Adore tour

The Adore tour kicked off with a televised performance on Later... with Jools Holland in London, and continued through 21 countries, ending in Argentina. Some dates abroad were billed as An Evening with The Smashing Pumpkins. The band performed at a number of at what had been called an "eclectic mix of interesting venues", among them the rooftop of a FNAC record store in Paris, France, in the botanic gardens of Brussels, Belgium, at the Cannes Film Festival, and at an International Shipping Harbor in Sydney, Australia.

Back home in United States, the Pumpkins donated 100% of their ticket profits to local charities. In the end, the band raised more than $2.8 million, while also funding expenses out of pocket (yet one stop on the tour, July 17, 1998 in Minneapolis, was a free concert and underestimated the attendance of the show).

The lineup was the most expansive yet. With original drummer Jimmy Chamberlin out of the band, John Mellencamp and Melissa Etheridge drummer Kenny Aronoff took the lead, with Dan Morris and Stephen Hodges on backup percussion. Famed pianist Mike Garson served as the keyboardist. In retrospect, Corgan regretted the decision to hire the two percussionists to play alongside Aronoff, instead of having the drummer play along with loops from the album. "That drove Kenny up the wall because Kenny has perfect time and one guy played on top and the other behind. I remember Kenny saying, 'I feel like I'm tripping on LSD' because he kept hearing things that were not in time, and it drove him crazy," said Corgan in the Adore reissue liner notes. Performing with Garson was also challenging because, according to Corgan, "he made a decision 40 years ago that he would live in the intuitive flow of what he was feeling, so he literally cannot play the same thing twice. So we'd have gigs where he'd have that same magic as on Aladdin Sane and the next night he'd come and play the extreme opposite style—like honkytonk. I really respect Mike, but to play with him was always challenging; precisely because he is such a supreme musician."

The sets mainly consisted of Adore material, with only a handful of reworked Mellon Collie songs and no songs from prior to 1995, eliminating many of their radio hits and fan favorites, with the exception of some shows performed in South American countries like Brazil and Chile, where they played for the first time, so they included old hits like "Today" and "Disarm". The tour also saw several festival appearances and the band's first visit to Mexico, before ending in Buenos Aires, Argentina on August 21, 1998.