35 years ago today: The Smashing Pumpkins released their debut album Gish

Originally published in Hot Press in 2002:

Butch Vig:

"What I loved in Billy [Corgan] was that he was very driven and he had a vision and really took pride in playing it as good as you could get it, he would happily spend ten hours on one guitar part to get it right. I jumped at the chance of making Gish. Billy really pushed me and I really pushed Billy and he really pushed that band, he expected them to be constantly at the top of their game.

"I mean, it was very tense – they were not a happy band. Siamese Dream was a hard motherfucker to make; it almost killed me at the end. Five straight months of working six, sometimes seven days a week, 15, 16 hours a day. And working too: not sitting around the studio drinking beer or smoking; really intense sessions.

"In some ways I think that’s the record I’m most proud of really. I had to deal with the whole dysfunctional breakdown of the band, and Jimmy [Chamberlin] going AWOL for days doing drugs and everybody threatening to quit, including Billy. There were numerous times he went, ‘Fuck you, fuck you!!’ He’d stomp out say he was gonna get on a plane and go back to Chicago.

"But somehow we were able to just barely keep everybody together. When I went and saw them play their final show in Chicago, people were asking me, ‘Are you sad to see them go?’ and I said, ‘I can’t believe they’ve lasted so long!’

"They made it through a lot of really horrible disasters, and a lot of that was I think Billy’s sheer ambition, his willpower to keep them going.”

Revisit Gish below: