An end of an era: live Smashing Pumpkins recordings

I remember back in college my roommate Scott got high speed internet.  What was this marvel of technology?  Now kids, if you didn’t know about dial-up internet, I recommend going to ask your parents right now what the sound of a modem dialup tone sounds like.

I didn’t really think too much about high speed internet at the time.  I was a student, I didn’t have a lot of money so I was fine with the dialup internet that was provided to students of Algonquin College.

Until I stumbled upon the New Smashing Pumpkins Audio Archive (NSPAA).  There it was…every concert they was ever recorded.

Scott was nice enough to let me use his high speed internet connection to download thousands of MP3s of Pumpkins concerts.  It was mindblowing how much data was coming down the pipe to me.  I remember burning them to CDs since I didn’t even have enough room on my hard drive to hold them all.

Years later when high speed internet was commonplace, I went about a quest to upgrade the audio quality and get FLAC or SHN files for all the concerts they had.  People thought I was insane.  I remember a very specific comment from my cousin Shawn who said he was fine listening to a really good concert from a touring cycle, but to listen to every concert…that’s madness!

You know what?  He was right.  I mean, when did I actually go and listen to every concert?  I listened to a LOT of them, don’t get me wrong.  But when I stumbled upon really good ones, I just kept listening to those instead of the hundreds of others.

Fast forward years later and I’m moving some files around today and I notice I have a ton of Pumpkins concerts hidden in a folder on my hard drive.  I sat there looking at it and realized that there was really only one thing I needed to do.

Delete them.

We are at a point now that we have the Live Music Archive and sure enough, every Pumpkins concert (or nearly every one of them) is available to stream or download.  So…barring the nuclear apocalypse hitting us and wiping out all the Pumpkins recordings on the Internet, I freed up a ton of hard drive space.

It’s strange…hours and evenings of my life has been wiped out in a fraction of minutes.  All because the Internet has become increasingly convenient over the years.  Heck, you can now stream television shows instead of downloading them.  Mindblowing!

And so I leave this memory…listening to one of the greatest recordings of live Pumpkins history; Vancouver 1997.