The Smashing Pumpkins - VH-1 Storytellers, Hammerstein Ballroom, New York City, 8-24-2000

Here comes yet another "VH-1 Storytellers" episode. This time, it's the Smashing Pumpkins.

This band was very popular in the 1990s, selling over 30 million albums. However, their popularity declined near the end of the decade, as the band changed styles and ran into the usual problems band have with big success, such as drug overuse and personality conflicts. In 2000, the album "Machina" was released, but it sold poorly compared to earlier albums, only going gold (meaning sales of over 500,000). By contrast, the band's 1995 double album "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" sold over 10 million.

In May 2000, several months before this concert, the band's main singer and vocalist Billy Corgan announced the band would break up by the end of the year, after some additional recording and touring. Sure enough, the band had their last concert in December 2000. (The band would later reform in 2007, and still exists as I write this in 2024.) As a result, this concert was recorded with both the band and the audience knowing the break up was coming. There is a joke about this during the banter between songs, where a song doesn't end properly and Corgan says he'll have to break up the band as a result.

I found two sources for this. One is a video of what was broadcast on TV at the time. It has excellent sound, and this is almost entirely sourced from that. The other is an audience bootleg of the entire performance, which lasts almost two hours. Unfortunately, the sound quality for that is poor, too poor for me to want to use it. I only used some of it for the first song, "Snail." That's because the show only included a portion of the song, in their usual, annoying style. I hate having only part of a song, so I used the audience boot to fill in the missing part of the song. I tried to use some audio editing tricks to improve the sound quality some, but there's only so much one can do with poor source material. You probably will be able to easily notice when there's a switch to the video source near the end of the song.

Three of the songs included here are from the 2000 album "Machina": "Try, Try, Try," "With Every Light," and "Stand Inside Your Love." Most of the songs I couldn't include due to the poor sound quality were also from that album.

This album is 47 minutes long.

01 Snail [Edit] (Smashing Pumpkins)
02 talk (Smashing Pumpkins)
03 Today (Smashing Pumpkins)
04 talk (Smashing Pumpkins)
05 Try, Try, Try (Smashing Pumpkins)
06 talk (Smashing Pumpkins)
07 1979 (Smashing Pumpkins)
08 talk (Smashing Pumpkins)
09 Thirty-Three (Smashing Pumpkins)
10 talk (Smashing Pumpkins)
11 With Every Light (Smashing Pumpkins)
12 talk (Smashing Pumpkins)
13 Stand Inside Your Love (Smashing Pumpkins)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17172251/TSMASHNGPUMPKNS2000StrytllrsHmmrstinBllromNwYrkC__8-24-2000_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/jgFdUgc1

The cover is a screenshot I took from the YouTube video of this exact concert. I upgraded the detail with the Krea AI program.

David Bowie - BBC Sessions, Volume 10: 50th Birthday Concert, Madison Square Garden, New York City, 1-9-1997

I'm going to tempt fate by posting another David Bowie BBC album. (Weirdly, as I write this, Volume 8 is banned here but not on YouTube, and Volume 9 is banned on YouTube but not here.) Again, get it while you can, because who knows if this post will last.

David Bowie turned 50 years old in January 1997, and he decided to celebrate it with a bang, via a concert at Madison Square Garden that was broadcast on the BBC. What makes this especially interesting are all the guest stars who dueted with Bowie, usually for more than one song: Frank Black of the Pixies, the Foo Fighters, Robert Smith of the Cure, Sonic Youth, Lou Reed, and Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins. 

I'm sure Bowie was especially excited to perform with Reed, since Bowie had been a big fan ever since the late 1960s, at a time when very few people had ever heard of Reed or his band the Velvet Underground, especially because Bowie was British and the Velvet Underground were even more obscure in Britain at the time. All the songs were originally done by Bowie, with the exception of three songs by Reed: "I'm Waiting for the Man," "Dirty Blvd.," and "White Light-White Heat." Bowie had performed "I'm Waiting for the Man" and "White Light-White Heat" pretty much since they were released. (For instance, it's known he performed "I'm Waiting for the Man" back in the summer of 1967!) However, this was the one and only time Bowie was involved with "Dirty Blvd." a more recent Reed song. The one Bowie original done with Reed, "Queen Bitch," comes from the "Hunky Dory" album in 1971. It is obviously an homage to Reed and the Velvet Underground, both musically and lyrically (and he mentioned the inspiration in the album's liner notes), so it's interesting to hear Reed help sing it.

The sound quality is excellent... now. Originally, all the lead vocals were surprisingly low in the mix. So I used the audio editing program UVR5 to remix every single song here. I think it sounds much better as a result.

This album is an hour and 58 minutes long.

01 Introduction [Instrumental] (David Bowie)
02 Little Wonder (David Bowie)
03 The Hearts Filthy Lesson (David Bowie)
04 Scary Monsters [And Super Creeps] (David Bowie & Frank Black)
05 Fashion (David Bowie & Frank Black)
06 Telling Lies (David Bowie)
07 Hallo Spaceboy (David Bowie & the Foo Fighters)
08 Seven Years in Tibet (David Bowie & the Foo Fighters)
09 The Man Who Sold the World (David Bowie)
10 The Last Thing You Should Do (David Bowie & Robert Smith)
11 Quicksand (David Bowie & Robert Smith)
12 Battle for Britain [The Letter] (David Bowie)
13 Voyeur of Utter Destruction [As Beauty] (David Bowie)
14 I'm Afraid of Americans (David Bowie & Sonic Youth)
15 Looking for Satellites (David Bowie)
16 Under Pressure (David Bowie)
17 'Heroes' (David Bowie)
18 Queen Bitch (David Bowie & Lou Reed)
19 I'm Waiting for the Man (David Bowie & Lou Reed)
20 Dirty Blvd. (David Bowie & Lou Reed)
21 White Light-White Heat (David Bowie & Lou Reed)
22 Moonage Daydream (David Bowie)
23 talk - Happy Birthday (David Bowie)
24 All the Young Dudes (David Bowie & Billy Corgan)
25 The Jean Genie (David Bowie & Billy Corgan)
26 Space Oddity (David Bowie)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/BihDJUwS

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/FENHxg97tAFqkXl/file

The cover photo comes from this exact concert.