by Ben Sisario
On it went, until Thompson eventually called time out. "At some point he got really frustrated with the whole process," Norton says. "And he said, `Let's go for a walk, Gil.' He took me to a record store around the corner. He walked right over and found Buddy Holly's Greatest Hits, turned it over and said, `Look at the times on these songs, Gil.' They were all about a minute and a half, one-fifty. If Buddy Holly had anything over two minutes it was an epic. And it was like, `If it was good enough for Buddy Holly...'
"What do you say to that?"
On Monday, October 31, 1988, the Pixies entered Downtown Recorders in Boston to begin recording what would become Doolittle, and they were ready The songs had been fully worked out in demo tapes, on the road, and in preproduction. And the album was set to be a big step up. They had a sizable recording budget, were being courted by Elektra, and would soon sign with the label, guaranteeing that the album would be in stores and promoted to hundreds of radio stations around the country. Videos would be submit ted to TNITV. It was to be, as Thompson says, their "put-ona-jacket record."
Downtown Recorders, on Tremont Street in the South End, was located within one of Boston's most distinctive buildings, the Cyclorama. A 23,000-square-foot brick rotunda, it was built in 1884 to display a panoramic painting of the Battle of Gettysburg, and in later years housed a skating rink, a bicycle track, a boxing ring, a car manufacturer, and the Boston Flower Exchange. In 1970 it was taken over by a city redevelopment agency and became the centerpiece of the new Boston Center for the Arts. Nine years after that, two local musicians, Mitch Benoff and Ben Kaye, founded the studio, leasing a space on the lower level that had been a wholesale orchid outlet in the Flower Exchange years. They took the shop's old refrigerators and made them into isolation booths, and installed the control booth at an angle to the recording room to reduce the surgeons'-viewing-gallery formality of most studios. Human Sexual Response and the Real Kids recorded there early on, and the place became a standby of the local scene.
The Pixies booked a lockout of three weeks and change, more time than they had ever spent had in a studio. Besides Norton, there were two assistant recording engineers and two second assistants; another engineer was later brought in for the mixing sessions. (Norton has producer and engineer credit on the album.) The cost of the production, not including the producer's fee, was about S40,000-quadruple the budget of Surfer Rosa but not an outrageous sum for a major-label release in 1989, and far, far less than the band would spend on subsequent albums. (Bossanosa would cost $200,000, and Trompe le Monde more than $250,000; each was recorded at five different studios.) Downtown Recorders was a professional 24-track studio, but it was indie-scale. Its equipment was a step below the norm-an MCI 636 console, as opposed to the SSL machines that were the pro standard at the time-and the studio's highest-profile booking to date had been the time Aerosmith came in to do a quickie version of "Rock-in' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu" for the Less Than Zero soundtrack in 1987.
As the sessions began, Charles Thompson got into the role of Black Francis the face-squinching squealer. "I do sing a little bit differently when I'm singing with the Pixies," he says now. "Some other little character or something enters in. It's more nasally, more spazzy or something."
Jonathan Claude Fixler saw the transformation while recording the Whore demos. "I noticed that these songs had character voices," he says, "the voice singing `Dead' and `Tame' was not really him. It was funny." He made a remark to Thompson about the personae. "It was a bit like the Beatles' White Album, with the character voices in `Rocky Raccoon,' `Sexy Sadie,' `Helter Skelter."' Thompson looked up and told Fixler, dude!, he had been listening to the White Album obsessively for like the last two weeks! But it had likely been far longer-the Pixies had recorded a shrill version of "Wild Honey Pie" at their first BBC session, on May 3, 1988, and the song had been a staple of their live set that year.
As a work of fragmented, jarring pop, the White Album is an aesthetic precursor to Doolittle. It relies on stark minimalism ("Why Don't We Do It in the Road?," `Julia"), sudden violence ("Helter Skelter," "Happiness Is a Warm Gun"), and goofy irony (`Rocky Raccoon," "Everybody's Got Some thing to Hide Except Me and My Monkey"), and throughout remains emotionally remote. Sung by a cast of mostly two-dimensional figures, it is a riddle that teases the listener yet evades easy interpretation, and it launched a tradition of rock built on eclecticism and obscurity No wonder Thompson was gaga over it.
