The Smashing Pumpkins’ sprawling reissue of 1996’s already sprawling The Aeroplane Flies High box set arrives on July 23 via Virgin/UMe, and among its eye-popping 104 tracks are some very well-known songs. One is Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness hit “1979,” which appears in a couple of different forms, including, most notably, a reissue-only acoustic take. That version is now online, and it’s exactly as you’d expect, with Billy Corgan’s striated vocals over insistent guitar strums, complete with that sliding little instrumental hook. It’s a “Disarm”-ingly (sorry!) stark version of a song more famously polished to perfection by big-time producers Alan Moulder and Flood. Rather than “the urgency of now,” a lyric echoing Martin Luther King Jr., this one ends with Corgan singing about the “the urgency of sound.” For a song that came out longer ago now than the year 1979 was at the time, it’s fitting.
Listen over at Consequence of Sound.
