The Pixies' Doolittle (33 1/3) Read online

  Doolittle

  Praise for the series:

  Ideal tot tie lock geek who thi i s lint notes just aren't enough-Rolling Stone

  One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet-Bookslut

  These ate for the insane collectors out these who appreciate fantastic design, well executed thinking, and things that make vout house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in stattling minutiae. We love these. We ate huge netds-Vice

  A btilliant sefies...each one a work of teal love-NME (UK)

  Passionate, obsessive, and smart-Nylon

  Religious tracts tot the tock'n' toll faithful-Boldtype

  Each volume has a distinct, almost militantly personal take on a beloved long-plavet...the books that have resulted ate like the albums themselves-filled with moments of shimmering beauty, forgivable flaws, and stubbotn eccentricity-Tracks Magazine

  [A] consistently excellent series-Uncut (UI)

  The nobility-and fun-of the project has never been questioned.. winning mix of tastes and waiting styles-Philadephia Weekly

  Reading about rock isn't quite the same as listening to it, but this series comes pretty damn close-Neon NYC

  The soft of great idea you can't believe hasn't been done before-Boston Phoenix

  For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our website at www.continuumbooks.com and 33third.blogspot.com

  Also available in this series:

  Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zones

  Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans

  Harvest by Sam Inglis

  The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller

  Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice

  The Per at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh

  Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli

  Electric Lsedyland by John Perry

  Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott

  Sign `O' the Times by Michaelangelo Mates

  The Velvet Under ,ground and N o by Joe Harvard

  Let It Be by Steve Matteo

  Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk

  Aqualung by Allan Moore

  OK Computer by Dar Griffiths

  Let It Be by Colin Meloy

  Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

  Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno

  Exile on Main Street by Bill Janovitz

  Grace by Daphne Brooks

  Murmur by J. Niimi

  Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli

  Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

  Endtroducing... by Eliot Wilder

  Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese

  Lou' by Hugo Wilcken

  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper

  Music from Big Pink by John Niven

  Paula' Boutique by Dan LeRoy

  Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

  There's a Riot Goin' On by Miles Marshall Lewis

  Stone Roses by Alex Green

  Forthcoming in this series:

  Court and Spark by Seau Nelson

  Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

  London Calling by David L. Ulin

  The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck

  Loveless by Mike McGonigal

  Bee Thousand by Marc Woodsworth

  Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti

  In Utero by Gillian Garr

  The Who Sell Out by John Dougan

  Doolittle

  Ben Sisario

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to the Pixies, particularly Charles Thompson, the friendliest and most hospitable rock star ever, and to Heidi Ellen Robinson Fitzgerald and Ken Goes for their generosity and aid.

  To David Barker for the assignment.

  To Mitch Benoff, Arthur Fiacco, Jonathan Claude Fixler, Steve Haigler, Lenny Kaye, Paul Kolderie, Simon Larba- lestier, Joyce Linehan, Peter Lubin, Corinne Metter, John Montagnese, Gil Norton, Vaughan Oliver, Geoff Patterson, Burt Price, Gary Smith, Frank Swart, Lauren Uzdienski, No Watts-Russell, and Steve Webbon for interviews, information and everything else.

  To Sam Retzer for help with the chords.

  To Sam Sifton, Tom Kuntz, Erika Sommer, and everyone at the Neiv York Tunes for their forbearance.

  Warm gratitude to Jesse Steinchen, Bill Madden-Fuoco, and Peter Keepnews for their invaluable editing help.

  And a very, very special thanks to Craig MVlilley for pulling Doolittle out of his pants one day in 1989.

  For updates, corrections, comments, and anything else, the author may be reached at bensisario.com.

