Back in the days when the o-board was alive and kicking. Billy was working on the Gatmog series. We all made showcases thorugh Screenblast. We had so much fun, working with the clips, and the music and all the characters. :)
Hey, guys You may know me as Event Of The Year here at thepumpkins.net, and probably most notably for my cover of "Zeitgeist" in the recent contest. Over the course of the contest, I received many requests from some of the members of this site for original music, and I just wanted to say, yes, I do... I'd like to disclaim that my intention here is not to use this site as a platform for blatant self-promotion, but I do appreciate the overwhelming response and encouragement from many of you, and I'd like to address the requests made from me in one fell swoop. My name is Jeff Savage, and I hail from Los Angeles, CA, where currently I am assembling the band that these songs will be a part of. Please check out my original compositions at: myspace.com/therealjeffsavage If you are members of myspace, please consider adding me. If not, still come by and take a listen to how Smashing Pumpkins have inspired me, and my musical growth. I appreciate the warm reception I received here at thepumpkins.net, and I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks again, Jeff Savage aka "Event Of The Year"
Guitar Center met up with Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin at a hole-in-the-wall Chinese food joint in North Hollywood to talk about Smashing Pumpkins, Fresh Cuts Vol. 2, studio chops and how to make it big as a fresh, young band. GC : You guys have seen some pretty dramatic shifts in the music business. What’s good and what’s bad about Smashing Pumpkins and the music business today? Corgan : Well, I’d say the best thing is that we’re out of a label deal – totally free agents. We we’re just talking about how we’re going to start addressing our artistic relationships with the world in a different manner because we don’t have to go through some parental structure of “we don’t like it and it’s not going to sell” – you know? We’re excited about the prospects of sort of being our own business people in terms of how it interrelates business. GC : Basically, you’re cutting out the middleman. Corgan : And that’s the best part. I think in this world you don’t even need distribution. I mean, look, what’s great is, if you want to put out your shit for free on MySpace, you can. You don’t need anybody. You don’t need anybody inputting. And if it’s not MySpace, it would be somebody else, so. GC : What insight can you offer a young act that needs to establish themselves without having the label marketing support, or having the knowledge of someone like yourself? Corgan : Great music is still the best marketing. Word of mouth – I don’t care what peer-to-peer network you’re in, who’s distributing your stuff – word of mouth is still the ultimate thing. So at the end of the day, if you’re sitting on MySpace four hours a day adding friends, as opposed to four or more hours working on a song or getting your band to be really good, I still think you’re better off getting your band good. Practice. GC : Guitar Center is giving away a free compilation CD in March with an exclusive Smashing Pumpkins track on it, Super Christ. It also features a lot of undiscovered acts that you guys helped select. How does a band like Smashing Pumpkins view this opportunity and how can this opportunity help up-and-coming bands? Corgan : We see it as a great marketing opportunity for us. We’re about music and we’re about the more people hearing our music, the better. Plus it gives us a chance to hear some new stuff. We work so much and we’re so in our own little kind of self-contained world, we don’t get an opportunity to hear a lot of real underground stuff. For us it’s a cool opportunity to hear what’s going on in the non-mainstream, in the non-record label, big management world. Like, what are kids playing these days? Kids that work at Guitar Center, they’re that core of what it was like when we were kids. Chamberlin : I mean, I didn’t work in a music store, but everybody I knew worked in a music store. We were dissecting records. We were really getting into it. And it’s like that’s where the music that Billy and I play today came from. It came from that completely obsessive nature, “What’s So-and-So playing? What kind of snare drum is he using? What kind of fuzz pedal?” It’s like those are the kids that, as adults, are going to make a difference someday because those are the people that are really into the nuts and bolts of making music. So that’s what’s exciting about it for us. GC : Can you tell us a bit about the recording process for Super Christ? Where’d you track it, mix it, what gear was essential to producing it? Corgan : We recorded it at Sunset Sound in Hollywood. There’re different rooms at Sunset Sound, but we worked in the one that Prince did Purple Rain in, on an old API board. We’d never recorded in there before. Drums sounded great in there, they’re really kind of dark but they got a lot of attack. Old basses. Actually, the bass I play on Super Christ, I bought at Guitar Center in Hollywood. It’s a ’58 Fender P-Bass. GC : Did you guys write Super Christ during the Zeitgeist sessions or is it something that came after? Corgan : We had the riff from the Zeitgeist sessions and we always knew that we wanted to do something with it, so once we got on tour we were like, okay, let’s go back to