by Ben Sisario
Selling more copies after the band broke up than before, Doolittle was sustained by word of mouth over at least two generations of fans. A lot had missed out the first time around, and the reunion concerts revealed, to many GenXers' surprise, a strong contingent of under-twenty-one fans who, evidently, could shout "you are the son of a motherfucker" and hold up seven fingers just as well as anybody else.
The Pixies had become a posthumous legend, with those steadily selling discs getting lots of play in dorm rooms, bedrooms, and band practice rooms all over the world. Like the Stooges or the Velvet Underground, the Pixies enjoyed such a rich afterlife that they seemed to have never really broken up. Cover versions and tribute albums poured forth. 4AD and other labels scoured the vaults for rarities. Everybody from Polly Harvey and Thom Yorke to Bono and David Bowie lined up to exalt them as the Mozart of alternative rock, the supergenius that died before its time. And journalists slapped the I-word on them as if it was a party affiliation: "influential."
It made sense. The Pixies had come to exemplify the very idea of an alternative rock band. They had nobly thumbed their nose at conventional rock, developing an irrepressible, idiosyncratic style, noisy and jocular and supremely tasteful. They were classic college dropouts: they had just enough education to reference French art films of the 1920s but were not too serious to ban the bong from the tour bus. They had straddled the worlds of indie and major labels without selling out. And they did it with an apparent minimum of effort. Their success was, as Thompson told Rolling Stone in 1989, like "doing your homework at the last minute and getting an A on it." Come '91 or so, what cool band didn't want to be like that?
Looking over the 90s from this angle, the Pixies sparkle turns up all over the place. Nirvana, Pavement, Weezer, Sugar (A Good Idea"). Spoon, Modest Mouse, Super Furry Animals. Blur (at least in "Song 2"). Veruca Salt (well, they're a Breeders ripoff-but close enough) ... jeez, there've got to be more Pixies-y bands. Dambuilders? Presidents of the United States of America? Isn't there a band called Havali- na or Velouria or something?
Like so much about the Pixies, the idea of their titanic influence turns out to be a paradox. Clearly, they were influential: this book cannot contain the names of all the musicians who say they were influenced by the Pixies, and you can 't really argue with that. But for a band widely credited with forever altering the direction of rock music, for inspiring whole dormfuls of junior Debasers, the Pixies have had few genuine followers. The book of rock has roman-numeral chapter headings for those whose blueprints have been copied the most, from the Beatles and Stones to the Velvets, New York Dolls, Stooges, Sex Pistols, Gang of Four, the Cure, Talking Heads, Fugazi-hell, even Slint left a tangible and traceable bloodline. Despite the sprouting here and there of a Kim Deal bassline, a strangled Joey Santiago guitar solo, or a quiet-loud-quiet verse, the Pixies' sound is hard to find. Either they were inimitable or not many actually tried to imitate.
The legend of the Pixies' influence began in early 1994, when Kurt Cobain, just a few months before he died, told Rolling Stone that with "Smells Like Teen Spirit," he "was basically trying to rip off the Pixies." He wanted to write the perfect pop song-which also meant the most fucked-up pop song-and so turned to the Pixies. "We used their sense of dynamics," he said, "being soft and quiet and then loud and hard."
To a degree he's right. Compare Nirvana's Bleach in 1989 to Nevermind just two years later and you will see a dramatic shift toward highly compressed, combustible power-poppure Pixiana. And from there, the story goes, Nevermind hit No. 1 and secondhand Pixies DNA was sprayed over a thousand waiting bands. QED.
Give "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Debaser" the old A/B test, however, and the link is weak. The Pixies track sounds ebullient and dancer; with a shuffling Madchester beat and a melody that is half nursery rhyme. Black Francis is a clown; a crazy one, but still a clown. "Teen Spirit," on the other hand, is a destructive, bipolar tantrum, about as much fun as a recovered memory of sexual abuse. When asked about the song, Thompson has long said hey, the flattery is nice, but he doesn't hear a similarity:
Cobain was an ardent Pixies student, and I take his quote at face value. He was trying to copy the Pixies. He just didn't quite succeed. The Pixies' playful pushmi-pullyu dynamics, and Thompson's scream, are transformed into trauma. Black Francis always seemed able to turn it on and off like a faucet; with Nirvana, the cry came from deep in the gut, and it couldn't be stopped.