  1

  April 2005. On a brisk spring morning in downtown Eugene, Oregon, the canary-yellow steel hulk of a 1986 Cadillac glides up to the entrance of my hotel like some combination of gondola and cargo ship. The motor purrs unhurriedly as I approach the window and see the driver sitting stiffly upright, his right arm extended over the passenger seat and a look of blank pride on his moon-shaped face. He does not gesture or speak, but the message is clear. The big man is here in the big car. Get in and come along on a journey

  Charles Thompson, aka Black Francis, aka Frank Black, pulls onto the road as we begin a three-day weekend of interviews that take place mostly in his car, cruising aimlessly through the pristine open landscape of western Oregon, where he has lived, in various spots, for the last couple of years. The man who made his reputation with a bloodfreezing scream, singing about slicing up eyeballs, about grunting whores and waves of mutilation, is genial and chat ty but remote, particularly about his old band, the Pixies. Where was Doolittle, the monument of alternative rock that is the band's crowning achievement and biggest seller, recorded? Don't remember. What was going on in his life at the time? Band, girlfriend. Whatever. All that is archaeology. Thompson has just turned forty and is in his first few months of fatherhood, a happy and doting dad. His girlfriend, Violet, threw him a surprise birthday party down in LA the week before, with old friends and stars-cool stars, not plastic-surgery stars: we're talking Jack Black, Polly Harvey, They Might Be Giants-and Thompson is still in the glow of it. He lives in Eugene for family considerations, but being in a quiet, suburban corner of the earth far away from the rock biz or anything having to do with the Pixies seems to suit him in his new life. He is like a great actor adapting to life offstage.

  The Pixies' music is distant indeed; the best and most enduring of it was recorded in the waning years of the Reagan administration, a time when "alternative music" barely existed as a market classification. But Thompson is not really so far removed from the band, or the stage. A few months ago, just before the birth of his first son, Jack Errol, he returned home from the Pixies' reunion tour, one of the most significant comebacks in rock'n'roll history. Selling out halls and sheds and festivals from Indio, California, to New York City, from Saskatoon to Paris, it was highly profitable. When I first sat down with Thompson, in New York at the end of the 2004 tour, he mentioned, with no excessive enthusiasm, that it was fun to be back playing Pixies songs with his old bandmates. But he was unequivocal about one thing: "It's very nice to finally be making good money."

  Thompson, Kim Deal, Joey Santiago, and David Lovering well deserved their payday. But they were also returning to claim a big slice of the rock-history pie, one that had long been out of reach. As the Pixies, they have had a most unusual career. The archetypal college band, they were a notquite-next-big-thing who played sold-out gigs everywhere they went and were festooned with critical praise, but were aborted while still young and still far from the top of the charts. Then a weird thing happened. Throughout the 1990s their posthumous legend grew and grew, and they emerged as one of the most admired and namechecked bands of the decade of alternative rock. They became gods in absentia.r />
  With modest but steady record sales and a never-ending stream of tributes from other musicians, but a murky legacy that left no clear school of descendants, the Pixies represented a peculiar pinnacle of the art of rock'n'roll. They played bitingly melodic miniatures, little spasms barbed with noise and Surrealistic lyrics. There was scant precedent for the prickly kind of pop the Pixies played, and their sound is recognizable on the slightest whiff. It's a series of opposing forces that fit together incongruously but exquisitely: a bouncy yet firm bassline (Deal called it "boingy-boingy- sproingy") joined to a demented choir of punky guitars; Thompson's harsh primal scream beside Deal's coy and smoky harmonies; explosive, grating riffs in songs crafted from prime bubblegum. Behind it all is Thompson's songwriting, playful but also insular, inscrutable.

  Thompson is a master puzzlemaker, and he has made no puzzle greater than Doolittle. Released in April 1989, it marked the midpoint of the Pixies' career and was their first to be released on a major label, Elektra. Their exhilarating previous album, Surfer Rosa, had established the band as one of the brightest lights in underground rock, but Doolittle improved on it, showing the intricacy, depth, and breadth of vision they were capable of. It is deliberately both attractive and repellent, a pleasure that makes you squirm-a trick Thompson picked up from two of his heroes, Luis Bunuel and David Lynch, the masters, decades apart, of Surrealist film.

