“We Were Golden”: The Soundtrack of a Lost California, and the Band That Never Was
There’s a moment in “We Were Golden,” a nostalgic surf rock anthem from Mikey’s in the Mustang, where you can almost feel the salty ocean breeze on your skin and the innocence of a bygone era slipping through your fingers. It’s the California of the 60s—the golden era of sun-kissed beaches, drive-ins, and young love. And yet, as Mikey (aka Mike Mahoney) reflects on the past, it’s clear that this isn’t just a song; it’s a reverent tribute to a time when life felt simpler, when the waves seemed endless, and when every drive felt like the beginning of something new. But “We Were Golden” is more than just a retro throwback. It’s a piece of a much bigger story.
With its rolling surf and upbeat, beachy vibe, the song is part of a grand project—an album that will serve as the soundtrack to a movie currently in the works.
“I wanted to do a tribute song to Brian Wilson after I’d finished my legacy stuff,” Mike explains. “But my producer, Dave, said, ‘You don’t want to write a geography song. You live in a time, in a place that’s unique.’ And that’s when I started thinking about my own experiences. It wasn’t a geography lesson—it was about my life, my memories.” The song “We Were Golden” was co-written with Mike’s longtime collaborator and producer David Blackburn, and became a tribute to Wilson’s timeless influence on Mikey’s own musical journey.
And those memories? They come flooding back in the chorus of “We Were Golden,” with imagery of places like Disneyland in the 60s when the park wasn’t a corporate powerhouse but a haven for young lovers and dreamers to enjoy the dances they would put on with live bands. The song captures the innocence of a time when girls had to pay $2 to get into Disneyland, and the guys paid $4. They’d wear their best suits, head to the dance stage, and wonder if the girl standing across the room might be their first love.
“It was the innocence of the time. That’s what I wanted to convey in the song,” Mike recalls. “We used to go to Disneyland, and the world was simple. There was magic in everything. I wanted “We Were Golden” to take people back to that time. And it wasn’t just Disneyland. It was about the whole experience—sitting at the Tastee Freeze with your friends, talking about the future, but not knowing where it would lead. We didn’t have the distractions of modern technology—we didn’t even have the internet or cell phones. A long phone cord in the kitchen was all we had.”
This reflection on the simplicity and wonder of youth drives “We Were Golden”—and the larger project that’s slowly unfolding. The track features some of the same Beach Boys-inspired harmonies that made the 60s a magical time. “I knew I didn’t have the voice anymore to do it, so we brought in a couple of guys—Patch and Liam—and they knocked it out in under eight hours,” Mike says, chuckling. The resulting track has that rich, layered sound that calls back to Good Vibrations and all the great music of the California coast.
And it’s not just the sound that evokes nostalgia—it’s the visuals too. The music video takes you on a journey through a time capsule, featuring scenes of a white Mustang, carefree beach days, and vintage clips of the iconic places Mike remembers. Some of the footage, he admits, is stock—“I couldn’t drive around to find 32-cent gasoline anymore,” he laughs—but the imagery brings everything full circle. When Mike sings about driving with a bucket of gas, it’s not just a line; it’s a visceral snapshot of a time when a few bucks at the pump meant a full day of adventure.
“It was about evoking those memories,” he explains. “We wanted to show what it was like to live in that world—a world where you could just get in your car with your friends and drive off into the sunset. And Disneyland, the Tastee Freeze—those were the places that defined it all.”
But beyond the sweet, sunny vibes of “We Were Golden”, there’s a story within the story. Mike is working on a film—Think American Graffiti meets The Notebook, but with a twist. The film opens with a reunion concert of 70-year-old men who never got the chance to play the gig they dreamed about as kids. It’s a journey through youth, love, and the undeniable pull of nostalgia.
The film will explore the impact of the Vietnam War, the way it changed a generation, and the ripple effects it had on the kids who lived through it. The film’s storyline follows a group of college students in 1967 who were also in a band, capturing their lives in Orange County before the Vietnam War swept in and forever altered their world. The film will then shift to 2017 when the band reunites for “one of the concerts they never got to do.”
