by Ben Sisario
Lubin contacted the band's management and began the A&R mating dance, eventually signing the Pixies to a licensing deal. 4AD had worldwide rights to the band, but no distribution in the United States (or, for that matter, anywhere outside Great Britain). The negotiations began in the fall, and after months of lawyering, the deal was finally signed on April 2, 1989-just two weeks before the album was released. Elektra took the American distribution rights; PolyGram had already licensed the band in Canada.
In a sense, the Pixies had hit the indie jackpot. In just a couple of years of existence, they had gotten a taste of stardom, been praised by the press as geniuses, and secured a sizable deal that would get their records into the stores, their music onto the radio, and their mugs into yet more magazines and newspapers. They were about to spend tens of thousands of dollars recording an album with a guy who had a British accent. They had become "whores."
Or not. Selling out was the great cardinal sin of alternative rock in its golden age, but prior to Nirvana's success in 1991, signing to a major had rarely amounted to much for anybody. The Replacements, Husker Du, Soul Asylum, and Throwing Muses, among many others, had all done the Faustian deed, and none had found riches; ready-for-themainstream R.E.M. was one of the few that had. Alt-rock in 1988 was, as a music-business proposition, strictly smalltime. Without bankable hits that resembled those of the big rock sellers-U2, INXS, Van Halen, Guns N' Roses, John Mellencamp-a band was not likely to go far, and the modest recording contracts of the era reflected this. The Pixies were one of the last bands of the 80s college-rock era to sign to a label that did not expect megahits out of them.
And yet Charles and company had a high-fiving cockiness as they worked on Whore. "I remember the first thing we did was, after we made the demo, I went over to Joey Santiago's apartment," Thompson says now "We just sat around playing the demo tape over and over again. We were just like, fuck. This is good. If they don't get this, fuck'em."
3
The springtime air is moist and pure along the byways of western Oregon, with gentle rains giving way a couple of times a day to a cleansing sunshine. The Willamette Valley gets so much rainfall, in fact, that the suburban yards and gardens nearby burst with impossible pinks, purples, fuchsias-all the colors of a makeup kit. That means they burst with pollen, too, and Charles Thompson says the area was known by the Indians as the "valley of sickness." Could have been a Pixies song.
Driving out of Eugene in his Cadillac, Thompson keeps his eyes straight on the road as I begin my interrogation. Which of the songs were written first? When did you record the slow version of "Wave of Mutilation"? Why save the UFO songs for the B-sides? His answers are monosyllabic, vague. Before long a strip mall appears on the other side of the road, and glancing over at it he says, "You know, you probably don't have to sit down and listen to it, but we should probably go pick up a copy of Doolittle." But surely that's not necessary; I say. I have a copy right here in my-
Too late. We're in the record store, one of those unnecessarily spacious pseudo-Sam Goodys that seems to stock more video games and CD storage wallets than actual CDs. Thompson goes straight to the P section and pulls out Doolittle and the Pixies' Complete B' Sides, explaining that for the upcoming leg of the reunion tour, some concerts have been billed as B-sides and rarities shows, and he needs to bone up. He scans the racks and makes two more quick grabs, an Iggy Pop album and Leonard Cohen's I'm YourMan. At the register, he hands the discs and his credit card to a sandyhaired indie girl who looks about twenty. She clearly doesn't recognize him, nor the name on the card. The incident is uncomfortably familiar: the same thing happened a year before while Thompson was in Portland with a writer from GQ. I wonder if he is deliberately showing off his anonymity.
Back in the car he tears the plastic wrapping off Doolittle and slides the disc into the stereo. The machine bleeps rapidly as he flips through the tracks. Landing on "Hey," he nods deeply and says, "That's a big one. That one is the sleeper song. Over the years I've discovered that people love that song. They love that song." He sounds almost confused.
