Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness was originally released October 24, 1995. I was a sophomore in high school and still listening to cassette tapes. On Christmas day 1995, I got my first CD player, a copy of Green Day’s Dookie and Kerplunk!, plus gift card to Record Town. The very next day I spent what seemed like hours walking around the store deciding how best to spend the gift card that was burning a hole in my pocket. I chose MCIS for the amount of songs I could get and the fact that I liked side two of Siamese Dream (side one of my cassette copy didn’t work very well).
Almost exactly seventeen years later, The Smashing Pumpkins have reissued a deluxe remastered edition and so I decided to photograph my original copy of Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness, which I have only preserved for posterity or maybe just for my own nostalgia. For years I took this copy of MCIS everywhere–camping, long family trips, college, my first car, my first apartment, etc. As you can tell, I eventually I had to purchase a new copy. Inside the tray I taped my ticket stub from the July 7, 1996 Hampton Coliseum show, which was less than a week before the death of Jonathan Melvoin and the end of the original Smashing Pumpkins lineup.
By the way, if anyone out there has a copy of the July 7, 1996 Hampton Coliseum show please get in touch!
PJ Sykes Photo Blog 