cowboy hat. It was a negation of a bold rebrand that flopped and rather than a correction that set Adore right, it felt needy, if not somewhat desperate—this tendency got worse, never better, as Smashing Pumpkins proceeded.
However, “Perfect” is how most people who love the record choose to remember Adore, working within the polarity established by its opening duo and revealing that Corgan had his next move already figured out two years prior. The aforementioned door had already been blown open by “1979”, as Smashing Pumpkins learned to use guitar without being reliant on it—a pristine acoustic demo recording of “Perfect” shows how it could’ve fit on any Smashing Pumpkins record or even Zwan’s. On Adore, guitars are distorted, but not with distortion, instead given blushing effects that complement the more subtle emotional palette. Ornate chamber ballads were relegated to the "experimental" final quarter of Mellon Collie, whereas hearbtreaking sob stories “Once Upon a Time” and “Crestfallen” have come to define Adore's character. Moreover, “1979” (and really, everything after “X.Y.U.”) unintentionally prepared Corgan for life without Jimmy Chamberlin—compare “Perfect”’s stone-skipping pace or the lush, sultry “Appels & Oranjes” and “Daphne Descends” to Chamberlin’s pummeling heavy metal funk on MACHINA’s “Raindrops and Sunshowers”.
With a light touch and a heavy heart, Corgan expands his range and alchemical abilities beyond classic and symphonic rock of the 1970s; trip-hop’s hermeticism is infiltrated by a sunlit chorus on “Pug”, while 8-bit percussion gives way to a silvery Fleetwood Mac pop ballad (“The Tale of Dusty and Pistol Pete”) that now appears to be 15 years ahead of its time.Even the requisite eight-minute guitar epic isn’t really a guitar epic—“For Martha” is a tender tribute to his mother that builds from a simple piano line to an even simpler guitar solo bearing a similar tone to the one Corgan’s father lent to The Aeroplane Flies High cut “The Last Song”. Centerpiece “Tear” finds room for minimalist electro-pop, clattering Zep-sized drums, and J.G. Ballard’s Crash, foreshadowing M83’s Before the Dawn Heals Us, a record from one of the Smashing Pumpkins’ most outspoken and famous fans.
Of course, none of the above changes the simple fact that Adore is 73 minutes long—reissuing it with five bonus discs, which includes a version recorded in mono, certainly doesn't either. It’s been in regular rotation for me over the past 15 years and when I listened to Adore in its entirety for the purposes of this piece, it dawned on me how long it’s been since I had done that. I’m hesitant to call songs like “Annie-Dog” and “Blank Page” “filler” even though they’re rough, indistinct sketches filled with insular lyrics. They’re almost certainly meaningful songs to somebody. But they both arrive as comedowns on a record that certainly didn’t lack for them. It’s where Corgan wins out over Smashing Pumpkins, a show of generosity when concision would have made for a stronger record.
The duality of Adore is best demonstrated in an oft-quoted line from a 1998 MTV interview: “I’m not talking to teenagers anymore.” It can be seen as a cynical, preemptive strike in retrospect, Corgan realizing Adore wasn’t going to achieve the widespread commercial success of Mellon Collieand shifting the blame. But this is a guy who so convincingly sang the words, “Time makes you bolder/ Even children get older/ And I’m getting older too” as if they were his own. There was likely a recognition that Smashing Pumpkins fans who’ve been there since the beginning were becoming adults now, and yeah, I graduated from high school two weeks after Adore dropped, though I’m sure I truly believed that having my emotional tumult soundtrack by Smashing Pumpkins entitled me to feeling like an old soul.
Either way, Corgan once belted “I’m all by myself/ As I’ve always felt”, and previous Pumpkins records offered empathy towards fellow isolators in their preferred quarantine, whether it was in the clouds (Gish), your past (Siamese Dream), or your room (Mellon Collie). Without being overt about it, as much as this record was meant to provide “a door” for Smashing Pumpkins’ music, it was an emotional portal as well, to perhaps get outside yourself to risk loving something or someone. And that can be scary—Mellon Collie spoke to hyperbolic and yet safe associations developed in one’s teen years, offering, “Love solves everything” and “Love is suicide.” Love is a lot of things on the feedback-stained long walk home of “Shame”—it’s good, it’s kind, it’s drunk, it’s blind. But Corgan gives his first piece of grown man talk about how it always ends—“You’re gonna walk alone/ You're gonna see this through/ Don't let them get to you." Delivered in a warm register but a discomforting tone, it reveals the other unifying theme of Adore: moving on in the face of loss, of friends, of family, and of the Smashing Pumpkins.
