The Smashing Pumpkins are diving into the making of their classic “1979” music video in a new episode of VEVO Footnotes.
In the clip, Billy Corgan reveals that he wrote the song, the final track the band recorded for 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, when he was a teenager. “I was stuck at a light heading into the city. It was raining and I’m watching the wipers go back and forth…It was this feeling of ‘I’m leaving one life and I’m going towards this other one,’” he explained. “ A farewell to my youth.”
The video follows a crew of high schoolers engaging in the time-honored teenage activities: driving around, killing time, hanging at a convenience store and hitting a house party. “I wanted the video to be about suburban teenage angst, but the idealized version,” Corgan added. “Almost the teenagehood that I wished I had, which was sort of carefree and fun.”
Although the video primarily features real high schoolers (only one actor could drive, Corgan revealed), it also includes cameos throughout from Smashing Pumpkins members. The full band also performs during the house party segment. “We actually set up to play for real because we weren’t syncing the song. We were just playing stuff we would jam on and the kids were yawning, bored. So we started playing some of our better known songs and people started responding so it almost turned into this weird mini concert.”
One of the most notable reveals in the video is that the house party scene almost never made it to film. After the band filmed, a production assistant allegedly put the tapes on top of their car and drove away, losing all the footage. Because of this, everyone had to come back and film identical scenes later on—the original tapes were never found. Somehow, everything still came together, and the storyline engaged the Smashing Pumpkins so much they even made a sequel: the music video for their 1998 track “Perfect.” According to Corgan, the premise of the video is set five years after “1979”—they even hired back four out of five original “1979” cast members, save one actor who was in jail at the time.
Corgan and co. look back on “1979” with pride. “To have made something that has endured the test of time means a lot to the band,” Corgan concluded. “It’s incredibly humbling to see new generations discover the album and form such deep emotional connections to it 30 years later.”
