A bad patch

Smashing Pumpkins offer a thorny concert

by Ted Drozdowski

Anger is an energy. Johnny Rotten told us that, and most of us took the Public Image Ltd. leader's declaration to mean that the same animal release of human voltage it takes to express fury could be redirected into a more positive form. Say, an act of protest, motivation, or even a rock-and-roll performance.

But anger, and its more sullen brother, cynicism, can be an ugly thing when misdirected or left to simmer unchanneled. They're especially unpretty when they become a public spectacle. Billy Corgan might know this. The songs of his band Smashing Pumpkins have enough knotty introspection and modern-day angst to imply an understanding of human nature. But if that's the case, then the brittle, acid character of Smashing Pumpkins' November 5 FleetCenter concert was even less excusable. Rarely have I seen a band so lacking in generosity of spirit, so seemingly indifferent and contemptuous of their adoring audience.

If rock and roll is Corgan's creative lifeblood, he acted as if the crowd that purchased all 17,000 seats in the FleetCenter were somehow trying to squeeze it from him drop by drop, and he wasn't going to let it go without a fight -- dissing the wildly cheering, mostly teenage attendees for what he claimed was a lack of enthusiasm, berating Boston audiences in general, and presiding over his hard-edged psychedelic realm with a stone-faced, stiff-backed stage demeanor that broke its rigid cheerlessness only for a caustic dig at the day's presidential election, a perfunctory "howdafuckareya," and a couple of guitar solos that were the kind of joyful creative expressions one would expect from a band with such a fine, edgy recording history.

Granted, this has not been an easy tour for Smashing Pumpkins. After the beautiful mainstream breakthrough of Siamese Dream (Virgin), a great album whose hits -- "Cherub Rock," "Today," "Disarm" -- improved the sound of pop radio in 1993, the band headlined Lollapalooza and followed that by making the most ambitious recording of their career, the two-CD Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (also on Virgin). Mellon Collie sailed out of the radio a year ago with the speed and ferocity of the title of its first single, "Bullet with Butterfly Wings." There are few albums of Mellon Collie's ambitious scope (hardcore churn to metal burn to full-out pop heroics), an embrace that welcomes comparison with historical documents like Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime, and Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade. But the summertime heroin death of the Pumpkins' touring keyboardist, Jonathan Melvoin, and the subsequent firing of smack-shooting drummer Jimmy Chamberlain -- following a pair of overdose scares earlier in the tour -- has doubtless soured their triumphant streak. Shit, who can blame Corgan for being deflated over this?

Like it or not, however, Corgan and his bandmates are entertainers -- and there was little entertaining in the stiff, joyless performance at the FleetCenter. The sound was horrid, and though that might be chalked up to the enormodome's empty-warehouse acoustics, the rushed tempos that dominated the set didn't help. Playing the songs at a goosestepping pace meant there was less space for the tones from Corgan and James Iha's guitars to resonate, less room in which to distinguish D'Arcy solid bass from the whomp of the kick drum and toms. The wall of muck was penetrated mostly when the band pulled back to let Corgan sing on numbers with low-key dynamics, like "Today," or when it was time for a guitar solo -- whether a wiggy squeal from Iha, when he stepped on his pitch-change pedal to pull his instrument up an octave or two, or when he whipped out an E-bow. Or when Corgan offered a bold moment of guitar heroics.

The problem is that what was good merely came in moments. The best of those was "Silverfuck," the hard-edged guitar-flogging space jam that strained the sterno of psychedelia from Pink Floyd to Hendrix through the whitebread of hardcore, producing a biting distillate of what's best about Smashing Pumpkin's music: a sense of edgy timelessness and inward exploration that seems like an introvert's reaction to a world so full of strife and pressure that the only possible safety zone lies somewhere between the brain and the womb.

In a move typical of the night's show, Corgan wasted the irony of "Today" by injecting so much venom into its lines -- "Today is the greatest day I've ever known/Can't wait for tomorrow" -- that it sounded cruel. The innocence of his vocal on this song's recorded version gives it a rueful, disillusioned feel, more swindled and confused by life than simply pissed off. At best, Corgan's vocals sounded constricted and perfunctory through the night's performance -- the emotive rasp that's become so familiar in the past few years was robbed of nuance by a more hard-edged singing approach that left his voice merely a rasp.

If better sound were paired with the fluid, backwall lighting and films that made like an update of the old Fillmore-era light shows, it might have been a better show. Psychedelia doesn't really hit its heights until fine sonic details start raising their heads. There should be layers and layers of sonic trickery to tease the brain; and that's found on Smashing Pumpkins' albums. But the lack of a clear mix meant only the most obvious sonic gestures -- Corgan riding a feedback trail up in pitch by twisting a tuning peg, or pulling a tremolo'd squall out of his Stratocaster by smacking it against his amplifiers and holding it in the air at different angles to produce shifting pitches of feedback -- really sliced through. (Openers Garbage suffered an even rougher mix. Shirley Manson's voice was devoured by her 'mates' roar throughout their entire set.)

Late in the performance, Corgan exhorted the crowd to "show some enthusiasm, you fucking people." (This to a crowd that was on its feet for most of the gig, cheering and singing along to anthemic numbers like "Disarm.") But the same could be said to the band, who stood stock still throughout most of the concert, never physically carried away by the swaying tides of their big sound . . . never offering a sign that they took any pleasure in the craft of performing. Perhaps we had no right to expect more in view of the bleak universe the Pumpkins often create with their lyrics, which are protected by a wall of sound. In a sense, their repressed stage presence may simply be a manifestation of the culturally reflective claustrophobia one can feel from listening to the density of Mellon Collie. It's cloistered music for a cloistered world. But whatever one's expectations, boredom and cynicism have never been good company for powerful rock and roll. And it's never gracious for artists to insult the people who support them.