The odds are good that if you’re a student at Western Carolina University you probably lived through the ’90s, unless you’re some sort of child prodigy. But for most students, the ’90s hosted the awkward squeaking voices and general discovery of advanced hygiene practices of puberty and (or) the walking, ticking drama bombs that just discovered an interest in the opposite sex of adolescence.At any rate, if you lived through the ’90s and were musically savvy (or a Halloween hooligan) you’ve probably heard of the Smashing Pumpkins. It was a band and, if you were cool, you liked them. If you don’t remember, the Smashing Pumpkins formed in 1988 and released their album, Gish, in 1991 followed by nearly a dozen other mainstream albums including a handful of compilations and greatest hits albums. They released what was, arguably, their best album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, in 1995. You might remember their singles from back when MTV managed to sneak music videos in-between episodes of Road Rules and the Real World. Sadly, the band broke up in 2000.That was the bad news. But now, seven years later, the good news has finally rolled around and the Smashing Pumpkins have reunited, including front man Billy Corgan and drummer Jimmy Chamberlain, both of whom are original members of the band, for an international tour. Once the band finishes in Europe, they will perform at the Orange Peel in Asheville (that city that’s about an hour away from Cullowhee that has places to sit down to eat and a Target) for nine nights. The band will be rocking your socks off on June 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30 and July 2, 3 and 5. Of course, that’s assuming you were one of the lucky few who were able to order tickets from TicketWeb, an online distributor, before massive traffic crashed the server, or were one of the individuals who were able to buy a ticket off of Ticketmaster after the sales were switched onto their beefy servers. If you weren’t, then you will have to log onto straight-out-of-luck-dot-com because those tickets were going and are gone.Band Management required that tickets for the shows be available online only in order to avoid the time-honored tradition of scalping the night of the show. Good news if you’re one of those people who are annoyed by jerks scalping tickets for triple their worth, bad news if you are a jerk who scalps tickets for triple their worth (or if you are without a speedy internet connection).In just five minutes each of the 8,478 tickets available for all nine shows sold out for what might just be the best show that the Orange Peel, or even Asheville, has ever seen. The ’90s may be well behind us, but it’s good to see that some of the greatest music of the decade didn’t end with it.