Through "Smells Like Teen Spirit," one can see much of the 90s alternative explosion as a story that got farther and farther away from the Pixies. Once "Teen Spirit" became a hit, alt-rock coalesced around Nirvana and a handful of bands Jane's Addiction, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins-that shared a central theme of wounded, raging masculinity. A new hero emerged, a sort of ill-tempered lost son of Jim Morrison, troubled and insecure but capable of tremendous destruction; he wore his heart on his flannel sleeve and demanded empathy. A genre was born, and it was sustained by a quickly introduced batch of copycats (Bush, Stone Temple Pilots, Moist, Candlebox, Collective Soul, and all the rest). Add some rap and metal mitochondria to this gene pool, and it's no great stretch that it produced the unholy twins nu-metal and rap-metal. And thus Korn, Deftones, Papa Roach, Staind, Godsmack, and even Limp Bizkit became the inheritors of the alt-rock revolution of the 90s. The Pixies had been bypassed.
Grunge wasn't the only story, of course. There were other strains of alternative rock that were seemingly closer to the Pixies side of things, with spunky rhythms and angular guitars and all, and their sundry names are a feast of hyphenation: to-fi, math-rock, indie-pop, pop-punk, retrorock, post-rock, noise-pop, emo-I guess emo says it all. But as the 21st century arrived and the Pixies reunited, Charles Thompson didn't see a lot of the Pixies' aesthetic reflected in the indie diaspora. "Now people pursue rock music, and they go, `I have something important to say, and here's what it is, and ooh, I'm singing it from my heart, too,"' he told the New York Times in 2004. "And it's all too serious. And people totally miss out. They totally miss the fun, jabberwocky, funwith-language, fun-with-poetry."
Maybe this is why it sounded so fresh when the Pixies returned. Their sound was just as odd a fit in 2004 as it was in 1989. And despite the enormous affection for the band, their sound was absent. Not on the radio, barely present at all in other bands. Unlike so much of the we're-gonna-cramthis-down-your-face youth marketing that was an unfortunate legacy of the grunge era, the Pixies to some degree remained a secret: they were the band that we all wanted to be celebrated as rock gods, wished could be duplicated or imitated somehow So when the band re-formed and played its first concerts, the overriding feeling was surprise. So this is what they sounded like! It sounded raw. It sounded punks, aggressive. Poppy too, kind of sweet. Even gentle. And weird.
It sounded like the Pixies.
I climb into the Cadillac around 10:15 on Saturday morning. The sun is out but there's a light drizzle, and Thompson's windshield wipers make a loud, grinding honk as they drag across the glass.
The plastic bag from our trip to the record store the day before lies crumpled beside him on the seat, and he holds up I'm Your Man, the Leonard Cohen CD he bought along with Doolittle. The cover design of I'm Your Man is ridiculously simple, just black on top with LEONARD COHEN in big, thin white letters, and a field of textureless gray on the bottom. In a passport-size black and white photo, Cohen stands in black shades, his left hand in his pocket and his right holding a half-eaten banana.
Thompson looks at the cover and grins wide. "This album is sooo great," he beams. Really? I say, embarrassingly ignorant of most of the Cohen catalog. He says something about how Cohen started off as a writer, a poet, and did some albums, and... He gives up and just sticks the CD in the machine, and it begins to play. Released in 1988, it is a cold Eurosynth concoction, a prison made of neon. Cohen's weary baritone sounds trapped there, the only sign of humanity. Thompson sees my puzzlement and smiles as though he's letting me in on someth
ing. "Think of the production as just the frame around the picture," he says, tracing a rectangle in the air. "And just look at the picture." I imagine the banana man, standing in a nightclub that looks like a set from "Miami Vice" and muttering something cynical and obscure. He speaks so simply and with such depths of sarcasm that his words must be riddles. He is unfathomable, insular, and fascinating. I realize that Thompson and I have been listening without speaking to each other at all for several minutes. "First we take Manhattan," Cohen mumbles. "Then we take Berlin."
