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Thursday, 26 July 2007 06:25

The Fillmore, San Francisco 

Tuesday night I was finially able to live out a dream of mine since I was 12 years old - I saw the Smashing Pumpkins live. For whatever reason, I always missed them when I was in high school (and before that, I was “too young” to go to concerts, according to my mother). When I heard that they were getting back together and playing no less than ten shows here in San Francisco, I immediately had Ryan buy us tickets for my birthday.

The show was good, albeit way too long (I never thought I’d say an SP show could ever go too long). It was over 2 hours, and by the end I felt like my back was about to break, or my feet were about to disintegrate… whichever came first. They started off the set with some new tunes, and although I have Zeitgeist I’m not all that familiar with the new songs. Then they played a few surprises, like "The Aeroplane Flies High" (from the box set), "Drown" (another B-side), and "Bullet with Butterfly Wings."

Jimmy Chamberlin stole the show towards the end with an amazing drum solo, and we got a peek into the personality of the new bassist, Ginger Reyes, when they skipped a song without telling her! She seemed very sweet, and joked about it with Billy. OK, now I’m just getting too involved, sorry.

Billy was kind of down on San Francisco, saying that everyone he met was “mean.” Really? But I guess it gave him the inspiration to write a new song, called “Peace and Love and All That Other Shit,” which is the video I took (and you can see here). It’s sad that SF wasn’t his cup of tea (and too bad they’re playing so many shows here, I guess) but the song was one of the highlights of the evening for me.

I’m having trouble finding the setlist for the show, but I remember them also playing "Tonight, Tonight," "Disarm" (one of my all-time favorites), "Tarantula," "Doomsday Clock" and "United States." A mix of old and new, but as Billy said at the opening of the show, “This is 2007, not 1992. Welcome to the new decade.” It would have been nice to see them back in the day, but it was still totally worth the sore feet.

When not following Smashing Pumpkins, Veronica Belmont produces a daily podcast at mahalo.com.
She blogs regularly at www.veronicabelmont.com.