The White Album was important to Joey Santiago as well. He may have cribbed from Hendrix and Wes Montgomery, but the most recognizable Santiagoism, the bent note that whines into dissonance, came from George Harrison. "`Savoy Truffle,"' Santiago nods. "When you hear that song, you go, 'Ah, there it is!' Every time that part came on, it's like, `Hey!"' (Remember, man of few words.) That magical part is a bluest' E that veers upward nearly half a step in a quick, mousy squeak. The technique turns up, beautifully twisted, all over the Pixies oeuvre, from "Vamos" to "Broken Face," "Where Is My Mind?" to "I Bleed," "Number 13 Baby" to "Planet of Sound." In the Santiago school of notebending, two strings are preferred, one bent and one not, or both slightly off, creating a beat frequency through the interference of two close but clashing sound waves. "You can hear it shaking when it's off," Santiago says now. "And I loved it, you know I think in high school I even showed a friend of mine, `Listen to this.' And I wasn't bending it-it was making those shaky notes. `Oh, that's because it's out of tune!' I like it!"
Throughout Doolittle, Santiago's crying bent notes are a melodic motif, from the double-tracked solo in "Monkey Gone to Heaven" to the five-second taste of brine at the beginning of "There Goes My Gun" to the siren call in "Gouge Away." The opening to "There Goes My Gun" was one of Norton's few indulgences in the sound of pure guitar-in the song's original demo, and on a Peel Session version recorded just weeks before Doolittle, Santiago's squall was buried within a drum intro, but on the album Santiago has a wide field all to himself. "He can play one note," Norton says, "and make it sing, make that note do things that no one else has ever done with it."
Thompson had long toyed with the classic power-pop trope of playing the verses tense and restrained and then letting the noise and emotion burst forth on the big kick-ass chorus, the New Wave apotheosis of which is the Cars' "Just What I Needed." It was not the only songwriting trick in Thompson's book, though he happened to have used it in his two best songs to date, "Gigantic" and "Where Is My Mind?" But it was now very much on his mind. Doolittle is where Thompson-with the help of Norton's crisp production-perfected the quiet-loud-quiet-loud dynamic, and the album remains the blueprint of the style. "Tame" is its Platonic ideal, with just three chords and three sing-songs bass notes that could have been in a Ronettes song. On the chorus the same three notes persist, this time twice as loud, with an ugly monochord by Joey Santiago blaring and Black Fran- cis's big head making the most raucous sound of all. The valve turns off, then on again, then off-a simple binary function. It's a jerky technique, and it can be terrifying, but it's jokes; too. "It's a little bit tongue-in-cheek," Thompson says. "It's a little bit, well, not self-mocking, but it's got a little bit of a grin on it, you know what I mean? It's just sort of like, `I'll be quiet, I'll be loud, I'll be quiet.' It's kind of playful or childish. It's simple."
Musical opposition was spread over the entire album. "Debaser" opens it with an orgy of guitars slashing in every direction, while in the middle of it all Black Francis writhes in degenerate ecstasy like Z-Man from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. (Or at least like Nick Cave howling, "Release the bats! Release the bats!") Next is "Tame," the demonstration of the dynamic dyad. From there Thompson spaces things out, and patterns emerge: slowish dirges driven by Deal's bass and Santiago's acrid guitar ("I Bleed," "There Goes My Gun," "Dead"), sunny pop strummers led by Thompson's rhythm guitar ("Wave of Mutilation," "Here Comes Your Man"). Ugliness and prettiness are constantly in conflictThompson's comforting acoustic guitar against Santiago's caustic electric, the angelic feminine of Dea
l's voice versus the demonic masculine of Thompson's.
