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

  Charles Michael Kittredge Thompson IV had none of his suitemate's timidness. He was born in Boston and his parents separated twice by the time he was in the first grade. His family moved back and forth between Massachusetts and Southern California repeatedly throughout his childhood, first with his natural father, a no-nonsense publican who tried business out West for a while before settling down in Cape Cod, and later with his mother and stepfather, a religious man who "pursued real estate on both coasts." In California, when Charles was about twelve, his mother and stepfather joined a church with ties to the evangelical Assemblies of God, and "also attended other services here and there, including of the Pentecostal variety," he says. Young Charles drank up the fire-and-brimstone oratory, and by his early teens had absorbed a concordanceful of Old Testament drama. The Sunday school indoctrinations would fade from his conscience, but the lessons of charismatic storytelling would not. "Bible stories are great!" he told the NME in 1988. "Everything you want: sex, violence, it's all there. Brutal, too. The hardcore stuff, whoooo, that stuff'd make spicy movies." At a religious summer camp around age thirteen he saw a performance by Larry Norman, the Gregg Allman of Christian rock, whose catchphrase was "come on, pilgrim!"

  Other scenes from youth have passed into the Charles Thompson apocrypha: how his family encountered a UFO while driving through Nebraska when he was an infant, how as a teenager he received vocal instruction from a Thai former rock star-his neighbor or his employer, the stories vary-who encouraged him to "scream it like you hate that bitch!" Perhaps they're true, perhaps not, although Thompson has told the stories himself. What matters more is that they helped establish his persona as an Everydude, a pudgy blank slate who lacked the looks or poise or stage presence of any rock god yet matched them by force of screams will.

  One day first semester, Santiago happened to hear Thompson and his roommate screwing around on guitars. Charlie was strumming chords and the other guy was noodling in a blues scale, the traditional paint-by-numbers jam technique of the small-minded. Santiago was both excited and appalled. Anything but plain old blues scales! "That's exactly what I wanted to get away from," he says now But it was enough to get him to retrieve his guitar from Mom's house forty minutes away, and soon he and Thompson were playing all kinds of non-blues-scale, non-cover-song rock.

  As a guitarist Santiago was a self-conscious amateur-he still speaks of his "insecurity" on the instrument-but he had a few moves to bring to a dorm-room jam session. He had learned about rock'n'roll from checking out records at the local library-"the Springfield library, not the town library;" he states, pausing with the surely-you-know-the-difference look of a true mole. He found Les Paul and Jimi Hendrix, who then led to Wes Montgomery, a pillar of jazz guitar. "And that's when I said, 'Ah, that's a hook,"' he says. "'That's some hooky stuff in this jazz world.' And that's how you do it, you just simplify it. Simplify the hell out of it." Among the tricks he picked up from Montgomery and Hendrix were "those octave thingies." (Santiago is a man of few words, and many of them are "thingy.") Via Hendrix, Santiago also culled abluesy dissonant chord, the dominant7 sharp-9. Groin-thrustingly erotic in Hendrix's hands ("Purple Haze"), when it was played by Santiago, the shyest boy in the dorm, it tapped a hidden rage that matched the horror of Thompson's scream ("Tame").

  Thompson had two off-campus experiences during his time at U-Mass that would provide ample inspiration for his songs. One was a summer archaeological dig in Arizona, where he found the bones of infants with jewels stuck in their ribs and teeth. The other was the six months he spent on an exchange program in Puerto Rico. There, while avoiding a "weird psycho gay roommate" who babbled frighteningly about receiving transmissions from Fred Flintstone, Thompson boned up on his Spanish, ate mucho rice 'n' beans, hung at the beach, and inhaled all the passions of a pungent Caribbean metropolis. He was there sans guitar, but the place-and the local Spanish dialect-long haunted his music. "Isla de Encanta" and "Vamos" from Come On Pilgrim, "Oh My Golly!" and "Where Is My Mind?" from Surfer Rosa, "Crackity Jones" from Doolittle, and the B-side "Bailey's Walk" all came directly from his time in Puerto Rico. "You're digging up the bones of Indians in Arizona," he says now, "it's romantic already just the whole setup, as opposed to writing about-what, how high school sucked? No, I'm gonna go for the archaeological dig and the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico. These are independent-youngman experiences."

