Jellybelly

"Jellybelly" is a song from The Smashing Pumpkins' third studio album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Billy Corgan considered issuing the song as album's first single but it was passed over in favor of "Bullet with Butterfly Wings". The original riff dates back to 1992, when the band would jam on it during encores. Corgan has said the line "Living makes me sick, so sick I wish I'd die" is one of his all-time favorites.

I felt really close to 'Jellybelly', because it sounds to me like a classic Pumpkins song from a third album. It sounds to me like the manifestation of everything we've ever done on a third album, whereas 'Cherub Rock' sounded to me like a second album single. But 'Bullet's one of those songs where, you know, it's easy to sing along to and [he affects a drawl] ya gotta sell them records.

The song was covered by American emo group A Thorn for Every Heart on The Killer in You: A Tribute to Smashing Pumpkins.

Liner notes
Corgan, from the liner notes of the 2012 reissue: If memory serves the original riff dates backwards into 1992, where we'd spasmodically play some concoction of this song if there was nothing else to jam on in a 3rd encore. To spice things up the machine gun bit was added to chop up the monotony on the back end of the blues. Once we flipped the script to bring the rat-tat-tat up front, this led to far more excitement. Sped up tremendously, a Teutonic maelstrom emerged, until there was a starship waiting without a single lyric or melody to accompany it into space. A nihilist manifesto thrown like a pink hand grenade into an alley, I just went rode shotgun with the images until it sketched out nicely the gray of my suburban years. 'Jellybelly' holds one of my all-time favorite lines: 'Living makes me sick, so sick I wish I'd die.' Prescient indeed!

Equipment
In the Mellon Collie sessions, Corgan used a Marshall JMP-1 rack preamp, fed into an Alesis compressor to drive extra gain.