User talk:DavidB

Hello friend! Thanks for creating Billy Corgan 2022-11-22 :)

I noticed you linked to Cyr and not Cyr (song), which I've now fixed. This is an easy mistake to make, so I wanted to let you know about the link highlight gadget that I just created. It will highlight redirects like like this and disambiguation pages like this, making it easy to identify and fix incorrect links. You can enable it in your gadget preferences.

Note that it's only links in templates that really need to be fixed. In prose, it's fine to link to for instance Mellon Collie instead of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. But in the {{infobox song}} template, the |album= parameter must match the page title exactly, and likewise for {{live song}} on live show pages.

Hope this helps, and that all is well on your end. The Philly SP show I'm sure was as amazeballs as the two shows I saw. What a tour!

Ah, of course...thanks for the heads up. I did the page so quickly and felt like I was missing something. I transcribed the interview and banter for that show today and it'll go up tonight or tomorrow.

I had a great time at the Philly show. Oddly enough, the third time I've attended a bill with Jane's Addiction on it and the third time I haven't seen them for one reason or another. Glad I taped since it seems like nobody else did and it was the longest of the arena shows. Hope you enjoyed your shows too!

I already did the social media blast for the "first ... since ..." factoids; I wish I had realized it was the first non-VIP performance since 1994!

Anyway, from our previous convos I got the hunch you lived in the NYC area? Are you attending Sea Hear Now by chance? If you are we should meet up! Let me know and I'll email my contact info ;) I plan to meet up with Pamela Fisher and other prominent SP fans, too.

I actually live in Jersey, 10 minutes outside Philly. I thought about hitting Sea Hear Now since it's only an hour+ drive from here but the ticket price was too much for the one band and a set I worried would be heavy on Cyr songs. Lol. Otherwise, I'd totally meet up - thanks for the idea. I'll keep it in mind if I ever go to another concert - going to Holmdel or Jones Beach would be a nice change of scenery over Camden.

Have fun though!

Ah bummer, I guess if you're only in it for SP it isn't worth it but there are so many other good bands playing in my opinion, hehe! Anyways I'll keep you in mind as well for future SP shows and related acts. I live in Manhattan but my mother in law lives near Holmdel so I go to many shows at PNC.

Cheers and good to see you editing again :) I was starting to think you had lost interest, hehe

Ha, just happened to finish work on the MCIS tour right before my family went on vacation, then my wife was out of town for a week and so on and so on. My younger kid started full day school this year so I can actually get to things on my to do list that hasn’t been touched in a couple of years. Cleaning out our garage isn’t sexy but man, it was driving me nuts, haha. Also been working on a few things that will go up eventually, like adding times for United States and some longer songs that vary in length while procrastinating on doing my pass on the 93-94 show banter. Anytime I think about the poor audio quality of recordings from that era and I just don’t want to do it, lol. I do have a couple of other ideas cooking but nothing started yet.

My wife likes to say my musical taste is stuck in the 90s and she’s totally right! I mean, I know who Patti Smith and Billy Idol are but don’t need to see them. Know Pearl Jam obviously but not a big fan and not sure how they’d top the one time I already saw them. Everybody else on the bill? 🤷‍♂️ And as I mentioned, worried the show would be Cyr heavy and that is easily the worst album Billy’s ever released. To be fair, the video I saw of Wyttch from Riot Fest looked more interesting than anything from the album. Ah well. Enjoy the show!

Hey thanks for joining :) You may have noticed the live show pages is a bit of a different system than on SPLRA. I created a help page that hopefully explains it. Basically, we use templates here instead of raw text. This puts the information in a database, so that index pages like The Smashing Pumpkins 2000 tour history or the "Tour stats" section at "The Everlasting Gaze" is automatically updated. Sometimes there is a little bit of a lag; you can get around that by purging the cache of the page with outdated info, but there's no need as it will update eventually on its own.

Also to note – banter uses wikitext rather than HTML. This isn't a hard requirement, but it's preferred just because in MediaWiki you always prefer wikitext over HTML. So for instance you would use '''Cherub Rock''' instead of <b>Cherub Rock</b>.

Anyway thanks for helping out! I will definitely be able to pull in all the banter changes you made since October 1 on SPLRA. The other changes (setlist, venue info, notes, etc.), are unfortunately harder to parse with automation. Once SPLRA updates their version of MediaWiki, it will be easier. Until then there's a lot of manual syncing :( So I really appreciate any efforts to keep both in sync, because they very kindly allowed me to import all their data and I want to help them too. No worries if it's too much work though, just edit wherever you want to.

Aside from the tour history, we've got plenty of other stuff to edit if it interests you. If you're bored, there's a to-do list with some ideas. Cheers and thanks again! 🎃🤘

Sorry, just noticing a month later that I had a message waiting here... Thanks for all the info.

I've been using wikitext at SPLRA anyway so easy to carry over that formatting here. Most of the setlist changes made recently were minor - adding "abandoned" versions of songs, etc. There were a few cases in which song teases were added, I'll manually port them over here as I come across them again. Sort of easy to find since they're only from shows with banter and most are from 2010 or later.

Since you and I last spoke, I've added banter for the Spirits in the Sky shows from 2009, SP shows from 2010-2016, and a few Billy solo shows over the years. I've been listening to all of the 2007-8 shows I haven't listened to already so fall 2007 will fill in slowly over the next few months. I'm just doing the banter for 2008 now since it could be months before I get to it otherwise and I'll never remember specifics when I get around to listening.

