eLIFELIST.com Bike Trip

July 5th: The Smashing Pumpkins.  

It's taken me a bit to write about the Smashing Pumpkins show because I'm still recovering from it.  After an Earth shattering ride to Asheville, seriously we almost died ending the day on the Kopac's hill "Rose Hill", seeing the Smashing Pumpkins in concert was awesome.  Asheville is such a great city and the venue "The Orange Peel" was perfect.  It was the last show of their 9 show residency stay in Asheville and they played a pretty wide range of songs for about 3 hours.  Standing on our feet for about 4 hours after the day's ride was tough, we were walking like Frankensteins after the show.  Fortunately there wasn't a lot of motion from the crowd, but every time someone bumped into you there was a risk of falling on your face because our legs were no exaggeration "stiff as boards".    

The Pumpkins put on a good show, they played some of the classics off "Siamese Dream" and some new ones off their new album Zeitgeist.  I wished they had played a couple off of their first album "Gish."  The venue only held a little under a 1,000 people which made the show really intimate and very loud.  Billy Corgan was great in all his weird glory and Jimmy Chamberlain (the drummer) was excellent.  Seeing the two of them play together is pretty special, their chemistry is easy and fun to watch, they both need each other as performers.  There were three other "whippersnappers" as Billy called them, playing with them.  I bought a T-shirt for $35 while the tickets were $20 each.    

I enjoyed hearing a few of their new tracks off "Zeitgeist", some I liked, others I didn't.  Now that I own the album I have a feeling it will grow on me.  

Billy Corgan has definitely started to get on autopilot in his song writing and even then his songs are very well composed.  I guess what I mean is that he doesn't really have anything to fight for anymore in his writing and hasn't since "Siamese Dream."  He's rich, successful, and has great sales so his music has lost a bit of the passion and pain of his earlier albums.  I know that tends to happen with all great musicians once they "make it" but I'm glad to see he's at least back in the saddle with the Pumpkins and wants to keep writing and performing, that is a good sign.  

The show was great and I'm glad to check "see the Smashing Pumpkins" in concert off my list.  There are some photos below, I will be posting videos from the show soon. 

There are a ton of things we will be doing on the trip.  Below is a list of the Life-List items we plan to check off. 





- Hang Glide in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
- Go to a Durham Bulls baseball game
- See the Smashing Pumpkins in Concert
- Camp in the Great Smokies
- See the Ozarks
- Go to Sturgis Motorcycle Rally
- Camp in the Badlands of South Dakota
- See Mount Rushmore
- Climb a 14,000 mountain in Colorado
- Compete in the Muddy Buddy Race in Boulder
- Mountain Bike Moab, Utah
- See the Grand Canyon
- Hike the Narrows at Mount Zion National Park
- Bike the “Extraterrestrial Highway” at Area 51
- Camp in Yosemite/See El Capitan
- Finish at the Golden Gate Bridge

Ok, so the Smashing Pumpkins are hands down my favorite band and Siamese Dream is my favorite album, wanted to get that out of the way early in this post.  Siamese Dream came out when I was just beginning to find and play music and I have a deep nostalgia for the Smashing Pumpkins.

I saw Zwan play in New York a couple years ago, which was great, at the very least it was Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlain playing together and I like a good number of the tracks on that album.

That said, I've never seen SP in concert and it is on my Life-List to see them.  I heard they were getting back together for a new album and tour and had hopes that seeing them wasn’t a lost cause.  I remember being 14 and a couple of my friends were going to the Lollapalooza tour the Smashing Pumpkins played in and I was so pissed I couldn't go. Now that I'm older I of course understand my folks hesitation to let me go to a huge rock festival at that age.

The battle for the tickets was pretty intense.  The deal is that they are playing 9 residence shows in Asheville North Carolina to kick off their US tour.  They are playing at The Orange Peel, which is a venue that holds about 950 people.  The tickets were set to go on sale this past Sunday May 20th at 1PM EST.  I was online, credit card in hand at 12:50 ready to put my ecommerce quick check out skills to work.  At 1PM TicketWeb.com came to a screeching halt and trying to get through to purchase tickets was a joke.  I wasn’t sure if it was my connection or if other people were getting tickets ahead of me.  I stomped and huffed like a little kid that just lost his Ice cream scoop to the ground. 

To make a long self-indulgent story short, TicketWeb’s servers crashed hard and later that night they announced the tickets would be sold on Ticketmaster.com the next day, Monday.  I was there again at 7PM Monday, burned through check out and got 2.  All 9 shows sold out in under an hour. 

It’s great that we will be able to see them on the trip and check that one off the list.  We are going to have to seriously haul it to get to Asheville by the 5th.