by Ben Sisario
Violence, sex, theatricality, black humor, veiled social commentary, semiotic mutability: these were the traits that attracted Charles Thompson to Surrealism. And in its rejection of bourgeois values, the movement also had a contemptuous hauteur that would forever endear it to adolescent students across this wide somewhat-educated world. In Breton's formation, Surrealism was a pure expression of the antisocial impulse. "The simplest Surrealist act," he famously wrote in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism, "consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd."
Surrealism tapped the childlike joy of blood and gore as voyeuristic entertainment. [In chien andalou, of course, is a slapstick comedy, jumping from one absurd gross-out to the next, and Thompson's muse never told him that this stuff was anything but pop. "I guess I see David Lynch films as entertaining," he says as we pull away from the record store. "Highly entertaining in the arena of entertainment-a bit surreal, a bit humorous, a bit squirmy, kind of designed to entertain and also make the audience feel just slightly uncomfortable, maybe."
Is that what you were after in your songs?
"Yeah, sure. Not to be abrasive for the sake of being abrasive, not to be strange for the sake of being strange. I think if that were the case, then our music would've been a lot stranger. I think of it as a necessary ingredient for being entertaining. Being entertaining is not only about going `Tada! Hey!' It's also about doing some other thing that can even be a little bit uncomfortable or something. Dissonant. Right? That's what's nice about Surrealist film. It's like, wow this is entertaining, and it doesn't make sense! There's no narrative! There's things about this that's not all square! They're different. And different feels good. Different feels stimulating. And therefore, because it's stimulating, it's good entertainment."
The random-cut-up aesthetic of Dada passed into rock via Zappa, Beefheart, and Bowie, but Surrealism of the Bunuel/Breton /Lynch stripe was largely left untouched until Thompson picked up on it. Psychedelia and prog dabbled in the "surreal," but never found the unsettling dream logic central to Surrealism, nor the critical aspect of violence. A few who got close were Pink Floyd, early Peter Gabriel, and Tom Waits in his Szvordfzrbtrombones era. But closest of all was Talking Heads, an important inspiration for the Pixies, if not for sound then for vision. "Stop making sense," Thompson says, citing David Byrne's art-rock commandment. "Stop making sense and have rhythm. Or have groove. Or rhyme. Or use some interesting imagery. Or be very convoluted about what you're trying to say, for the purpose of making it interesting for all of us."
The irony of Thompson's interest in Surrealism, and his profession in "Debaser" of lifelong dedication to it, is that it was not such a wild life choice at all. In fact it is the oldest story in the collegiate book. Babyfaced suburban kid goes to school, strums guitar in his dorm room, gets his mind blown by some out-there art, and next thing you know he swears he is Mr. I Defy Conventional Morality.
And as a composition, "Debaser" is not so groundbreaking either. In a sense, the song does not live up to the challenge of the Surrealists. They created something boldly original, inventing a new and widely influential school of art, and Thompson merely called out their name and set it to a rock song. "Debaser," while serving as the invocation to Surrealism, in fact embodies that movement far less than do the menagerie of songs that follow it on Doolittle, from the underwater wanderings of "Wave of Mutilation" to the cataclysms of "Monkey Gone to Heaven" and "Mr. Grieves" to the Hieronymus Bosch canvas of flesh in "He}" And yet without the discovery in "Debaser," one wonders whether any of the other songs would have been created.
Eraserhead, Un chien andalou, Iggy Pop, Captain Beefheart, and a handful of others were powerful sources of inspiration for Thompson, and for a time sent him in an immensely productive direction. Indeed, it was a new and fruitful combination, postpunk and bubblegum and Surrealism. But before long those sources dried up and Thompson replaced them with new ones. His next big preoccupation was UFOs and aliens, which entered the Pixies discography on the Bsides to Doolittle, the first of which were recorded just a month after the band finished recording that album, in sessions at Fort Apache's new studio in Cambridge. "Into the White," "Manta Ray," and "Dancing the Manta Ray," all outer-space songs, were recorded in January 1989, and Thompson continued to follow his new trail to the end, two albums later, leading Kim Deal to criticize Bossanova as "more Steven Spielberg than David Lynch." Half a dozen albums into his solo career as Frank Black, Thompson finally began to explore a territory he had long spurned-personal, confessional songwriting.
