by Ben Sisario
Norton considers mixing a crucial step. "Recording and mixing is the same process," he says. "To me it doesn't really stop until you put it down to half-inch. It's still evolving and still making decisions. It's still a work in progress until you finish mixing."
It was hard labor for Norton and Haigler, but fairly easygoing for the band, which contributed to their good mood. ("They played all their parts already," Norton says. "They could just sit around all day and say `wow"') For the first time, they were able to relax and take their time with a recording, and watch it come into focus in someone else's hands. "We were really able to contemplate the art that we had created," Thompson says. "We went and did the demos -blammo! Did some work with Gil, rehearsed, went to a recording studio-blammo! And then we were at this mixing studio, living at the studio, and we got two weeks here. Let's try some strings out on this song. Let's try this opening. Let's redo that vocal. Let's, you know, let's just play the music over and over and listen to it. It was being able to enjoy your record a little bit. It was a nice luxury."
Mixing was complete on or about December 12, and the tapes were sent off for final mastering and sequencing. Doolittle was done, and the band took a break for the holidays as preparations were made for its release.
On a sunny Sunday afternoon in Hollywood, David Lovering pulls up in a clean black sedan to the Magic Castle, the big Munster-family mansion on a steep hill that serves as a combination Friars Club and Hard Rock Cafe for the magicians of Southern California. Lovering is dressed in black jeans, black leather jacket, and black baseball cap, and his eyes have a dramatic definition around the edges... is that eyeliner?
He shows his membership card at the front desk and walks in through the not-so-hidden door built into the bookcase. The place is dark and stale and done up in a hokey Victorian haunted-house motif, with hidden passageways, an "invisible" piano player named Irma, and Sardi's-style caricatures of magicians along the walls. Lovering himself is up there. He discovered magic four or five years after the Pixies broke up and, having given up playing the drums, he made magic his livelihood. He does a show on Friday nights and right now he's psyched because just the day before he scrapped much of his old act and began anew "I feel so great today because I've just taken my babies and thrown them away" he says. "You have to get rid of the things that don't play. And I got rid of a lot of shit and added more, and just rearranged it and it's-I can't wait till Friday. I can't wait till Friday That's all."
It's brunch day at the Magic Castle, the one day each week when civilians are let in without a magician escort, and as the moms and dads have coffee upstairs, groups of teenage girls dressed in their Sunday finest-pink dresses, pantyhose, wobbling a little bit in heels-wander through the building's honeycomb of small stages. Lovering and I get a beer and grab a couple of stools at one of the many bars that are unattended at this hour.
Lovering was the great unacknowledged anchor of the Pixies, a powerful, confident, and flexible drummer who was the most experienced musician of the bunch when the band came together. His emphatic thud at the beginning of "Bone Machine" established the rhythmic foundation of the Pixies as economical, aggressive, and slightly off-kilter.
He is shaky on Doolittle details. Doesn't remember Downtown Recorders. Doesn't remember "Debaser." I ask about "La La Love You," his one vocal on a Pixies album. "That was on Doolittle?" he says, and looks as if he genuinely does not know But he does remember a key episode during the mixing sessions, at Carriage House.
"One freaky thing happened," he says. "We were sleeping. I was in a separate room, and it was this old place, with keys in the door-those little skeleton keys. And I heard a noise. And I looked, and the key was on the inside of the door, and it was actually moving. I thought, somebody's fucking with me from outside. So I just sat there and looked. And then it just kept moving and moving. No one was there. I got freaked out. And I got up, grabbed my stuff and went downstairs. The next day I went to the room, I got my shit, and I also got the key. Check this out," he says, pulling a small, old-fashioned key from the front pocket of his tight jeans.
That's the key?
"This is it right here," he says. "But watch this. It's so freaky. It's haunted. I put it right there," he holds it flat in his palm. "Watch. Watch what happens..." After a good ten seconds in which nothing seems to occur, the key begins to very, very slowly roll over in his hand. "Oh, man! See? That place freaked me out so bad" He puts it in his pocket and smiles goofily "Sorry, a little magic."
But seriously. How was Charles to work with? What was his personality like at that time? "As a person? ULn...a nice guy who's clever," he says. "Very clever. He knows what he's doing. He definitely knows what he's doing. Yeah. Intelligent."
And the Pixies? How would you describe the music the band made, perhaps to a person who had never heard it before?
He thinks for a moment. "I think the way I've always described it is alternative rock," he says. "Dynamic, very different. It's everything from kinda country to punk, in a way. And there's a girl in the band."