As Thompson listens, a memory soon comes to him. Pixies' Doolittle tour, summer '89. They're stopped somewhere on the coast of Spain, they've got a couple days off. Everybody decides to head to some party town. `And I was like, `You know, I need to be alone, I'm getting out of here,"' he says. "`Let me out and pick me up on the way back from wherever you guys are going.' And the bus drops me off, and I step out-and then fucking Kim steps out of the bus and says, `You know what? I'm getting out here too.' You fucking-I can't believe it."
It was both the highest and lowest point of the Pixies. Their big album was out, it had established them as one of the preeminent bands of alternative rock, and hell, there they were hanging out on the coast of Spain. But already they were butting heads, already the end was in sight.
So Thompson and Deal go up to the hotel, and sure enough they are put in rooms right next to each other. "We never saw each other or spoke to each other the entire time. I was kinda depressed at the time, and I think she probably was too. She was on the phone the whole time, I think. 'Cause there was this whopping phone bill that the tour manager almost had a heart attack over when he picked us up. And I just stayed in my room most of the time, except for going out for a walk once in a while, and listening to this record on a boombox"-he points to the stereo, still playing I'm Your Man.
"And then I wrote a song, too," he says. "I wrote a song for Bossanova, the first song for Bossanova."
NVow, which song?
"Called Blown Away:"'
It was recorded on the road just a few weeks later, at Hansa Ton Studios in Berlin, one of the Pixies' first big expensive indulgences-a one-song session at the same place where Iggy Pop did "The Passenger." With Thompson's voice cloaked in a wraithlike reverb, the song is a distant, lonely cry from outer space. It could be a love letter or an SOS from Major Tom, marooned somewhere far across the galaxy.
That's a beautiful song, I tell him.
"Yeah, I've always liked it," he says, and drives on.
Doolittle
"Debaser"
Joey Santiago says Doolittle could not have started any other way. "That's the whole formula of the Pixies, that one song," he says. `All the sound qualities are there. That's what it represents. It would've been wrong to start off with `Here Comes Your Man."'
It begins with the melodic buddy-buddy of a classic Kim Deal bassline. A pattern is traced out, mathematical and precise, like a pentagram drawn on the ground-within these lines anything can happen. Two bars into it comes a fury of guitar, high and clangy, followed by a shuffling drumbeat by David Lovering and Santiago's mutated recapitulation of the bass theme. Already, within twenty seconds, a crucial element of sonic philosophy has been revealed: all that is poppy and pretty will meet its raging, deformed reflection, and the twain shall rock on together.
Black Francis jumps in from stage left as a cackling madman. "Got me a movie / I want you to know!" he snarls. "Slicing up eyeballs / I want you to know! / Girlie so groovie / I want you to know!" He's a lunatic, but he gets to his point fast. "Don't know about you / But I am un-" here comes a big one-"cbien andalusia!" Cbien is delivered with boom-boom backup vox ("shen!"), giving the line the fistpumping insistence of a gang chant. It's a little musical bomb, and the effect of Charles Thompson squealing on maniacally about cutting up eyeballs is one of the great moments of insanity in rock'n'roll. It is as chilling as it is hilarious, as silly as it is genuinely shocking to hear for the first time.
The song is also a thematic demonstration, the closest Thompson has come to a manifesto. Right away he throws in his lot as a junior Surrealist, vigorously declaring himself to be an adherent-an embodiment, even-of Un chien andalou. It's aesthetics as identity; he might as well be saying "I am Mohy-Dick" or "I am The Rite of Spring." Instead he's the old movie where the girl's peeper gets split open for no reason at all. So he's the artist as contrarian, as Dionysian violator. "`Debaser' fitted well because at the time of the movie the Parisians were ripping up their seats in the theaters because of another film," he told the NME in 1989, referring to LAge d'or, Bunuel and Dali's even smuttier second collaboration. "And the point of Un chien andalou was to debase morality. To debase standards of art."
