Professor of Rock

Some of the best songs ever recorded were never released as singles. But today, they have become bigger than a lot of these legendary bands’ biggest hits. Today we're counting down the most beloved album cuts that became the band’s signature tracks, and for starters, we have an acoustic track that’s become the most-streamed song in the Beatles catalog… despite being purposely passed over back in the day. It ended up bettering every massive hit the Beatles have ever released, and they had dozens of #1 hits…Then there’s Kurt Cobain, who wrote a harrowing tale about living homeless under a bridge to explain his song's haunting origins… but it turns out the story was totally fabricated and debunked by his bandmate after he passed. Plus the song that you won’t get through without collapsing in complete devastation. The most soul-crushing song in history. Plus the Smashing Pumpkins song that got its bizarre title from a Japanese translation blunder. It was deemed too long and too strange for radio, but has since become one of their most essential songs. And that’s where we’re starting the countdown. Let’s get into it. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Executive Producer Brandon Fugal Honorary Producers David Roche, Bob Bell, Holly, W.T.F, James Dorsey, Bruce Suit ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe to the Professor of Rock Podcast Apple: https://apple.co/445fVov Spotify: https://spoti.fi/42JpfvU Amazon: https://amzn.to/44b5D6m iHeartRadio: https://bit.ly/444h8MO ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Patreon: http://bit.ly/ProfessorofRockVIPFan Merch Store: https://professor-of-rock-lsn-shop.fourthwall.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/Instagram_Professor_of_Rock #classicrock #70smusic #vinylstory #70srock Hey Music Junkies let’s get into the greatest albums cuts in rock history. Make sure to subscribe below Alright so starting things off at #7, it’s a song that came from a translation blunder. it’s the Windy City quartet of Billy Corgan, James Iha, D’arcy Wretzky and Jimmy Chamberlain… known as The Smashing Pumpkins. And the song is Mayonaise. Mayonaise was written in late 1992 and recorded at Tritonus Sound in Georgia, serving as the 10th track on The Smashing Pumpkins' breakthrough Siamese Dream. Clocking in at nearly 6 minutes, the song was as the emotional center of the album, bridging dream-pop acoustic textures with walls of heavy, distorted fuzz guitars. The story behind the bizarre title of "Mayonaise" did not come from a trip to the kitchen refrigerator, but from a translation blunder. While touring Japan in 1992, the Pumpkins opened a promotional fan booklet printed by their Japanese record distributor… and inside they discovered that a line from their 1991 album Gish had been hilariously mistranslated as "mayonnaise seas." Amused, Billy Corgan and James Iha adopted "Mayonaise" as the working title for an unrecorded instrumental demo, and the name stuck. The recording sessions for Siamese Dream were infamous for Billy Corgan's tyrannical oversight, as he re-recorded nearly all guitar and bass tracks himself… driving bandmates James Iha and D'arcy Wretzky to complete mental breakdowns. But "Mayonaise" was the rare exception to this toxic dynamic. James brought the core chord progression and demo directly to Corgan, who loved it and collaborated on the arrangement and vocals… making it one of the few true team efforts on the album. Describing the intense pressure that fueled the album's recording, Corgan reflected on his studio obsession, "It's hard to explain without sounding like you're completely insane, but making it was like feeling like you're looking at a distant horizon and knowing that, if you stay focused and true to yourself, you'll get there. I wish from Day 1, people would have looked at me and said, 'You're all right, come on, join the team,' but it's never been that way with me. I don't know why, maybe I'm a dick…” Mayonaise was passed over as an official commercial single during the promotion of Siamese Dream in 1993 and 1994. Instead, the label pushed four shorter, radio-formatted tracks—"Cherub Rock," "Today," "Disarm," and “Rocket.” With its long runtime and unconventional structural shifts, label executives considered "Mayonaise" too long for standard radio rotation. And they kept it as an unreleased album cut for fans to discover on the full LP. But over the years, "Mayonaise" has earned a reputation as the crown jewel of 90s alt-rock, routinely voted by fans as the Pumpkins' greatest track. In April 2023, 23 years after its release, "Mayonaise" was featured in a pivotal episode of the Emmy-winning Netflix series Beef, triggering a viral resurgence that sent it to #5 on both the