  Doolittle is, on one hand, among the most violent pop albums ever recorded, if not in body count then in the starkness of its calamities. It features rape, mutilation of the eyes, vampirism, suffocation, smothering by tons of garbage, and the chaos of blind gunfire; for the punch line, everybody gets crushed to death. When not killing or maiming, the album turns to depraved sexual loathing and visions of apocalypse. And yet, even with its shrieks and its squalls, it is one of the most tuneful and lovable albums in the canon of alternative rock, and Thompson has spent the better part of two decades insisting to journalists that there is no real meaning to all the horror and dread, that the lyrics are just words that fit together nicely. "There is no point," he says. "The point is to experience it, to enjoy it, to be entertained by it."

  History will eventually sort out how important or unimportant the reunion was to the meaning of the Pixies. Nineteen eighty-nine, besides giving us Doolittle, was also a landmark year for rock bands returning from the grave-the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Allman Brothers, the Doobie Brothers, and members of Yes were all reassembled-and a smart person then might have predicted that the naked greed revealed in such a masquerade would forever tarnish a band's memory. That person would have been half-wrong, because Wbo'r Next still kicks my ass every time I hear it, no matter how much of a pathetic whore Roger Daltrey becomes with age. (Before you complain, did you see him as Ebenezer Scrooge in Madison Square Garden's musical version of A Christmas Carol in 1998, as I did?) But he would have been half-right, too, because every time "Bargain" is used in a car commercial I die a little.

  Back in the Steel Wheels/Join Together era, the reunion tour seemed a cynical effort at brand preservation, a way for dinosaurs from the 60s and 70s (and whatever corporate entities stood behind them) to retain a moneymaking hold on popular culture. But by the time the Pixies got back together, the idea of the reunion itself was being transformed. A number of important revivals were taking place on a smaller scale, as Mission of Burma, Gang of Four, Wire, the Buzzcocks, and Dinosaur Jr. all had exciting and surprisingly fruitful second (or third) runs; many, in fact, wound up releasing records, and not-half-bad ones at that. Their success served as an oblique rewriting of rock history, a delayed canonization: once marginal, these groups had accrued a significance that was now unquestionable.

  The Pixies' reunion topped them all. In their time they barely cracked the top 100 of the Billboard album chart and got only minimal attention from the mainstream press in the United States (though in Britain and Europe they had a much easier time), but now, years later, were being received as major rock heroes. It was a heartwarming change. Throughout the 80s and 90s, it had been an unspoken rite of faith in underground music to believe that there was a meritocratic alternate universe in which groups like the Pixies were the superstars, the ones who made triumphant come back tours before crowds of thousands, and that albums like Doolittle should be celebrated as masterpieces. It's thrilling and just that this long-held belief has been confirmed.

  Some of us knew it all along.

  Thompson lives with Violet and their growing family in a large but unpretentious house in the hills around Eugene, with a wide view over the city and the fresh, green Oregon horizon. It looks like a fertile spot, a good place to begin again, and he shows the place off like the proud new father and homeowner he is. His half brother, just out of college, is painting the kitchen a funky earth tone, and Thompson talks with excitement about the remodeling work he's going to have done. "Gonna tear all this out, have a great unobstructed view What do we need this balcony for? Not really practical for little kids anyway." He speaks with a mixture of ordinary American domesticity and rock-star elitism. "Honey, do you know where that David Cross birthday DVD greeting is? Dammit, maybe we were watching it upstairs." There is a huge framed poster of Jacques Tati's 1958 film Mon Oncle in striking crimson and a stylish collection of midcentury modern furniture. But besides the scratched, punctured acoustic guitar propped up in the middle of the living room, there are few visible reminders of the Pixies.

