Pixies really came out of nowhere in 1988. And not before time! There was a need for a full on, unhinged Rock and Roll band at this point in the late eighties when frankly things were a bit dull in white guitar music and they fitted the bill entirely. I vividly recall the sensations if not the detail of a moment in that year, late summer it seems to me (in fact having checked it was probably early), at the top of my parent's house with the windows wide open. It was not a good time in my life. I was very ill, but I don't remember that about the instant. All I recall is putting this on, One of the first times I'd played it. Side One, Track One, cranking up the volume and letting the waves of sound wash through me and beyond. Out into our suburban back garden.
It was deeply American music. It came from the loins of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. David Bowie was probably thereabouts too but mostly it spoke to me of Mid -West towns that I'd never go to, of college bars, diners, raw teenage lust and dreams of driving to Mexico to get wasted. It was an idea not a reality to me in the time and place I was in, just as I think it was an idea not a reality to the band themselves, but it was a thrilling one.
Something was reborn in music that had lain dormant for a while. Pixies were seizing the promise and raw excitement of Iggy and the Stooges, The Gun Club, The Replacements, Black Flag, Husker Du and Sonic Youth and taking them someplace new. No one knew it at this point but they were preparing the ground for Nirvana and all that followed.
I wasn't the only one who was excited. The Melody Maker I remember were very, very excited. John Peel too. I remember him starting one show with Surfer Rosa's opening two tracks, Bone Machine and Break My Body. They very much bled into one another.
Pixies had the right formula and the right ingredients. No song ever outstayed it's welcome. No song ever broke the winning template they established very early on. They had Kim Deal. It's impossible to overstate the importance of Kim Deal. Without her they had no sexual allure. At least not one that would have appealed as it did. With her they had it. They had a rocksolid drummer in Dave Lovering and an inventive guitarist Joey Santiago who gave them the authentic hispanic edge they needed and blasted out rolling waves of wild, vicious unrelenting sound that somehow stayed within that template too. And they had Black Francis who provided the guiding vision.
'I do my lyrics at the very, very last minute. I’m more into making music and coming up with poetic structure….The lyrics come after I make a big shape…I come up with the structure first….Music is mathematical and needs mathematical structure more than a topic. A topic will come. You take a bunch of words and put them all together, and you have a topic. [The song makes sense] because it comes from the same mind….It’s like a Dadaist approach, which is…just taking reality from many different places and throwing it together in the same pot….Like many songwriters when they’re young they start writing songs and they write a topical song which is usually a very bad song with many syllables and many words, and it’s not very entertaining. Rock n roll is all about “Tutti Frutti!” and “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow-Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow”—“Surfin’ Bird”…that’s a good rock n’ roll song.' Frank Black 1989
This is a song for Carol...
Seeing Pixies as a piece of work makes sense of them to me. They're an exercise in controlled noise. A thought through career plan on Frank Black's part realised by his own contribution and the contribution of the other three. Not that there's no love involved, because it wouldn't work if there wasn't but it also wouldn't work without the science.
Pixies songs are acts of engineering and he plans, oversees and directs the process, Bob Stanley in his excellent new book 'Yeah Yeah Yeah' describes the male members of the band as looking like a bunch of plumbers, which is meant as a disparaging comment about their looks. He's on the right lines but I think they're better imagined as wearing hard hats and working on a building site.
A lot of the main American alternative pioneers were geeks. The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, Pere Ubu, Thurston Moore. Michael Stipe. Frank Black is a geek too. But he always found it difficult to find acceptance among the hip geeks.
I remember watching David Thomas of Ubu and Thurston Moore chumming up in a late night programme on British TV in the late 80s to show their disdain for Pixies video of This Monkey's Gone to Heaven just as the band were beginning to break big. They couldn't admit to liking it. Pixies were too Mid-West, too provincial, too keen to be liked to get their hipster seal of approval. They even threatened to break really big at that moment. The ultimate taboo for indie elitists. No wonder they were dismissed by a pair of avant gard icons who couldn't muster a hit single between them at any point in their careers. The main reason for the dismissal was that Santiago gave a thumbs up signal to the camera about a minute into the song.
After the bruising one two of Bone Machine and Break My Bones comes the obligatory one and
a half minute walloping drums, thudding bass squalling guitar and howling into a baseball glove thrash of Something Against You. Surfer Rosa does have its standout tracks and some moments which might be called filler in less capable hands. This isn't the case with Pixies though. I can't quite explain it. Sometimes you just need a momentary pause from depraved sexual practices, biblical lamentations and bestiality.
I'd like to amend that last post. I reviewed Something Against You on the internet with headphones. I've just corrected that horrific mistake and listened to it as it was meant to be heard and followed that by listening to Broken Face, another Pixies song I hadn't really listened to with ears before. Such a great exercise writing this blog.
Both songs shimmy, squeal, howl and sway the way any truly great music should and does. They take Side One from three to four on to five and six in a quite seamless transition of noise, pace and sound. Then we're ready but hardly ready for five and six.
Surfer Rosa is very much about the joyous experience about having sex with someone. I've done that and hope you have. It's a nice, nice space. Surfer Rosa replicates that entirely. The great moment when you think your brain might explode through lack of imagination.
At the same time it's the reverse from sex. It's the objectification of it. Pretty close to pornography. Or else art. Francis Bacon stuff. Very clever, writing and playing. But Pixies were ultimately three blokes and Kim Deal and to be honest and get to the bottom of the band and how they operated, and their themes, you'd have to think about that.
It's ugly and clever art at the same point! No wonder Pixies didn't clean up but Kurt Cobain did with his great distillation and reversal of their soul, sound sex, looks and ideas. Much good that idea did him.
Listening to Pixies twenty five years after I listened to it first time in that attic room. Pixies haven't changed but perhaps I have. It's leaner, thinner, uglier, more real. Less sexy. Pared to the bone. Commerce. Where's your 10 dollars?
I didn't review the second side. I didn't review every song. Like I said. I was sick. So is the world. Pixies amongst others predicted that. They did it very, very well. I know I'm not doing them justice! But sometimes music consoles and warms. Sometimes it doesn't. Pixies are great. They just didn't do it for me this time.
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