As a longtime Smashing Pumpkins fan, I was thrilled to get to see them play live again last night at The Fillmore. If you’ve never seen a show there, the Fillmore is a tiny, intimate venue in SF–I was about 6 feet from the stage in the center, and the view and sound were amazing. It was this wonderfully raw feeling of just seeing some “normal guys on stage” playing music–who happened to be extremely talented. 🙂
And get this–they played for over 3 hours. I didn’t get out of the show until after 1am! They played for 2 1/2 hours straight without taking a break, and then did two encores (finishing with a 10+ min improvised version of silverfuck). And this is the 11th show in a row they’ve played here (the last show in the series is tomorrow). How do they have the stamina to do this every night?! Amazing. I wish I could have gotten tickets for more of their shows, but they sold out in literally about 90 seconds, so I was lucky to even get the pair of tickets I got.
Of the 3+ hours they played, I’d say >1 hour was new unreleased material they’d recently written, including a number of beautiful acoustic pieces. They also performed a 30-minute song called Gossamer that was originally supposed to be on Zeitgeist. I had the good fortune to be standing next to a serious pumpkin-head who had been to 10 of the shows and new all the new stuff by heart already. I asked him how he knew the names of these unreleased songs and he said the sound board in the back displays the name of each song and fans post the info online. Crowd-sourcing at work!
Highlights for me included a hard-rocking electric rendition of Tonight, Tonight, the performance of To Sheila, in which the full band kicked in half way through, and a completely deconstructed new version of Heavy Metal Machine. Luckily someone’s already posted the set list from last night, and there are tons of photos and videos already online as well. Gotta love the internets!
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