Les Smashing!

by RAF KATIGBAK

Twenty-four bottles of water. That’s what I will remember most about my trip last week to St-Malo, France. It won’t be the high, ancient stone walls of the medieval town proper, and it won’t be the charming Brittany seaside with its iconic striped sailor shirts, massive cawing seagulls and biting chilly August winds. It won’t even be the amazingly huge 30,000-person crowd at La Route du Rock festival that my band had the honour of taking part in, or even the mind-blowing experience of watching Sonic Youth perform their entire Daydream Nation album live, 20 feet away, from the side of the stage.

No, it will be 24 bottles of water.

Not just 24 bottles of ordinary water, mind you: 24 bottles of very special water. Norwegian artesian water—water collected from a confined underground aquifer (a water-bearing impermeable layer of rock, sand or ice). In other words, it’s the holy grail of water. The kind of water Jesus himself would drink if he were alive today and drove a gold convertible Hummer.

It was 24 of these particularly austere cylindrical clear bottles that Billy Corgan, leader of the semi-recently reformed Smashing Pumpkins, and headliner of the La Route du Rock festival, suddenly demanded a young festival volunteer retrieve the morning he arrived from a trendy boutique in the heart of Paris (the only place it’s sold in France). A trip that spanned a distance of 403 kilometres, a travelling time of 10 hours return, and at a cost of 200 euros.

This tale of superstar diva-osity was the first thing Gael, the young, scruffy, goateed runner that picked us up from the airport, told us when we asked him how the festival was going so far. He recounted the tale in that cutting, matter-of-fact half-scoff that the French seem to have perfected: “Les Smashing,” he huffed, “c’est des minables.”

I laughed it off and quietly filed it away under “Another exaggerated French bitch session” as we drove to the quaint coastal city. But when we arrived, I found that he wasn’t the only one talking about it. The other artists backstage at the massive fort where the main stage was located were all joking about it.

“I hear he just uses the water to flush his toilet,” ribbed Jace Lasek, frontman for Montreal’s Besnard Lakes who played right before the Pumpkins. The truth, in fact, was worse: the water was not even for Corgan, but for his crew (Corgan only drinks some esoteric imported Korean water). The more I heard people joking, the more cutting it got.

With his shameless self-promotion (taking a full page ad out in a Chicago paper to “thank the city” and announce his band is reforming) to his blatant cash grab covenants with box stores like Best Buy and Target (Google Pitchfork News—Smashing Pumpkins to Fans, Indie Stores: Fuck You), it’s no secret that Corgan has fallen from grace from the indie rock elite. Whenever his name was mentioned people scowled and dropped words like “pathetic” and “has-been.”

It didn’t help when, while hanging out behind the main stage, everyone was ushered behind some police tape by a behemoth of a man (Billy C’s personal body guard), so as to let Mr. Corgan make his grand entrance on stage, unfettered by the lowly artists who had the honour of sharing the bill. And it certainly didn’t help when we were shoved out of the way by said behemoth when the girl bassist Corgan got to replace the other girl bassist, and the Asian guitarist Corgan got to replace the other Asian guitarist, were being escorted to their private state of the art port-o-potty (which was later tipped by a particularly miffed UK band that shall remain nameless).

But heck, I didn’t let him get me down. I don’t care if he’s arrogant, desperate and reminds me of a manorexic version of Nosferatu. It didn’t diminish the awesomeness of seeing fellow Montrealers Besnard Lakes and Patrick Watson slay the crowd at their respective shows (standing ovations abounded), or the surreal site of watching Lee Ranaldo play Guitar Hero II backstage against a young coquettish 20-year-old French groupie (Ranaldo got his ass whupped), that shit was magic.

And what of the water? Well, I eventually snuck in back and got a mini dixie cup of the stuff. Did the taste make me feel like I was suddenly propelled into a magical Nordic fjord filled with rainbow elves juggling on dancing unicorns? No. Did drinking it make me feel, as one musician speculated, “like an angel was jerking off on my face while God gave me a golden shower?” No. It was just fucking water. But yeah, I guess it was pretty good for water.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca