FORMED: 1986, Boston, MA DISBANDED: 1993
The Pixies centred around vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Black Francis. Born Charles Thompson, he was often an outsider at school as his father moved between pub jobs. Contrary to the themes of some of their songs, he was never much into the actual beach-surf-sun lifestyle of California.
As Charles grew up, he learned how to play rock ‘n’ roll - learning piano, drums and guitar, and finally taking bass lessons from an uncle.
He learned to sing from the cousin of his employer at the time - a rock star in his native Thailand, who told him, “Scream it,” Charles recalled in a Sounds interview, “scream it like you hate that bitch!”
Charles and Joey had both gone to college with the intention of joining bands, and were fortunate enough to be roommates together at University of Massachusetts, the U-Mass from Trompe Le Monde.
Prior to this, Charles listened mainly to Beatles and Doors records. Joey introduced him to punk, Iggy Pop and Spiders-era Bowie.
Much of their first year was spent listening to music, smoking dope and messing about with guitars.
During one year at U-Mass, Charles' roommate objected to the way Charles' feet smelled and asked to be moved to a new room. His new roommate turned out to be none other than J. Mascis. He decided that Mascis and Thompson should meet as he thought both of them were weird. Charles talked mostly about the Bible and becoming a rock and roll hero and Mascis said nothing and left unimpressed. Neither of them at this time were in bands.
In the second year of his Economics course, Charles jumped at the chance to go on an exchange programme to a Puerto Rico university. He had the opportunity to go to Cork University in Ireland, but preferred to improve his Spanish.
But the Tropics weren’t all that he had hoped.
“There are probably far worse places in the world,”he told Ireland’s Hot Press, “but Puerto Rico is weird... because it’s American!
“It’s a welfare state so the people are really screwed up. They’ve got a really bad identity problem.
“They’re a Spanish-Indian race, but some of them want to be Indian. More think of themselves as American, and they’ve been, like, on the dole for something like five hundred years... Man, it’s just so fucked up!
“And because it’s essentially a Catholic place - that fuck’s things up even more. the serious alcohol problems don’t help much either.
“I’m not trying to put the people down or anything, but it is definitely a strange and screwed up place!”
The intention of the exchange, as I had said, was to have developed his Spanish, but he starved for a week as he didn’t have adequate knowledge of the language to open a bank account and cash his cheque.
His dorm was fifty storeys high, with a majority of the students being gays and queens. His gay roommate was immortalised in the song Crackity Jones.
By the following May, 1986, he had returned to Boston. He had given up on his studies in Puerto Rico, spending more time in bars that class, and had come to a decision.
He would either go to New Zealand to observe the passing of Haley’s Comet or get around to forming that rock band.
Joey chose the name of the band. Pixies in Panoply. Being originally from the Phillipines, Joe’s native language was Tagalog and looking at dictionaries for words that “sounded good” had become one of his hobbies.
The name eventually became The Pixies and their drummer was replaced by David Lovering at the suggestion of Kim Deal - herself, the only person to reply to an advert they placed in a Boston paper... and she didn’t even have a bass!
As a gesture of good faith, Charles gave Kim $50 towards fare to Dayton, Ohio, to borrow a bass from her twin-sister, Kelley, who she had played truck-stops with for a time, singing country tunes, called The Breeders.
Prior to David joining, though, Charles had thought it a neat idea if Kelley could join as drummer. She didn’t want to play drums.
In July, after only a month of rehearsing in the Lovering garage, the band began to play out and soon supported Throwing Muses.
An eight song demo was recorded that year and comprised of the songs Build High, Down to the Well, Here Comes Your Man, Ed is Dead, Brick is Red, Weird at My School, Rock A My Soul and I’m Amazed.
All songs, bar Rock a My Soul, would eventually get rerecorded and released by 4AD.
Here Comes Your Man has a countryish feel and Ed is Dead is backed by some Jerry Lee Lewis-style piano playing. I’m Amazed has the middle bit that they also performed it live with, but Albini edited out of the Surfer Rosa recording.
Down to the Well was written shortly after David joined, and was, in fact, the first song that the four of them rehearsed together.
At a soundcheck for a gig were they would be, again, supporting Throwing Muses, they were approached by Gary Smith, a producer at Fort Apache Studios, who was awed by their performance.
Gary invited Charles around for dinner one night, and recorded him singing several songs. Gary has done this with other musicians, and refers to it as his Sing For Your Supper sessions.
He recorded a set of demos with the Pixies on rented equipment in a few days at Fort Apache during March 1987 and these are affectionately called The Purple Tape.
Few copies were sent to record companies, one being 4AD in England, because, they believed what the Muses told them, that they “paid on time”.
Eight songs were lifted directly from the tape and released as Come on Pilgrim that October.