Though it comes near the end of the album, "Hey" is an arresting midpoint. Everything drops out as Black Francis, naked and vulnerable, cries out-"Hey!" He waits a brief eternity for an F-sharp on the bass and continues. "Been trying to meet you/Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm." For a moment it's a poetry slam, with a why-am-I-so-shy-around-girls lyric, a walking bassline, and a delicate guitar lick that sounds like a two-second sample of Steve Cropper circa 1965. But all too quickly the song turns into a frightened, paranoid rant. "Must be a devil between us," he sings, "Or whores in my head / Whores at the door / Whore in my bed." All around him "the whores like a choir" writhe and grunt in a grotesque chain that stretches from the conjugal bed to the maternity ward. It's the Violent Femmes' "why can't I get just one fuck?" recast as a Danteic scene of never-ending agony and lust.
"People are clapping along, they just love that song," Thompson says. "`Whore in my head, whore in my bed.' What the fuck? Don't you guys find any of this a little abrasive or something?" I offer him my interpretation, a psychological profile of the narrator: sexually inexperienced and fearful, he yearns for what he also finds threatening and repulsive, the thought of bodies copulating wantonly. Thompson entertains this "armchair analysis," but he's not totally buying it. "If that is a right-on analysis," he says, "then you're probably going to have to get at it by talking to other people, because if that is correct, you're not going to bring it out of me. I wouldn't intellectually arrive at the same conclusion. I'm more like, I don't know what it means." He says that in part it may be about his father and his mother, though he does not elaborate.
Then it hits him. "There's something to be said for how it's all about sex and death, or whatever. Maybe that's why people like the Pixies. Because even if they don't get it, they pick up on the sex and death vibrations. They relate to that. They go, `Yeah, sure, I know what you mean, dude.' But I think they do, actually. They're kind of on the same page, even if they don't totally get what you're saying. I would say that because maybe at some point I should return to it. For whatever reason, whether you don't want to become a parody of yourself, or because you run out of steam, or because you can only take it for so long."
"But whatever it is," he continues, "I think my sex and death vibrations were strong when I was with the Pixies, and it was a good thing. And they were real sex and death vibrations. They were maybe a little bit put on, a little bit of pretension. But it wasn't fake."
When Gil Norton arrived in Boston to record Doolittle, he found Charles Thompson overflowing with new material. "Every time we did a Pixies album, he would have maybe twenty-five to thirty ideas to start with," Norton says. "Quite a few might be songs, quite a few were ideas he was just developing." I've got songs coming out of any ears, man!
As fragments, they might consist of little more than a chord progression and a phrase or two. "This monkey's gone to heaven"-sounds pretty cool, pretty weird. With a song in this fetal state, its meaning was often obscure even to Thompson, but he was intrigued. It was, in a way, beginning with nonsense. Most songs on Doolittle, and many in the Pixies repertoire, originated with a single word or phrase that captivated Thompson as he strummed his six-string lyre. Many share the same sharp, nasally vowel: Debaser. Wave (of Mutil-a-tion). Tame. Hey (which also yields the delicious Chained. Others: Bleed. Grieves. Gouge (A-nvay). In early interviews Thompson characterized his songwriting process as solitary and obsessive, and said that he spent long stretches-often in the bathroom, he said, or in front of a mirror-vocalizing his way through a tight rhyme scheme.
Discussing his method now, he likens it to a journey that can begin anywhere. "You need words to a song," he says, revving up like a motor. "You got some music, you've determined that a particular syllable or a certain syncopation works particularly well at a particular moment. So what's the harm in saying, OK, I'm going to take this random word from the vocabulary of the English language, or any language, and stick it right h
ere? So I'm going to build from there. What does that word remind me of? It doesn't matter. It's like throwing a dart at a map. You gotta go somewhere. OK, there's the starting word: `gigantic.' Where are going to go from there? OK, go. That works well for me. It frees me -it doesn't mean I have to be some sort of sage, or that I have all this important shit in my heart that I have to share with everybody. It frees me from all that kind of precious singer-songwriters stuff. And I can be like, hey man, that's where I threw the dart."