Finally, also did banter for a few fall 1996, winter 1997 and summer 1998 shows that were missing it or provided by a user I've found to be unreliable in their transcription. I think this stuff is still sitting in my master document waiting to be posted. It's possible but unlikely that I'll go back to shows pre-1996 since Rhinowing did most of them and his work is solid.

I did take a look at the help page a few weeks ago - at some point I'll have to go through the banter here and clean up album + song titles to fit the site's rules. Since SPLRA doesn't have any guidelines for them (that I've seen), it was just easier to ignore italics and quotation marks so I didn't have to remember what I used in the past.

Definitely want to add more info to various song pages, like info on different live arrangements used over the years. (Spring 2016 being a good example: Billy plays electric piano on x song, or x song is just played to a backing track with Billy and the ladies on vocals and Jeff on guitar.) I had a few other ideas too but will try to remember as I finish out the transcription from the remaining available shows.

One question I am curious about - do you happen to have any of the officially released live recordings from 2008? Hoping to fill in some of the gaps for shows that don't have audience recordings (plus they just sound great). I have October 31st, November 3rd, 4th & 8th, and December 5th & 7th. I might end up buying a few with Xmas money but am cheap.  :)

Thanks, DB

All good. We greatly appreciate all you're able to do! Don't worry too much about rules. The song titles in the banter section to me are mainly for finding where you are when listening to the recordings. If they don't match the titles in the setlist exactly, that's okay :) Use your discretion.

Unfortunately I have not gotten my bot to sync your banter changes from SPLRA. I think it's still possible, just challenging! For now whenever I go over the Today in history section, I cross-check the shows with SPLRA and manually copy over the banter, if missing. This is bad because it gives attribution to me in the revision history and not you, but I take it you're not bothered by this (I do leave the edit summary "from SPLRA", though). If you have the energy to update both sites, great, if not, that's okay too :)

As for 2008 live recordings, I assume you're talking about Live Smashing Pumpkins? I wish I had those tracks, but I do not :( Spot-checking it doesn't appear they are on archive.org, surely because of licensing issues. They are still available for purchase on nugs.net, at least. $0.99 a track comes out to be a bit pricey; I wish they had a deal to buy the whole lot! Oh well.

Cheers and thanks again!

I'm updating both sites when I upload new material - did a couple shows last night. I think it should be easy enough for me to go through and copy stuff over here. I use a Word emulator to type everything out - sometimes I can copy stuff back into it with the wikitext formatting on bold and italics intact and sometimes not (it turns the hash marks into apostrophes). If I can get that to work, just have to copy into Word, run a search and replace to get rid of all the line breaks, and then paste into this site. We'll see if I can get that working...

Now that I think about it - 2 things that came up last night: 1) I couldn't figure out how to add a checkmark for banter in the list of shows for a given year. Can you give me a quick explainer or would you just prefer I just send a list after I upload a bunch? For example, last night I did 1996-09-08 and 1996-09-14.

2) I was also trying to add an anchor to link back to within the banter for 2007-07-02 and couldn't quite figure it out. Billy and Jeff talk about limited edition 4:20 shirts that were made for the Asheville residency and they refer back to them several times over the next few years, getting amused when they see them in a crowd. Are you create the anchor for me or can we just create a separate page that can be linked to? Some Googling found me a picture of the shirts online that can be included.

No problem whatsoever with you getting the attribution for my work. Not like any fame or fortune will come from it, lol.

I think nugs does offer a deal for the entire tour package but it's still not that great. $300+ or whatever it is for the lot is still pricey for me. Since the shows were unavailable for many years, I was browsing the other day and even buying a 2 show/2 night package only gets a few bucks knocked off. Would be happy to share a couple shows with you if interested. I have MP3s readily available for the shows I cited in my last message - may still have FLAC on CDs in my basement (almost definitely 11/3 & 11/4 for starters) but can't be sure off the top of my head (and the quality may have degraded over 10+ years).

1) Here you use the {{banter}} template (example). The template ensures that the formatting is consistent and eliminates the need to enter <br> markup. When I copied banter from SPLRA, I usually just do a find/replace to remove all the <br> tags. Lastly, and most importantly, using the template will store in the database that banter exists for that show. This is the part that makes the check mark appear automatically wherever the show is listed (which can be on many pages, for instance venue pages like Metro). More info at Help:Tour history. Note there is some caching that might cause a delay in the automatic updates. You can force it to update immediately by purging the page where the checkmark is missing, but this isn't required.

2) I think that's a clever idea! You can use the {{anchor}} template for this (which basically does the same thing you did, except as a <span> tag instead of a <div>). You can now link to that part of the banter with The Smashing Pumpkins 2007-07-02#4:20shirts. Uploading a picture of the t-shirt would be cool too :)

Thanks man. I had a brain fart re the blockquote template. Shouldn't be a problem going forward since I'm now copying to this site and adding bolding and italics, then copying to SPLRA and adding the HTML line breaks. Also noticed the "auto checking," appreciate that I don't have to double back to add that.

I got the picture of the shirt uploaded. Wish I was able to find a better one but I guess I should be glad I was able to find one. Thanks for adding the anchor. I'll get the other shows linked back there soon.