"You do a bunch of songs where it's like, `Hey man, automatic writing, man. Surrealism. Got me a movie,' where you're just kind of rifting. And you're like, hey, my songs mean nothing," he says now "Hey, man, it's all about the sound of the syllables and consonants-whatever, here's another one! When you're writing with that kind of energy, I think, with me, I scored pretty high early on. It was like, good one, good one, good one.
"But I think there's some kind of inner sense that you can't just keep doing that and keep juggling. You're being really spontaneous and not trying to write traditional songs. It's great, but you can only keep up that juggling so long. Then after a while, it's like, wlioof. I guess I'm a songwriter and a musician and I'm going to write a song. And maybe, out of deference to narrative songwriting or traditional songwriting or whatever, I'm going to try to expand what I know how to do and do some of that too. If every song you try to do is some nonsensical sex, incest, Old Testament, and psychobabble, after a while, isn't it going to sound like a shadow of its former self? It's going to start sounding like a parody of itself, you know what I mean?"
Early on, Thompson revealed some of the real-world concerns behind his songs. "We're Surrealists. Maybe the avant-garde appeals to people from our economic background, because we're typically rejecting the older meaningful Christian values, but we're still confused as hell," he spluttered to the Melody Maker in 1987. "Like with all the satellites and shit there's so many words flying through the air you don't know what's going on, you don't know what to think. I really love all that stuff, though-shit-they talk about AIDS in Africa, everyone's gonna die in ten years-you just think-what the fuck's going on?" (The interviewer mercifully stopped him there.)
A trace of this newspaper-skimming authorial anxiety bleeds into Doolittle, particularly on "Monkey Gone to Heaven," the first single from the album and the band's "contri bution to that burgeoning new student-rock genre, the `holy shit the ecology's fucked and we're all gonna die' song," as Glenn Kenny quipped in the Village Voice. If sex and death alone were the primary forces behind most previous Pixies songs, there appeared to be more topical concerns here. Somebody gets "killed by ten million pounds of sludge from New York and New Jersey." Next verse, "a hole in the sky" makes everything on the planet burn. Holy shit, another song about how the ecology's fucked.
It was an odd move for Charles "besando, chichando con Surfer Rosa" Thompson. And indeed the Pixies never became a political band, a band with a "cause." (Thank you, Charles Thompson, Joey Santiago, Kim Deal, and David Lovering.) But for a moment "Monkey" seemed to connect them to a pervasive thread in 1980s pop culture: the discourse of apocalypse. Nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, the rotting of cities and the growth of crime, the spread of AIDS, an escalating "drug war." It was a theme of broad cultural paranoia that ran deep and wide and had roots going back decades into the Cold War. Technically, of course, it still was the Cold War; Doolittle was recorded in the last months of the second Reagan administration, with the Soviets still in power and the Berlin Wall still standing. And while Reagan and the "Cosby Show" family smiled, artists played Cassandra, crying in terror about imminent doom.
Whether in nihilistic metal and punk (Big Black, Megadeth, Slayer), mainstream rock (R.E.M.'s "Orange Crush," Lou Reed's New York), politically charged rap (N.WA., Public Enemy), or in other music from the fringes (Diamanda Galas's shrieking masses for AIDS
victims), or in a variety of films and books (The Terminator, The Day After, Watchmen), pop culture at the end of the 80s was awash in late-Cold War millenarian dread. The end of civilization was seen, with fright but no big surprise, as looming just around the corner. A couple of decades earlier, artists like Stanley Kubrick and Kurt Vonnegut used absurdist comedy to address the idea of the end of the world, but there was very little humor in Do the fight Thing or Big Black's ",Jordan, MVlin- nesota," and a glum acceptance of the idea of inevitable decline took over even high-culture comedies of manners like Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. The definitive novel of 80s moral decay, Wolfe's book cynically portrayed New York City as a cauldron of hatred that erupted the instant the social order was upset.