A song not quite figured out yet had an unstable energy that Thompson, even through the labors of rewriting and polishing, strove to preserve. Gary Smith witnessed this in the early days of the band when Thompson played him working drafts. "Sometimes the earliest fragments of songs are the most powerful and unmediated," he says. "They come from somewhere else, whether they are from a higher plane or the subconscious. They are not subject to the same acts of will that crafting a song involves. And Charles was never afraid to show you those. He would stand in front of me with his acoustic guitar, and sometimes did not have words yet. He made noises like an animal. It wasn't humming-it was something else entirely, something mysterious and inexplicable."
The unmediated writing process was to large degree drawn from one of Thompson's most important influences: Surrealism. While a student at U-Mass, he encountered the films of Luis Bunuel, David Lynch, and others, and took to them in the way only an American college student can. "I didn't have the patience to sit around reading Surrealist novels," he says, "but hey, twenty-minute films? Sure. I can deal with that."
It clicked as both an aesthetic model and a working method. "I got into avant-garde movies and Surrealism as an escape from reality," Thompson told the Alen, York Times in 1989. "There's nothing Surrealistic about everyday life. To me Surrealism is something totally artificial. I recently read an interview with the director David Lynch who said he had ideas and images in his head but that he didn't know exactly what they meant. That's how I write." Lynch's Eraserbead was a particularly potent inspiration. A stark but hilarious dramatization of the primal fear of fatherhood, it portrayed the unwanted baby as a twitching, wormlike turd born "premature"; Jack Nance cuts its guts open in a fuck-all climactic rage. Surrounding Nance throughout the film are what might be called a choir of whores, women who are angelic and cruel at the same time. One is the puffy-cheeked Lady in the Radiator, who clumsily and gigglingly squashes fetuses beneath her high heels. She sings a ditty, "In Heaven," which Thompson adapted in one of his finest whisper-toputrid-scream treatments.
Doolittle is where Thompson paid explicit tribute to Surrealism, and where he mastered his own version of it. He continued to turn to the Old Testament for material, but also looked to other sources of myth both ancient and modern, as well as one standby, sexual angst. As his songwriting model he set upon the concept of the Bunuel short, with a deliberately thin plot but a carefully constructed chain of imagery meant to startle and arouse, and sometimes degrade. The album opens with "Debaser," a raunchy and bloody invocation of the Surrealist muse. "Got me a movie / Ha ha ha ho!," Black Francis famously gawps with shredded throat. "Slicing up eyeballs / Ha ha ha ho!" The singer is declaring his induction into a rare club. "I am un chien andalusia," he says, after (In cbien andalou, Bunuel and Salvador Dali's 1928 dirty bomb of a film, which features the still-shocking image of a man apparently drawing a razor across the eyeball of his calm, pretty female companion. The scene is as artful as it is truly disgusting. With enterprising Model T-era FX, the close-up of the eye with the poised razor is "cut"-cute, right?-to a shot of the moon being "sliced" by a thin cloud, and then, still smoothly, to a blade splitting a calf's eye, which when penetrated splurts a load of pale, gelatinous goo. Sex and gore and art and ejaculating body parts! One can almost see an enraptured young Charles Thompson witnessing this in film class at U-Mass and offering up his pledge to the sacred fraternity of the eyeball-slicin', the symbol-juxtaposin', the bourgeoisie- epater-in': "Wanna grow / Up to be / Be a debaser!"
Surrealism, of course, was more than just punctured faces and men sliding their hands up little girls' dresses. It was a radical artistic movement that aimed to spelunk dark psychic depths through "automatic writing." This technique, articulated and promoted by Andre Breton, the P. T. Barnum of the Rive Gauche, sought to conjure language directly from a burning inner source, bypassing the rational interference of the conscious mind-to channel speech the way those fume-huffing ancient oracles once did. Breton trumpeted its artistic potential, but the process also symbolized a deep human challenge: face what frightens you, and speak it.