One more question for you today... The FAQ answers this but there's an example running counter to what that says so I'll leave it up to you: copying from liner notes. Allowed or no? FAQ suggests it would not be allowed but all songs on Pisces Iscariot have info copied from the original booklet. In this case, I'm specifically thinking of the "track by track" notes from the reissues of the past 10 years.

Thanks!

A single quote or two in the lead is totally fine with attribution (such as using a reference, or the "author" and "source" parameters of the {{cquote}} template). However if there are too many quotes on one page you run into an issue called "quote farm". In general, for hard facts or something where the original wording could be improved, it's better to paraphrase in your own words to maintain an encyclopedic tone. Quotes shouldn't dominate an entire article or section, but the concept of using quotes is perfectly fine :)

The Pisces songs are good examples. There is only one use of {{cquote}} in the lead, which isn't overwhelming, and in fact it helps fill in the some of the otherwise very short articles. Overall, don't worry too much about it, just make sure it's clear it's a quote and not original content. If they are very long quotes, you might just quote the most interesting bits and paraphrase the rest in surrounding text.

From a legal standpoint, I don't really know where to draw the line. We're kinda already pushing it hosting the lyrics, but SPFC for instance has gotten away with this for decades. For lyrics, I try to change spelling and formatting so it doesn't match the original exactly. The likelihood of legal trouble is slim, but nonetheless still possible, and the same goes for excessive use of quotes.

Sounds good, makes sense to me, just wanted to see where you stood. Based on my limited knowledge, I think they have to request that you remove the content before they can take legal action but I am also not a lawyer.  :)

One last thing I forgot to mention yesterday, related to my inability to figure out how to update the main page for a tour. The page for the 20th Anniversary tour (https://spcodex.wiki/wiki/20th_Anniversary_tour) has a typo for the 2008-11-08 show in Atlantic City - you have "w:Borgata" instead of the link to the Wikipedia entry. I saw this while updating the venue on the individual show page to be more specific (Borgata has two concert venues) but it didn't auto update to the tour page the way entering banter might.

Thanks!

You found a bug! So pretty much all data you see on the tour pages (except the intro) comes from the database. That data gets stored by {{infobox live show}} which is used on every live show page. So normally, to fix any errors you just fix the infobox values for the corresponding show. The venue name, specifically, gets stored after being passed through the {{delink target}} template – that's where the bug was, which I've now fixed. The link target (not the link label) is what gets stored, and in this case w:Borgata Event Center happens to go the right Wikipedia page too, so I've fixed that link accordingly. If you run into this issue again, you can just remove the link to Wikipedia as it's totally optional (so put just Borgata Event Center instead of [[w:Borgata|Borgata Event Center]]).

Sorry I know this is a bit complicated, but hopefully the benefits of the database-driven design are showing :) Thanks for discovering the bug!

Definitely a little complicated, but I'll give it a try since I noticed a couple of other places where that same bug was occurring. Thanks!

Oh no, I fixed the bug. You shouldn't see the w: prefix in the venue names anywhere :) On tour pages, it won't link to the Wikipedia article, just so you now; it will only link to the local article if it exists. My suggestion about removing the Wikipedia link is if you see a different situation where the link target (i.e. Borgata) isn't the actual name of the venue (Borgata Event Center), since "Borgata" is what would be shown on Tour pages. Hopefully that makes sense.

Thanks for all of your awesome work!

No problem! By the way, you may have seen that I ported over the banter from all previously posted 2007 and 2008 shows. Partially a test to see how quickly it would go and partially just me being anal (generally minor edits that I made to all shows recently: adding SSB to United States, WR/WH to Heavy Metal Machine, etc.) but it went surprisingly fast. No need for a program or any work on your end to move that stuff, I should be able to handle it myself.  :)

By the way, bug appears to still be there - at least on the 2007-8 Zeitgeist tour page.  :)

Great! Glad to hear editing is quick enough for you :)

> By the way, bug appears to still be there - at least on the 2007-8 Zeitgeist tour page.

Okay this time it should be fixed, for real! I regenerated the data for all shows. Sorry about that!

Heh, you don't owe me any apologies! No worries.

Question for you since I'm re-doing some banter from 1998. Is there an easy way to flip "Summertime (tease) > Blank Page" to "Blank Page > Summertime (tease)" on most of the 1998 setlist pages without doing all of them manually? I'd argue that it should appear that way since Mike plays 10-12 notes of Blank Page before starting the Summertime tease at every performance. If it has to be done manually, I don't know that I care that much (LOL) but it's something that's always bothered me. Just wondering, thanks

Ugh, one more related question now that I'm into uploading the remaining banter from 20th anniversary shows in 2008. Everything Is Beautiful is listed as a cover of the 1982 Willie Nelson/Dolly Parton song; however, their version is (I think) a cover of the 1970 original written and performed by Ray Stevens. (Even if the Nelson/Parton version isn't quite a cover, check out the youtube link below - the SP version is much closer to the Stevens version.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Is_Beautiful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a45z_HG3WU

I'm assuming you pulled the info from SPLRA before I got around to updating everything there. On the song page here, the song title, songwriters, blurb at top and link itself are wrong. Obviously I can easily fix the first three myself but will the info at the tour date pages repopulate automatically? Also, does it matter if the song title in the link itself is wrong?

