News 001202-2
The Smashing Pumpkins exited as they arrived 13 years ago, four personalities built to implode, bonded by their passion for music and little else. There was no final unison bow, no crowd-pandering displays of back-slapping or glad-handing, no last-minute appearance by recently departed bassist D'Arcy Wretzky to bring the moment full circle in the Chicago quartet's final concert Saturday at Metro.
Instead, there were the three remaining founders of this city's dominant rock band pulling in different directions: James Iha, in sequined Grand Ole Opry suit, quietly walking into the shadows; Jimmy Chamberlin, in black muscle shirt, blowing kisses and hustling off as if double-parked outside, and Billy Corgan, an alien, adrogynous presence in silver dress and commando boots, smiling, waving and trying to savor the moment, until he finally put his shaven head in his hands and sobbed.
It was catharsis after an epic blowout -- an unexpected yet richly appreciated moment that brought the biggest applause of the night from a capacity audience, many of whom had waited for hours, even days, in the unforgiving cold for the club's doors to open. Hundreds of others stood outside the club ticketless and shivering, holding a vigil for the band of their generation in its final hours. And a long vigil it was: a 4-hour-and-40-minute, 37-song marathon that ended in the wee hours of Sunday morning and touched on every phase of the band's career -- a half-dozen studio albums, B-sides, rarities and even a blues cover, Albert King's "Born Under a Bad Sign."
The body of the evening was divided into three "acts," a typically bombastic conceit for a band that has never made any small plans, and followed by four encores. In contrast to their United Center performance last Wednesday, when the Pumpkins built from atmospheric acoustic tunes into full-on rock, the quartet opened at full roar with three guitar-heavy monsters from their first two albums: "Rocket," "I Am One" and "Rhinoceros."
As personalities, the Pumpkins have always been a fragile configuration, but as a hard-rock ensemble they are Godzilla wading through Tokyo. The foursome flexed and flailed, the songs not so much about head-down linear motion as an extended boxing match, Chamberlin's drums and Corgan's guitar pushing and pulling against each other with titanic force, while Iha slid and slithered into the gaps with six-string riffs, drones and otherworldly noises. Wretzky's replacement, Melissa Auf Der Maur, stood her ground and refused to be pushed into the background. Whereas Wretzky once sat dutifully on the beat with her bass strumming, Auf Der Maur played around it, functioning like a third guitarist and tossing her curls as though auditioning for Led Zeppelin in her glittering gown.
Epic versions of "Porcelina of the Vast Oceans" and "Thru the Eyes of Ruby" glimmered with Robert Fripp-like guitar treatments, rapturous excursions into the deepest recesses of the Pumpkins' peculiar brand of psychedelia. In contrast, "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" and "The Everlasting Gaze" were played at express-train speed, twice as fast as the recorded versions.
If the first set was all about the scorched-earth yang of Corgan's musical personality, the second was the quiet, contemplative yin. "Muzzle" was given over to a Mike Garson piano solo, while "Go" gave Iha a rare lead-vocal turn. Hunched over a small piano for an atmospheric keyboard duet with Garson, Corgan dwarfed the instrument, looking like an exotic Victorian doll with his dress and shaven head glistening in the lights.
"Tonight, Tonight" brought the band back for one more round of electric mayhem, Corgan smiling broadly as he delivered the song's homage to the "city by the lake" that nurtured him, for better or worse. "(Expletive) You" lived up to its title, a white-noise screed on which the singer risked blowing out his voice, and a merciless "Cash Car Star" knocked the stuffing out of Grand Funk with its lyrical allusions to the 1973 hit "We're an American Band." In covering David Essex's "Rock On" as a prelude to the hand-waving arena-rock parody "Heavy Metal Machine," Corgan posed the question of the evening: "Where do we go from here?"
The encores were distinguished by the appearance of the singer's father. The pair shared vocals on "For Martha," a song which the younger Corgan wrote for his mother, who died of cancer in 1997. "I know she's up there listening," said William Corgan Sr., an accomplished blues and jazz guitarist with a keening tenor voice. He later alluded to his son's famously disruptive childhood: "We didn't always see eye to eye on everything, but there's one thing we agree on: Both of us were born under a bad sign," and he and the Pumpkins dove into the Albert King blues classic of the same name.
A few minutes later, Corgan was reliving some of that childhood in the gorgeously destitute "Disarm" and the celebratory "1979," with Chamberlin on acoustic guitar and Matt Walker joining on drums. The show should have ended there, but the band was called back for a fourth encore, "Silver(expletive)," 25 minutes of tortured dynamics and stream-of-consciousness wordplay that indulged hard-core fans.
It was a night that showed the Pumpkins as the complex, contradictory beast they were: romantics walking on eggshells, storm troopers marching toward Armageddon, space-rock commandos, pastoral folkies. It was a time to marvel at how this peculiar mix of personalities had come this far. And, after the applause had faded, it was possible to appreciate the sweep and ambition of the art they created in spite of their differences. Few bands have come this far, and as this foursome faces a future apart from one another ("where do we go from here?"), they can cling to one certainty: Their music was built to last.