Top 19 -- Smashing Pumpkins: Siamese Dream

We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19  I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*

* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so does this list.

A lot of times when I look back and write about stuff from the past, I'm not 100 percent sure that it's accurate. I'm not saying that I'm lying, but if you had a time machine and went back to verify the events as portrayed, I'm not sure if it would be completely true. (BTW, great use for a time machine. Geesh, get off my back and go kill
baby Hitler first.) Memories tend to fog with the passage of time, things sort of meld together and so on. 

With that preamble (two preambles! How lucky!) I think that one of the more important times in a young person's life is the first time he or she comes back home from college and visits their old high school friends. For me it was a little more than two months since I last saw them, when I came home during the 1992 Columbus Day long weekend, but it seemed liked a lot of things had changed. My friends seemed to dress a little differently, their hair was shaggier and they were filled with stories of the "craziest people" who did the "craziest shit" and "I should have been there". 

But I wasn't there. For the first time, I didn't experience the same things that they did. And here's the important part: I didn't give a shit. At all. I didn't care that they knew a guy who once drank 21 beers. I didn't care about that insane party at that frat house. I didn't care about the teacher who gave a mountain of reading on the first day of classes. And I really didn't care about the bands that they brought back to Amesbury. 

And to be completely honest, I'm sure they didn't care at all about my tales from Merrimack College. 

I recall that weekend, my friend Jesse brought home a tape of a local University of New Hampshire band called Groove Child and he played it constantly. They were a jam band, which, yeah. Groove Child obviously spent a lot of time listening to the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers and did their very best trying to emulate them. They were ... fine. I guess. I mean it was cool that UNH had their own band that everyone loved, but whatever. I couldn't give less of a shit about them. 

Merrimack didn't have that kind of music scene. There was a few campus bands, but they mostly played out-of-tune Pearl Jam covers. No one ever bought one of their tapes, as far as I know. So instead of some local band, I came home with Smashing Pumpkins "Siamese Dream". I was not the first person to land on the Smashing Pumpkins planet. They had release "Gish" a year or two prior and were on MTV here and there. But, I don't think my home friends had really listened to them. 

We listened to them a lot at Merrimack. Especially when we were drinking in the dorms. These parties, I guess you could call them that, was where some of my best college friendships were forged and this album was the soundtrack to that. I wanted to recreate the same scene at home with my high school buddies. The important thing to know about this story was "Siamese Dream" hadn't blown up yet* and I don't think that my friends really cared for the tape very much. 

* Smashing Pumpkins might be one of the last groups where I listened to the album a ton, but knew nothing about the band. I knew that Billy Corgan was the lead singer and guitarist, D'Arcy was the incredibly pretty bassist, James Iha was the guitarist and Jimmy Chamberlin was the drummer. That's pretty much all I knew. I assumed that they were from the Pacific Northwest (they were from Chicago, but at the time all bands were seemingly from Seattle) because of their sound and I had no idea that Corgan was a megalomaniac Svengali. I just thought that they were a normal band who made really cool music.  

We must have gone to a party that weekend and I suggest that we pop in "Siamese Dream" and we probably listened to "Cherub Rock" (the first song on the album) once and then Jesse popped Groove Child into the tape player and we'd have to hear that for the next hour. Jesse wasn't the leader of our crew, but one of our friends who held more sway in the group visited him at UNH a lot and he had a good looking sister whose friends were also drinking beers with us and all of them were into Groove Child, so I was subsequently outvoted. 

Which again, was, whatever. It was the first time that I wasn't in sync with my high school friends. I wasn't pissed at them (that would happen a few years down the road) but at the same time I remember thinking, "Hanging out with these guys isn't as fun as I remembered. I wish that I was back at college."

And that's what was important about this album. It showed me that I had changed and my friends had changed and we had different views from each other. That was scary. And I sorta felt that something was wrong with me--we were all supposed to be best friends forever (which sounds dumb now, but it didn't in 1992)--but people change. Circumstances change. It's okay not to unequivocally love the past. And yes, Thomas Wolfe, you're right, you can't go home again.