“Tarantula” by The Smashing Pumpkins

"Tarantula" was the Smashing Pumpkins' comeback shot in 2007, leading off the campaign for Zeitgeist, their seventh album, and the first new music since the band reunited the year before. Billy Corgan wrote it and produced it with drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, with Roy Thomas Baker adding production, and it roars like a band that has something to prove.

The title is a tip of the hat to the Scorpions, whom Corgan had just worked with on their song "The Cross". The intro and outro borrow from their "Dark Lady", and Corgan wrote the solo imagining how Uli Jon Roth would play it. He and Chamberlin called it the sum of everything they'd grown up on, the Scorpions and UFO in particular. Its stage debut came in Paris, at the band's first concert in seven years, and they played it on the Late Show with David Letterman that July.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.