To create songs in the Bunuel/Lynch filmic mode, Thompson engaged in a sort of house-divided struggle between his internal "director" and "scriptwriter." The director has an idea, best expressed visually, and tells the writer to churn out some copy to go along with it. The writer wants to give it some sense, while the director is mainly interested in getting to the next big, weird scene. Take "Here Comes Your Man," which Thompson calls "just some kind of surreal cowboy movie in my head." Here's the set visit. "The scriptwriter says, `Well yeah, it's a movie about hobos, you know, but I'm not gonna force too much plot on this thing,"' he says. "The director, who's a Surrealist, is sort of like, `Let's sing it! Let's have bells over here, let's have whistles over here, let's have a rock'n'roll experience! I don't care what the narrative is, that's up to the scriptwriter.' The scriptwriter's like-well, the scriptwriter's the real Surrealist, actually. The director, he just wants a good movie with some bang for your buck. He just wants some stuff to happen. He doesn't give a shit if it makes sense or not." And so it goes until verse-chorus-verse.
The Surrealists, like Thompson, were obstinate opponents of interpretation. It's art, you see, it has no meaningor, at least, you'll never figure it out. Why did Rene Magritte paint a green apple over that stiff bowler-hatted businessman's face? Nobody knows. Un cbien andalou's makers gave themselves a rule that "no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted." Charles Thompson zipped his mouth in the great tradition. "The song is a puzzle," he says, "and it's there for you to figure out. Some of them are easq and some of them are hard. Some of them are so hard that you'll never, ever figure them out, because you would have to be inside my brain, to know what I know."
But the idea that a thought or a work of art is purely and inexplicably sui generis is the white lie of Surrealism. Words come from somewhere, even when generated "automatically," and the movement itself has an identifiable place in history. Surrealism-like Dada, from whose Zeus-like head it sprung-was a reaction to the absurdity and horror of war, and to the tumult of modern life. It also drew from the stillnew science of psychoanalysis, which reintroduced man to fears and desires long unspeakable, and posited that the human mind is a vast and mostly unknown realm ruled by those very drives and emotions. In a sense, automatic writing was a simple reconfiguration of Freud's analytic method of free association.
(Freud himself never got it. In a 1932 letter to Breton, he wrote: "Although I have received many testimonies of the interest that you and your friends show for my research, I am not able to clarify for myself what Surrealism is and what it wants. Perhaps I am not destined to understand it, I who am so distant from art.")
The beauty part was that the Surrealists managed to produce incisive social criticism while avoiding any specific commentary that would have diminished their work by rendering it merely topical or allegorical. Max Ernst's rampaging monsters and mechanical beasts, Magritte's literally faceless businessmen, Bunuel's fetishists of wounded body parts-each had indirect symbolic resonance as worries of the modern age. The idea behind using them in a work of art was to poke a deep and uncomfortable part of the viewer's brain and leave him violated and yet confused, offended and yet enticed. One might never willingly face such things-a fear, a terrible memory, the thought of sagging human flesh propped up like a tent-but when led there on a broken and winding path, one is forced to confront them. A corollary of t
his concept is that an artist's sources are also obscured, but can be sensed. Why, for example, in [In chien andalou, are a man's efforts to maul his lady impeded once he notices that he is dragging (a) two priests, (b) two grand pianos, and (c) those pianos loaded with two bloodied donkey carcasses? Bunuel and Dali ain't telling, though one can wonder about the symbolic "weight" of social and religious inhibitions in the rapidly modernizing cities of post-World War I Europe. But it sounds a little boring to put it that wad; doesn't it? And anyway, questions remain, like what do bloody asses have to do with sexual inhibition? Oh, wait.