“We were still innocent when the war hit,” Mike says. “We weren’t into the drug scene, we were still hanging out on the beach, drinking beers. But then, the draft hit, and a lot of my friends—some of the best ones—didn’t come back. It decimated our community. That’s something we’re trying to capture in the movie.”
The project, which is set to film a concert scene this spring, will bring together the talents of a well-known Hollywood director and cinematographer, along with William Gereghty, who will help guide the film’s visual direction. A close friend is also working on the script. The project is being spearheaded by men in their 60s and 70s, a generation that is keenly aware of the passage of time and the opportunities lost.
It’s not a movie about young rebels running from the law or fighting for their lives in the streets. Instead, it’s a story of lost opportunities, of what could have been—a reflection on the promise of youth and the stark reality of adulthood. “We Were Golden,” in all its upbeat, surf-inspired glory, is a celebration of that lost innocence, a look at how even the most carefree days can end in heartbreak.
Mike’s passion for the project is palpable. “It’s not about the money or fame,” he insists. “It’s about telling a story—one that I think a lot of people, especially those from my generation, will really connect with. We were golden, and now we’re just trying to bring that feeling back.”
Listen to “We Were Golden” now and watch the music video!
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ON THE RISE
It was the beginning of 1996 when an up and coming alternative group called the Smashing Pumpkins set out on a global run in support of their latest release, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.” One of the earliest dates brought them to Los Angeles for a packed performance at the legendary Palace Theatre, where fans filled the venue wall to wall. Instead of opening with the loud, abrasive energy that dominated alternative rock the year before, the band surprised everyone by beginning with a quiet piano performance.
The song was the album’s title track, a deeply reflective piece filled with emotion, optimism and the feeling of stepping into a new chapter. Billy Corgan, who was 28 at the time, wrote it while teaching himself how to play piano.
Corgan recalls the moment feeling almost unreal, surrounded by the Palace Theatre’s velvet drapes, the gentle melody and the overwhelming excitement from the crowd. Then everything erupted as pounding drums and roaring guitars crashed into the room, fully introducing the massive soundscape of “Mellon Collie.”
Three decades later, “Mellon Collie” is widely viewed as one of the defining rock records of the 1990s, later inspiring artists such as Muse, My Chemical Romance and Silversun Pickups. The album marked a dramatic turning point for the band, who had previously become known for the dreamy, progressive leaning sound of their 1993 breakthrough “Siamese Dream.” Unlike that record, “Mellon Collie” arrived as an ambitious concept double album, with lyrics tracing a journey that Corgan described as “one day that can represent your entire life.”
Throughout that concept, the record shifts through crushing and emotional examinations of rage and identity on tracks like “Muzzle,” “Zero” and “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” nostalgic and delicate moments in “Cupid De Locke” and “Thirty-Three,” and themes of youth and romance in “1979” and “Love.” Its enormous range in both storytelling and musical direction made it stand apart from other rock albums of its era, abandoning the detached attitude often associated with grunge in favor of sincerity, emotion and experimentation.
Taking cues from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” the noisy textures of Sonic Youth, the symbolic songwriting and layered arrangements of Black Sabbath, along with surreal visual art influences, “Mellon Collie” pushed the Smashing Pumpkins further than ever before. The album challenged the group to discover how far they could stretch creatively and how completely they could capture human emotion within a single project.
To celebrate the album’s 30th anniversary, the band has partnered with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, their hometown orchestra, to reinterpret “Mellon Collie” as an opera production. They are also releasing the album again alongside previously unheard recordings from the 1996 “Infinite Sadness” tour. Featuring performances from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, the recordings preserve the intensity of the live shows and document a defining chapter in the band’s story.
In “Tonight, Tonight,” Corgan reflects, “And our lives are forever changed, we will never be the same.”
Looking back at the legacy of “Mellon Collie,” those lyrics feel hauntingly accurate. “Nothing was quite the same after this album,” Corgan told the Times. In many ways, that statement could not be more true.
The album earned seven Grammy nominations and launched the band into another level of fame through massive MTV exposure and a series of enduring hit singles. Away from the spotlight, however, Corgan was struggling through the collapse of his first marriage. During the tour, growing tensions inside the group eventually exploded following the overdose death of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin. Later that same year, Corgan also lost his mother.
