Summer 1989 – Reel Time Studios

The Summer 1989 Reel Time Studios sessions were more recording sessions with Mark Ignoffo, intended to constitute the first Smashing Pumpkins album. Fortunately for the future of the band, these sessions did not produce an album as anticipated but the second demo tape Moon Demo. Billy Corgan also compiled a promotional tape from these sessions that is known as the Gish Basement Tape, used for bookings and label solicitation in 1989 and 1990. Corgan also made a number of homemade mix tapes for friends and fans that featured different configurations of material from these sessions. While about half of the sessions have appeared on various releases, the remaining half can be found on bootlegs, the highest quality as unmastered final mixes compiled on a DAT tape that had belonged to Mike Potential.

According to Corgan, the album originally came from The Smashing Pumpkins' early vow of poverty. "The roots of Gish are the fact that the band had a policy then that nobody made any money from the shows, so we could save up to record," he explains. "It was amazing that everyone agreed to it because none of us had any money back then. So by 1989 we had collected a couple grand from playing club gigs. A guy named Mark Ignoffo, who lived in the neighborhood near where I worked at the used record store, had just graduated studio-engineering school. It turned out he had set up a studio in his parents' basement, so in 1989 we took that saved money and made an album — even though we had no one to make an album for. There was absolutely nobody interested in our band. So we just made an album-plus worth of material hoping somebody would become interested. And if you listen to that material, it sounds very much like Gish turned out."