The artful play of opposites is part of the band's basic musical DNA. Take away Santiago's lead guitar and Thompson's vocals and you are left with a steady, bouncy rhythm section and peaceable acoustic chords that wouldn't be out of place in an R.E M. song. Against this, the screams and lead guitar are a monstrous mutation, something that has gone fascinatingly wrong. Thompson kept the songs in a further unstable state by doctoring their time signatures, adding and deleting beats here and there to form irregular shapes in repetition. The instrumental break in "Number 13 Baby" is an example of this. After three bars of 4/4 time, it drops two beats and then goes back: 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2.
But for all its truculence, its spacewarp dynamic switches and wobbly time signatures, Doolittle remains tightly wound, irresistible pop. "Wave of Mutilation," "Monkey Gone to Heaven," "Here Comes Your Man," and "Gouge Away" are sleek, tuneful ditties without a pinch of fat. Like a Buddy Holly song-or a Ramones song, or a Beach Boys songthey catch your ear just long enough for you to fall in love, and then they're over.
Norton's engineering training made him a particularly hands-on producer, and he did painstaking work on Doolittle, adding layers of guitars and vocals. "Debaser" ends with a riot of overdubbed guitars. On "WWave of Mutilation" Norton stacked the vocals, one after another after anotherthere are as many as ten lead vocal parts on the track, Thompson says-to give the lyric spookiness and strength. These are not Freddie Mercury levels exactly, but for the Pixies, they were getting up there.
The producer also fussed with tempos. Several of the songs had been faster and punkier in their original form, and in preproduction Norton slowed them down, making room for new parts and allowing for more detail. "There Goes My Gun," for example, had originally been much faster, with a Bob Mould-style guitar attack and a mostly unchanging drumbeat. On the album version the tempo is decreased significantly, opening the song up for spooky, surfy guitars. But Norton's suggestions were not always welcome, and in one sense Doolittle is the sound of a band struggling against its producer. "I think this record is him trying to make us, shall I say, commercial," Thompson told Rolling Stone, "and us trying to remain somewhat grungy"
An axiom of studio work is that the more complicated a song is to record, the more boring it will be to do it. A bit of that crept into Downtown Recorders. The participants say that much of the experience has been bleached from their minds, the gladly forgotten tedium of a thousand punch-ins and snare checks. "It was just a place I took a cab to every day," Thompson now says of Downtown. But I wonder if he has at least in part blocked remembrance to avoid digging up that dreaded "tension." It was during the preparations and recording of Doolittle that problems between Thompson and Deal first become visible to those around them. There was bickering, there was venting, there were passive-aggressive standoffs-recording studios, where every tick of the clock has an equivalent dollar value, can be highly stressful places.
Those ticking clocks can also be powerful motivators, however, and there wasn't a great deal of time for melodrama. The focus of the sessions was drums, bass, and basic tracks-overdubs and other more complicated matters would be done during mixing. So boom boom boom on the drums. They were set up in the middle of the room, not in a separate isolation booth as is the norm in most studios; when Benoff and Kave built the studio, they deliberately avoided making an isolated drum booth so that the drummer could perform in the midst of his band, fostering good vibes all around. (The Pixies might have needed them.)
At some point Whore was dropped as the title. "It was too strong," Thompson says now "It wasn't really where I was coming from." In a British music trade magazine at the time, he cited another consideration: "Vaughan [Oliver] changed the artwork idea and said he was going to use this monkey and halo, so I thought people were going to think I was some kind of anti-Catholic or that I'd been raised Catholic and trying to get into this Catholic naughty-boy sort of stuff, like Ken Russell does in his movies. A monkey with a halo, calling it Whore-that would bring all kinds of shit that wouldn't be true. So I said I'd change the title."
His replacement was less blatantly antagonistic, but in the context of the album's intermingling themes of sex, religion, and depravity, it's not so nice either. Dr. John Dolittle, in the children's novels of Hugh Lofting, was a wise and jolly Victorian naturalist ("the greatest nacheralist in the world") who could speak the language of animals-a heroic achievement of man the enlightened scientist, the master of the earth. But in Thompson's songs, the name becomes symbolic of the abasement of man's place in the universe. "Pray for a man in the middle / One that talks like Doolittle," he sings in "Mr. Grieves," a song that pictures nuclear holocaust and the end of humanity. Man has screwed things up for himself, he will devolve, perhaps, and become but a beast, so he better start learning how to talk like one. A similar theme emerges in "Wave of Mutilation" and "Monkey Gone to Heaven"-man falls gurgling into an underwater grave, his human nature jumbled confusingly with that of god and critter like some fish-eyed semihuman monster out of H. P. Lovecraft.