What followed “Mellon Collie” and the turbulent 1996 tour was a period filled with instability and upheaval. Yet within the life of the album itself existed a rare moment where Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins came together in complete creative harmony to make a record that would ultimately shape their careers and, in many ways, the course of their lives.
Something I really love, especially about the piano and “Tonight, Tonight” as the opening track, is this feeling of hope that it starts off with, or maybe that’s just what I got from it.
[Laughs] It starts with hope and ends somewhere else, let’s put it that way.
What was the intention with starting with this feeling and what was it inspired by at the time?
I was going through a lot in my personal life, and I was grappling with the changes in my life and the awareness that I had in my life, given what I’d been through as a child and now as an adult with success, it was like I was trying to grapple with all that and wondering what really matters.
I think if you look at the general narrative of the album, it starts with the idea and it starts with the dream and what is possible within the dream. So, for example, you pointed to the piano piece that opens the record.
I went to a store, not too far from where I’m sitting and talking to you [he was calling from his car in Chicago], and bought an old 1920s piano with mismatched legs for $2,500. Now that may not seem like a big deal, but at 27 years old, when I was writing the record, I never owned a piano nor was I allowed to play a piano in my relatives’ houses.
So I finally had this moment of, wow, I can actually buy a piano and I can play my own piano in my own house. As silly as that sounds, it had never crossed my mind that way. I’d always lived in apartments and I was always on the road. It was like a new beginning. It starts with the gift that I gave myself and that ends up having a lot of influence on the compositional structure of the record.
And then “Tonight, Tonight,” was a song that we messed around with for about four months. And one night it just came to me in a flash, like what the song needed to sound like, and I went upstairs to this room that I had in my house and I just remember playing it like I could hear the whole orchestra in my head and I thought, OK, that’s what I need to do.
Something I see on this new reissue is that there’s going to be a lot of recordings from that live 1996 tour right after the release of the album. What was it like relistening to these performances, especially as it was the last tour with the band’s full original lineup?
We had crested a particular wave at the time. We had a No. 1 album. We were playing, I think, a 90-date arena tour, which, now there’s a ton of artists playing stadiums, but back then an arena show was essentially the top of the mountain. So then we had success, we had fame, we had money that we’d never had.
With that, we had all the trappings. And I think in the recordings that are on this record that’s coming out, it’s like a light burning bright before it burns out. If you’ve ever had that experience, you’re in a room and all of a sudden the lightbulb gets really intense and then it burns out. So, you hear us basically burning out.
And there’s a sort of incandescent poetic beauty to all that, and there’s just the sorrow to it because you also realize it’s the last of that moment. In many ways, it was truly the end of that band. I mean, yes, the band has continued, and James [Iha] and Jimmy [Chamberlin] and I have been playing back together again for seven years, and released more records and had a tremendous amount of success of late.
But you can never recapture the innocence of youth or the innocence of the time. When you combine those types of experiences with loss and sorrow and the knowledge of what didn’t happen or what could have happened, then it makes revisiting this time bittersweet.
What do you think “Mellon Collie” means today and how has it been for you to see younger generations continue to be inspired by it?
I view that album in particular very much within the realm of a child who grows up in a latchkey situation. It’s very much a Gen X term. Latchkey kids were those whose parents were working a lot or not home, so they grew up by and large unsupervised. So what does a kid who grows up unsupervised do? They watched a lot of television, and then we consumed a lot of sugar and got up to a lot of delinquent-type things.
So I think the album is very representative of that experience and I think why it continues to resonate for subsequent generations is, it’s very dissociative. Back in the ’90s, the mainstream culture, including the L.A. Times and the New York Times, they really struggled with, “Where’s this all coming from?” Now you are living in a world that is constantly dissociative thanks to social media.
The thing that’s surprising, I’m basing it on personal conversations I’ve had with tons of musicians through the years, is that our album gave some musicians the permission to pursue a wider artistic vision. Because “Mellon Collie” is so wide. It has so much breadth. So what I’ve heard from other artists is, “Wow, when I heard that album, I thought, I can do this too, but in my own way.” And that to me is like, that’s a penultimate compliment from another musician. It’s really humbling.
The greatest thrill now is seeing that young people really do connect with the record. And they connect with songs that are different from the previous generations, which is even cooler. They seem to like the weirder stuff on it rather than the ... let’s call it, the classic rock alternative stuff.
