i can remember being a freshman in college, and thinking that the pumpkins were my little secret since not one person that i knew had ever heard of them. then, one day while walking back from class, i saw the words "my boredom has outshined the sun" spray-painted on the back of a garbage dumpster and i just remember thinking how cool it was that someone else was in on it.

*sigh*...i miss those days...... :(

the pumpkin-less world sucks
let's blow it apart

* listening to Siamese Dream over & over in the dark & watching the equalizer on my crappy stereo sytem flicker to the beautiful music emanating from my speakers.

* Dec.01.1993 - seeing SP live for the first time at the Palladium. This is probably one of last times I remember going with people to a concert who were as fanatical as me about the music.

* watching No Alternative video & finding out with great amusement to my (and a bunch of my SP friends surprise) that Billy belts out the high pitch for Glynis (foolishly thought it was D'arcy..I should have known from Daydream that my assumption was unlikely)

* watching SP perform for the first time on SNL (Halloween Day IIRC).

* 'winning' a ticket to the taping of Storytellers in NYC. The Chaos of finding out you win, staying up all night for the instructions, going to work with no sleep, getting permission from boss to not come back for the rest of the week, go home & shove a bunch of clothes in a black garbage bag & drive from T.O. to NYC alone for the very first time not knowing exactly where I will be staying when I get to NYC......falling asleep at the wheel at least 5 times heading to NYC...beautiful NYC & beautiful SP. Good Times !!

Originally posted by Sentinel
i can remember being a freshman in college, and thinking that the pumpkins were my little secret since not one person that i knew had ever heard of them. then, one day while walking back from class, i saw the words "my boredom has outshined the sun" spray-painted on the back of a garbage dumpster and i just remember thinking how cool it was that someone else was in on it.

*sigh*...i miss those days...... :(

wow. that story honestly made my heart skip a beat. thats exactly how i always felt and still feel about the pumpkins, like theyre youre little personal thing. the fact that you saw a line like that one is incredible. it must have felt amazing seeing that line.that line in plume just sums up the feel and what part of the pumpkins is mine. awesome story.

yeah. Listening to MCIS when I was like 15, laying in bed, reading the lyrics, swearing that Billy was watching me and writing the lyrics about me....sort of a 'The Truman Show' kind of feeling

Memories are of an infiniplicity when it comes to the Pumpkins. Like ghosts of human beings entering my head through my ears and wreaking havok on the pleasure centers of my brain, they were capable of making the world shake time and time again....

DECEMBER 2nd 1999*****

After sifting through intense discussions on this very site about the new song "Everlasting Gaze" I entered my room and turned on the stereo just in time to hear "Coming up next, brand new Smashing Pumpkins" followed by commercials. At this point my heart-reate increased ten-fold, a series of shivering cold blots of mirth ran across my skin like tiny spiders, and I prepared a blank tape for the anticipated first glimpse of the new era.

And mother of God, I actually cried. The music was subversive, bombastic, and ubiquitious. Layers of synthisized bliss, layers of crunching guitar euphoria, layers of vocal harmonies that sounded like Billy punctured the sky and let the sounds of heaven escape, layers of cascading cymbols and lusting drum fills, all in all enrapturing me and connecting me to a sense of godliness. Naturally, the song has never even approached that effect on me since then. But you should realize that the fists flying through the air, the jumping on the bed, the knees buckling and falling to the carpet and the beads of water surfacing on my eyes was completely authentic. It was incredible. I think it was just the culmunation of months and months of anticipation colliding with the earsplitting pumpkins of old drowning in a fresh blissfull sound that just plain rocked.

August 4th 2000*******

The band just didn't have the energy I'd expected. It was a fair but largely dissapointing set as they closed out the Summersault tour stop in Vancouver. Sound was terrible, everyone but Mellisa seem overworked and rather docile. There were high moments of course. Cherub Rock, Once Upon a Time, and Drown were enthralling. But in a crowd of apathetic fans the magic was noticably absent.

When the last verses of the last song were coarsely spitting from my vocal chords as I sung along I finally gave into a certain type of magnatism and looked at the person standing next to me. The song was 1979, and I knew this stranger in a red shirt had been singing along as well with the true enthusiasm and conviction of someone deeply affected by the music. She met my eyes and we sung the last verse of the evening side by side. It sounds exceedingly trivial but for me it was almost transcendant. I've never physically been in the proximity of someone who cares like I care about the band. And so the moment was the first time in my life that I didn't feel alone. That I felt apart of something much bigger than myself and yet I remained an integral part of that energy. We breifly spoke as the band left the stage and the crowd began to disperse. It was wonderful.... I've since never seen or spoken to the girl again. Even in that beautiful moment the ugliness inside of me kept me from interacting with another human being. But it was still a moment I won't ever forget.

The Alienated Youth Era***********

The Aeroplane Flies High was released in late 96, I purchased it in early 97 which would of made me 13 years old at the time. Over the course of that year the disks were my absolute favorite nighttime companions. I spent many evenings over the backdrop of Meladori Magpie's and ...Said Sadly's reading books about alien abductions, writing silly little poem after silly little poem, and pasting glow in the dark stars ontop of every square inch of my room. The songs were so vulnerable, so pretty, and I've longed for so many years to tap into the emotion and creativity on those disks. It hasn't happened, but I like to imagine that my appreciation for the music makes me a small but dignified part of its existance.

