The Smashing Pumpkins had their biggest hit with this looped and sampled coming of age story. It was the last song completed for their 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness' album. As they were getting down to the end of the album, Billy Corgan wanted to include '1979', even though it was unfinished. Producer Flood gave Corgan 24 hours to make it happen; so he went home and wrote the lyrics and they recorded it the next day. The song topped the Canadian Alternative, US Modern Rock, and US Mainstream Rock charts and was nominated for two Grammys: Record Of The Year and Best Rock Performance.
Corgan considers: "Sometimes, when I write a song, I see a picture in my head. For some reason, it's just sort of an obscure memory I have. and the memory that I have for this particular song was I was about 18 years old and i was driving down the road near my home and it was really heavily raining as only it can seem to rain in a gloomy way it can in Illinois and I remember just sitting at a traffic light...and that's the memory and I don't know why that memory sort of stayed. but that's the memory I wrote the song from. that sort of feeling of sitting in a car at a traffic light. I know it doesn't sound very glamorous; but it emotionally connotes for me a feeling of waiting for something to happen, and not being quite there yet, but it's just around the corner."
Shakedown 1979, cool kids never have the time
On a live wire right up off the street
You and I should meet
Junebug skipping like a stone
With the headlights pointed at the dawn
We were sure we'd never see an end to it all
And I don't even care to shake these zipper blues
And we don't know
Just where our bones will rest
To dust I guess
Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below
Double cross the vacant and the bored
They're not sure just what we have in store
Morphine city slippin dues down to see
That we don't even care as restless as we are
We feel the pull in the land of a thousand guilts
And poured cement, lamented and assured
To the lights and towns below
Faster than the speed of sound
Faster than we thought we'd go, beneath the sound of hope
Justine never knew the rules,
Hung down with the freaks and the ghouls
No apologies ever need be made, I know you better than you fake it
To see that we don't even care to shake these zipper blues
And we don't know just where our bones will rest
To dust I guess
Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below
The street heats the urgency of sound
As you can see there's no one around
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