Pumpkins’ Long, Dazing Journey Disappoints Fans

Talk about adding insult to injury. First, the Smashing Pumpkins disappointed fans at the Pond of Anaheim on Monday 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, leader Billy Corgan and his mates gave the full house a big, horrific castor-oil draught of the worst of 1969--a ridiculous, 37-minute jam that was the equivalent, and more, of Iron Butterfly inflicting “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on the world in all its bloated, psychedelic wretchedness.

The Pumpkins’ long, dazing journey into night actually lasted almost 50 minutes, if you count a 12-minute delay before the concluding musical trek began. The crowd waited in the darkened hall while the Pumpkins apparently rested up for this filibuster against all the stripped-down, no-nonsense norms of modern rock.

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 and outtakes. It degenerated from there.

The Pumpkins jammed 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.

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, 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. It was far from the on-record form that has made the Smashing Pumpkins one of the least formulaic and most expansive and potentially surprising modern-rock hit-makers.

* The Smashing Pumpkins play tonight at the San Diego Sports Arena, 3500 Sports Arena Blvd., San Diego, 8 p.m. $26.75. (619) 224-4176. Also next Wednesday at the Forum, 3900 W. Manchester Blvd., Inglewood, 8 p.m. $30. (310) 419-3100.