that. GC : You guys have worked with many, many producers. How involved in the process of arrangements, tracking the song, producing, do you let someone come into your space to do that? Corgan : Honestly, not so much anymore. And I don’t think it’s because we don’t want advice. We actually do want advice, but feel there are very few people that think about music the way we do. And I know that sounds incredibly pretentious, but we have a sort of philosophy. It’s like it’s asking them to think about it a totally different way, and most producers these days, honestly, they’re Pro Tools producers. They don’t think in terms of getting a great band performance or getting a great band sound. They think in terms of creating this massive wall of sound. Doesn’t matter that the band can’t play those parts. GC : Can you tell us a little bit about recording with Roy Thomas Baker? Were there parts of the process where you felt like you were being schooled? Corgan : Every day. Chamberlin : Unbelievable. Corgan : It’s like going to a recording master class. Chamberlin : The first night he mic’ed up the drum kit, he had 414s over the toms, literally over the toms about this close, about a half-inch away from the drum head, with cotton balls taped to the top so there wouldn’t be any cymbal bleeds from the top. Just mics everywhere, and literally, I played for about five minutes, and when I went to listen to it, it was the loudest thing I’d ever heard in my entire life. Corgan : For example, let’s say you had a bass guitar. If you don’t really need the rumble at 100 Hz and it’s going to get in the way of the kick drum, he just dumps it. And he dumps it in a way that you don’t hear that it’s been dumped, but he clears a lot more space. And his whole argument is, see I can turn the bass up louder and now there’s still room for the kick drum. Well, he does that to everything. He carves stuff out. GC : You guys worked with Alan Moulder and Flood on Melancholy And The Infinite Sadness, two great producers, two different producers. But the record is totally cohesive, how was that achieved? Corgan : Oh, yeah. Flood’s incredible. Flood is a tremendous producer. Flood is very masterful with the sonics, but where he really shines is he’s a great idea person. And I don’t mean like he tells you, “Oh, put this chorus here.” It’s more like he can see an ambiance of the song that you don’t necessarily see and he would really fight with us – not negative a fight, just he would really kind of push us to say there’s another vibe here that you can get to. And I think you can see that when he’s worked with U2 as well. He kind of pushed them to get to a little bit of a tougher vibe. I think a perfect example on Melancholy is a song called By Starlight, where the original version, the band sort of – rehearsal version was very ’70s. It sounded like a sort of a sad song from the ’70s. And he really pushed us to make it darker and prettier and more atmospheric and more kind of Depeche Mode and nighttime-ish. And when I look back now I really appreciate it. The song was the same. He didn’t change anything about the song. He really pushed us to a higher level with the way that we thought about our music and I think if you look at the changes in our music since Melancholy, he had a profound effect on the way that we think about music. GC : How important is that type of experimentation for a younger band that maybe hasn’t had that opportunity to be educated by someone like Flood to say, hey, take a couple of steps back to really look at how you’ve constructed this song. Corgan : I think it’s also the Pro Tools problem. And what I mean by that is, people fix the atmospheric or emotional problems in a song with production. Flood wouldn’t save the song with production. He would force us to save the song with our playing and then we would produce it. Essentially what I would say is if you don’t have the right emotional base in a song, you can never produce it right. And that’s what he really taught us, was spend the time getting that exact right feeling so that, even when you play it on acoustic guitar, that feeling comes through. Even when you play it heavy, that feeling comes through. Once you have that feeling in your body, then you know what to do. Then the production is easy. And a lot of times, if you look at the Beatles, it doesn’t take a lot sonically to produce an atmosphere. You can produce an atmosphere actually with very little instrumentation. It’s oftentimes the way you play and the voicing of the instrument that’s key. http://gc.guitarcenter.com/interview/billycorgan/
...for all you kiddies. lol. In olden days, before the coming of the saints to Eire, that island knew an Age of Heroes. The Celtic peoples made their heroes into gods and gods into heroes. However, sometimes a very important (and entertaining) part of their culture has oft been overlooked in the ages since then...the women. Poets were renowned on par with the adventurers, their wit and musical ability unsurpassed. So, too, were their ethics raised just as high, along with the morals of their priestly Druids and impartial Judges. But, being only human, they at times had failings. Take for instance, Bricriu of the Poison Tongue, aptly named for his abuse of his masterful arts. His satires broke peoples reputations, and likely as not, livelihoods, and his dry, cruel sense of humor much feared across the land of Erin. What was his saving grace was his sparkling wit and the fact