Thanks!!

> Is there an easy way to flip "Summertime (tease) > Blank Page" to "Blank Page > Summertime (tease)" on most of the 1998 setlist pages without doing all of them manually

Generally, yes, I can write a script for things like this. But it seems like there are only about 23 pages, so doing it manually might be quicker. I'm happy to help. Here's a query that shows all 1998 shows containing "Summertime". The first date, The Smashing Pumpkins 1998-05-31 has "Summertime (tease)" with "Blank Page" and yet another "Summertime" below it. I'm not sure if that's right or not? For the next one, 1998-06-01, I listened to the audio and it sounds like they played Blank Page in full, starting with what I think is a tease of "Summertime". So it would seem that is correct, no?

> Everything Is Beautiful is listed as a cover of the 1982 Willie Nelson/Dolly Parton song; however, their version is (I think) a cover of the 1970 original written and performed by Ray Stevens

Indeed, Ray Stevens is what we have down at "Everything Is Beautiful". There were only six shows with this song, so I fixed them all to point to that title, and I deleted "Everything's Beautiful (In Its Own Way)" (which was the page for the Nelson/Parton version).

For the {{live song}} template, yes, it must match the page title exactly, if there is one (but it's okay if there isn't). And yes, tour pages should update automatically.

Thanks for the Everything Is Beautiful fix! I would've taken care of the setlists but thank you for doing so.

I wouldn't mind handling the setlists with Blank Page/Summertime - I was being lazy but I suppose I didn't think about the fact that it might involve actual work on your end. :) Anyway, it's sort of a moot point, I think I'm just being a weirdo as far as which should be listed first. I can't speak to the May 31st show since Blank Page isn't included in the audio recording at LMA and I don't have the pro-shot VHS with it included. June 1st has about 7 seconds of the intro I'm talking about before he goes into Summertime, but June 19th may be a better example since it happens much more frequently through the tour.

Garson starts with a brief intro that sounds completely different from Summertime (to my untrained ear). Summertime appears to kick in at approx. 9 seconds into the track - I checked out a couple different variations on Summertime on Youtube and they both start with the melody at 9 seconds. After a period of Summertime and improv, at 1:11 Garson then returns to the melody that he starts the track with before kicking into Blank Page in full. I think I'm just going insane since Blank Page has such a clear starting point. Maybe I thought that since he never plays the same thing twice but yet always returns to that melody before starting Blank Page, it was part of that? Who the hell knows? This probably isn't worth the amount of time I've spent explaining all of this, lol. Sorry for the confusion.

Hey man - let me ask your opinion on something... If you haven't seen already, I've been re-transcribing the banter for the MCIS tour (posted up to early Feb. 96 at this point, although I'm currently working on April). On both April 14th + 15th, I noticed that although Billy says a version of "goodnight" after Mayonaise, it seems fairly clear that the band doesn't actually leave the stage afterwards, as both setlists indicate. When listening closely, there's no cuts or crossfades to indicate a gap in the recording. (On the 14th, the band pretty much goes right into Silverfuck and on the 15th, maybe 30 seconds elapse between Mayonaise and Bodies.)

I was going to go ahead and update the setlists on both dates to combine encores 2 and 3 but don't want to just make the assumption I'm right without getting a second opinion. I'm assuming Rhinowing sourced SPLRA from SPFC but firsthand sourcing obviously wasn't as easy in the mid-'90s so I can't be 100% sure SPFC was right with their info. If you have a moment, would you take a listen and tell me what you think? Links below for your convenience, including to the version of 4/15 that I'm using. (And fwiw, I'm combining files into a large WAV and then using a WAV Editor to make transcription easier - may not be as audible to the naked ear if using the LMA player.) Thanks!

https://archive.org/details/tsp1996-04-14.shn/

https://archive.org/details/tsp1996-04-15.flac16

I agree on April 14, but there's enough cheering from the crowd on the 15th that them leaving the stage, even just for half a minute, is believable. I can't say for sure if I've seen SP do it but bands sometimes pretend like they're about to leave the stage when there's a scheduled encore but don't, just to save time, if they know they're going to keep playing regardless. Maybe that's what they were doing here, because indeed ~30 seconds isn't very long. Or, the cheering could have been prompted by them simply dimming the lights momentarily. Who knows :) If you are confident, by all means feel free to combine the 2 & 3 encores for both shows. Cheers.

Heh, thanks, that works for me, I'm confident. I should have also mentioned that there's no audible cheer for band members coming back on stage. I absolutely get what you're saying - certainly seen shows like that myself - but it's very atypical for SP. For all the shows I've transcribed post-MCIS tour, including Zwan and solo shows, not sure I've come across an encore break (with no audible cuts on the tape) less than at least 90 seconds. It takes time to walk offstage! Appreciate the 2nd opinion though. :)

Actually ended up leaving 4/15 - if you combine the two encores, there's just too many songs and that many would be very atypical for the band as well. Reserve the right to come back to it again later though, haha.

