Pumpkins Beat the ‘60s to a Pulp

Talk about adding insult to injury.

First, the Smashing Pumpkins pointedly disappointed fans at the Pond of Anaheim on Monday night by neglecting to play one of the band’s finest and best-loved hits, the elegantly sinewy “1979.”

Then, in a strange, gutsy, remarkable and deplorable act of either nose-thumbing or self-immolation, Billy Corgan and his mates gave the full house a big, horrific castor-oil draught of the worst of 1969. Not the song, “1969,” a punk-alternative Rosetta stone from Iggy Pop & the Stooges, but 1969, as in Iron Butterfly inflicting “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on the world in all its bloated, psychedelic jam-rock wretchedness.

Except that, where “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” consumed 17 minutes on LP, the Pumpkins’ show closer was a long, dazing journey into night that wasted 37 minutes.

The episode actually went on for almost 50 minutes, if you count a 12-minute delay before the concluding musical trek began. The crowd waited in the darkened hall, sporadically cheering, while the Pumpkins gathered in the belly of the Pond, apparently either resting up for this filibuster against all the stripped-down, no-nonsense norms of modern-rock concertizing, or simply getting up the nerve to do it.

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The marathon began normally enough--normal for Corgan anyway--in a lather of alienation and disgust, as he performed “The Aeroplane Flies High,” the baleful title track of the Pumpkins’ new boxed-set collection of singles, B-sides, outtakes and bric-a-brac. But the song turned into a jam, which turned interminable as Corgan tried laboriously to exorcise the demons of curdled romance.

There were a few good snippets of driving acceleration and Cream-like psychedelic blues, but for the most part Corgan, co-guitarist James Iha and bassist D’Arcy pounded away pointlessly or spaced out lethargically, with help from drummer Matt Walker. (Walker actually was impressive in the interminable encore, after a nondescript evening in his role as replacement for Jimmy Chamberlin, who was sacked last summer for chronic drug abuse in the wake of the heroin overdose death of Jonathan Melvoin, the Pumpkins’ hired-hand keyboardist.)

Apart from those few flickers of decent jam-rock, the Pumpkins’ 37-minute roll was essentially awful--a re-creation of everything that was wrong with the psychedelic late ‘60s.

The Pumpkins performed against a visual backdrop that was the gaudier digital-age equivalent of an old-fashioned psychedelic liquid-light show, ending with stars whooshing through space in an approximation of either the birth or death of the universe.

By then, we’d witnessed the death of interest among most of the fans, some of whom voted with their feet, while others stayed to shout abuse. “Spit on him!” yelled one fellow in Section 221, as Corgan, having finally satisfied himself, put down his guitar and strode to the front of the stage to flip unused guitar picks to admirers.

If nothing else, the Pumpkins found a cure for moshing, as most fans sat inert, some yelling for the band to “Play a song!”

It still might have been a night to remember fondly had the Pumpkins devoted the first 80 minutes of the show to bringing alive the hard, taut edge, dreamy aspiration and canny dynamics and varied structures of their recordings.

But there was little magic in Corgan’s unremittingly harsh vocals and the band’s monochrome performances, which generally failed to capture the nuances that have made the Smashing Pumpkins one of the least formulaic and most expansive and potentially surprising modern-rock hit makers.

Corgan’s big, bald noggin and shiny spaceman’s pants gave one an inkling of how Uncle Fester of “The Addams Family” might have looked had he been miscast as one of the Robinsons in “Lost in Space.”

In concert, this son of Chicago miscast himself as some sort of contorted blues man. He spent most of the show braying in an exaggerated, nasal growl, sounding like a boy trying to cry Howlin’ Wolf--only to wind up a Bleatin’ Sheep.

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There’s enough pliancy in Corgan’s voice that, when listening to him sing on the Pumpkins’ records, one can imagine him as a rasping saxophone freely blowing, rather than what he actually is--a singer going for the calculated and obvious big-emoting effects that have fueled the Smashing Pumpkins’ rise to multi-platinum sales and arena-headliner status.

At the Pond, where the band also was scheduled to play Tuesday, Corgan preempted any such imaginative tricks a listener might want to play; his singing was so rough and unvarying that his appealing vulnerable side hardly came through.

“Today,” for example, was all exaggerated sarcasm, destroying the enigmatic balance between anguish and hope that gives emotional complexity to the recorded version’s declaration, “Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known.”

The stage set itself pointed symbolically to the fundamental duality of Corgan’s songwriting: Its cone-shaped, Eiffel-like lighting structure suggested an ominous guard tower, with all the rat-in-a-cage entrapment that signifies. But, under different lighting effects, it became a rocket-launching pad, with all the shoot-the-moon transcendence that implies.

After the Pumpkins went to all that expense to symbolize their thematic essence, you’d think Corgan would have taken greater pains to capture its dualities in his singing.

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In bearing, the Pumpkins came off as aloof arena-lords. There was no significant communication between band and crowd, except when Iha and Corgan threatened to pull the plug on the show after some fools threw stuff at Corgan as he tried to sing the acoustic ballad “Thirty-Three.”

The Pumpkins did rally toward the end of their pre-encore set. Corgan finally sang with some nuance on “Muzzle,” and the episodic, dynamically varied “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans” proved that the band could sustain interest through a long, evocative excursion. The first encore, “x.y.u.,” found Corgan ranting in his revulsion mode, to good effect.

Corgan introduced “x.y.u.” by noodling around with the riff of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” At that point, it seemed merely a sour reminder of the disappointingly routine arena show the Pumpkins’ evening had been to that point. Little did we know that it was, in fact, a harbinger of bigger--much bigger--psychedelic horrors to come.

Since the release last year of the smashingly successful double-disc album “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,” Corgan has talked about trying to revolutionize the Pumpkins’ sound somehow on the band’s next record, taking it away from alterna-rock guitar conventions entirely.

The best thing that can be said about Monday night’s show is that, if upsetting fans’ expectations is the band’s ambition, then this was certainly a start.

Garbage’s opening set, in contrast, was a by-the-numbers affair in which singer Shirley Manson and her cohorts (including Smashing Pumpkins producer Butch Vig on drums) stuck to more or less replicating what they’ve recorded.

But playing by the numbers isn’t so bad when a band has numbers as good as Garbage does. Manson showed she can be a commanding presence even with little room to roam on a hemmed-in stage. A muddy sound mix didn’t stop her from bringing to life the psychodrama and humor in the material. Manson played caged, cornered characters who are so afraid they become dangerous.