Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide,"
performed by Smashing Pumpkins

Nearly 20 years after its original release, an unlikely cover by the Smashing Pumpkins on its 1994 B-sides collection, Pisces Iscariot, introduced the '70s folk-rock group Fleetwood Mac to a generation of kids years younger than the song itself.

Forever doomed to be played during father-daughter wedding dances, the Stevie-Nicks-penned classic, "Landslide," seems only natural sung by Billy Corgan, who had already made his presence known as a confessional, introspective songwriter.

Corgan covers the song with surprisingly little melodrama, leaving "Landslide" stripped down to its lovely acoustics as heard in the original 1975 recording.

Somehow missed when it first turned up as a B-side to the Pumpkins "Disarm" single, the song (as well as Pisces Iscariot) became a bona-fide pop hit for the Smashing Pumpkins. And Fleetwood Mac went on to ride the wave of kitschy MTV revivals of '70s pop stars in the '90s — like the unexplainable resurrection of Tony Bennett — but the band didn’t hold on to the new-found interest among the kids for long.

Courtney Love did a forgettable version of "Gold Dust Woman" with her band Hole, and later Fleetwood Mac albums received little praise (though The Dance sold well). The band, however, would only have truly marked success as a subject of VH1's "Behind the Music."

— Jennifer Pfafflin (pfafflin at students dot wisc dot edu)