  Though the house was surely paid for with Pixies tour receipts, the biggest reminder of the band might be Thompson's car. He bought it in 1989, the year of Doolittle, with his first royalty check. He got $16,000, he says, and paid $13,000 cash for the thing. The band, founded in Boston a few months after he and Santiago dropped out of college, had existed for only about three years at that point, but was already beginning to fall apart. On January 1, 1990, Thompson packed up the Cadillac and left Boston with his thengirlfriend (and now ex-wife), jean, heading to Los Angeles at a leisurely pace. He had a CB radio installed in Memphis (he chose a handle, Big Daddy Caddy, but never used it, and stopped here and there to play some gas-money solo gigs. With the others scattered around the country and a growing case of "tension"-that catchall band disease-the Pixies recorded two more albums, Bossanova in 1990 and Trompe le Monde in 1991, before Thompson buried the band by fax on January 1, 1993. He had other things on his mind, including a solo career as Frank Black that, at least through 2005, encompasses ten albums.

  He had his own music on his mind right up until the Pixies reunion in April 2004. In the days before the tour began, Thompson recorded a set of gentle, confessional songs in Nashville with star R&B players including Steve Cropper and Spooner Oldham. The material from those sessions, released in July 2005 as Honeycomb, is about 10,000 light-years from his old band. But it didn't take him long to turn around. When he finished those recordings, Thompson headed up to Minneapolis for the first Pixies gig in twelve years, driving all the way in his yellow Cadillac.

  2

  The Pixies had existed for barely two years when they began to work on Doolittle, and things had moved fast. They had come together in the most prosaic way a band can-through a classified ad in the local weekly. In early 1986, Charles Thompson and Joey Santiago, recent dropouts from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, were newly installed in Boston and looking to form a band, but lacked a bassist and a drummer. Their listing in the Boston Phoenix was jokey though not so aesthetically inaccurate: seeking female bassist into Husker Du and Peter, Paul & Mary. "Charles put that ad out," Santiago says now, "and when he showed it to me, I go, that's perfect, that'll weed out the, um. . .Whoever calls is gonna have good taste. They're gonna get it. You know Turns out we only had one call."

  The respondent was Kim Deal, a toothy former cheerleader from Dayton, Ohio, who had just moved to Boston with her new husband, John Murphy. She came over to Charles's apartment and they played through some nascent Pixies songs over hummus. And though she was four years older than Joey and Char
les, and played guitar instead of bass, she got the job. ("I'd played guitar before," she said, "so I figured, `Four strings-no problem."') But they still needed that drummer. They tried and failed to recruit Kim's twin sister, Kelley. She flew out from Dayton "to have a talk and a listen to the songs in consideration of her playing (and learning) the drums," Thompson remembers.

  After at least one more false start, Kim remembered another drummer: David Lovering, a square-jawed former Radio Shack co-worker of her hubby's, whom she had met at their wedding reception. Lovering, the only Bostonian among them, was a gearhead and a Rush fan, but he was a monster behind the kit, and that's all that mattered. The lineup was complete by July 1986, and they headed to Lovering's parents' garage in the suburbs for rehearsals. Within fifteen months their first record was out and journalists were flying over from England.

  Thompson and Santiago had been assigned to the same dorm suite their freshman year at U-Mass. Thompson was there to study anthropology; Santiago remained without a major as long as the university would let him, whereupon he settled on a tough one, economics. Both arrived at school eager to start a band, but not just any band-had to be Original. "I didn't want to do any covers whatsoever," Santiago says. "I always wanted to make something different."

  As decisive as he may have been about his rock ambi tions, Santiago did not bring his guitar to school that first semester. He had been too studious, he says, or maybe just too shy. Born in the Philippines, the third of six sons of an anesthesiologist, he came to the United States when he was seven. After two years in Yonkers, New York, the Santiagos settled in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a leafy and affluent suburb of rust-belt Springfield. Joe grew up as the deepest kind of teenage rock nerd, naming his first computer program Iggy and his second computer program Pop. He seems to have never lost the caught-in-the-headlights eyes and nervous half-smile that peers out from so many Pixies photographs. Even today, rounding forty and establishing himself in Los Angeles as a composer of commercial musiche landed a gig doing the music for the cable TV series "Weeds" during the reunion tour, and recorded the music in the breaks between concerts-he has a silent, boyish anxiety, hovering around me with shoulders drawn inward as we wait for coffee at a Starbucks near his studio.