in response to the press saying pumpkins "don't play the hits"

[carapatricia]

Hipstersunited.com has broken down the tours into statistics, trying to prove... something.

Hipsters United // a blog about the Smashing Pumpkins Tour breakdowns by album-era

I’m sure by now we’re all well aware of the claims that this last tour was, at least according to the popular press, made up almost entirely of Zeitgeist material, with a dearth of older fan-friendly hits. I recall at least one mention in one of the latest podcasts about wondering how the breakdown compared to other tours, so I decided to run a quick query.

The results below are broken down as follows: each album-era tour is split into date ranges according to when the tour either obviously started (i.e. the Double Door shows for MCIS, Arising! for Machina, or a 7-year gap for Zeitgeist), or from the first show at which a significant perecentage of songs played were from that era’s album (note that most, if not all, of these eras precede the actual albums’ release dates). For a song to be counted as part of that era, it must be a released track from that album, or one of its b-sides, as noted below. Also, no soundchecks (not that there’s that much data to throw it off), and only full performances are counted (no teases/abandons).

Gish: Gish and Lull
SD: Siamese Dream and Pisces Iscariot (may ******* some Gish-era b-sides, but it was easier to count this way)
MCIS: Mellon Collie and The Aeroplane Flies High box set
Adore: Adore and TEITBITE (the Adore-era b-sides were only played once or twice each, if at all, and aren’t counted)
Machina: Machina and Machina II (this means LMGTWTY counts as Machina-era in the scores below)
Zeitgeist: Zeitgeist, American Gothic and G.L.O.W

All other unreleased tracks and covers are listed under ‘Unreleased/Other’. So, how did each tour stack up?

Album/Era -- Distinct Songs -- Song Performances -- % of song perf
Gish Tour (1990/06/16 - 1992/09/??) : 474 total song performances
Gish: 11 310 65.4 %
SD: 7 101 21.3 %
Unreleased/other: 19 63 13.3 %
SD Tour (1992/06/09 - 1994/09/08) : 1678 total song performances
Gish: 12 359 21.4 %
SD: 22 1143 68.1 %
MCIS: 1 3 0.2 %
Unreleased/other: 18 173 10.3 %
MCIS Tour (1995/02/20 - 1997/12/05) : 3084 total song performances
Gish: 2 79 2.6 %
SD: 15 701 22.7 %
MCIS: 34 2172 70.4 %
Adore: 4 18 0.6 %
Unreleased/other: 32 114 3.7 %
Adore Tour (1998/01/15 - 1998/12/12) : 826 total song performances
Gish: 0 0 0.0 %
SD: 2 5 0.6 %
MCIS: 9 196 23.7 %
Adore: 15 552 66.8 %
Machina: 3 17 2.1 %
Unreleased/other: 16 56 6.8 %
Machina Tour (1999/04/10 - 2000/12/02) : 2585 total song performances
Gish: 5 74 2.9 %
SD: 11 359 13.9 %
MCIS: 11 458 17.7 %
Adore: 10 267 10.3 %
Machina: 23 1123 43.4 %
Unreleased/other: 18 304 11.8 %
Zeitgeist Tour (2007/05/22 - 2008/12/08) : 3743 total song performances
Gish: 4 67 1.8 %
SD: 10 509 13.6 %
MCIS: 22 752 20.1 %
Adore: 9 255 6.8 %
Machina: 18 522 13.9 %
Zeitgeist: 19 879 23.5 %
Unreleased/other: 51 759 20.3 %

Looks like the average range was about 60-70% new album material for each era up through Adore, and then dropped sharply down to 43% for the Machina-era tour. This last tour was less than 25% (released) Zeitgeist material. Even if we count the ‘Unreleased/Other’ category as all brand-new songs (which they’re not, since there were a few covers thrown in, plus I Am One part II), that’s still only about 44% “Zeitgeist-era” material - exactly the same ratio as there was during the Machina tour. The only thing different about this tour is the sheer number of unique unreleased songs, but this is largely because there haven’t been many b-sides released for Zeitgeist. If we excluded Machina II, we might see similar numbers for the Machina era.


Now, I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t recall the press claiming back then that the Machina tour was “entirely new material” with a dearth of older hits. If any tour qualifies for that, I would have to say it’s the Adore tour, with over 90% of the tour made up entirely of Adore and Mellon Collie tracks, less than 1% Siamese Dream songs, and not a single Gish song performance.

I could probably come up with slightly more accurate numbers by matching each individual song, rather than matching album tracks, and the Gish data is obviously far less complete than tours since MCIS, but I don’t think the results would vary by more than a few percent. Bottom line? The media frequently have no idea what they’re talking about. But then again, I suppose - at least around here - we already knew that.