  While on the isla del encanto (his es anol was a tad imper- fecto), Thompson wrote Santiago a letter. Thompson's dad had offered to fuel his son's wanderlust by paying for a trip to New Zealand to see Halley's Comet on its passage in February 1986, but Thompson was itching for something else. "He wrote me saying he's coming back, but not to go to school," Santiago remembers. "This time, we should drop out and start the band." Santiago did not need a great deal of convincing. "I was like, sure. I've had it with this schedule."

  In Boston, where both young men promptly got jobs in warehouses, Thompson lived alone in a studio apartment for a time, subsisting, he says, on a tape collection of Husker Du, Iggy Pop, Captain Beefheart, and nothing else. (The Iggy component: New Values and the 1'/,v Sick of You boot. "That thing's awesome," he says of the latter, still wide-eyed nineteen years later.) He began to amass a small heap of songs and was cranking out new ones all the time, writing in the bathroom, on the T, anywhere. But as working musi cians, he and Santiago were impossibly green. When the Pixies lineup was completed and a gig finally booked, Thompson and Santiago realized they had no idea how long a set was supposed to last. Solution: they went out to some clubs and timed the bands. Turned out most of them played for about half an hour.

  "I didn't have it all slicked out," Thompson says now "I wasn't this super-confident guy with a zillion songs sitting down at open mic night every night. It wasn't like I was really established in a way that some people can be. The problem is that people think they're fully formed, but that form is lame. The form is mediocre. That form represents mediocrity, it represents cliche-it represents all the things that you don't want to be when you want to be an original. So I think that Joey being an unformed guitar player and me being an unformed songwriter, kinda lost but at the same time really driven, was a good thing."

  Kim Deal and David Lovering were as unlikely a rhythm section as Charles and Joey were a Mick 'n' Kee£ She was older, married, and had never played bass before. Lovering was her age, and though he was the only one with any kind of technical command of his instrument, his experience came from playing in jerkoff bands with names like Iz Wizard and Riff Raff. The upside to this, however, was that he was a drummer with Neil Peart chops who was willing to play in a band called the Pixies, which even the girl bassist admitted was kind of a sissy name.

  Deal and Lovering brought something unusual for a college-rock band in the age of Sonic Youth and R.E.M.: a solid rhythm section. Lovering was a powerhouse, and his taste for flashy prog-metal gave him a precision and versatility essential to following Thompson's songwriting quirks. Deal's bass playing was steady if unremarkable at first, but she came to develop a buoyant style that matched her everpresent ear-to-ear. She played with a pick and kept budda- budda eighth notes like a rhythm guitarist-just like Dee Dee Ramone did, in fact. Deal's bass remained the most accessible aspect of the Pixies, and the lady herself, surrounded by young men who barely moved a muscle onstage, became the band's welcoming persona, its source of humor and bonhomie. She seemed tickled by the very idea of playing with these goofballs. In the early days Deal worked at a doctor's office-you had to call her there to book the band-and showed up to gigs in a long skirt and pumps while the menfolk dressed for a morning paper route.

  Deal wound up with a variety of roles in the band, ranging from frat-house sister and journalist's loudmouth favorite ("First I'm gonna piss like a racehorse," she told one charmed NME reporter during a night on the town in 1988, "then I'm gonna dance like a black woman") to underappreciated resource and designated antagonist. In time she and Thompson would openly clash; he resented the att
ention she got, and she griped that he wouldn't let her sing lead. Eventually, in 1990, the band had a big meeting with lawyers and such, in which Thompson had to be talked out of firing her. (Deal's side of the story is unknown to this reporter. She declined numerous requests to be interviewed for this book.)

  Those clashes were still far off on Saturday, December 13, 1986, when the Pixies had one of their biggest early shows, opening a Throwing Muses homecoming gig at the Rathskeller, aka the Rat, the beloved Kenmore Square dive that had long been a dank hub of the Boston scene. ("Boston's CBGB," it was called more than once, and remained so until it closed in 1997.) The Muses, from Newport, Rhode Island, had just released their first album on the British boutique label 4AD and played in Europe-pretty major shit for a mid-80s indie girl band. During soundcheck the Pixies were seen by Gary Smith, the Muses' friend and sometime producer. The man was gobsmacked. "It was an otherworldly experience," he later wrote. "They had no parallel. They had no peer. They had no idea what the hell they were doing or that it could change everything." He told the band he wanted to record them at Fort Apache, a newish studio in the Roxbury section of Boston, and eventually booked a freezing three-day weekend there in March. (Smith was then the studio manager and eventually became a coowner.) Thompson paid for the sessions with a $1,000 grant from his father-not the churchgoing stepfather but the Cape Cod barkeep, whose religious affiliation his son describes as "pagan, totally" (Dad's generosity was a form of recompense. "He wasn't around for a lot of my younger years," Thompson says, "so I think he was doing his best to make up for lost time.")