I could go on, but fatigue is setting in.... Long Live the Smashing Pumpkins...

My fondest SP memories-

1. Listening to Gish for the first time.
2. Listening to Siamese Dream the first time.
3. Listening to Pisces Iscariot the first time.
4. Listening to Mellon Collie the first time.
5. Listening to Adore the first time.
6. Listening to Machina the first time.

The intense feelings that I experienced listening to their albums for the first time are undescribable and I have never been able to replicate those emotions.

1996

the mellon collie tour date in sacto, when i worked at chuck e. cheese i had to put down my reason for the time off. jared was very shocked to see i wrote down "the smashing pumpkins concert" becuz he thougt i was the sterotypical black girl, we have been friends (on & off) ever since.


1998

my 1st SP tattoo ( my 1st ever tattoo at that)

2/5-2/6/2000

meeting awesome people in line for the SP (mike, tessa, jason, lysett, vera, crazy michelle) , finally knowing i wasn't alone in my fanatic ways. having billy tell me i rawk & kissing me on the cheek


3/6/2000

signing in S.F where billy referred to me on live 105 as "the girl with the pumpkins tattoo" and letting me rub his head.

5/24/2000

meeting robyn for the 1st time.


11/17/2000

jay leno show!!!!

12/2/2000

getting into the metro for free becuz of some random guardian angels.

another one that i was just remembering came at a very difficult point in my family's collected life. my just-born nephew was in the hospital undergoing a serious of life-or-death operations because of some undetected problems with several of his organs, and my entire world was basically flipped upside-down. there were so many hours spent sitting and waiting and praying and crying, etc. etc. one day i just couldn't take it any more, so i left the hospital, got in my car, and just drove around for a while to try to clear my head and just get away from everything for a little while. well, as i was driving around, i remember hearing the radio dj say "and now, the brand-new single from the smashing pumpkins forthcoming album.....here's 'the everlasting gaze'." then that first guitar-line came in, and for the next 4 minutes i felt better than i'd felt in a month.

another time would have to be the sick children singing "today" with the band accompanying them at the chicago show i saw on the adore tour. there was definitely not a dry eye in the house that night....

Roadtrips through the Kansas Flint Hills on my way to or from Lawrence KS and glorious KU listening to SD, MCIS & PI. (The Flint Hills from the Kansas Turnpike look alot like the 1979 video area) Just riding along in my faded grey 4dr box with cracked plastic rims Nursing my warming Mt. Dew while I gazed over the expanse, playing verions of my past present and future life in my head. Early evening arrivals in the summer carried the smell of cut grass in the air or it reached that crisp feeling in fall & winter. Those 2.5hrs were some of the most peacefull moments I ever spent in my life.

I discovered SP was the only music I could completely relax and zone out to. I couldn't have recited the lyrics or even knew alot of the song names even though I had listened to them 1000 times over. I've gone over lyric sheet to some songs in the recent past and figured out I must have just been sumbliminally attracted to them.

When I went to college in mid August of 1991 the majority of my friends where still caught up in hair metal which I never cared for. They would watch headbangers or whatever they called pre-TRL and I waited for 120 minutes and Dr Dre and Ed Lover on the Hip Hop Countdown. The college radio station KFJK played Nirvana Teen Spirit within the first 10 hours I was there and I new I had been liberated musically (I was recording the radio show on cassette to boot, which is the way we pirated music in our day sonny, we didn't have fancy CD burners, broadband or MP3's ). Thank you Janes, Pixies, Nirvana and most importantly SP.

I remember the glee I felt when I played back Teen Spirit to my Winger/Poison/Warrent saturated high school friends and they just shrugged and said "its alright. This music was mine and I loved it. I got the Nevermind CD when it came out and played "Terrestial Pissings" for my sister who was a senior in hight school so I could share the new world I found with someone else I knew craving a change.

I miss origional Rawk & Role music

The first time i ever heard of or saw SP was when i was babysitting-i saw them on SNL on tv-i was in grade 8 at the time. All i remember was just staring at the tv and going," Hey , who's the weird guy with the 70's shirt?"

A month or so later , i was listening to Siamese Dream. Most people i knew hated it -though obviously i got hooked for good after that.

august 1994: listening to siamese dream everyday until i had to buy another CASSETTE tape because i wore it out. and then literally, collecting anything that said smashing pumpkins. started the shrine..started the obsession..started it all and then some more...

01.30.96

san diego, ca (soma) mcis club tour. first sp show. met billy and james before the show. shared a moment with darcy.

12.11.96

san diego, ca (sports arena) mcis arena tour. heard landslide with billy and jimmy flemion on guitar for an encore.

06.30.98

san francisco, ca (bill graham civic auditorium) adore tour. first show outside of san diego. first time actually traveling by myself.

04.16.99 (??)

san diego, ca (spreckels theatre) arising! tour. damn...blessing to actually have gotten tickets to this show. but a damn good show at that...original lineup...intimate setting.

year 2000 = 6 shows, 2 in store signings, jay leno...CHICAGO!

nuff' said. good times. good people. sad moments but all smiles. lots of money...a lot of traveling...weird situations...all that and a bag of cheese.

07.07.01

yes...i was opening act for act 4 @ the metro thankyouverymuch.

*bows*

-robyn