Down to the Well and Rock a My Soul appeared on the Sounds Waves 3 EP, given with Sounds in March 1988.
“I sometimes think we should have worked on them some more,” Joe told Guitar Magazine after the release of Death to the Pixies, when asked if he would have preferred to have rerecorded the tracks that eventually made up Come on Pilgrim. “But, in a way, it’s better as a snapshot. The thing was that we didn’t think we were making an album when we recorded the songs - we were just trying our best.”
Surfer Rosa was released the same month as the Sounds freebie. It was produced by Big Black/Rapeman Steve Albini at the suggestion of 4AD’s Ivo Watts-Russell.
Albini works on a straight fee, rather than a cut of a record’s profits, very often doesn’t like the bands he records and hates doing the vocals (especially the “ri ri ri” harmonies on River Euphrates!)
The music on Surfer Rosa was recorded in about two weeks and the vocals took an additional two days!
The following month they toured the UK and Europe as support act to the Muses, and were often seen as a double-bill. Sounds Machine 1 EP, again given free with Sounds, contained a song by each band recorded from the tour.
The Pixies’ next recording, The Gigantic EP, also contained live cuts from the same tour as well as rerecordings of Gigantic and River Euphrates with Gil Norton.
It was released one month after their first session for Radio One’s John Peel show.
They toured UK and Europe for a second time that year, headlining above My Bloody Valentine, with Perfect Disaster making it a threesome at the Mean Fiddler show.
Several songs from Doolittle were previewed on the tour, and Surfer Rosa won Album of the Year in Sounds and Melody Maker Readers’ Polls.
“Gil was the king of overdubbing,” Joey said of Norton’s production. “He wouldn’t just stick on a bunch of guitars just to get a wall of sound, on Here Comes Your man, he made me do five overdubs with Mustangs, Teles and Les Pauls. They weren’t all going at the same time - they were dropped in very carefully at the precise moment. It wasn’t easy, but it sounded cool.”
Whether it was the better quality of recordings or just, simply, better songs, Monkey Gone to Heaven as a single and the Doolittle album were released a month apart in the Spring of 1989 and were commercial and critical successes for the band.
That Summer I played a tape of Doolittle (backed with a Stooges compilation) solidly in my car - the album contained the stupid-pop of Surfer Rosa and the religion of Come on Pilgrim.
Charles was brought up in the Pentecostal Bible-belt of California. Brought up a Christian only by his parents’ choice, he attended Sunday school were he loved the stories of the Old Testament, telling NME about it in October 1988 he said, “Bible stories are great! Everything you want - sex, violence - it’s all there... brutal too. The hardcore stuff would make spicy movies!”
It was from seeing folk singer Larry Norman at a Christian Summer Camp when he was 13 that inspired Charles to quote him in Levitate Me - “Come on pilgrim, you know he loves you!”
“I believe that each successive record release, be it a single or an album, should not only be an exercise in satisfying all the band’s existing fans,” Norton told Melody Maker in September 1990, “but also attracting a whole bunch more besides.
“When we came to doing the Doolittle album, we consciously gave it a dry, American hardcore sound, which was a step on from Surfer Rosa.”
A 50+ date tour began almost as son as the album was released. The first show opened with Into the White, a then-unreleased track, and continued in a similar fashion with some of the shows being played with songs in alphabetical order of the songs performed, and a London show in reverse-alphabetical order!
Gigs included a few on the European festival circuit, playing Glastonbury more for the exposure than the politics of CND awareness that it raised money for.
Up to this time, Joey had actually been playing a Les Paul guitar that belonged to Kim. He had originally wanted to play a Fender Telecaster, but was beaten to the punch by Charles.
In Athens, Greece, Joey, David and Kim took to riding mopeds, as Charles and his girlfriend, Jean, preferred to see the sights at a more pedestrian pace.
David and Joey refused to ride with Kim after she crashed three times in one day!
The American tour followed immediately and was a terrible strain on the band, being a great relief when it ended in New York.
A year previously, Kim and Tanya Donelly from Throwing Muses were in a nightclub and, while terribly drunk, decided to record the ultimate disco song and retire from the profits.
This was the seed of The Breeders, known sometimes as The Breeders MkII because Kim and Kelley had played under that name before.
Breeders is a slang term used by gays for heterosexuals.
I believe Leslie Langston and David Narcizo, bass and drums with the Muses, were to have helped out originally, but Josephine Wiggs, bassist at the time with UK band Perfect Disaster, was brought in. Kim knew Josephine from supporting the Pixies on a few UK and European shows. I think David Lovering played drums on Breeders’ demos at Fort Apache.
Steve Albini was brought in to produce the record, bringing Brit Walford of Kentucky band Slint (and later the likes of Palace Brothers) to play drums.
