A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece lauding Ben Harper’s Massey Hall show as a perfect marriage of performer and venue. Last night’s Smashing Pumpkins show at The Air Canada Centre represented the complete opposite of that. The sight of 6,200 mildly-engaged spectators amidst a wide array of empty seats (the 300 level was completely barren) highlighted a pretty major misstep for the band.
It’s impossible to know whether the choice of venue was an overreach on the part of their tour promoter or an ambitious attempt by the band to celebrate their second Toronto appearance in a decade (they did two Massey Hall shows in 2008). The broad layout of the ACC left many fans stuck deep at the back of the house. A large, illuminating digital globe looming above the band offered a cool visual, but it hardly made up for the lack of video screens that should have provided fans with a closer look at the guitar skills of Jeff Schroeder and the fervent-but-controlled drumming of Mike Byrne (Nicole Fiorentino’s underwhelming bass, however, makes me yearn for the days of Melissa Auf der Maur).
An engaged crowd may have helped to infuse some energy into the atmosphere of the show, but Billy Corgan and co. didn’t give them the opportunity to do so until well into the second half of the two-and-a-half hour set.
The band first played their mixed-reviewed Oceania from the start to finish, resulting in many trips to the beer line among the increasingly listless crowd. Then, there was Corgan’s rapport with the crowd, which could best be described as limited and, at worst, baiting. He acknowledged the crowd’s disinterest with a sneering sarcasm, calling out, “Having a good time so far? It’s a very party-like atmosphere in here.” In his only extended dialogue with the crowd, he trolled them about the Maple Leafs (he was greeted with boos) and then bizarrely spoke at length about his Chicago-based pro-wrestling reality television show (he was greeted with silence).
To the Pumpkins’ credit, business did pick up when they jumped into a slate of second-half oldies that included “Disarm”, “Tonight, Tonight”, “Zero”, “X.Y.U.” and a surprisingly good cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” But it was too little, too late, as much of the goodwill generated by the band had already evaporated into the vast empty air that was the ACC.