That’s a cool way of looking at it. Like the previous generation probably was really obsessed with “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” and maybe newer listeners aren’t as focused on that song specifically. In that song, it’s interesting that you say, “Can you fake it for just one more show?” Or this feeling of putting on a performance and feeling that you have to fake it as an artist. Is that something that still resonates with you?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because you work so hard to be on that stage and then, as Roger Waters so aptly describes in “The Wall,” you find yourself having a surrealist experience on that same stage. You put yourself through hell to get there and then one day you’re standing there and you’re like, what am I doing here?
I’ve had similar moments where I’m standing on stage and you feel like you’re tripping on drugs, but you’re totally sober. Because the thing that you love inverts on you. When I was a kid, I thought being on TV was a peak thing. But then I was there, about to perform on TV, and there were all these things going on, like you’re tired, or you’re being sued or your bandmate doesn’t like the deli tray. And I just thought, what am I doing here? I felt like I was living in “Spinal Tap.” This is supposed to be fun. This is supposed to be glamorous. This is supposed to be a thousand other things that you put on the rock-star checklist and you find yourself saying, I don’t want to be here.
If you turn to your friends or your family and say, “I’m really struggling with how I’m supposed to process the information that I’m receiving up here,” you’re told you’re ungrateful or you’re out of your mind or you really need to check your ego. I reached a point where it was like, no, I don’t have the skill set to survive punishing my mind, body, spirit five to six nights a week in front of strangers singing songs that are very personal to me and I hear the cheering and I see the flash bulbs popping, but I’m so numb that I can’t feel what’s happening. So in a lot of ways, that song and the themes from the album are still real.
You’ve said in the “Mellon Collie” sessions, you guys were working on 50 songs at once, that you’re working for six hours a day, just really intense in the studio. What are your thoughts as you think back to that? Were there any memories that really arise for you?
Despite our public persona of being dysfunctional and brawling, we were quite quiet in the rehearsal space. We almost never had guests and 97% of the time, it was just the four of us in a room working.
So, the real memory for me is just day after day after day of trying tons and tons of different ideas, and it started to wind itself into a story through those 60-plus songs, many of which came out in those few years. It was our best period of musical alignment and I think you can hear that. We worked very hard and very peacefully together for eight months to put all that together.
We had just come off a tour, “Siamese Dream,” which was a 14-month tour, and we went in the studio for eight months, made the “Mellon Collie” record, and we immediately went back on tour. And that tour was 22 months long. So when you ask my memory from that time, it’s like, can you describe the blur? It was a really beautiful blur, you know?
You said something really interesting earlier about “Tonight, Tonight” coming to you with the sound of an orchestra. Talk about what it was like to see that song and this album come to life as an opera with Chicago Lyric.
The idea that I would even not only write something on the piano, and now, a full orchestra is playing that song here in Chicago with the lyrics I wrote ... is totally mind-blowing. The first time I heard it with an orchestra, I started to cry, because I thought, this is so crazy. This song that I used to teach myself how to play the piano was now being played by some of the greatest musicians in the world in this beautiful opera hall. I can’t explain to you the strangeness of that journey.
I was made fun of [for using classical instruments in ’90s rock music]. It was seen as too precocious or too artsy or too, I don’t know, overly grand. And now, if you look at alternative music, I mean, there’s been an absolute explosion of people using unconventional instrumentation within the breath of alternative music, as it should be. So it makes me laugh now that there was a time where somehow that was pseudo-controversial.
Coming to my last question for you, how did this album impact your life 30 years later and impact your artistry?
After putting out something like this, artistically it was a triumph. But then publicly it became surreal. We hit a level where people were following you through malls and we were on MTV. It’s not like we had not tasted success, but this was this other stratospheric aspect of success. And something about that album just kind of blew everything wide open.
Family relationships, personal relationships, business relationships, everything just kind of went sideways. I remember thinking nothing was quite the same after that album. Which is true, but it’s not true the way you think it is.
The album has never left my life and is never far away from the conversation. It was never like I put it down and left it behind. Other people won’t let me forget and that’s a good thing because the value holds, and I’ll never forget about it.
