smashing pumpkins

Shortly after midnight on October 24, 1995, I lay in bed, in the dark, my stereo volume low, and, for the first time, heard that famous piano melody drift tenderly from tiny speakers. The album was Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by the Smashing Pumpkins. I had waited in line with friends and hundreds of other kids to snag a copy the moment it went on sale. The piano melody was followed by the triumphant strings of Tonight Tonight. The hard distortion of Jellybelly. The sinking isolation of Zero. I had no idea, in that moment, how familiar those

After a fuzzy, daydreamy guitar intro, Billy Corgan belts out the word Love. That's how a twenty-five year journey begins.

There I was, steering my parents' car through the empty streets of Ottawa, Illinois in the summer of 1994. The windows were open, hot sun heating the dashboard, and that daydreamy guitar intro to the song Rocket began playing on the radio. For some reason, I cranked up the volume.

Soon, I’ll find myself alone / To relax and fade away

Of course, I had known of the Pumpkins before that day.

I turned nineteen years old that summer. I

Twenty years ago tonight, my friends and I began what would become, for me at least, a life changing adventure. Our destination: the most prominent music store on campus, Record Service I think it was, on Green Street in Champaign, Illinois. The reason: a midnight release of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the strangely named third album by The Smashing Pumpkins.

We’d all been introduced to the Pumpkins a couple years earlier by Los Angeles native Matt Redman, our teammate and friend. We each had varying degrees of interest in the new album. After all, $20 was a