Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 7 - A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 18 record,” Corgan explained to Rolling Stone for a November 1995 cover story. “It was like setting myself some kind of weird goal. It sounds crazy: ‘When you get done with all this work, here’s more work.’ I came home from Lollapalooza, I took three days off, and then I started. It was literally six days a week, at least four to five hours a day. Which doesn’t sound like a lot of time. But in terms of emotional time, it’s a lot.” The gambit of a 28-song double album paid off. Launched with the tense and menacing lead single “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” Mellon Collie would earn the Pumpkins a number one debut on the US Billboard 200. At present, the record has achieved Diamond status (10 million units sold) in the U.S. No small feat for four kids from Chicago. “The four of us come from nothing. And, y’know, we hatched this little dream between us, and fought all odds and succeeded,” Corgan would tell MTV in 1995. Mellon Collie would produce five official singles from fall 1995 through fall 1996: “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” “1979,” “Zero,” “Tonight, Tonight,” and “Thirty-Three.” All five cuts would prove to be staples of mid-’90s MTV, including the carefree pre- social media snapshot of adolescence of “1979” and the scuzzy moneyed hedonism of the “Zero” visual. The treatment for “Thirty-Three” offers a series of surreal, dreamlike fantasies, while the “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” clip gets down in the mud for something more visceral and violent. The video for “Tonight, Tonight,” meanwhile, channels both 1902’s historic Photo by Kevin Cummins/Getty Images more visc ral and violent. The vid o for “T night, Tonight,” meanwhile, channels both 1902’s hist ric French film Photo by Kevin Cummins/Getty Images