  Smith recorded eighteen songs, put seventeen of them on a cassette with a purple cover and a post office box number on the back, and sent it all over the place. The eighteenth cut, "Watch What You're Doing," was a cover of a song by Larry "come on, pilgrim" Norman, and has never been released. "I have the only copy of the recording," Smith says, "and, perhaps, by now, it's unplayable.") One copy of this Purple Tape landed with No Watts-Russell of 4AD in London. Known for its slick, gauzy package design and quasi-gothic bands invariably described as "ethereal" (q.v Cocteau Twins), the label did have an unpredictable streak. It had some success early on with the Birthday Party, who were anything but gauzy, and in 1987 the label scored a fluke hit with M/A/R/R/S's spacejam instrumental mix "Pump Up the Volume." The Pixies had an in. They were now being managed by Ken Goes, who also represented Throwing Muses, 4AD's first American signing and a new critical favorite on both sides of the Atlantic. But the boss did not capitulate immediately. "I was hesitant," Watts-Russell says now. At first blush the Pixies had seemed a tad too straight, too normal, "too rock'n'roll." He might have passed on them if not for the efforts of Deborah Edgeley, the label's publicist and his then girlfriend, whose subtle arguments persuaded him. "Don't be so fucking stupid," he says she told him. "We have to do it."

  Watts-Russell picked eight songs from the Purple Tape for a mini-LP, called it Come On Pilgrim after a beguiling line in "Levitate Me" (no Christian-rock Bible camp for the young Ivo, apparently), and released it in October 1987. The week it came out Charles Thompson scoured Boston's record stores in vain-4AD had no American distribution, and it could be bought only as an import.

  In honor of Iggy Pop, Thompson had chosen a vaude villian stage name, Black Francis; his father had once made a gag, understood by nobody outside the bloodline, that he had been saving that name in case he had another son. Deal picked her own, calling herself Mrs. John Murphy as an ironic feminist joke. She stuck with it, on album jackets at least, until her divorce from Mr. Murphy a year or two later.

  Smith and Watts-Russell began to hype the band with British journalists, and by the time Come On Pilgrim was released, with a cover photograph of a nauseatingly hirsute brute engulfed in Joel-Peter Witkin-esque sepia and blackness-if a free copy of that didn't catch the eye of a rock critic, nothing would-there was significant press interest. Reporters from the British weeklies began to trek their way to the Rat, where they were all charmed by twenty-two-yearold "chubby salt-of-the-earth avuncular poet" Charles Thompson. He was then first asked a question that would forever annoy him: What's with all the freaky lyrics about incest and stuff? "It's all those characters in the Old Testament. I'm obsessed with them. Why it comes out so much I don't know," he told the Melody Maker, already a little impatient. "I use the word `motherfucker' in the way it was used 200 years ago; it's been devalued since." Anyway, he told them, the lyrics don't really mean anything. They're just words that sound good together. Like T. Rex.

  To record the Pixies' first full LP, 4AD hired Steve Albini, the butcher of Big Black. He did it in Boston over a couple of weeks in December 1987, placing amps in the bathroom of the studio, Q Division, for that extra-harsh tile resonance. Surfer Rosa, released in March 1988, is the Pixies' version of a hardcore album, whose thirteen tracks seem not so much songs as quick and violent crimes. Thompson is a demon with a destroyed body, his voice a frantic whine punctuated by dick-in-a-bear-trap screams. Around him the guitars simply burn. The head rush of Side 1-"Bone Machine" to "River Euphrates"-is broken only by "Gigantic," Kim Deal's greatest moment with the Pixies, and perhaps ever. On its most obvious and enticing level, it is an unabashed praisesong to a well-endowed black man ("Gigantic! Gigantic! Gigantic! / A big, big love!"). But a commonly overlooked theme is its eroticized maternalism: Deal has said that an inspiration for the lyrics was the 1986 film Crimes of the Heart, in which Sissy Spacek plays a married woman who has an affair with a teenager. Deal's earthiness, her "sweet humanizing gravity;" as Robert Christgau once put it, is the ideal counterbalance to Thompson's abstract ravings, and their interaction-not flirtatious per se, but not exactly brother and sister, either-is an emotional touchstone. Even Thompson's "you fuck-in' die!" is directed, with corky affection, at her.

