Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
The last few years of the Smashing Pumpkins’ ’90s run were a little chaotic. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was fired and then rehired, and bassist D’arcy Wretzky permanently left the band. Frontman Billy Corgan envisioned another epic double album as a grand farewell record. But Virgin Records, stung by low sales for 1998’s Adore, only agreed to release a single-disc version of Machina/The Machines of God in February 2000.
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As the year wound down, Corgan decided to go out with a bang, assembling the extra music Virgin declined to release as Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music. Corgan had 25 vinyl copies pressed up and given away to friends and fans with instructions to share the music on the internet, and the album existed for decades only as a beloved bootleg. Machina II opens with a couple of uptempo rockers including “Cash Car Star,” featuring lyrics that seemed pointedly disillusioned with show business.
The band reunited in 2006 and have released many new albums since then, but for many years a proper release of Machina II remained elusive. And then this month Smashing Pumpkins released Machina – Aranea Alba Edition, a massive 80-song box set featuring an expanded version of both albums. The Machina II songs “Speed Kills,” “Let Me Give the World To You,” and “Real Love” have appeared on reissues and compilations over the years. But the new box set offers the first retail release of most of the songs on the album, albeit in a very expensive limited edition package ($395), including “Cash Car Star,” which the band performed on television multiple times.
“Cash Car Star” made its live debut in October 1998, when Smashing Pumpkins opened for Kiss at Dodger Stadium for a Halloween special broadcast on the Fox network.
Two years later, in between the black market release of Machina II and the band’s farewell shows in Chicago, the band made one last television appearance, playing “Cash Car Star” on The Tonight Show. Host Jay Leno walked over to banter with Corgan afterwards, asking why the band was breaking up. “Comedy doesn’t pay, Jay,” Corgan deadpanned. “You’ll be back, you guys will be back,” said Leno, who’d later have his own struggles with gracefully leaving the spotlight.
Three more essential Smashing Pumpkins deep album cuts:
“Hummer”
Siamese Dream is more purely a guitar album than the Smashing Pumpkins records that would follow it. But the “Hummer” intro is one of the album’s more unusual moments, a distorted loop of Corgan playing sitar that producer Butch Vig chopped up on the same Akai S 1000 sampler that he’d go on to use for many of Garbage’s early songs.
“Starla”
1994’s Pisces Iscariot is one of the most impressive rarities compilations in the alternative rock canon, full of great songs that somehow didn’t make the cut for the band’s early albums. The 11-minute “Starla,” originally released on the B-side of the “I Am One” single, climaxes with arguably Corgan’s most transcendent guitar solo.
“Here is No Why”
The tuneful Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness highlight “Here is No Why” is sandwiched between the band’s heaviest hits, “Zero” and “Bullet With Butterfly Wings.”
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