Can't Get This Stuff No More #1. - The Aeroplane Flies High

In the entirety of rock history, there are few bands who have been as prolific as The Smashing Pumpkins. Their 1993 album Siamese Dream was huge, and hugely revelatory for impressionable 14-year-olds. Imagine our happiness when only a year later we got another Smashing Pumpkins album, the rarities collection Pisces Iscariot. Then, a year later, ANOTHER album, this time a DOUBLE. It would have been too much, had it not all been amazing.

As successful as Siamese Dream was, Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was even bigger, bolstered by the popularity of the singles "Bullet With Butterfly Wings", "1979", "Zero", "Tonight, Tonight" and "Thirty-Three". The album was definitely one of the high points of the 1990s, not only in its scope and scale, but also in the sheer enormity of it. It was inescapable.

So for the band to put out ANOTHER release just a year later, with 28 new songs, they were simultaneously pretentious, presumptuous and genius.

The Aeroplane Flies High, in true Smashing Pumpkins grandeur, was a collection of expanded versions of the aforementioned singles from Melon Collie, each with it's own theme. The harder songs were on the "Zero" disc, the new wave-y stuff on the "1979" disc, the grandiose stuff on the "Tonight, Tonight" disc. All 5 were packaged (with a 44 page booklet containing lyrics, photos and a complete Smashing Pumpkins discography) in a retro box made to look like a 1960s carrying case for 45s.

 Look how retro!

For a band to do this today would be near impossible - there's not enough radio, television and magazine support, and there is currently no rock band popular enough that could move this much product, as terribly consumerist as that sounds. The only thing that comes close is Teargarden By Kaleidyscope, a 44-song opus that is being released for free on the internet, one song at a time over several years. The band? The Smashing Pumpkins.

Back to Aeroplane, the set is truly remarkable just in the sheer amount of material included. For a band to have released 55 songs in a little over 2 years was astounding; to put out another half as many a year later was unheard of in the 1990s. Even Pearl Jam, a prolific band in their own right, only put out 37 songs in their most productive 3 years; Nirvana put out 55 the whole time Kurt Cobain was alive.

 Don't act like your not going to buy it.

Not only is their quantity here, there's also quality. "The Boy", a James Iha-sung song from the "1979" disc, is a breezy little piece of power-pop that would have been a single for most of their contemporaries. That it got released as a B-side here speaks to the greatness of the band at the time. "Pennies" from the "Zero" disc is another standout track, and is a forebear to the future of the band, particularly songs like "Try, Try, Try" from their 2000 album, Machina.

The "Tonight, Tonight" disc is particularly engrossing, with "Medelia of the Gray Skies", a companion piece to "Porcelina of the Vast Oceans" off of Melon Collie, and "Rotten Apples", a song that's as beautiful as the lyrics are desperate.

The "Bullet" disc contains one Pumpkins song, "...Said Sadly", a country-ish duet between James Iha and fellow Chicago-an, Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt. The other tracks are made up of covers, mostly from the late 70s and early 80s - The Cars, The Cure, Alice Cooper, Blondie and Missing Persons. Their cover of The Cars "You're All I've Got Tonight" is a standout, as the raw, ferocious guitars and an unrelenting caveman stomp (equal parts drums and friends pounding their feet in the studio) turn the new-wave synth-driven original into Queen-sized stadium rock.

The "Thirty-Three" disc is where all the odds and ends ended up, which oddly makes it the most representative of the Pumpkins' work at the time. "The Last Song", no doubt a contender for Melon Collie's closer at one point, features Billy's father on piano and is a perfect companion for the sweeping Mellon Collie (forgive the pun) of "Thirty-Three". As gentle as "The Last Song" is, "Transformer" is raucous, sounding more like "Zero" than anything else. The James Iha-sung "The Bells" (featuring Fountains of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger) and a cover of the standard "My Blue Heaven" are also representative of the Pumpkins' softer side, but it's the track from which the collection derives its title, "The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right)" that most truly encapsulates what the Smashing Pumpkins were in 1996. Beginning with some random Billy-esque spoken word ("I never really liked sunny days...the black wings just reach out to me over a distance") over a strummed clean guitar riff, the song quickly explodes with the same riff, with all the power of the Pumpkins' guitarsenal, then goes on for a full 8:31, with meandering solo and the repeated line "disconnected by your smile". It's this juxtaposition of doom and glee, in its epic form, that perfectly sums up the era for the band.

Nowadays, the set is only available online and in record shops, where you'll inevitably pay too much for it, considering that every song ever recorded is available for download on the internet, whether at a cost or for free. Whereas it originally retailed for around $30, a mint copy of the set now fetches close to $200 on Amazon, and used copies in good condition go anywhere from $40 to $140.

That is, if you can find a buyer. Used record stores are quickly disappearing and the most common response from the 13-23 set would be, "I think my dad listened to them" before turning back to their X-Box and upping the volume on the new Neon Trees or whatever stupid crap they listen to.

Whatever.