Hey - went in and re-added the missing city (Vegas) for the Pearl Concert Theater - literally only added "Las Vegas, NV" as per another venue page and everything looked fine in the preview - but it looks like it threw off the coding for the venue performances somehow...? I can't figure out what I did wrong but wanted to give you a heads up in case you can figure it out. Thanks - DB

Yeah it's a bug with Cargo extension, which is what we use to store data in a structured format. It only happens if the Cargo query (in this case in {{venue performances}}) uses the template display format. The fix for now is to simply purge the cache after you save. I'm going to try to make this an automatic thing since obviously anyone attempting to make such changes is going to be very confused just as you were... either that or I can rewrite those templates to be Lua modules such that they don't need the template display format. I haven't gotten around to fixing it yet. Thanks for letting me know and sorry for buggy software!

Also, FYI, locations in infoboxes should always end with the ISO 2-letter country code. So "Las Vegas, NV, US" instead of just "Las Vegas, NV". I might have forgotten the country code in some other places, if so please feel free to fix those :) But again depending on what page your on you may need to purge the cache after saving if any templates look mangled.

While we're on the subject, I'm almost done adding coordinates to every show (for which coordinates are known). Once complete we'll have interactive maps on all the tour history pages \o/

No problem for the heads up and no apologies needed for the buggy software! Got it re country code, something I never remember but will try to be better about. Cool re coordinates!

By the way, I ended up splurging on the 2008 live shows on nugs that I didn't already have so as soon as I get around to uploading the already tracked banter, every single show from that tour will be complete! Ugh, my life is so sad that this passes for excitement, lol.

Hey dude--

Can you try your hand at IDing a song tease for me? Both times Jeff doodling during intros but I assume it's a cover tease since the shows are 11 months apart. Happened to stumble across within a day of each other. Sounds like La Grange but fairly certain it's not, unless he's intentionally playing it shitty.

At about 0:21 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSP9LXj2DWE

And at about 21:40 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiKTEqP4ZEw

Thanks! DB

One more example with a few extra notes tacked on at the end (be careful not to blow out your ears - the crowd noise is loud on this one):

At 1:36: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDCNiw9lZ2k

Finally got around to giving this a listen. I have to be honest... I can't make out anything he's playing at those moments. It's just so faint and quiet I can't even begin to guess as to what it is, haha. I'm amazed you're able to make a guess! If you're talking about the intro riff for "La Grange", I'm going to guess it's not judging solely by where Jeff's fingers are on the fret board. To me, it comes off as some little improvisation, perhaps a go-to melody he uses during the band introductions or when he's warming up. But I really am not sure.

Oh gosh! I hope you didn't spend too much time on it, I completely forgot to follow up and let you know that a friend of mine was able to ID it for me: Hot for Teacher by Van Halen! IIRC from my verification, I think it's the beginning of Eddie's solo. Of course the day after my friend IDs it, I transcribed banter for a show where Billy actually mentioned what it is, but glad it got figured out since I found at least 3 other teases of it since I reached out to you.

That said, I did find one more tease I haven't been able to ID since then. I can nail down that it's a Rush song, given that they're in Toronto and tease 2 other Rush songs immediately before. How big of a Rush fan are you?

Thanks for the admin rights. I'll have to check out what I can do with them. As you mentioned, probably shouldn't need them but may be helpful to have someday.

Upcoming for me: 1) Been transcribing a lot of banter off YouTube recently for shows without audio sources, that'll all get uploaded soon. 2) All that YouTube searching led to discovery of a bunch of dates that aren't here already and will be added - about 50/50 promotional appearances vs. appearances with other artists. (Some more interesting than others - not sure transcribing Billy's 2009 appearance before Congress will be high priority for me, lol.) 3) Have to go through MCIS, Adore and Arising tours to clean up notes sections and add wiki links to banter, as I recently did for 2000-2020. 4) Research is already done but have updates re first/last/final performances for songs from 2013-2017.

Awesome! Note that for #4 specifically, it's possible to automate the first/last performance thing. Right now we enter it manually in the "Notes" section, but each {{live song}} template could run a query and automatically indicate if it's the first/last performance. This way the pages update themselves. So for instance it could read:

"Cherub Rock" [live debut]

or

"Cherub Rock" [final performance]

The downside is a query must be ran for each individual song, which might slow down page loads a bit (especially for shows with a very long setlists). I need to run some tests and see just how much of an impact it will have.

It's probably also possible to automate things like "last performance until XXXX-XX-XX" but would look clunky inline with each entry in the setlist, and slow down page loads even more. So those I think should stay under "Notes".

---

Also, I've been meaning to ask you... do you think there's value in storing whether a song was performed acoustic in the database? Then you'd be able to answer questions like "when's the last time the band played Cherub Rock acoustic?" Or how many times it was played acoustic, etc. That might be cool. To do this, we'd introduce a new parameter to {{live song}}, so you'd enter it in like |acoustic=1 much like you do indicate teases and abandoned songs. Similar to above, this would put the "acoustic" indicator inline with each row in the setlist, as opposed to listing it under "Notes". So a live song entry could get pretty long, for example:

"Johanna" [Iggy Pop / James Williamson] (tease) (acoustic) [live debut]

Is that too much info for one line? Or do we like having this info under the "Notes" section (which we have to manually maintain)?

I know you've already put a lot work into listing which songs were played acousticly, so don't worry about having to go back through and add |acoustic=1 . I can write a bot to do that for us.

I agree re leaving "first/last performance since/until xxxx" in the notes section but think it's probably fine to add debut/final within the setlist itself pending your tests. Maybe a little confusing if viewing on a phone but would be fine on a computer.

