Smashing Pumpkins Reveal 20th Anniversary Tour Details

Smashing Pumpkins announced some details for their upcoming 20th anniversary tour. To kick off the festivities in August, the band will take to "smaller venues" to play "unique sets and songs." In November, the tour will shift to much-larger venues in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, as well as a few more unannounced cities. "The August tour is going to be a blast... Expect a very loud and raucous show from us...and we are very, very happy to know we will finally be playing our own shows come November in New York, L.A., and Chicago... The 20th Anniversary shows will be magical... We are already working on lots of surprises," Billy Corgan wrote on the band's website. The planned Gish tour — coinciding with the reissue of the Pumpkins' ferocious debut album -- has been pushed back to 2009. So far, only one date has been announced--August 9 at Hammond, Indiana's Horseshoe Casino--with the remaining dates and venues expected to be announced shortly. Corgan revived the Pumpkins in 2006 after a five year breakup and toured behind the release of the new album Zeitgeist; only Corgan and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin were involved in the reunion, and it seems unlikely that original members James Iha and D'Arcy Wretzky will be involved in the anniversary festivities.

Related Stories:
• Smashing Pumpkins Plot Gish Box Set, Tour
• Corgan's Fury: Exclusive Q&A
• Smashing Pumpkins Sue Virgin Records Over Pepsi Promotion

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter