A Pumpkins history of the Alternative Revolution

I spent a while last night on Wikipedia reading about Nevermind, and the article stated that Nevermind was the album that launched the alternative rock explosion.  I don't disagree with this by the way.  Credit where it's due, it's a phenomenal album, bursting at the seams, and manages to make a lot of other music look ridiculous.

Two things, though.  First, I bought Nevermind in the same spirit I bought Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits - because it was a band I thought I should get to know.  I'd been reading a lot about music, and Nirvana was one of those bands that you have to know, so I bought Nevermind.  Like Dylan, I came to really like the album, but from the start for me, it was an "important" album - this helps explain why I still don't own In Utero.

Second, I got thinking - if Nirvana hadn't broken through, for a variety of reasons (say, radio stations hadn't played "Smells like Teen Spirit", or they never made the jump from sub pop and decided to be an indie band forever, or maybe if they just hadn't been a band that had a Nevermind in them, and had released a string of Bleach's) would the alternative revolution have happened?  There were a lot of great alternative bands that only got signed, or got major airplay, or whatever because alternative was big - where would Stone Temple Pilots be if Nevermind had flopped.?

To that second question, I realized that the alternative revolution would still have happened.  I don't mean that there was this huge scene full of brilliant music waiting to burst forth, because that doesn't matter - Dinosaur Jr. are still nobodies, and it doesn't matter how great Yo La Tengo has been over the last decade, most people probably think they're a Mexican band.  No, what would have happened was Siamese Dream.

Nirvana being the greatest band of the nineties is such dogma it doesn't even seem useful to question it, but think for a second.  Siamese Dream is every bit as good as Nevermind, and in many ways a good deal better.  Jimmy Chamberlain was one of the few drummers alive who could give Dave Grohl a run for his money, Billy Corgan could do the tortured teen angst lyrics every bit as well as Cobain, and Siamese Dream would have hit like an atom bomb if it had come in a vacuum.  As it was, it proved that alternative had staying power - this was about more than one great band.

But not only could the Pumpkins do everything Nirvana could do, they could do more.  They could do the trademark loud soft loud dynamics - but Corgan could do both at the same time, practically whispering the vocals over "Cherub Rock"'s surging riff.  They'd drag that loud soft loud thing out to be a song structure - instead of Verse Chorus Verse, the soft section would be a bridge; in "Silverf***" that bridge would be half the song.  Corgan was under the same pressure Cobain was to deliver a killer album (and the same pressure a generation earlier that had led Springsteen to create "Born to Run") but he wasn't tortured by the prospect of being a rock star - he wanted to be a rock star.  Of all the alternative bands, Smashing Pumpkins ran most enthusiastically toward stardom.

I once played "Silverf***" for a cousin of mine who was studying classical music in college.  I said, "This song has only one chord" and played the intro.  She was intrigued, but bored, until the main guitar melody came in - it blew her away.  "Nothing harmonically at all, just this drone, and then that lyrical melody over it!"  

Okay, I know I'm kind of trying to sell the idea that the Pumpkins were a better band than Nirvana, and in the end that comes down to everyone's tastes.  But to me, what I get out of Nevermind is a punk band that loves the Beatles, and is filtering pop through a twisted punk lens.  Siamese Dream is an album that is trying to take everything the band loves about the last forty years of rock - spaced out interludes, bone crushing riffs, metal solos, acoustic ballads, punk, metal, Hendrix, Beatles - and funneling it all through a thousand guitars.

I like Nevermind, but I love Siamese Dream.