There was one big question around The Smashing Pumpkins as Billy Corgan & co. prepared to release their fourth record Adore at the beginning of June, 1998: how were they going to replace Jimmy Chamberlin? The band’s drumming lynchpin had been fired midway through the tour to support 1995’s all-conquering Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness after overdosing with live keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin, who subsequently died. The tour had continued with Chamberlin’s spot filled by Filter’s Matt Walker but now that the Pumpkins were about to release their next record, everyone was keen to see how it was going to play out in the long haul.
Instead of answering that question though, in typical Corgan and Pumpkins fashion they went in a direction that brought a whole new set of queries to mind instead. First: the actual record. Adore featured three drummers (Walker on seven tracks, Soundgarden and future Pearl Jam man Matt Cameron on one and Joey Waronker, currently rumoured to be gearing up for a shift in Oasis, on three) at the same time as often sounding like there was no drummer at all, with programmed beats or a drum machine providing the rhythmic pulse. A mix of muted, wistful slow-tempo rock and warm electronic-pop, Adore certainly has its moments. There’s a really good 10-track record somewhere in its overblown 17-track, 73-minute run-time.
But the album wasn’t the half of it. When it came to the accompanying live performances, it became clear that this version of the Pumpkins were all over the shop, a period where one of rock’s most exhilarating and talented bands became a bit of a sprawling mess.
On the face of it, it felt like a good thing that the band were mixing things up. A tour with the tragic death of Melvoin hanging over it, the mammoth trek to support Mellon Collie… took in arenas all over the world and stretched on for over a year. This one was planned to be different – playing small theatres and bespoke venues, sometimes for free, in big cities over the course of four months.
There was a musical deviation too. Where on record Adore was often stark and minimalist, Corgan instigated an artistic expansion when it came to the live shows. Rather than just replacing Chamberlin, new drummer Kenny Aronoff was flanked by two percussionists in Dan Morris and Stephen Hodges whilst Mike Garson, a long-time collaborator of David Bowie, joined on piano and keyboards.
“Mike Garson is tremendous. We’re hoping to have enough room in the music to allow improvisation and re-interpretation of the songs on a nightly basis,” Corgan told radio presenter Jeff Woods. “They can freestyle things and me and James don’t always have to make the wall of sound, then the two percussionists providing a thicker rhythm track to play against, it’s gonna be really interesting. We’re flying by the seat of our pants.”
Curiously, Corgan also told Woods about the plans for US multi-instrumentalist Lisa Germano to feature in the line-up on violin but, by the time the tour began, she was nowhere to be seen. She gave an insight into her brief spell in the Pumpkins in an interview a decade or so later.
“That was a bunch of young kids being powerful and not being respectful of anything,” she appraised. “We went through rehearsals. Billy Corgan, D’Arcy and James Iha didn’t talk to each other. It was a fucked situation… they were fighting at that time.”
When Germano was presented with a contract listing stipulations of the things she could and couldn’t do whilst in the band – one being that she wasn’t allowed to release a record when she stated the Pumpkins knew one was scheduled – her time with them came to a premature end. “I didn’t sign it,” she explained. “They sent me home without discussing it… Billy is such a lame ass… They were complete assholes and it fucked me up.”
It doesn’t exactly paint a picture of the harmonious fresh start the band were after. But at least they had a new drummer, seasoned session man and former John Mellancamp and Melissa Etheridge sticksman Aronoff. “We had this weird night where we auditioned people through the middle of the night,” Corgan explained of how they found their new guy. “It was very bizarre. Everyone wanted to know what we wanted them to learn to play and we told them, ‘Don’t learn anything, we’re just gonna jam’ and that’s what we did with everybody, we were just seeing how someone would react. Kenny was the person who struck me, we played three songs and every song just got better and better. He’s a great drummer. He’s got more experience than us and is a little more mature than us, it’s a comforting feeling to know he’s not going to flake out on us. Not that Matt Walker flaked out on us. Poor Matt Walker, he had a year of people comparing him to Jimmy, it’s a lot of pressure.”
“There’s no escaping the Jimmy thing and we’re not trying to run from it,” Corgan continued, “but it can to be almost like a ghost where he’s bigger and stronger and better than he really was, he was mortal like the rest of us.”
The Adore tour began in Germany in mid-May, 1998, making its way across Europe and then moving on to Australia, Japan, North America and South America, wrapping up at the end of August. I was there at the London show, taking place at Shepherds Bush Empire as part of MTV’s Five Night Stand series of shows. Thinking back to it now, it was the sound of a band in the midst of an identity crisis, a group who still wanted to rock but had just made an album of material that definitely didn’t.
It was a wonky setlist to say the least. It began with seven straight songs from Adore, ironically the best part of the gig, the ballads delivered with a flourish, songs that sounded bare on the album now armed with a muscular amped-up flourish – Ava Adore and Daphne Descends, for example, came across as prime Pumpkins rockers and made their recorded counterparts seem like skeletal demos.
The rest of the set, though, was a confused jumble, reworked renditions of 1979, Tonight, Tonight, Bullet With Butterfly Wings and Thru The Eyes Of Ruby all stripping out what made them so great in the first place. It was self-sabotage with an added percussion solo, a point hammered home by the fact the encore was Duran Duran cover (featuring an appearance from Simon Le Bon himself) and an OTT, 18-minute version of Joy Division’s Transmission. Somewhere in the middle of it all, an Aussie punter standing next to me pissed on my foot. Don’t worry, 16-year-old Niall, it’s a metaphor for the mental state of your favourite band in 1998.
It was very much a vibe they maintained for the entire run, the percussion solo taking pride of place in the middle of the performance every night. “I discovered the use of space,” Corgan said by way of explanation. “So much of our other stuff, there’s so much density to it, we’re using things in fractured ways to create space. The song Crestfallen is a nice example of that, and To Sheild, just letting things breathe, drums don’t have to be huge, for me it was more about texture.”
Looking back on the jaunt in the liner notes for Adore’s deluxe edition reissue a few years ago, Corgan admitted that it was an odd moment for the band. “The band was drifting apart internally, so it became a strange tour.”
Having the two percussionists playing alongside Aronoff was a mistake, he said. "If I had it to do all over again, I would have had Kenny Aronoff -- who's an incredible timekeeper -- play along with loops from the album. But I made the fateful decision to get two percussionists, Stephen Hodges and Dan Morris, and that drove Kenny up the wall because Kenny has perfect time and one guy played on top and the other behind. I remember Kenny saying, 'I feel like I'm tripping on LSD' because he kept hearing things that were not in time, and it drove him crazy."
It was a version of the band that was a one-off. Corgan must have come off tour knowing they needed to rediscover themselves and to do that they’d require their OG drummer – by 1999, Chamberlin was back in. No extra percussionists needed, they had their octopus-limbed sticksman back on board. It makes the Adore tour one of the most curious and strange points in their history. Even for a band who always chose to take the hard way round, this was an era that left them momentarily out in the wild.
