October 12, 2009 at 8:58 am

The Smashing Pumpkins – 1979 | Lyrics, Audio and Music Video

by twistedsifter

smahing pumpkins The Smashing Pumpkins   1979 | Lyrics, Audio and Music Video

Billy Corgan called it, “the closest we’ve ever come to realizing everything we wanted.”

It was the Smashing Pumpkins’ highest-charting single, reaching number twelve on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the Mainstream Rock Tracks and on the Modern Rock Tracks charts.

Did you know the video that had to be made and remade after it was lost in a Los Angeles street? The unfortunate victim of an innocent but nonetheless costly accident by a video assistant

Luck had very little to do with the initial writing of “1979.” The song wasn’t really a song as the Mellon Collie sessions wound toward their conclusion. When the time came for paring down the nearly 40 songs in contention for what would be a 28-song double-CD, it was an easy call for Flood, the famed producer (U2, PJ Harvey, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails) who shepherded Mellon Collie through its six-month studio birth with Alan Moulder and Corgan.

“He just said, ‘Not good enough,’ and was ready to drop it”, says Corgan, “but I had a gut feeling about this song from the very beginning.” He accepted Flood’s implied challenge. “It was almost like I was afraid to go where this song was taking me. It’s the kind of song that if I thought about doing it on the previous albums, I’d have questions about whether I’d sound shitty doing it. It’s just not the typical Pumpkins song. So when he was hesitating about putting it on, it riled me. I thought, ‘No fucking way, this is not another toss-off song.’ It really inspired me to finish it and prove him wrong. So that night I wrote the entire song in about four hours. The next day Flood heard it one time and said, ‘It’s on the album’.”

*If the video above does not play, you can find it here

Additional Facts:

– ‘1979’ was released in 1996 as the second single from their third studio album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

– To capture the proper feel on video, the band traveled to Los Angeles to renew acquaintances with directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who in 1994 had filmed the Pumpkins’ video for “Rocket,” from Siamese Dream. Dayton and Faris have an impressive resume that also includes R.E.M.’s “Tongue,” Jane’s Addiction’s “Gift,” and Porno for Pyros’ “Pets”.

– Among those in the running to direct “1979” was Spike Jonze, but he was already booked

– The song is central to the theme of the Mellon Collie album, which Corgan describes as “a farewell to my youth.” At age 28, he acknowledged, “I’m on the edge of losing my connection to youth, but I wanted to communicate from the edge of it, an echo back to the generation that’s coming, to sum up all the things I felt as a youth but was never able to voice articulately.”

– For “1979,” Corgan drew on a specific high school-age memory for inspiration: “I remember being about 17, 18, this weird feeling of having a job and a car, and I could go anywhere I wanted, but I still had the tethers to home, to school. It’s kind of a restless period with a lot of sexual energy and you’re stuck in fucking nowhere. That’s the feeling I had writing the song. Why “1979?” I have no idea, I had to call it something. Much of the song is more intuitive than literal. I trust my intuition way more than I trust my conscious mind.”

mellon collie and the inifinite sadness album cover smashing pumpkins The Smashing Pumpkins   1979 | Lyrics, Audio and Music Video

The Lyrics for The Smashing Pumpkins “1979”

Shakedown 1979, cool kids never have the time
On a live wire right up off the street
You and I should meet
Junebug skipping like a stone
With the headlights pointed at the dawn
We were sure wed never see an end to it all
And I don’t even care to shake these zipper blues
And we don’t know
Just where our bones will rest
To dust I guess
Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below
Double cross the vacant and the bored
They’re not sure just what we have in the store
Morphine city slippin’ dues down to see
That we don’t even care as restless as we are
We feel the pull in the land of a thousand guilts
And poured cement, lamented and assured
To the lights and towns below
Faster than the speed of sound
Faster than we thought wed go, beneath the sound of hope
Justine never knew the rules,
Hung down with the freaks and the ghouls
No apologies ever need be made, I know you better than you fake it
To see that we don’t care to shake these zipper blues
And we don’t know just where our bones will rest
To dust I guess
Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below
The street heats the urgency of sound
As you can see there’s no one around

the smashing pumpkins The Smashing Pumpkins   1979 | Lyrics, Audio and Music Video

Sources
http://www.starla.org/articles/mtc1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_%28song%29


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