This series is about influential music and what it did to me. It’s inspired by Jeff Tweedy’s book World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music. This post is about Cherub Rock.

The conditions around the writing, recording, and production of Siamese Dream by the Smashing Pumpkins are rich with lore. Virgin grew impatient as time and money ran past plan—the album ultimately ran something on the order of $250,000 over budget. The band’s songwriter was in depression. Guitarist James Iha and bassist D’arcy Wretzky had ended a romantic relationship. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was struggling with heroin, with disappearances that disrupted the sessions. The label wanted a return on its investment. For the Smashing Pumpkins, making this album had to have been a hellish experience.

Yet the result is a magnum opus. Say what we will about the pressures major record labels put on artists. There is a push-pull that sometimes still works—this album went 4× Platinum in the United States. It also takes a special person, namely Billy Corgan, to be insanely driven: to make an album like this happen in spite of the circumstances, and not just make it happen but to push the envelope far beyond what anyone expected—layered, tape-based studio craft at a scale few peers attempted. One could easily make an argument that this album should have never happened—the band should have broken up, things should have fallen off the rails.

But they didn’t.

Now fast-forward to 1993, when Cherub Rock was topping the charts. The release of this album coincided with a massive technological shift in audio distribution: the compact disc. It had already been out for several years—the band, and everyone in that orbit, anticipated taking advantage of what it could do. As a rule of thumb, whenever you pass through tape, you add noise. Sometimes you want that noise—like in the recording phase, where the inherent sound of tape can give you qualities people describe as warm—but once you’ve captured what you love, you want to lock it in. The weakness of the cassette is, you guessed it: you’re back on tape, introducing new noise along with dynamic constraints and the usual bleed. The compact disc doesn’t smuggle in another generation of tape noise on playback—it lets the recording lock in—and dynamic range expands: things can sit quieter and hit louder than on cassette. Siamese Dream played to its strengths.

Now fast-forward again to the bedroom of a lucky teenager who has just received their first compact-disc player boombox for a birthday. They go out and purchase Siamese Dream as their first full-length for the new player.

That person is me. And all of that background? I knew none of it.

I put the disc awkwardly into the player—like a first encounter with alien technology. I pressed play.

WOW.

I had only listened to cassettes up until that point. I didn’t need to know the technical details. I felt them. It was truly a Wizard of Oz moment: going from black-and-white to color. The quality of the sound was insane. A CD would have made any album sound head-and-shoulders above my cassettes—but this wasn’t just any album. For me it draws a line in the sand for alternative rock—it could be a perfect album for the genre.

What I love about Cherub Rock is everything. The slow build to start—what an opener. The anticipation is palpable. You know something is going to explode, and it hits—but not the way you might think. Not some superficial cacophony. No. Layers upon layers of rock distortion flowing off the magical drums of Jimmy Chamberlin. Butch Vig’s oft-retold story is that Corgan pushed Chamberlin on Cherub Rock until his hands bled. The solo absolutely screams like the melding of a jet engine. The song sets the tone for the entire album. Once you’re in it you fully realize you are on a journey, my friend, and this album is going to take you. The current is too strong.

Cherub Rock and Siamese Dream are some of the most prized recordings in my collection. The song and the album showed me that a guitar is not just a hammer for pounding out barre chords, but a set of brushes to paint with. From the fine strokes of a whisper to kicking the paint can across the room in a rage, this album lights the way.

Siamese Dream laid out all the brushes and showed me what rock guitar could be.

References

  1. Wikipedia: Siamese Dream, Recording and production; U.S. RIAA (album 4× Platinum); “Cherub Rock” (song), Charts.
  2. Hero image — William Goodman, Smashing Pumpkins’ Beautiful, Grand ‘Siamese Dream’ Turns 25, Billboard, 27 July 2018 — Smashing Pumpkins photographed in London, July 1993; photo: Paul Bergen / Redferns. Source JPEG: https://www.billboard.com/wp-content/uploads/media/smashing-pumpkings-portrait-1993-billboard-1548.jpg. Local WebP: /images/smashing-pumpkins-billboard-london-1993-hero.webp. © as credited on Billboard; not an implied licence beyond personal use.
  3. Official video — The Smashing Pumpkins (SmashingPumpkinsVEVO), “Cherub Rock” (official remastered upload).