Thirty-Three

"Thirty-Three" is the final single from The Smashing Pumpkins's third studio album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It was also the first single released after the firing of Jimmy Chamberlin and death of Jonathan Melvoin. The song peaked at 39 on the US Billboard Hot 100, number seven in New Zealand and the top 30 on multiple charts in Canada and the United Kingdom. In Canada it coincidentally finished at number 33 on the RPM Alternative 30 year-end chart for 1997.

Background
About the song, Billy Corgan said it was "A simple song in a country tuning" and was the first song written by Corgan after the Rock Invasion tour. The guitars recorded in the song are tuned to EGBGBE half a step down. The drum machine track is exactly the same track Corgan recorded when he laid down the demo version of the song, because he "couldn't remember how to recreate it". Corgan also explained that the "stringly sounds" in the recording are a vocoder with five slide guitars, each tuned to a single note to create the chords.

Corgan joked on an August 24, 2000 taping of VH1 Storytellers that he planned on making "Thirty-Three", "Sixty-Six", and "Ninety-Nine", but only finished "Thirty-Three". On a more serious note, he explained that when he was 27 years old, a tarot card reading told him his life would completely change at the age of 33.

When the band released their greatest hits collection in 2001, Thirty-Three made neither the international nor the US version. It was included, however, for the Greatest Hits Video Collection.

The cover artwork is a rendering of Grigori Rasputin's face, with Vladimir Lenin's face towards the bottom-left.

Single release
At the time of its release, the plan to release the song as the album's final single was a point of disagreement for insiders. Sources close to the band claim that "Muzzle" was in fact due to be released as the final single, as is evidenced by the fact that a promotional single for the song was issued to radio stations worldwide.

Music video
The music video for "Thirty-Three", directed both by Billy Corgan and then-girlfriend Yelena Yemchuk, is a series of images shot in stop-motion, ending with a re-enactment of the Mellon Collie album cover. Jimmy Chamberlin is notably absent from shots of the band. Because the group's videos so often avoid the literal interpretation of lyrics, the video for "Thirty-Three" was created with images closely related to the words of the song, as an intentional stylistic departure.

B-sides
The B-side "The Last Song" features a guitar solo by Corgan's father, William Corgan Sr. and was performed live in full only once, at the Pumpkins final show at Chicago's Cabaret Metro.

The B-side "My Blue Heaven" features piano by Keith Brown, a song written in 1927 by George A. Whiting and Walter Donaldson.

Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne and Ivy fame contributed piano for the B-side "The Bells".