Live Performance
"Bullet with Butterfly Wings", like "Disarm", "Stand Inside Your Love", and "Today", metamorphosed dramatically during and after every tour. "Bullet" in particular, verified by Corgan himself, comes in five different versions.
During the tour in support of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the band often performed the song with an audio clip intro welcoming concertgoers to "the only circus of its kind in the world", after which Corgan would shout the opening line. Later, the band would drop the intro, starting off the song with a drum beat, a style reminiscent of the variation adopted for the "Sacred & Profane" tour. A third and fourth version showed dramatic variations of the song, both of which were adopted for the Adore tour. The former was an extended and extremely distorted electric version, including several other instruments outside of the ones used for the studio track, such as a 7-string Ibanez electric guitar and additional percussion. The latter was a nine minute or longer version of the song. During the "Sacred & Profane" tour, the fifth variation of "Bullet" started off with an extended bassline and drumbeat build-up into the main song. This version is similar to the newest versions the band has been using on its 2007 tour.
Also to be noted is that later renditions of "Bullet" used the C tuning of "The Everlasting Gaze" and "Heavy Metal Machine", making the song sound heavier. As a result, the chorus was so low in Billy's register it sounded almost spoken. They then preceded non-stop with a cover of "Once in a Lifetime" by Talking Heads. Post-reformation renditions restore the original tuning.
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