Chords for Billy Corgan talks Smashing Pumpkins' Gish and Siamese Dream Reissues

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_ _ _ _ _ _ [Gb] Looking back 20 years later [E] on GISH, what strikes me [A] is although we made an album that's
very powerful and still has a real electricity when you put it into a room, especially when
you [Em] crank it up, _ [A] I'm struck by how naive we really were.
We [E] had no idea of the record business, we had no idea of what was expected of us, and
I think that's what really makes the [Em] album special.
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_ We didn't want to sound like anybody in Chicago, [Ab] we saw that as the [Gb] death of our future.
[Em] We were incredibly isolated [A] from the scenes in New York and LA, [A] which allowed us to figure
out who we were long before we came in contact with the pressure cookers [E] of kind of the [A] mainstream
American musical culture.
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_ _ [G] _ And that ultimately is what led to a lot of [Dm] success because we didn't sound like other people. _ _
_ [G] By the time we met Butch Vig in 1990, I [Gb] already had my mind made up, I [E] want my band to sound
like [A] this and it's going to be like this, and Butch was the first person I ever met
that didn't care.
[E] Oh, you want to change that?
Go [Dbm] ahead.
We worked together as a team.
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We recorded [Abm] GISH at Butch's studio, it was not professionally designed, [E] the walls were
all at weird angles [A] and plasterboard and on the surface it sounded terrible but it recorded incredibly.
Most of our [Dbm] focus was how do we take the live energy [B] that we're feeling and then translate
that back into the record.
[A] What I like about GISH as a production [B] is you can almost [Gb] hear the depth of the band
as if the band's [E] playing right in front of you.
So then you hear it in the speaker, it just explodes.
Boom!
_ _ _ _ _ We found [Eb] a commonality which is like if we push this [E] and we push this music to this level,
it will be [Em] more explosive, more in your face, more intense.
When the album [E] came out, we saw this weird backlash because it was right away people
said it's too overproduced, it's too good, which blew our mind because how can something
be too good?
We were criticized for being too good.
I'm [Gb] going crazy.
[Bb] _
I wrote the song I'm going crazy in about five minutes and it pretty much summed [G] up
the way we all felt at that time which is that we were all literally going crazy.
Little did we know that that crazy was a lot less crazy than the crazy that we were about
to go in the subsequent years.
[A] _ _ _ I have [C]
gone.
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_ _ _ [D] _ [E] After GISH came out, we toured approximately 14 [Bb] months on the album.
[Eb] We were very aware that there was going to be an expectation placed on us, particularly
because we knew that our next album would be coming out on a major label.
_ _ [Bb] _ [Ab] The only way the song seemed to improve and the only way [Eb] I saw any emotion coming out
of my band was [Bb] when I was able to write a song [Ab] that was really close [G] to myself.
[Eb] It was in that period that I started writing songs like [Bb] Today and [C] Disarm and Cherub Rock,
songs that really expressed my frustration, my hopes, my fears, my dreams, [Eb] blah, blah,
blah.
Today [E] is the [Ab] greatest day I've ever [Eb] known.
I just spent the last two or three years of my life [Ab] trying to figure out how to be a psychedelic
kind of brain [Eb] crusher with this [F] explosive band and suddenly [Ab] all those things were the
exact opposite of what needed to [Am] happen.
[Eb] Somehow [Bb] along the way, I knew I needed to write [Gm] a different level of [E] song. _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [D] Simon's Dream is [A] beautiful to this extent.
[E] We did have hit songs on the record, but they were defiantly our hit song.
I think that's why the album is endured and is significant because it was both a commercial
record and a mainstream record and at the same time, it was very much our own record
and we insisted on [D] that.
We were lucky to work with somebody like [A] Butch who backed us up and of [E] course, very lucky
to work with Alan Mulder.
Alan, Butch and I mixed the record.
[D] Top to bottom, [A] it was an effort to [E] both meet the challenge but meet the challenge in our
own [Em] unique way.
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As far as the [G] reissue goes with the extra tracks and the bonus to some of the tracks
that have [Em] been remixed, so I think it was really great that Butch took the [G] time to sit
down using modern [D] technology and create what I [A] would call a more definitive [C] version.
In the case of some of the tracks that Kerry Brown remixed, [G] Kerry was able to go back to
the [E] original tapes and probably put more care and attention to those [D] mixes than we were
able to time.
[C] It all added up to something that has a very aspirational [Em] quality to it and I think that's
why many [A] people still identify with the record because [C] it has a hope to it and it has a yearning
to it and it has [Em] a reaching for something [A] bigger than who you really are quality.
[C] For us personally, that was the [A] end of the garage, the end of the small club, [E] the end
of that sort of moment of [C] innocence and that's when you start to realize that you're connecting
to a [A] whole bigger world than the one that you're used [Em] to.
It's a very strange surreal experience [C] that you can only have once. _
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