Critics and listeners picked up on Doolittle's bad vibrations, and who can blame them? The album is a vivid panorama of death and annihilation, from the suicidal paradise of "Wave of Mutilation" to the invitation of a big, big death in "Gouge Away," the nukes of "Mr. Grieves" to the blind, panicked killing in "There Goes My Gun." Even "Here Comes Your Man," originally written as a dusty pastoral, became a scene of catastrophe and ruin when adapted for Doolittle. But the Pixies were an odd fit in the apocalypse culture. Their songs, though rife with scary themes of extinction and death, are slippery to interpret, and do not assert any clear social commentary. Thompson avoided topical specifics in his songs, and any effort to reduce them to Greenpeace slogans will fail: they are too weird, too contrary, too fixated on mythology. But this can also be the source of an enduring power. Like his Surrealist heroes, Thompson buried his themes deeply. They sprung from the subconscious, which means they could be in a listener's sub conscious as well. What might have been a political allegory becomes a dream, a nightmare, a film. It can mean anything.
"Monkey Gone to Heaven" never made it into the admonishing realm of "Orange Crush," because its warning about environmental death was cloaked in an oblique fable on man's connection to the divine. The character who gets sludge-crushed is Neptune, the mythological god of the oceans (the "underwater guy who controlled the sea"). He bites it as a forgotten, has-been deity suffocated by the detritus of modern civilization. Same fate for the "creature in the sky." Man killed them off out of negligence and hubris. But Black Francis makes it clear that man will get it in the end-he has to. With a flourish of pseudoreligious numerology, Francis reminds man that he's not so big after all. If man is 5, then the devil is 6, and that means that God is a big, powerful, uncrushable, ineluctable 7. Man is dispatched back to his lowly status as the divine order is restored-but is it too late? Find out in the next exciting episode of Doolittle, entitled "i/Ir. Grieves"!
Thirty miles outside of town, and still somewhere in the middle of "Hey," Thompson cruises in the midafternoon sun down wavy two-lane roads that pass through thick, wet coniferous forests. Coming to a fork in the road, he takes an arbitrary left and we find ourselves beside a long fence, behind which graze a dozen or so creatures that look a bit like sheep and a bit like giraffes.
"Is that a llama?" I ask.
"Yeah, there's a lot of llamas around Oregon," Thomp son says. "They raise them for the wool. Here's a little information card." He stops the car in front of a sign attached to a wooden post. The nearest llama, just on the other side of the fence, casts a quizzical glance in my direction and munches noisily. He is much less animated than a pushmi- pullw, the breed of taro-headed llama that was one of Dr. Dolittle's chief companions, one of which, in the 1967 film with Rex Harrison, performed a dainty little dance for an astonished circus audience.
"`Their uses include showing, packing, driving, wool, pets, and breeding,"' I read. "Wow"
"`They rarely have twins,"' Thompson reads, leaning toward my window "`They can carry sixty to eighty pounds, eight to ten miles a day. Although they do' spit at each other, they seldom spit at people. They hum to their babies.' Yeah."
"...And also have a high-pitched scream which is an alarm call."'
They rarely have twins. What an odd thing to note, we both agree, and drive off. The llamas chomp away.
4
Gil Norton got his start in the music business at age nineteen with a summer job at a studio in his native Liverpool, and quickly moved up the pecking order from gofer to engineer to producer. He worked with a succession of almostforgotten 80s bands-China Crisis, the Triffids, Hurrah!, Auto da Fe, Wall of Voodoo (plus, ahem, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark)-but distinguished himself on two albums, Echo and the Bunnymen's Ocean Rain, in 1984, and the self-titled debut by Throwing Muses two years later. Ocean Rain balances complex string parts with spare band arrangements and Ian McCulloch's Jim-Morrison-with-ahaystack-hairdo gloom; for the Muses, Norton set a bare stage, letting Kristin Hersh's nervy introversion play as an uninterrupted psychodrama.
A year after recording Throwing Muses, Norton flew to Boston to hear songs for a new album. He came with No Watts-Russell of 4AD and Chris Roberts from the Melody Maker. A Sunday night showcase was set up on August 30, 1987, at-where else-the Rat, with the Pixies and the Blake Babies booked as the openers. Watts-Russell had recently signed the Pixies, and was expecting to see them for the first time. That night, however, was the band's sole appearance as a three-piece. Kim Deal was indisposed because of a family medical emergency; and so Charles, Joey, and David went on as Part of the Pixies. At solo gigs in later years Thompson seemed musically invigorated by the absence of his bandmates-he had to howl and flail even more than usual-and he was surely in such form that night. Norton did a full-on Gary Smith. "I just leaned against the back wall," he says, "and thought, `Oh my god, I can't believe they're doing this."'
