Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan is not a man to do things by halves. So when his band exploded into the mainstream, selling over six million copies of their 1993 album Siamese Dream, Corgan instinctively knew that the Chicago had to go bigger next time around, pushing every artistic boundary. At the height of the alt. rock boom years, while the Pumpkins were headlining 1994's Lollapalooza festival tour, on a line up which included Beastie Boys, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Breeders, L7 and Green Day, Corgan declared on MTV that the band's third studio album would be a double album, which set alarm bells ringing at executive level at the band's record label.
"The record label went into a panic," Corgan recalled recently in a new interview about the making of that record, 1995's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, in Classic Rock magazine. "They told me I was insane – things like 'career suicide' and all that stuff was thrown around. It was seen as a sign of my growing hubris; 'He’s gone mad'."
