By the time Smashing Pumpkins arrived at their third album, Billy Corgan had already dropped one classic detailing some of his thoughts about the music industry (he wasn’t really a fan) in the avalanching Siamese Dream cut Cherub Rock. But little did the frontman know that his next entry on the subject would catapult the Pumpkins into a whole new realm.
That song was Bullet With Butterfly Wings, a landmark Smashing Pumpkins release and not just because it was their final single where Corgan had hair. In many ways, the track, which turns 30 next week, is a close counterpart to Cherub Rock. Both were the first singles from their respective albums and both gave you a pretty decent idea of what to expect from the full-length records – in terms of a trailer for the heavier songs that featured on the shapeshifting sonics of its parent album, Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, Bullet… is a perfect specimen.
They are lyrical bedfellows, too. Cherub Rock hissed at vacuous poseurs and bandwagon-jumpers, a lashing out probably fuelled by all the artists who dismissed the Pumpkins in their early days - Bob Mould, for example, called them the “grunge Monkees”. Bullet With Butterfly Wings maintains that disdainful grimace but this time it’s from much deeper into the rabbit hole.
Chart success and Siamese Dream’s multi-million sales had not, surprise surprise, improved Corgan’s view of his new surroundings: Bullet With Butterfly Wings is a song that snarls at fame and celebrity culture and at the lack of risk-taking the music industry as Corgan saw it encouraged.
That Corgan also takes aim at the tedium of professional band life intertwined the song with its very roots. The band were recording their masterful version of Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide at the BBC (“not my favourite place to record… they are still in 1971,” he noted in the liner notes to their outtakes compilation Pisces Iscariot) and while waiting as the sound engineers fiddled around with mics, Corgan came up with the “Despite all my rage/I’m still just a rat in a cage” chorus, a hook that would come to be one of his band’s most well-known.
One cut-and-shut later with a verse that he’d had lying round since the Siamese Dream sessions – “Somewhere, I have a tape of us from 1993 endlessly playing 'the world is a vampire' part over and over,” he once said – and a Pumpkins classic began to take shape. “There were always lots of Frankenstein parts laying about that I’d mix and match back up together,” Corgan wrote in the liner notes to the 2012 reissue of Mellon Collie….
Everyone who heard Bullet With Butterfly Wings as it was being worked on in the studio knew it was a monster of a track. “The great thing about working with the Pumpkins was that it was obvious which tracks were going to be the real main players,” producer Flood recalled in an interview with Tape Op. “Bullet… was most definitely one of them, and we all knew it because it had the energy we wanted to capture.”
Everyone that is, except for Corgan. “All the way through the 10 or so months of writing and making this album I thought this tune both powerful and stupid, and I could never really settle on one such opinion over the other,” he would remember.
The frontman was shocked when he took a call from label chief and veteran music executive Phil Quartararo insisting that Bullet… should be the album’s lead single. Corgan was of the opinion it should be the flailing onslaught of Jellybelly but was open enough to let Quartararo pitch his case.
“He literally did the thing on the phone, ‘Kid, it’s a smash! You gotta trust me!’,” Corgan recounted during an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast. “And I trusted him. I thought he was crazy.”
It was a decision that paid off. Released on October 16, 1995, Bullet With Butterfly Wings remains one of the Pumpkins’ all-time best songs, a glorious whirlwind of rollercoaster dynamics, indelible melodicism, seething riffs and powerhouse drumming. It became their first Top 40 US hit, winning a Grammy in 1997, and paved the way for the gargantuan success of Mellon Collie…, which arrived a few weeks later.
He might not have saw it as a calling card back then, but now the song makes more sense to Billy Corgan than ever. “At the time it was a trope about the business I was in,” he told Howard Stern. “The angrier you got the more silly it became and then you just found yourself in a bigger cage. We live in a world now of social media where you can say something stupid and get a bunch of attention, but you are just imprisoned in some other paradigm.”
A song written in two halves years apart and only released as a single at the behest of their label boss tells you nothing was ever straightforward in Pumpkins world in the 90s. But when they finally hit a sweet spot, they were unstoppable. Bullet With Butterfly Wings is the sound of Smashing Pumpkins hitting an imperial peak. Watch its classic video below:
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