I do think there is value in storing the acoustic info in the database. Not essential but it might be fun to be able to track # of acoustic performances, etc. I debated including "first acoustic performance since xxxx" with this last batch of research/edits but it would have been too much work. Don't mind going back to remove in notes and add acoustic=1 in the setlists if needed.

A few other questions re general maintenance/appearance: Is it possible to write a bot to change the header of the notes section to match the font size of the other headers on a given page? You may have intended it to be smaller so that it folds into the setlist dropdown on a phone, but the smaller header looks weird to me when using an actual computer and able to see multiple sections at once. Your call. I actually changed it manually on some pages where I was doing other edits but am happy to go back and readjust if you prefer it smaller.

The other two things are kind of related to the acoustic tag above, but also raise the question again of how much is too much on any line. I like the potential ability to see guest appearances next to the song name, similar to the @with tag at setlist.fm. If you exclude Jimmy Frog on Infinite Sadness, really not that intrusive because guest appearances are so infrequent.

Also, it really bugs me how MCIS is listed as a song in the Infinite Sadness tour setlists when (unlike the 2018 tour) I don't think there's any doubt that it's a tape there. Possible to add a tape=1 or intro=1 tag? I don't think cover artist info would be needed there and I can create pages for the (off top of head) 3 intros they've used that weren't a version of MCIS. Also don't mind going through and doing the work on this manually since it's applicable to so few tours and the music alternated in 2007, which would make it hard to write a bot. I suppose it does raise the question of how to list the intro used in August and fall 2008 tours since I don't know the name for it, but we could just use "2008 Intro" like I did in banter.

May be worth mentioning that one other thing on my to do list is to add a section on the Infinite Sadness tour page about all of the different segue tapes used and their changing placement, but I think adding that info within the setlists themselves would potentially clutter them up too much. Especially since it would mean adding them for the 2011 shows where they used tapes between basically every other song. Also a few random notes on show pages, i.e. "first appearance of Planet of the Apes intro tape before Thru the Eyes of Ruby" or "with this show, the circus intro tape moves to before BWBW, where it will remain for the rest of the tour".

> Don't mind going back to remove in notes and add acoustic=1 in the setlists if needed.

Done! You can now add |acoustic=1 in {{live song}}. Feel free to start using it now. Later I'll try to get a bot to help. For starters, I did this to a random show at The Smashing Pumpkins 2018-07-22. After that, the "Notes" section was empty, so I removed it.

> Is it possible to write a bot to change the header of the notes section to match the font size of the other headers on a given page? You may have intended it to be smaller

SPLRA had it programmed that way (level 3 instead of level 2), and I took it as notes about the setlist, itself. Any notes about the show such as "Jimmy arrived late" or "Show almost ended due to people throwing shoes" should go in the intro as prose. These are the interesting bits and are what gets shown in page previews, on social media, or in Google search results, etc. I'm fine with "Notes" being 2 or 3 level, so long as anything interesting that's not directly related to the setlist is also in the intro as well :) Any especially interesting setlist-related things can go in the intro as well, of course.

> I debated including "first acoustic performance since xxxx" with this last batch of research/edits but it would have been too much work.

Once we have all the acoustic=1 parameters plugged in, doing the research is as simple as running a query! I've been wanting to explore with making charts, too. Perhaps a pie chart on each tour page showing number of acoustic/non-acoustic/tease/abandoned/etc.?

> I like the potential ability to see guest appearances next to the song name, similar to the @with tag at setlist.fm. If you exclude Jimmy Frog on Infinite Sadness, really not that intrusive because guest appearances are so infrequent.

This is a good point. Right now we just have personnel in {{infobox live show}} and we include people even if they just played triangle in one song. That I like; it makes it easy to see which shows artists shared the same stage.

But I agree some granularity on a per-song level would be nice. So how about if we have something like:

• 1979
  Jimmy Flemion on drums, Jimmy Chamberlin on guitar

It could be entered in with something like |with=Jimmy Frog=Drums,Jimmy Chamberlin=Guitar. How does that sound?

> it really bugs me how MCIS is listed as a song in the Infinite Sadness tour setlists when (unlike the 2018 tour) I don't think there's any doubt that it's a tape there. Possible to add a tape=1 or intro=1 tag?

Yes! Would |pa=1 make sense, so that it shows "(over PA)" like we're manually entering now? But anyway, having it stored this way in the database means we can exclude it from other counts. Indeed, it shouldn't say at Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (song)#Tour stats that the song was played 208 times in full, heh!

> May be worth mentioning that one other thing on my to do list is to add a section on the Infinite Sadness tour page about all of the different segue tapes used and their changing placement

That sounds great to me! Infinite Sadness tour is embarrassingly missing any content besides just the list of shows (compare with Adore tour).

As always, thanks for your help! I'll get back to you about the |with= parameter.

> You can now add |acoustic=1 in "[[{{{1}}}]]" . Feel free to start using it now. Later I'll try to get a bot to help. For starters, I did this to a random show at The Smashing Pumpkins 2018-07-22. After that, the "Notes" section was empty, so I removed it.