The key line, however, is not the "cbien" chant but the one that follows it: "Wanna grow / Up to be / Be a debaser." Screaked by Thompson with particularly harsh mistreatment of his own throat, but backed with steady stand-by your-lead-singer sweetness by Deal-the first and most dramatic of their many vocal contrasts on the album-the line casts a curious light on the claim made by the narrator. He's not Mr. Debaser yet, but )ants to become him, when he's old enough. He's a kid whose mind has been blown by this crazy, arty movie, and by God he wants to be in that number. The demo version of the song underscored his callowness. In the first chorus, instead of "wanna grow up to be," Thompson sang, "Ma, I wanna be / Be a debaser." The additional percussion is the sound of baby fat jiggling as the mores of orthodox society get tossed out the window.
But adolescent rebellion, of course, ain't so new. And strictly speaking, "Debaser" is not nearly as inventive as most of Thompson's earlier material; even the classically simple "Gigantic," with its libidinous tides of noise, is more interestingly constructed. "Debaser," by contrast, merely repeats itself several times. But as a prayer and a ritual, it conjures an energy that sustains the entire album. It cries out for art, lust, ambition, contempt, opposition, absurdity, violence, self-absorption, and liberation through rock'n'roll- all passions and themes borne out by the rest of Doolittle.
"Debaser" is also a slam dunk for Gil Norton. The recording is crisp and precise, pushing each of the band's component parts forward. He overdubbed a swirl of guitars in the closing section, a solid fifty seconds of overlapping planes. For Thompson, then still a recording neophyte, it was almost too much. `At one point [Thompson] hated `Debaser,"' Norton says. "He didn't want it on the album. And I was like, there's no way this cannot be on the albumthis is a great song!" he says, still with a bit of disbelief. "There were certain layers of how that song developed at the end, the way the guitars built up in different layers in the outro. By the end of the recording he sort of got into it."
Aside from the guitar complexities, the song was recorded largely as originally written. The differences on the demo recording are lyrical and minor. "Ma, I wanna be" is one. Another is the repetition of "debaser" in the chorus. Instead of shouting it six times, as he did on the album, he chanted it twelve times in a somewhat numb monody. The album version is simpler, and more effectively contrasts Thompson's voice with Deal's.
Another lyrical change was more consequential. When the song was first written, instead of "tin chien andalusia," Thompson sang "Shed, Apollonia!," after Prince's buxom plaything in Purple Rain. As usual, he had a rhyme scheme before he had lyrics, and Apollonia" fit it just as well as "andalusia." (Plus, do you remember the scene where you see those tits?) Thompson thankfully came to realize his cinematic affections lay more with mutilated eyeballs than Morris Day. "I couldn't sing about stripping Apollonia 6, that was just too silly-although I like the idea!" he told Sounds. "It was too tongue-in-cheek, too like an inside joke. It had to be at least a little more broad than that."
"Tame"
Pure minimalism is a straight line dividing space in half. Night and day. Loud and soft. Whisper and scream. And there is no better example of the Pixies' particular kind of minimalism than "Tame," a switch that abruptly goes from hot to cold to hot again.
The c
omposition is so simple that it's almost insignifi cant. Three chords, reduced to three throbbing bass notesD, C, F-persist without change or interruption. It's songwriting done on a dare: see how much we can do with so little, with the same few chromosomes that are in every single pop song. The genius part was to exploit the contrast between verse and chorus. The former usually builds up to the latter, as tension and release. Why not exaggerate that difference and make a whispered verse leap up to an Olympian firestorm, only to plunge back down in an instant? All rock'n'roll is loud; the only way to make it louder is to bring it down to silence and then crank it way up again.
The lyrics express the meanest sentiment Charles Thompson could think up, a contemptuous sexual insult. Pixies songs are movies, and in this one there's a guy and a girl. He's a voyeur, and he's dangerous, or at least fancies himself so. She's smiler and prettied up, and he's having none of it. "Got hips like Cinderella," he mutters, too quiet for her to hear. "Must be having a good shame / Talking sweet about nothing." Uh-oh, now she's gonna get it. "Cookie, I think you're taaaame!" His face turns the color of a tomato, and steam blows out his ears. But in an instant it's over-somebody tapped him on his shoulder, the phone rang, his mom called from downstairs. He's back to zero, and it begins again. Black Francis conjures a formidable rage, perhaps most frightful because it's a fantasy. Even the lascivious moaning he shares with Kim Deal in the song's wordless third verse seems imaginary. It's all in his head, and it disappears as quickly as it comes.