Watch Smashing Pumpkins' Explosive Take On James Taylor's "Fire And Rain"

"Fire and Rain" would always have worked as a title of a Smashing Pumpkins song, but the band didn't make the James Taylor classic their own until just recently.

The semi-reunited Pumpkins debuted their take on "Fire and Rain" during an August 8 concert at the BB&T Pavillion in Camden, NJ.

Much like the band's cover of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," "Fire and Rain" was more of less played straight ahead with the utmost to the legendary singer-songwriter Taylor.

While Taylor didn't employ three distorted electric guitars, plus bass, drums and organ on his original studio version, The Pumpkins' didn't depart much from the song's original tempo while accentuating its guitar melody with their array of fuzzed out axes.

Front man Billy Corgan is onto something covering Taylor. His delivery of the song's devastating lyrics feels completely natural and is not unlike Taylor's crestfallen, glassy-eyed original recording.

In his biography, Taylor explained that he wrote "Fire and Rain" in 1969 after the suicide of his friend Suzanne Schnerr, whom he'd met while playing with a band called The Flying Machines two years earlier.

Check out The Smashing Pumpkins' version of the song at the top of this page.

Smashing Pumpkins are on tour through the end of August. Get all the tour dates here.

Photos: Getty Images

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