Smashing Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan wrote "1979" about making the transition out of youth and into adulthood. He remembered being in high school and having adult responsibilities like a car and job, but still being very much a kid and dependent on his parents.
The title appears only in the first line:
Shakedown 1979
Cool kids never have the time
Corgan was born in 1967 - he could have chosen other years, but 1979 was the easiest to rhyme. The coming-of-age theme would more accurately place the song around 1983.
On a VH1 Storytellers episode, Billy Corgan talked about what led him to write this song: "Sometimes, when I write a song, I see a picture in my head. For some reason, it's of the obscure memory I have."
The memory that goes with this song is from when he was around 18 years old. He was driving down a road near his home on a rainy night, and was waiting at a traffic light. He says that the picture "emotionally connotes a feeling of waiting for something to happen, and not being quite there yet, but it's just around the corner."
"1979" was the last song written for Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, the third Smashing Pumpkins album.
Corgan told the producer, Flood (Mark Ellis) that he thought it had a lot of potential, so Flood gave him 24 hours to make it work, or else it wouldn't be on the album. Billy went home that night and came up with the lyrics, and they recorded it the next day.
Corgan had a version of this song written long before it was released, but he didn't think it fit the mood of any of their previous albums. This early version he called "Strolling."
The video took three days to shoot and includes a scene where a bunch of kids are at a party and Smashing Pumpkins are the house band. The original tape of this scene was lost after a crew member placed it on top of his car and drove away. A new video was cobbled together with unused footage, plus new footage shot by the group. The production assistant who drove off without the tapes was sentenced to stand in the city center with a sandwich board that said: "Lost Tapes, reward for return" on it.
"1979" was nominated for two Grammy Awards: Record Of The Year and Best Rock Performance. It didn't win but "
Bullet With Butterfly Wings" won Best Hard Rock Performance at that ceremony, giving the band their first Grammy.
Billy Corgan once joked, "We wrote this song for Michael Jackson, but found he couldn't do the Moonwalk to it." Corgan did a lot of interviews around this time and often said stuff like this to lighten the mood.
The husband-and-wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris directed the video. The supermarket mayhem in the clip is reminiscent of a video they did five years earlier: "
Been Caught Stealing" by Jane's Addiction.
There's a "we're all going to die anyway" message in this song, as you can hear in the lines:
We don't know just where our bones will rest
To dust I guess
Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below
Corgan has a reputation for being glum, which is why he jokingly titled the album Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, but he sees this song, and those lyrics in particular, as a discovery on life's journey.
"That's me turning the corner, finally stepping back from childhood," he explained to Q magazine in 1999. "What I love about '1979' is there's no pain in it. It's a resolution."
"1979" is Smashing Pumpkins' most popular song. Released as the second single from Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (following "Bullet with Butterfly Wings") it rose to #1 on Modern Rock and Mainstream Rock charts, the group's only #1 on either tally. It also went to #12 on the Hot 100, higher than any other Pumpkins song.
1979 happens to be the year Pink Floyd released their album The Wall, which sent many teenage boys into a voyage of self-discovery. Billy Corgan is a big fan of that album and inducted Pink Floyd into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 1996.
