Siamese Dream (1993)
Siamese Dream is a 1993 alternative rock album by The Smashing Pumpkins.
Butch Vig and Billy Corgan made this record under strain, and the strain is part of its history. Siamese Dream, the second studio album by the Smashing Pumpkins, reached the UK on July 19, 1993 and the US eight days later through Virgin Records. Difficulty and tension ran through the sessions.
Corgan produced alongside Vig rather than handing the job over, so the band's frontman sat at the desk while his own songs took shape. Plenty of bands hire a producer to referee the room. This one put the person with the most at stake in charge of the decisions, and the sessions carried the cost.
The album entered the Billboard 200 at number ten. It reached four times platinum with the RIAA and has sold more than six million copies worldwide. The band crossed from the alternative circuit into the mainstream on the back of it, and their standing in alternative music dates from here.
Start here if you are working through the alternative rock of 1993, and read the recording history alongside the album. The two are hard to separate.
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A few thoughts on Siamese Dream
Three books pair well with a record this tangled up in its own making. Heavier than Heaven follows Kurt Cobain through the same stretch of the early 90s, when a handful of American alternative bands went from clubs to platinum inside two years, and it is unsparing about what that did to the people involved. Serving the Servant covers the same scene from a manager's chair, closer to the business decisions behind how these records reached six million buyers. The '90s: The Inside Stories from the Decade That Rocked widens the frame to the decade itself.
For the studio side, Tony Visconti: The Autobiography has a producer explaining his own methods across decades of sessions, useful if the Vig and Corgan partnership is the part you want to understand.