  The band did a short blitz through Europe-eighteen shows in twenty-four days beginning April 8-and got a madly, wonderfully, ego-strokingly rapturous response. "Pixies were welcomed like gods, which I felt was underestimating them somewhat," wrote the Melody Makers reviewer of their appearance at the Town and Country Club in London. Fans were reportedly pissing off the balconies in sheer Caligulalike abandon. The weeklies went nuts, competing with each other to put the young band on the cover again and again. Surfer Rosa topped the indie charts there-on the NME's chart for the week of April 16, it was No. 1, while Throwing Muses, the Pixies' benefactor and the headliner of their joint tour, was at No. 2 with House Tornado-and was named album of the year by the Melody Maker and Sounds.

  In America, Surfer Rosa was greeted with far fewer golden showers. It was licensed for distribution to Rough Trade, whose retail penetration was minimal. The press response was positive but muted, a tone that would persist for much of the band's career. Spin gave it a nothin'-special 120-word review ("beautifully brutal"), though the magazine later chose the Pixies as musicians of the year. The Village Voice ran a nice spread on the album ("kicks like no pop record ever kicked"). But there was a sense that the Pixies were being greeted with a thud in their home country. In England they got long, thoughtful stories by leading writers. In America, Musician magazine called the album Suffer Rosa, Rolling Stone didn't review it, nor did it make it onto the annual Pazz & jop critics' poll in the Voice, a survey of, that year, 212 of the country's most prominent music writers.

  Still, not bad for four kids who had never set foot in a professional recording studio until a year before. After its victorious run in Europe, the band returned home and rounded out the middle of 1988 with gigs gigs gigsMaxwell's, the 9:30 Club, and such in the U.S.; big halls with names like the Paradiso and the Town and Country Club on a return engagement across the pond-and began to work on what could possibly top Surfer Rosa.

  During the summer the group began demo sessions while on breaks from touring. They returned to a studio they had used early on, Eden Sound in the Boston suburb of New- tonville. A small room located in the basement of a hair salon, it was a part-time 8-track facility that recorded to ha
lfinch tape for $15 an hour. They were in there for a week, and the circumstances were similar to those of the Purple Tape sessions the year before, but having released two records and charmed the London critics by the pubful, the band was remarkably more confident this time. Jonathan Claude Fixler, the owner of the studio and the engineer of the sessions, remembers that Charles screamed so loudly on "Tame" that Fixler kept backing him away from the mic until he reached the far wall.

  Thompson gave the tapes a working title: Whore. It touched on a recurring theme in his new songs, contrasting eros with fear and disgust. "Whore" is still a brutal word. A signifier of an intense and forbidden desire, it is also a moral accusation that has few equals. Thompson says it was suggested by his pagan dad, and was meant to have a broad and provocative resonance. "There are male and female prostitutes, and they're both whores," he said when the album was released. "I only meant it to be in the more traditional sense of the word, the operatic, biblical sense, you know, zzvhore , as in the great whore of Babylon. `Whore' is a great word with a lot of connotations-mercantile connotations and politics, everything."

  The term would also surely have had a snide and ironic meaning for any so-called alternative rock band that found itself signing papers with a major corporation, as the Pixies soon would. Surfer Rosa had made enough of a splash that some of the big labels started checking them out, and by the fall the band had interest from Elektra, the coolest major there was. Founded as a folk label in 1950, Elektra got into rock via Love, the Doors, the MC5, and the Stooges, and in the late 80s had a roster that included the Cure, the Sugarcubes, Metallica, and Motley freakin' Crue (plus, well, Howard Jones and Simply Red). Peter Lubin, then an A&R man for Elektra, says that there was little serious competition from other labels, and that the band was easily signed. The Pixies' management, however, says they were fielding calls from a variety of labels in the post-Surfer Rosa months.) Lubin first saw them on October 14, 1988, at the World club in New York, opening up for the Jesus and Mary Chain. He was there with other scouts, who convened on the sidewalk after the show. "In typical A&R fashion," he says, "I turned to my comrades and said, `I don't know what to think.' The others all said, 'Pass.' I remember telling them that any group that can get up there and play for eighty minutes and I don't understand the first note, that's something I've got to be interested in."