that he was tremendously, fabulously wealthy. He entertained lavish get-togethers and he announced the biggest feast of the year to be held at a special stronghold built just for the occasion. It was fit for a High King when completed, and the gathering was expected to be the talk of the region for some time to come. Absolutely everyone was invited and they determined to go, Poison Tongue or no. The Irish just can't pass up free food and ale, after all. The Ulster champions in particular were warned by Fergus MacRiogh, who had a good head on his shoulders, that to attend would end in some mischief, and like as not would be fatal to those boisterous lads. He wasn't listened to. Remember, free food and beer. The famous Cuchullain, who fought in more wars than he could count years on earth, attended with his equally impressive wife, Emer, she of the Six Womanly Gifts: music, physical beauty, the gift of song, embroidery, the gift of wisdom, and of modesty. Conal Cearnath's wife was with him, Lendabair the Fair, whose golden hair shone like spun silk in the sun. Fedelm the Ever-blooming travelled there as well with her champion husband Laoghaire Buadach, and her voice was like that of birds on a warm summer day. All were impressed as they entered Bricriu's house with it's open, airy spaces and massive pillars. When the feast was begun the halls rang with their loud merriment and good fellowship was felt by all. Bricriu, playing the indulgent host, saw an opportunity to express his twisted humor. He struck up a conversation with Fedelm, who came of an old, royal family, and made a point to tell her so. He complimented her quite ample curves undaunted by the layers of fine brocade swathing her voluptuous frame. Smiling while eating the roasted wild boar she simpered and preened, pleased that someone had noticed her among all these fine champions and ladies. "It has been given unto me in a vision," he went on, smooth as butter, in the High Old Gaelic, "that it should be after thy heels that the whole band of the women should come. To-night, the first lady to enter the banqueting hall shalt be queen over all the other women, indeed over all the people of Ulster." Exercising one of the maidenly virtues of modesty Fedelm said nothing and merely lowered her eyes. Bricriu repeated his praise and 'vision' to the other ladies present, and none of them forgot. That evening the ladies with their myriad attendants strolled to take the air in the troublemaking poet's magnificent lawn, each minding what the serpent had said. The women enjoyed conversing with each other about their families, children, poetry, and many had battle-training which they discussed, do you like better the sword, or the spear, or the bow? After a time it was apparent that the evening was wearing on and they should return. Over the first rise the women and their servants walked, neither walking faster than the others. They walked with dignity and grace, fair heads held high. Then they reached the second ridge and their pace quickened, each one glancing at the other to see their progress. After the third rise one after another broke into a run, startling the attendants who clambered to keep up. Catching up their skirts they tucked them into their girdles for easier running, and they dashed full-out. Cascades of hair streamed behind them, blonde and red and brown hair flowing in the breeze. The last few hundred yards to the house was a blur of expensive cloth and long, white, supple legs pumping furiously. Screaming war-cries and nostrils flaring announced the tumultuous approach to the feasting-hall as they put on a last burst of speed, leaving the servants in the dust wondering what in the Underworld was happening. All the ladies could think of was Queen! Me! Queen! Lean and lithe Emer reached the door-hole first but had her head yanked back by the sturdier and feistier Lendabair. Yes, she of the golden hair who had a handful of Emer's red-gold locks and screaming like a ban-sidhe. The other women running like the winds couldn't stop and slammed against the pair, slapping them all against the outer walls, too tight to fit into the door. One man later said that it was the noise like the rush of fifty chariots and whole kingly house shook with the impact. In fact it was so loud and sudden that the champions took up their arms which they'd relinquished when entering the hall, thinking that the whole place was under attack or that the women had been ambushed. Clanging sword and spear against their shields they rushed out to see the huge pile of women in front of the door, still fighting amongst each other over who gets to be High Queen, silks, linens, jewelry and hair flying hither and thither and yon. And laughing so hard tears streaming down his cheeks was the well-dressed starter of troubles, Bricriu of the Poison Tongue.
Unfortunately I made a mistake by giving you the wrong adress. If you´re still interrested in my arts, I´d like to invite you to my blog: http://elfen-und-zeitgeist.over-blog.com Macht´s gut, Natascha
As you see, I´m new here. So you can also visit my other blog, where I am blogging my artwork: http:/elfen-und-zeitgeist.over-blog.de I hope you like it. love & peace
This Blog is for any one that wants to share there heart on why we are pumpkin heads. Why I Am a Fan, I have been a fan since 2000 my dad got me into them, All of the SP songs speak to me in a way I can't Explain.
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