We’re not very good at writing music reviews, so we’ll let HARP magazine reviewer Fred Mills do the work for us:
Well, they didn’t play “Rosalita.” But the Smashing Pumpkins did mount an E Street Band-worthy concert marathon last night (June 23), commandeering the stage of Asheville, N.C., venue The Orange Peel for three solid hours.
Spotlighting a healthy chunk of material from the upcoming Zeitgeist album while injecting their 26-song setlist with plenty of old faves, obscurities and even a new song that frontman Billy Corgan indicated had only been written the day before, the Pumpkins pulled off that rarest of feats: they left the sold-out crowd of more than 900 fans not wanting more (although they would have gladly accepted more), but rather utterly spent and satiated, sweat-drenched and basking in the kind of afterglow that you usually only get after a good, long, late-night-into-the-early-a.m. session between the sheets.
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For maybe the first half or two-thirds of the concert, Corgan kept his stage comments to a minimum. But sometime after the set passed the two-hour mark, he became visibly more animated and grinning frequently to his bandmates as if to say to them, “This is actually a helluva lot of fun, ain’t it?” He also started engaging the audience more towards the end and even related the tale about the individual Schroeder mentioned in his blog who offered him some weed shortly after the band’s arrival in Asheville. (For the record, Corgan politely declined, telling the generous-minded fan that he doesn’t partake.)
At 12:40 a.m., almost exactly three hours after the Pumpkins took the Orange Peel stage—the opening act at 9 p.m. was Baltimore’s Celebration, who put in a short but energetic half-hour set—Corgan stepped to the front, stretched his arms out to the audience and offered a simple, “Thank you—God bless you!” He clearly meant it.
And that was that. But with eight more nights’ worth still to come. The Smashing Pumpkins perform again tonight (June 24) in Asheville, with subsequent dates scheduled for June 26, 27, 29 and 30 and July 2, 3, and 5.