SAN FRANCISCO -- The Smashing Pumpkins are spending the summer being

charitable. And everyone knows it.

On Tuesday night the Pumpkins played a punishing hour-and-a-half set of

songs from

their new album, Adore, at San Francisco's Bill Graham Civic

Auditorium. Before coming back for an encore, they made a very public

display of their largesse. The group took time out from the show to present

representatives of an East Bay charity the show was benefiting with a

$170,000 check, a moment that clearly felt awkward for some in the audience

during such a cathartic rock concert.

It's hard to recall any band that has embarked upon a tour of this scale

before. Scale, not in the sense usually used to describe the megaplatinum

Chicago trio -- massive stages, huge shows, epic guitar solos -- but in the

sense of economic scale. Seated at a school lunch table at Oakland's

Hawthorne Elementary School on Tuesday afternoon, the band --

singer/guitarist Billy Corgan, bassist D'Arcy Wretzky and guitarist James

Iha -- speculated that the 14-city, 16-date charity tour would collectively

net more than $2 million for local non-profit groups in each city.

That's $2 million out of the band's own pocket.

And though Corgan didn't mention it at the press conference, the group is

spending

hundreds of thousands of dollars of its own money covering tour expenses:

sound,

lighting, travel and the like.

"It's very close to our hearts," Corgan said at a press conference arranged

in one of the school's classrooms. "We've always talked about what's an

ethical approach when you have success, and I think we've reached the kind

of success very few people ever reach. We're doing exactly what we'd always

hoped we'd do, which is to stand up for something. To represent something

and not just basically take the gold and go live in a castle."

Here were three of the planet's biggest rock stars -- Corgan, dressed all

in black, his gleaming head tossing off rays from the reflected lights of

the local news camera crews; the glamorous D'Arcy, wearing a sheer black

top and slinky black pants; and the subdued Iha in dark blue-jean jacket

and pants -- bringing their new album's dark, gothic vibe to a room

plastered in grade-school finger paintings.

Just before the press conference, they'd hung out with 10- and 11-year-olds

from the school, answering questions about what it was like to be a famous

rock star. "They wanted to know if we came here in a limo," mumbled Iha.

"We came in a van today." (Corgan made a comment before the end of the

first set Tuesday night about having to "leave to go catch a limo" that

drew loud jeers from the teenybopper crowd. Only he knows how far in cheek

his tongue was planted.)

Bands have mounted benefit tours before: Bruce Springsteen asked fans to

bring canned goods for food banks in the mid-'80s; Michael Jackson has

staged a number of benefits for children's charities; and shows like Farm

Aid, Live Aid and even the now-laughable Hands Across America were all very

public displays of celebrity generosity. And while some artists and

philanthropists prefer to give in silence, this being the Pumpkins, their

charitable work was out in the open, on display for all to see, public

catharsis being Corgan's stock-in-trade.

A colleague said he felt the in-concert check ceremony was "weird." Too

public, too self-aggrandizing. He said it disturbed the flow of the show

and seemed to upset some fans by drawing so much attention to the

philanthropic gesture. If you looked around there were plenty of hard-core

Pumpkins fans dressed in their Billy and D'Arcy glam drag and their "ZERO"

shirts, with some young girls in homemade angel's wings who seemed

bewildered after the show.

I saw it another way, though. For all their bluster and, at times, overkill

moments of self-analysis, this gesture by the Pumpkins was one that felt

almost awkwardly genuine. Here they were presenting a large check to a

children's charity in front of an audience of (mostly) children, sending a

clear message about where their hearts and minds were. This, despite the

fact that the chaotic show made no attempt to assuage the young fans who

were looking for Mellon Collie II instead of the more arcane

Adore.

"The music business is basically an egoistic business, and it's hard to get

people away form their egos," Corgan said that afternoon, adding that he'd

like to see more bands follow the Pumpkins' lead. That statement in itself

would seem, as my colleague suggested, self-aggrandizing.

"Don't break your arm patting yourself on your back, Billy," my colleague

might have said. But it was what Corgan said next that might have stolen my

colleague's thunder.

"We're out [promoting a new] record," Corgan replied, in reference to how

the no-profit tour might affect the so-far sluggish (by Pumpkins standards)

sales of the new album. "And in some ways, by doing this we're not doing

the basic necessities of touring our record. If it was about egoism we'd be

more worried about our record than what we're doing today."

I'm as jaded as the next guy, perhaps even more so, but I wanted to believe

Corgan. Even if the tour were hatched out of some millionaire rock star's

guilty conscience, born out of fear of being trapped in that gilded castle,

it doesn't really matter.

I think the check hand-over was weird too, but I also think this feels like an

unprecedented gesture by a huge band that could very well have done another

arena tour that netted it more millions with which to fortify its already

formidable golden castles.