Smashing Pumpkins play like guitar heroes
Kevin Bronson on
3
Not much I can say about what I witnessed Saturday night at a Hollywood soundstage, except that there is Guitar Hero, and there are guitar heroes. One room separated them: an outer area with an open bar, free food and enough video games to anesthesize the youth of a nation; and the room that housed the logo-bedecked stage where the Smashing Pumpkins played their hourlong corporate-sponsored gig to an increasingly diminishing crowd.
If you wanted the hits, you stuck with the video games. But if you wanted stimulation and not simulation, you hung with the Pumpkins, whose set for the Guitar Hero World Tour launch party included, oh, about two hits — if you count 
“G.L.O.W.,” the new tune the seminal Chicago rockers released via the game. There were a couple covers, a couple tunes from deep in their catalog and some fresher stuff that let the six-piece blast into a psych-jam-metal-core haze. Take that, button pushers.
It couldn’t possibly have been the set the suits wanted the Pumpkins to play. In the new (“nu”?) music industry, after all, bands need these kind of commercial liaisons to finance and dispense their product. It’s no longer viewed as selling out to have your music on TV or in movies or in commercials or in video games. But ever so subtly, Billy Corgan and crew seemed to draw the distinction between selling and playing. And that is, when you are onstage and you have a a real guitar in your hand, you’re artist. And you play.
At least the plastic pumpkin behind Corgan onstage got the joke.
why do i feel like smashing pumpkins are the only ones who don’t get that nobody needed them to do a comeback tour? especially not at less-than-complete re: original members. we have sspu now. we don’t need you billy. take some time off and make some more awesome fashion looks and apply to project runway.
I was a bartender at the event, and I can tell you their show was hardly memorable. I was at the main bar, and I was one of two bartenders facing the stage (granted we were 20-50 yards away), but their show was nothing special. As a fan of the pumpkins growing up, I didn’t recognize any of their songs, except for during their sound check, oddly enough. We were super slammed the entire night so I wasn’t ‘watching’ them the entire time, but on a technical level, they did sound good. But lets be honest, this isn’t the Smashing Pumpkins, its Billy and his band.
The band that played the side stage to my left was a funky grove band, and they were much better, to be honest. Their lead singer was a blast, too. Too bad for the Pumpkins though, a manager/friend/PR person came up near the end of the night, and all I had left at the bar was wine and gin!
By the way, here’s the setlist …
Tarantula
GLOW
Siva
Superchrist
When Rome Burns
Sounds of silence
Set the Controls For The Heart of the Sun (Pink Floyd cover)