Cool. I'll update manually whenever I have an edit on an individual page. One thought is that it might potentially clutter a page for things like 2016 In Plainsong, where Malibu and Spaniards were the only electric songs (not counting solo keyboard Disarm). Would also potentially have to manually remove "acoustic" on piano songs on Billy's solo tours.

> SPLRA had it programmed that way (level 3 instead of level 2), and I took it as notes about the setlist, itself. Any notes about the show such as "Jimmy arrived late" or "Show almost ended due to people throwing shoes" should go in the intro as prose. These are the interesting bits and are what gets shown in page previews, on social media, or in Google search results, etc. I'm fine with "Notes" being 2 or 3 level, so long as anything interesting that's not directly related to the setlist is also in the intro as well :) Any especially interesting setlist-related things can go in the intro as well, of course.

Got it, thanks.

> Once we have all the acoustic=1 parameters plugged in, doing the research is as simple as running a query! I've been wanting to explore with making charts, too. Perhaps a pie chart on each tour page showing number of acoustic/non-acoustic/tease/abandoned/etc.?

Works for me!

> This is a good point. Right now we just have personnel in [infobox] and we include people even if they just played triangle in one song. That I like; it makes it easy to see which shows artists shared the same stage.

But I agree some granularity on a per-song level would be nice. So how about if we have something like: 1979 (Jimmy Flemion on drums, Jimmy Chamberlin on guitar) It could be entered in with something like |with=Jimmy Frog=Drums,Jimmy Chamberlin=Guitar. How does that sound?

That generally works for me. If possible, I'd add "with" or something similar before the guest's name for clarity. Also, it might make more sense in most cases to simply note alternate instruments, such as "Jimmy plays guitar," on the tour pages. It remains maybe 95% constant on each tour and could potentially clutter a page up. Just using Shiny tour as an example, just OTOH: 1) Jimmy plays ukulele on Baby Mine 2) Billy plays some sort of keyboard on 3 songs, doesn't play an instrument on maybe 5-6 more, and is off stage completely for Blew Away 3) Katie plays acoustic guitar on Blew Away 4) I'd have to look it up, but Jack and Jimmy play keyboard on (I believe) 33 (and are off stage for Landslide). Pretty sure Jeff plays keyboard on one song too but I may be confusing with late 2018/2019 Disarm.

The list of one offs that I can think of are random 2011 To Sheila, 2000 Storytellers 1979 actually has Jimmy playing drums IIRC, and a few songs here and there in early 2000 with Billy playing keyboards.

Generally fine with however you feel about it, but that sort of general alt instrument rundown by tour is on my to do list as well. Possibly on individual song pages as well, such as when songs like Disarm and 1979 are played with or without backing tracks on different tours.

> Yes! Would |pa=1 make sense, so that it shows "(over PA)" like we're manually entering now? But anyway, having it stored this way in the database means we can exclude it from other counts. Indeed, it shouldn't say at Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (song)#Tour stats that the song was played 208 times in full, heh!

I think so, although everything including the live music comes through the PA, technically. Maybe I'm being nitpicky (and I won't be offended if you tell me I am, lol), but may be another way to say it.

Thank you for all of your hard work!

Yo - hope this isn't too confusing but since it relates to something else discussed in this thread, I figured it would be best here.

I've started adding the acoustic=1 tag in a few places. I believe the End Times tour is the only thing I've done from start to finish so far, if you want to use that as a template for pie charts or other things. Anyway, it occurred to me that a piano=1 tag for Billy's solo shows might be beneficial too, since there's at least a few songs that were performed acoustic in 2017 and on piano in 2019 or vice versa. I've been adding piano info in notes for now but can easily move the info later. I'm happy to create the tag myself - I'm sure I probably have access through the admin links - but can't find info on how to do so. I can probably figure it out if you can point me towards the starting point. :) Thanks!

I think a piano=1 tag would be nice! I agree it would work well for Billy's solo shows, but it could be misused in other places. For instance, with SP, Billy sometimes plays piano accompanied by the band. I guess I could make this option work only for Billy's shows, and be ignored elsewhere?

Implementing it isn't very straightforward, but I can try to explain it if you really want. The relevant template here is Template:Live song which is powered by the Module:Live song, and that's where you'd need to do the actual programming. But don't worry about it, I'm happy to implement it.

Okay, piano=1 has been added. See Billy Corgan 2019-11-18 as an example. I have not made this flag exclusive to Corgan solo shows (though it is technically possible to do this). I am pretty sure there are SP shows where a song here and there is only Corgan on piano, and it can be used there, as well as maybe some Mike Garson jams, etc. But I'm not sure the flag should be used if there's anything other than just piano, right?

I've also added the automatic "(live debut)" feature. See The Smashing Pumpkins 2012-05-24 as an example. This is only shown for full performances; not abandoned, teased or soundchecked. As far as I can tell, the extra queries aren't noticeably slowing down page loads. Even the farewell show loads reasonably fast for me. If we want, I can add an automatic "(final performance)" notation, too.

Thanks for adding the piano tag. My inclination is to make it exclusive to his solo shows, since solo piano songs are so rare at SP shows (off top of head, possibly only For Martha at the 2015 Plainsong run, maybe one or two shows early in 2000?). Adding piano to other songs (like For Martha or To Sheila at the 2018 shows) with other band members playing or Garson would get confusing fast, especially if we then felt obligated to add alternate instrument info for other band members as well. I picture the 2016 Plainsong shows, where damn near every song has a different variation, and my head almost explodes. I think that info is better saved for the overall tour pages, whenever I get around to adding that stuff, since that info has usually been consistent across each full SP tour.

