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Music & Film Tue Jul 10 2007
Reckless to Smashing Pumpkins: F*** You Right Back
By now you may have heard that the new Smashing Pumpkins release, Zeitgeist, will arrive in four different flavors: Best Buy, Target, and iTunes all get unique bonus tracks while other retailers get a standard pressing -- a distribution scheme known in the industry by the technical term "making you buy the same record four times," or, more commonly, "dickslapping the fans." It doesn't look like local indie powerhouse Reckless Records is giving Mssr. Corgan a pass for this behavior, however -- Reckless has declined to place any orders for Zeitgiest and will not stock new copies of the record. It's a small gesture that won't have any huge effect on album sales (the fact that Zeitgeist kinda sucks will probably take care of that), but it's always nice to see an indie fight back. "We all kinda weighed in and decided that if we were going to be inconsequential to Billy and the Pumpkins, than we should make him him inconsequential to our sales," says Dylan Posa, manager of Reckless's downtown location. That downtown location, by the way, is a symbol of how well indie shops like Reckless are doing -- it just opened, in stark contrast to major music stores, which have been closing their doors. Looks like the Pumpkins might have bet on the wrong horse in the long run.