On July 23, 1991, Smashing Pumpkins played a small Montreal club called Les Foufounes Électriques ('The Electric Buttocks') as part of a North American tour in support of their recently-released debut album Gish. Although the price of admission on the night was just one Canadian dollar, as per the club's weekly 'Loonie Tuesdays' promotion, there were only around 20 people in attendance for what was the quartet's first gig in the city.
Nineteen-year-old Melissa Auf der Maur, a photography student at Montreal's Concordia University, worked part-time as a ticket girl at the venue, and had noticed a Sub Pop logo on the flyer for the show, the Seattle label having released Smashing Pumpkins' second single Tristessa in December 1990. Although she'd never heard of the Chicago band, she figured that any band on the label who'd released records by Mudhoney, Nirvana and Soundgarden could be worth checking out, particularly since she could get into the show for free. As the gig began, Auf der Maur loved what she heard from the "slick, romantic, magnificent" band on stage, but her room-mate's boyfriend Bruce, who'd tagged along, increasingly hated what he was seeing, and made no secret of his distaste for Billy Corgan and his band.