Plus, of course, it must have appealed to Thompson to use a title that was on one dumb level just a corny slacker pun: do little. Get it? It's an album called Doolittle that's got a song on it where he goes, "Some marijuana if you got some!"
No long recording session is complete without some mind-rotting downtime, and for recreation the Pixies and their studio colleagues played Centipede in the back room and chowed at the Ethiopian restaurant across the street (Addis Red Sea-it's still there). One of the second assistant engineers on the album was Burt Price, a new employee of the studio; Doolittle was the first album he worked on. Now a top studio tech, and on the faculty of the Berk-lee College of Music in Boston, Price remembers one particular night when a couple of members of the band Joey and David, he thinks, but this was many, many sessions ago-killed all the lights and bounced around the main room like the apes in 2001, making wild animal noises in the dark. Tape was rolling, Price says. Which means that somewhere, presumably in the 4AD vaults in London, lie professional 24-track master recordings of this romp, on expensive two-inch Ampex 256 tape. Were they conjuring the spirit of Dr. Dolittle or just smoking too much weed?
The Doolittle sessions continued at Downtown Recorders until November 23, the day before Thanksgiving. The next Monday, November 28, Norton and the band headed to Carriage House Studios in the wooded outskirts of Stamford, Connecticut, for two weeks of mixing. Carriage House was ideal for the purpose, with higher-quality gear-the board was an SSL 4036-56E-and some wows like a live room with rock walls and a hardwood ceiling to get that cathedral effect on vocals. It also had a cool past. Throughout the 80s the studio had been used to record the orches tral parts for cheesy violent movies like Missing in Action and Silver Bullet, many of them scored by the veteran lowbrow film composer Jay Chattaway.
Most importantly, Carriage House was three hours from Boston and an hour from New York, which for the band meant a good distance from any worries or distractions back home. As a residential studio, with four apartments on the second floor of the main building, the place lent itself to a relaxed slumber-party vibe, with all necessities taken care of. Each afternoon John Montagnese, the owner, bleached the toilets in the apartments and did the laundry; to get your washing done, you filled up a pillowcase with your dirty clothes and left it downstairs underneath the pinball machine. If people asked who did the cleaning, Montagnese told them "a gnome named Johnny.") The band shared other domestic duties, including cooking. "We took turns doing a meal for each other. I did a roast dinner for them on Sunday," Norton says. "There was a sort of communal bonding that happened." The only news that Thompson remembers piercing this musico-domestic bubble was the death of Roy Orbison, on December 6. It happened two days after they recorded the strings on " lIonkey Gone to Heaven."
They kept a tight schedule, averaging just over a song a day for the thirteen days they had booked; there was also a good deal of recording a
nd overdubbing left to be done on some songs. Norton brought in Steve Haigler, whom he knew through Fort Apache connections, to be the mixing engineer. Haigler had experience with Let's Active, Marshall Crenshaw, and others, and would soon work with Gary Smith on Throwing Muses' Hunkpazpa. He arrived at the Pixies mixing sessions stoked. "It was the coolest shit I ever heard in my life," he says. Haigler and Norton would maintain a strong partnership for several years, recording both subsequent Pixies albums.
Mixing means fine-tuning the tapes, and they added effects like gated reverb, the swift sonic decay that surrounds a big sound like a snare drum hit, causing the reverberations to die off quickly and dramatically. "What you're hearing on Doolittle is short gated rooms and gated reverbs," Haigler says. "We were tending to use that a lot in those days, to not be normal. The kind of records on the radio had a big, reverbed-out snare sound-really polished, vucky stuff. We wanted to be a little trashier." Thompson offers a more succinct characterization for the snare effects on "Gouge Away," "Monkey Gone to Heaven," and other songs: "English"