"He played `Levitate Me,' and it reminded me of Supertramp or something, but a punk version of it," Norton says. He wound up getting the shaft from the Muses-they chose Smith to record their next album, their debut on a major label, Sire-but he was entranced by the Pixies. So was Roberts, who wrote a Pixies-stole-show review and did one of the earliest major interviews with the band.
Eight months later, when the Pixies had two records out and were at the end of their first European tour, Norton got his chance to record them. Surfer Rosa was an indie hit but didn't have a strong radio single-Albini buried the vocalsso Watts-Russell hired Norton to re-record a couple of songs at Blackwing Studios in London over a few days in early May 1988. They remade "Gigantic" and "River Euphrates," and also recorded "Here Comes Your Man," which had been kicking around since the earliest days of the band. It had been on the Purple Tape, but Watts-Russell had given it the thumbs-down for Come On Pilgrim-it had reminded him of Mink DeVille's hokey 1977 semihit "Spanish Stroll." "Here Comes Your Man" didn't make it onto Surfer Rosa, either. And now, recorded again, it still didn't fit on a Pixies record. "It was too commercial," Watts-Russell says. "It was not indicative of where they were."
Thompson, never one to be pinned down too closely to any particular version of historical reality, offered his own recollections in an e-mail: "Gil and/or the band probably nixed it. 4AD was more interested in the other two songs at the time. That was why we were there. Especially `Gigantic.' The double A-side single did OK as I recall, but Surfer Rosa was already gaining a lot of street cred at that time, so it was not going to be upstaged... or rather, even British radio was not going try that hard to make anything of ours a hit... or rather, our audience is a non-radio-consulting, hardcore, indie kind of audience. We were never going to be a smash hit anywhere. The song was a little light sounding, or maybe a little too MOR to the band's ear (especially mine); I don't think we feel that way now" Each path leads to the same result-chop!
Norton's production on the "Gigantic" single added a new level of finesse to the band's sound without killing any of its essential rawness. He pushed the vocals higher in the mix, tautened the arrangements, and made a generally cleaner recording, with each instrument coming through sharp and distinct. Norton also made a caveman-striking-fire discovery in the rhythm section. The bass, steadied and made more trebly, gave the tracks a danceabl
e bounce, something more akin to the Cure than Husker Du. The new versions of "Gigantic" and "River Euphrates" were released on a 12 inch single by 4AD that August. Two live tracks from the Town and Country Club, the last night of the tour, were used as B-sides, "Vamos" and "In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)."
The new recordings made enough of an impression on the band and the label that when it came time to get a producer for the next album, Norton was one of only two names considered. The other was Ed Stasium, who had recorded the Ramones and Julian Cope and had a recent hit with Living Colour's Vivid. Stasium had also just worked on Soul Asylum's Hang Time with another of the Pixies' producers-not-taken: Lenny Kaye, guitarist for Patti Smith and compiler of the legendary Nuggets album. Kaye says he had the chance to record the Pixies in late 1987-Surfer Rosa era -but passed on it cuz the band just seemed a little too brand-new. "The Pixies were in such a nascent stage," he says. "Sometimes you don't want to produce a band, don't want to make them grow in a certain way they can't grow into." To choose a producer for what would become Doolittle, the Pixies' manager, Ken Goes, approached the band in its rehearsal space one day and offered two names, Stasium and Norton. The former's style was muscular and American, leaning toward metal; the latter's, light, precise, and undeniably British. Thompson shrugged. Up to you. Watts-Russell was keen on Norton, and everybody else liked him too, so that was that. Stasium was never approached.
Arriving in Boston in mid-October 1988, Norton began sorting through the band's various demos, and summoned Thompson to his temporary apartment to go over the material. They spent a couple of days playing the songs on acoustic guitar, tweaking them here and there. Norton, in song-doctor mode, had one recurring request: that the songs be longer. "He always had really good bits," Norton says. "They were really short, minute-and-a-half songs. Bangbang-bang, verse-chorus, over, done." So he attempted to persuade his client to add a verse here and there, do this part twice, add some middle eights. But Thompson was reluctant to make any alterations, due as much to his pride as his short attention span. "He was like, `Why do that? I'm going to get bored if I do that,"' Norton says.
