My Favorite Shirt - Diego Muñoz
Why did I choose this ratty, discolored, and possibly BOOTLEG shirt? To that, dear reader, I implore you to just look at the darned thing.
Diego Muñoz is one of my best friends. He’s also a connoisseur of punk, new wave, and metal t-shirts. Great qualities to look for in a person.
In my mind’s eye it’s 2007, and Diego’s wearing an old Refused shirt at Das Fun Haus. Or it’s 2011, and he’s rocking a Joy Division shirt, but not the one you’d expect. Or it’s 2019, approximately six months before the Endless Quarantine, and he’s giving my kids their first pedicab ride to Mario’s. I believe he had on a Sade t-shirt.
When Diego agreed to write this column, I knew he’d bring the heat. But don’t take my word for it, see for yourself.
It’s too late to turn back now.
My favorite shirt is an XL Smashing Pumpkins shirt from the 1996 Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness tour that I thrifted after school sometime in 2003/2004 in Streamwood, Illinois. Even at that point, it had seen better days and had a sizable hole in the armpit. In the intervening years, it has accompanied me to many a disgusting DIY show and bears the stains to prove it. At the time I acquired it, the shirt was many magnitudes larger than any of my other clothes. Like many other teenage boys, I was lanky, and the milieu I was desperately attempting to insert myself into (that of hardcore, screamo, and what was pejoratively dubbed “scene”) wore their clothes fucking TIGHT. Ball-hugging tight, raise-your-arms-and-your-navel-will show tight. I’m sure that, to my poor immigrant parents, seeing their oldest child transition from enormous clothes that felt like a waste of fabric to basically skin-tight in under six months was a bit of a mindfuck. Combined with the incongruous size, my desire to project an image that sneered at anything mainstream, and the fact that my sister Maria Fernanda was constantly “borrowing” it (she’s much more a Pumpkins fan than I could ever hope to be), the shirt didn’t see a lot of action for some years.
Still, what initially drew me to the Smashing Pumpkins–and to the shirt itself–has remained constant within me. There was no avoiding the band in the 1990s–but doubly so in Chicago. They were hometown heroes, and even though my exposure to them prior to their first breakup was minimal–the radio hits, what videos of theirs might have played on TV, their appearance on The Simpsons–there were qualities in their essence that I connected to deeply. Maybe it’s a bit of a retcon on my part, but knowing that Billy Corgan grew up in Carol Stream, not far from where I lived during middle and high school, helps me to relate to his artistic vision. Something about spending endless cold weekends in astonishingly boring cul-de-sacs wishing for anywhere less alienating feels like it's imbued across the band’s entire catalogue–and most definitely in the first three albums. We are closing in on 20 years since the band played their “last” shows at the United Center and Metro, and I can still remember going in and out of sleep as “1979” played over my alarm clock radio (Q101 broadcast the second to last show).
Now back to the shirt itself: if you know me, you know I have north of 60-something t-shirts, mostly of bands (everything from Sade to Cro-Mags, My Bloody Valentine to Think I Care, etc., etc.). So why did I choose this ratty, discolored, and possibly BOOTLEG shirt? To that, dear reader, I implore you to just look at the darned thing. Mellon Collie is by all accounts an ambitious–and, dare I say, indulgent–album, and the cover definitely reflects that. It’s evocative of an intricate sound that only a bloated 90s big label budget could afford you. Illustrator and collage artist, John Craig, worked with the band to bring together a work that was coherent in its incoherence, celestial details that helped channel the melancholy that was buried just under the surface of the excess at the End of History aka it looks really fucking cool, alright? My suspicions of a bootleg origin lie in the oddly specific nature of including Rapid City and Toledo but not New York or LA or any of the European stops the band hit in 1996. But that doesn’t bother me in the least. It wasn’t very long ago, while opening yet another package from a reputable seller of fine bootleg band merch, that I turned to my girlfriend and said, “I gotta cool it on the shirts.” The Smashing Pumpkins certainly had their share of more iconic shirts (namely Billy’s ZERO shirt, which I of course at one point also owned) but this one is a truer friend. I wore it the night I saw Bastard reunite at Chaos In Tejas 2010, and I wore it on many a long night of carting drunk fools during my pedicabbing days. These days, I just wear it to sleep. It’s very soft.
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