Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness

SUGAR

Sugar: Copper Blue / Beaster / F.U.E.L.

I had just found a Ryko remaster of Copper Blue when Merge Records announced that they would be reissuing the full catalog by the quintessential band. I sold my copy and waited by the mailbox after work each day. The remastering sounds great and over all the songs don’t seem dated or any less amazing.

Buy the reissues from Merge

MCIS

Smashing Pumpkins: Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness

The remaster sounds great and at least 50 of the 64 bonus tracks were new or different for fans like myself who have the two or three different bootleg MCIS era demo collections.

Check out my earlier post on MCIS / Buy the reissue from the band.

Rites of Spring: Six Song Demo

Even though this demo was widely bootlegged, I had never heard it until now. The demo sounds more like a mixtape or sound collage than a “normal” recording.

Buy the reissue from Dischord

11442

feedtime: The Aberrant Years

I wasn’t familiar with this late 70s Australian band until this cool SubPop reissue, but they did have a big influence on bands like Mudhoney.

Buy the reissue from SubPop

Medicine: Box Set- Shot Forth Self Living / The Buried Life / Sounds of Medicine / Always Starting To Stop

This box set came out on Record Store Day and I purchased it to share with my wife for our wedding anniversary!

Buy the reissue from Captured Tracks

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.