Sunday, April 10, 2016

At the Smashing Pumpkins show last night





I was going either way. I looked online. It was all so confusing. Ticket prices verses seating. Extra fees to buy online. Reaching out to Craigslisters to buy their tickets— if they were real. I just said fuck it (and this may be my new method of buying tickets). I drove into Boston alone, parked at the Commons garage and walked to the Orpheum hoping they had tickets for sale and if they didn’t maybe I could buy a scalped ticket. It couldn’t have worked out any better. I approached the ticket window and they said they had 4 tickets left. I bought one for 75 bucks and the seat was like 10 rows from the stage, right smack in the middle.

So, heavy acoustic set. I’m not a big unplugged fan— give me drums and heavy guitar every time but, as far as acoustical versions go they nailed them. There were some strange parts of the show— at one point, the drummer disappeared during an electric song and a drum machine filled in; then Billy did a version of Disarm, solo, just singing it and playing the music on a keyboard. But there were also moments when they rocked the house and I felt like it was 1994 again and they were full of rock and rage. They didn’t play a lot of their hits which was obviously disappointing but the non-hits they did play, they killed it and the sound was amazing. The non-hits so good, I had to go back to my early CD collections and upload those records into my Ipod. I had no rhyme or reason to my recordings of the show but, the two songs I really wanted to hear, Rhinoceros and Cherub Rock, they didn’t play. I also didn’t want to be a slave to recording and just picked my spots when I felt it. They did do some nice covers— an acoustic Space Oddity, an electric version of Hole’s Malibu, a song Billy Corgan helped write with Courtney Love and as an encore, the Rolling Stones, Angie. All in all, a great way to spend a Saturday night.

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