I went through Billy Corgan 2019-11-18 and added the acoustic notes to each non-piano song as an example - as long as you don't think it looks too cluttered, I'll go through and update all of the 2017 and 2019 solo shows.

One thing that could use a quick update re the above is adding a space after the parentheses for piano, so that any other notes don't run together. For example, check out track 20 at Billy Corgan 2019-11-18 - no space between "(piano)(final performance)". There's another instance of this happening (not acoustic=1) but I'll have to get back to you since I don't remember off top of head.

I've already seen the live debut and final performance notes and they look good! If you're happy with it, let me know and I'll start deleting that now duplicative info in the notes sections.

I've fixed the spacing issue, I believe. I also made "(piano)" and "(acoustic)" in gray font, which I think makes it look less cluttered. So feel free to add these tags to any other pages.

Some things I can easily write a bot task for, if you'd like:

• Removing the redundant "First performance..." and "Final performance..." notes
• Fix the numbering across sections for example with <li value=10>

I can probably make the bot add acoustic=1 too (when there are notes listing the relevant songs), but that is more prone to error. It may be better to slowly do this over time by hand. I'll help out as well.

Thanks. I like the gray on piano, acoustic, tease, etc. Happy to have you write a bot for removing the redundant first and final, as well as fixing the numbering, as long as it's not too much work. No rush, I don't mind correcting both as I go along with other stuff.

No big deal re adding acoustic info by hand either. I can tell you that I have a bunch of edits coming up in 1996-1999 (largely adding wiki links to banter since they were transcribed for SPLRA), so I can handle everything in those years. I also have to go in and add intro music for whatever years I listed previously, although the bulk of that work will be in 2007-2008.

I think that's it for now....

(Starting a new section to keep our conversations more organized)

I wanted to say, I'm keen on transcribing interviews such as Billy Corgan 1997-02-19, but we should distinguish them as just interviews and not actual live shows. When I first imported everything from SPLRA, I skipped interview-only appearances, as well as book signings, etc., anytime when there was no actual music performed. This is because they aren't actually shows and it can throw off the statistics and categorization. For instance Billy Corgan tour history says he performed 226 live shows, but if we were to interviews, etc., that number is misleading.

So basically, I think we need a new infobox template. Later tonight I will fork {{infobox live show}} and create something like {{infobox interview}}, and we can use that instead. I suppose for now these won't show up on the tour history pages like 1997 tour history. Maybe instead I can create a dedicated page listing interviews.

That said, there are of course some interviews that were also shows, such as Billy Corgan 2000-02-17. What I can do is add a parameter to {{infobox live show}} to indicate that event was also an interview, and that can make it show up on the new interview list pages. Not sure if I'm making any sense... ha, but anyway for now please hold off on creating more pages on interviews until I get all the engineering stuff figured out. I just don't want to throw off the stats :)

Thanks!

Sure, no problem, I get it. May I suggest broadening to something like "appearances"? You can make the call on what you think is worthy of inclusion or not, but just glancing at my to do list, there's a few things along the lines of:

2012-11-09: "Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan helped auction off a private acoustic performance and sit-down tea with him at...Zuzu's. After a bidding war between three guests, Billy generously offered the same chance to each bidder, all together raising $90,000 for homeless pets." (https://www.candidcandace.com/my_weblog/2012/11/paws-itively-the-best-fur-ball-yetand-billy-corgan-helped.html)

Another example that may actually fall into the interview category (haven't reviewed yet) is the 2015-05-18 press conference with Billy and Marilyn Manson for the End Times tour. You can find the approx. 40 minute video on YouTube.

Last example: 2018-11-14 (Smashing Pumpkins listening party at the Adler Planetarium during the WGN Morning News Primetime Special, hosted by Ana Belaval; also includes Jeff) (video here: https://www.facebook.com/WGNMorningNews/posts/2234400083239179?comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22O%22%7D)

I did find a video from a Cheap Trick concert where Rick Nielsen throws a pick or something from the stage and Billy catches it in the crowd, so there is a line somewhere, haha.

Broadening to "appearances" is something we can look into! Before I saw your reply I created {{infobox interview}} (see documentation) and updated Billy Corgan 1997-02-19 to make use of it. Here we have just the infobox, an intro, and what I'm calling the Dialogue section. Does this format make sense, you think?

I think both the press conference with Manson and the WGN special could count as interviews. The auction does not, but I'll look into a system for general appearances. For now I guess let's stick to interviews/press conferences, etc.

Works for me! Ditto general appearances - I'll keep a list and they can be added down the road or not. Thanks.

You have done an awful lot for SPCodex. I don't know that you'll ever need the admin tools, but I certainly trust you with them, and it would be good to have more than one person with admin rights on this wiki. All this does is give you a few extra buttons, like deleting pages and blocking users. Every once in a while we get a spammer, so if you come across one you can block them / delete their nonsense, etc. You can learn more about what new rights you have at mw:Manual:Administrators.

Also, you can more easily purge the cache of pages now (like the issue we have with tour history pages sometimes not updating). For that, look for the "Purge Cache" link under the "More" menu.

Thanks again for all you do!