This past week we’ve given a lot of love to the 25th anniversary of Nirvana’s appearance at the infamous WFNX 8th birthday party, a Lansdowne Street-wide bash that went down the night before Nevermind would hit the shelves and change the course of music. On Monday we posted video of Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins playing a bit of “Crisco Twister” at Bill’s Bar (well, it was mostly just Krist Novoselic taking part), and on Wednesday we revisited Duane Bruce’s audio from Nirvana’s raucous full set at Axis.
In each post we’ve talked about that Axis lineup: Cliffs of Dooneen and Bullet LaVolta repped Boston, and the Smashing Pumpkins would play a 30-minute set less than four months after they released debut album Gish on Caroline Records.
For a 2011 post for the Boston Phoenix, Bruce — who just released his radio memoir, Hang The DJ — provided the alt-weekly with an mp3 of the Pumpkins’ entire set, and you can stream and or download it here.
“They cranked through 80 percent of Gish with machine gun precision and were done,” Bullet LaVolta’s Todd A. Philips wrote a few years back. “The crowd smoked a collective post-coital cigarette as we set up our gear.”
At the end of their performance, you can hear Bruce quip, “I just saw god.”
Billy Corgan probably heard him.
DOWNLOAD: Smashing Pumpkins, live at Axis, September 23, 1991.
