Smashing Pumpkins Look Back in Wonder

When Corgan talks of the "slowly deteriorating state" of the Pumpkins, he is not referring only to public history: the 1996 fatal overdose of touring keyboard player Jonathan Melvoin; Chamberlin's two years in exile for drug abuse; D'Arcy's exit. There were, Corgan says, "many unresolved issues - mainly, for me, musical. Being this paternal figure doesn't work. It's like, 'Now, class, please pay attention to this next chord sequence.' And the band doesn't rehearse as much as it used to. When we had no money, no nothing, there was nothing else to do but be grungy and be in a band. Now there are many other options: 'I could be skiing.'

"I tried to take a progressive step with Adore," he says, referring to the band's 1998 album of gothic balladry, "and internally didn't get the support I needed. I got the support on a conscientious level: 'We're behind you on this.' But without Jimmy there, and James and D'Arcy not particularly motivated, for whatever reasons, we never got into that next complete musical agenda."

Machina was to be the Pumpkins' grand finale. Corgan wrote the songs on Machina and Machina II -- forty tracks in all -- as a "Ring Cycle" starring the Machines of God, a fictional band portrayed by the Pumpkins in much the same way that the Beatles played a marching orchestra on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Each Pumpkin was to have a tailor-made character. "James would have been this superaloof rock guy in high heels and a cape," Corgan says. "D'Arcy would have been this superspace queen. And it would have been 24/7" -- not just onstage and on record but in "all of the interviews and language." Corgan even drew a flow chart of the story's seven stages, with connecting arrows to each song title.

"Unfortunately, the band didn't completely follow through," he says with a sour laugh. When D'Arcy quit, the project "became more about survival - internal spiritual survival." (Auf Der Maur, formerly of Hole, replaced D'Arcy, knowing it would only be for a year of touring. "She's learned in the vicinity of fifty or sixty songs," Corgan says admiringly of Auf Der Maur. "She said that at the height of Hole, they knew fourteen songs.")

The Pumpkins briefly considered issuing a double CD of Machina material, a la 1995's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and then offered their label, Virgin, a two-for-one concept: Anyone who bought Machina would get Machina II as a free download. Virgin passed, so Corgan decided to put Machina II on the Internet for anyone who wanted it. "I'm thinking, 'This is pretty fucking good, I want this music out,' " he says of the sequel. Twenty-five vinyl copies were pressed up as a limited-edition set -- an LP and three EPs ("Technically the B sides," Corgan says) -- and given away to fans.

Looking back, Corgan believes some of the hard-pop songs on Machina II -- such as "Real Love," "Cash Car Star" and "Let Me Give the World to You" (first cut in a different version for Adore) -- would have made Machina a more commercial record. According to SoundScan, Machina has sold 510,000 copies in the U.S., a precipitous drop in sales from Mellon Collie (4.5 million) and Adore (1.1 million). "It was like watching your kid flunking out of school after getting straight A's for ten years," Chamberlin says sadly.