He was given the deceiving handle of Shannon Doughton - creating the impression of the band being an all-girl thing.
The album and a four-song John Peel session were recorded in Scotland during January 1990.
The album was finished a week ahead of schedule and they played two surprise shows in London - seen in the audience was Chris Acland (drummer from Lush), who was claimed to have been Breeders’ sticksman at one time.
Josephine shocked everybody when she left Perfect Disaster. She announced that she would form a band, probably called Naked Bosom, joined Ultra Vivid Scene for a while, eventually recording with drummer Jon Mattock of Spiritualised as Honey Tongue.
Sara Worley reviewed their album in RAMS#3 alongside her interview with Josephine and said, “This is the most compelling album my ears have been graced with for ages.” It’s nothing really like Perfect Disaster or The Breeders.
When The Breeders’ Pod was finally released it received many positive reviews. The obvious comparison was with the Pixies material as Tanya was unable to write or sing a lead vocal due to contractual obligations with Sire, Muses US record label. The plan was that she would write the following album.
Pod was the perfect followup to Doolittle.
In early 1990, Charles and Jean drove towards the US west Coast in a canary yellow Cadillac. He played the occasional show to pay to furnish his new LA home, and got hooked on the Bill Goodman Radio Show as featured in Bossanova’s The Happening.
Dave was “thinking real hard” in Jamaica and Joey went to the Grand Canyon “to find himself”.
Bossanova was rehearsed and recorded in LA, where Charles drove Norton around Hollywood Hills at night, playing him surf music, trying to get him into the feel of what he wanted to album to be about.
During one rehearsal the band had to leave their building do to a minor earthquake.
Velouria was released as a single, then the Bossanova album, then the Dig for Fire single (the latter being another early song).
As with all Pixies singles, they entered the Top 40, stayed for a week, then vanished without a trace.
They again played the European festival circuit, headlining Reading 1990. They were supported in Europe and Ireland by Pale Saints and the UK with Barkmarket.
Kim remained in England after the tour to work on stuff with Josephine, while Charles played three sell-out shows in London to pay for his return journey to the States on the QE2 (he has had a fear of flying since the 1989 European tour).
Trompe le Monde was recorded in LA, Paris and London and was overdue and over-budget.
The song Distance Equals Rate Times Time is an extended version with new words of the bridge bit from the original version, recorded back as early as the first demo in 1986, of Subbacultcha, which also appeared on the album. Build High from the same demo was rerecorded and put on the B-side of Planet of Sound, which preceded the album.
Eric Drew Feldman, who has played with Captain Beefheart and Pere Ubu, played keyboards on the album and became Charles’ musical partner, playing keyboards and bass on the Frank Black albums.
The following Spring they supported U2 on an American tour.
Bowie’s Tin Machine covered Debaser and Tony’s Theme in their live set around this time.
Kelley Deal joined The Breeders on guitar with the Safari EP, where drums were provided by Brit Walford and Jon Mattock. Kim Deal produced it.
In January 1993, on the eve of the release of the first Frank Black album, Charles announced the Pixies’ split. There had been rumours a few months previously that Kim had left or was threatening to leave the band.
Frank Black was to have been an album of covers, but, apart from a Beach Boys tune, ended up being a collection of songs that Charles had amassed since Trompe le Monde, and, although critically slammed by the music press, and seen by Charles, himself, as a change of direction, to me was more of a follow-on of ideas from the last Pixies album.
Joey Santiago guested on the first two Frank Black albums and is currently playing with The Martinis with his wife and David Lovering. David also worked with Nitzer Ebb on an aborted album and played with Cracker.
Joey and his brothers Bob and Lou played on Mangled, Steve Westfield's first album with The Slow Band, and Joey also produced an album for Westfield's original band, Pajama Slave Dancers, who come from Northampton, MA, and helped give a lot of the U-Mass bands of the time (Buffalo Tom, Dinosaur, Pixies, etc) their first breaks.
The British music press Pixies attention was diverted to the Breeders who, with a new drummer, Jim MacPherson, and without Tanya, who had formed Belly at this time, released The Last Splash album and the classic Cannonball single.
Apart from tracks such as Cannonball and I Just Want to Get Along, I thought that Pod was a much stronger album.
Frank Black has since released a John Peel session where he did a set of covers, backed by Teenage Fanclub, a live album, appeared on Top of the Pops with Men in Black (originally a B-side to the classic Headache from his second 4AD album, Teenager of the Year) and released The Cult of Ray on Sony/Epic Records in Europe and American Recordings in North America. He has recorded three albums and has toured as Frank Black and the Catholics.
Reprinted from Rock a My Soul #1 (with amendments and alterations)
