It's Been Smashing, Pumpkins

Superband Performs Final Concert Saturday

In the tiny Chicago club where they played their first show 13 years ago with three members and a drum machine, a full complement of Smashing Pumpkins will end an incredible career on Saturday. Front man Billy Corgan et al prefixed their send-off with a typical "fuck you" to the music business: they released their final album to 25 fans and on the Internet, ensuring that it would become a bootleg rather than a chart topper. They've had enough of those, and it's fitting that a band with such respect for and love from their fans would end with a gift to them.

With the Pumpkins dies the last great rock band of the explosive early '90s. They proved that "alternative" music need not be ugly and that commercialization need not be the end of creativity. The Pumpkins were a band in that old-fashioned sense, flying by the seat of their pants from the start. Their chemistry was often lethal: breakups, make ups - the old rock story - but somehow the elements always combined in the right way. Billy Corgan is a relentless worker and an innovator, and it was his tireless vision that kept the band afloat during the rough years.

The Pumpkins' studio history looks like the EKG reading of someone having a heart attack. After the solid but undistinguished debut album, Gish, 1993 saw the release of Siamese Dream. A million adjectives would be lacking for one that encapsulates this album's enduring effect. Most albums date; Siamese Dream ages delicately, not a bullet with butterfly wings but the butterfly itself. Layer after layer of guitar still melts into glorious melody and crystal clear lines, vital and beautiful. "Hummer" is still a soaring magnum opus and "Rocket" still an anthem for guitar gods/goddesses. "Mayonaise" is as tender as ever.

Of course the Pumpkins were never afraid to show their sweet side. Only they could cover Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" and get away with it. But they had no truck with lo-fi. Hi-fi and in stereo was their style - turn the volume dial all the way around. They were unabashedly commercial, yet refused to be dictated to by a vapid industry: taking risks, changing, growing.

Who else could follow up the release of a lifetime with a two-disc concept album and do it well? Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was a huge leap, and the fact that they pulled it off, a sort of sprawling, pretension-laden epic, is a testament to that Corgan vision. From the pounding (but somehow never vicious) "Zero," the intensity of "XYU," to the nostalgia-laced "Thirty-Three" and the hushed, bittersweet "Stumbeline," Mellon Collie is the product of a vaunting ambition that gets it right, and lands the band with both feet on the other side. After taking it that far, there was nothing to fall back on, and endless battles with an increasingly unresponsive industry and fickle public took their toll. "Tired of struggling with the Britneys of the world," Corgan and Company gave up.

"I used to be a little boy," Billy Corgan sings in "Disarm." We all used to be younger, and back then Smashing Pumpkins were the rock on which rock stood. Other bands would come and go, meteoric risers who crashed and burned as quickly as they came, but the Pumpkins seemed to be forever. Keep a place for them wherever you keep the first three bars of "Today," and they always will be.