Okay, now it’s time to rock it up a bit. This is a Smashing Pumpkins live version of an old song by The Animals. I must admit I’ve never bothered listening to the original, but am guessing it is not quite as heavy as this.
This is from “The Peel Sessions” EP, which is of course a series issued from British DJ John Peel’s radio shows. The Pumpkins played there live in the studio on September 8, 1991, and in 1992 issued this 3 song CD as an import only. I bought this one day at a record store in the Appleseed Shopping Center on Lexington Avenue (Mansfield, Ohio), and seriously paid about $30 for the thing. I’d heard of it before but never seen or listened to it. This seems astronomical even now, almost thirty years later. But it was the going rate for imports at the time, pretty much.
Of course, within a year, they wind up putting this track on their own wildly available b-side collection, “Pisces Iscariot,” anyway. And the other two will appear in other collections eventually. But such was the hysteria of the times, pre-internet — if you were a rabid fan and wanted this stuff, you basically had no other choice. Maybe hope a friend would buy it instead, and tape the thing on cassette, if you were lucky.
