Pumpkin soup for the soul

MANILA, Philippines - “I’m not here to hold your hand. I’m just here to understand. If you’re feeling low I can help.”  —One Diamond, One Heart, The Smashing Pumpkins

Sporting a pair of sneakers, a naked pate and lazy stubbles, he towers over us all at the press conference — slightly hunched as we remember on that classic Today video nearly 20 years ago with that pasty face and a head of wavy hair. In the popular music video, Billy Corgan drives an ice cream truck and picks up James Iha, D’arcy Wretzky and Jimmy Chamberlin — his original Smashing Pumpkins (SP) cohorts. They have a grand time trashing the truck with gobs of multi-colored paint.

Those are days long gone.

Much like the ending of that video where Corgan disembarks from the vehicle and it speeds off without him, Corgan now finds himself away from his original band mates due to various circumstances. But thankfully, more than 30 million in album sales, multiple Grammy awards and some 2,000 worldwide concerts later, Corgan and his present co-Pumpkins have finally found their way to Manila for a one-night show.

Billy is under the weather today, admitting to a slight case of the flu, but gamely answers questions — and even autographs stuff. At times, it feels less like a presser than a lecture on music, nay, entertainment business morality. We are all the better for it, partly because Corgan doesn’t mince his principled words — which stream out in a treatise.

“I saw in the last 10 years as the record sales went down for everybody, so did the connection — the emotional connection to the music,” Corgan laments, “and here comes the rise of music made by people who don’t really care about music… They want to be famous. They want to be on American Idol. They want to be in the spotlight. They have no respect for the people that came before them. They have no respect for the tradition of music, they have no respect for the blood and tears that have been spilt by great musicians all over the world — many of whom will never even know their name.”

Even old guards are not spared the vitriol.

When asked for his opinion on the return of Smashing Pumpkins contemporaries, Corgan observes: “There are those bands that are essentially coming back only to make money — playing their old albums, and maybe somewhere in the back of their minds they’re thinking there might be a future.”

He says with a laugh: “I am not in that business, obviously. I condemn anybody who’s in that business but doesn’t admit (he’s) in that business. When Soundgarden came back and they just played their old songs, great. I was a fan of Soundgarden, but call it for what it is. They’re just out there to have one more round at the till; same with Pavement and these other bands.”

The paradigm for Smashing Pumpkins is one of staying both true and relevant. “You have to make music for 2012,” Corgan underscores. That doesn’t mean SP won’t do old favorites. It’s more of maintaining an arc of evolution and conscripting new dwellers on Planet Pumpkin.

“Without the young fans there is no future for Smashing Pumpkins. We can’t run an oldies business. Not only is it boring, it’s actually not a very good business,” he simply says.

Truth be told, SP’s new album Oceania should test Pumpkins devotees old and new. Though it bears the unmistakable fingerprints of Corgan, the collection is not typical fare. It certainly distinguishes itself with lush electronic soundscapes sometimes set against the sludgy and/or delicate guitar musings.

Even the way the new effort is marketed and treated deviates from standard industry practice. Billy shares on the band website smashingpumpkins.com that it’s about “ignoring typical clap trap you hear about needing a single. The only way to make the case that every song on Oceania is worth hearing is to put your heart into the sequence as a cohesive whole.”

Indeed, on its current tour, Smashing Pumpkins play all the tracks in the order as they appear on the album.

The rains come unrelentingly. Manila is inundated. Billy tweets: “I’m happy to report (that) thanks to our great crew and with the helpful assistance of (our) Manila promoter we have rescheduled our show for tomorrow.”

Still, as expected, many of the ticketholders have failed to make it to the Smart Araneta Coliseum show. The floods have returned with a resumption of the downpour that went away oh-so briefly. The band pushes the start time to wait for latecomers burdened by the commute.

The curtains open to reveal a huge inflated white globe above the stage. Upon it appear images and video to accompany each SP song. The visuals are by Sean Evans, “whose most recent work was assisting Roger Waters on the newest staging of The Wall. The Pumpkins will be using new technology in video mapping to create something new and previously unseen.”

“What rain?” Billy says, and launches into SP favorites in the second half of the show. All told, the band snarls through 29 songs — more than the usual — a gift from SP to the fans who braved the weather. “Tonight is not a normal night,” he explains to the adoring faithful, and thanks them profusely for being there.

“Music has been hijacked by business, much like the American spirit has been hijacked by corporate interest. You know it’s a reflection of our greater culture where our value systems are been hollowed out by the glamour of fame, the glamour of power, the glamour of control — and none of these things matter in the eyes of God, in my opinion,” Billy continues at the press conference.

“What we’re seeing in the world is, the old system which said the only way you’re valuable is if you sell a record or if you get on the radio or if you get on MTV. Those values don’t matter anymore. What the Smashing Pumpkins means as a band is so much more valuable. What we mean to people is so much more valuable than our commercial value, and that’s what we’re seeing.”

It’s a lesson worth pointing out to our local musicians and record labels especially when grappling with what sells, or what can be more widely palatable and consumed.

“The music business essentially operates on a dumbing down principle,” Corgan says. “How dumb do we have to go to sell this record to the most amount of people? And the more intelligent and articulate it gets, you lose a certain degree of audience.”

Corgan insists that few bands are able to achieve both. “Radiohead’s an example — very high arc, very high message and still very popular. But for the most part, the charts are dominated by music that’s essentially dumbed down — repetitive melody, style, tone, texture and message because it reaches the most (number) of people. So it’s amazing if you let people be with you on a deeper journey — they’ll actually figure it out because most people are deep.”

Smashing Pumpkins, that most successful yet persistently “alternative” of bands has again found its gait. Overcoming personnel changes through the years, Corgan considers the new line-up of Jeff Schroeder (guitars), Nicole Florentino (vocals, bass) and Mike Byrne (vocals, drums) “family” – former SP fans themselves who understand what the band means. “They get that… they weren’t caught up in the hype,” shares Corgan.

The sustainable model for contemporary artist, and even the artist of the future is about not compromising — at all. Advises Corgan: “Sing about your values. Don’t Americanize yourself. Don’t try to be some Brit pop crap. Be yourself. Sing to your people, your friends.”

Indeed, integrity translates and resonates in any culture. Perhaps even in other planets.

(The Smashing Pumpkins Live in Manila was presented by Little Asia, Fox, Edsa Shangri-La Manila, Music Management International, Polyeast EMI and FILSCAP. Media parters were Myx, Rogue Magazine, RX 93.1 and Mellow 94.7.)