"That's the best thing I can come up with," he adds. "Alternative rock."
5
Doolittle was released in Britain on April 17, 1989, and in the United States the next day, where the major-label marketing wheels began to turn. Radio was serviced with the single for "Monkey Gone to Heaven," retail displays were built, and promotional gimmicks were dreamt up. The Cleveland sales rep for WEA, the manufacturing and distribution parent of Elektra, announced a contest: "Put up a prize-winning display and in trade for a photo of your beautiful work you may win one of three answering machines with messages left by the band!" ("This monkey's gone to heaven, please leave a message.") Behold the put-on-a-jacket treatment.
The response in Britain was huge. In its first week Doolittle reached No. 8 on the national chart, putting the band in the company of Madonna, Fine Young Cannibals, and INXS. The critics were still in love, mostly. _O and Record Mirror gave it four-star reviews, and long, worshipful cover stories ran in the weeklies. "Peel back that little monkey's scalp and you'll probably be both appalled and fascinated at the tumour of evil genius that's squirming there," wrote Edwin Pouncey in a review in the NME. A three-month "Sex and Death" tour of Europe began in Brighton two days after the release of the album, and once again the band was greeted like Jesus on the road to Jerusalem. "F***ING AWESOME!" blared Everett True in the Melody Maker, slightly paraphrasing Mark 11.
There were a few sourpusses-"Gil Norton's toy theatre production makes a drama out of what should have been a crisis," said Time Out-and Charles Thompson chafed at the suggestion that his new work was a step down in kicki- tude. "I hate that shit when they compare how hard Surfer Rosa is to Doolittle," he told Ted Mico of the Melody Maker. "Obviously the guitars are harder on Surfer Rosa because of Steve Albini's production, but that album is way more wimpy, way more poppy and light. Doolittle is more chunky.... They say Doolittle is less surreal and more silly. That's ridiculous. Songs like `Broken Face' are way more silly."
In America the reaction was mixed, but with promising highlights. Jon Pareles of the New York Times wrote a Sunday column the week the album was released, a thoughtful essay on the role of irony in the Pixies' music. Charles and company "yelp and bash through songs that can't take anything seriously," Pareles wrote, "not music or love or sex, not alienation or violence, not even life and death, and certainly not themselves." (But he called the bassist "Kim Clark"ouch.) Other critics quickly sang their hosannas. Ken Tucker in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune, and Steve Hochman in the Los Angeles Times each gave it four stars.
The magazines were a little slower, and a little less impressed. In March, Rolling Stone ran a short profile in a roundup of new bands (this time it was "Kim Neal"), but then took four months to get around to reviewing the album, making a tentative endorsement of three and a half stars-a sign that the magazine was reluctant to fully anoint. (Thirteen and a half years later, in the issue of November 28, 20
02, the band got that fourth star when the magazine re-reviewed Doolittle.) Spin, in its June issue, ran an ambivalent squib of 100 words, half of which were about how the reviewer, Joe Levy, really liked Surfer Rosa. ("On their second record the drums and bass are lots more clear," Levy wrote, "the insanity less surreal and more silly, and the songs themselves more like songs and less like adventures.") In the Village Voice, Robert Christgau graded it a B-plus and offered a strange but prescient warning: "Getting famous too fast could ruin them." This time, though, they scored on the Voice's Pazz & Jop poll, hitting No. 10, right between Soul II Soul and Tom Petty. Higher, even, than Paul'r Boutique!
Record sales at home were not so remarkable. Doolittle barely charted, opening at No. 171 on the Billboard 200. Its neighbors were, at No. 170, Al B. Sure's In Effect Mode, and, at No. 172, E.U.'s Livin' Large (featuring "Da Butt '89"). For a sense of the disparity between the Pixies' levels of success in Britain and the United States, consider their relation to Madonna's Like a Prayer in the week Doolittle was released. In Britain, the two competed in the top 10, while in America, Ms. Ciccone was sitting pretty 170 slots away-far, far out of sniffing range.
But with "Monkey Gone to Heaven" a hit on American college radio, the album began to crawl up the lower rungs of the chart. The highest it got was No. 98. (It spent only two weeks in the top 100; the other week it was No. 99.) "Here Comes Your Man" was released as a single in June, and enjoyed some rotation on MTV thanks to a clever and irreverent video-clever and irreverent enough for the "Parents Just Don't Understand" era, anyway-that mocked lip-synching in music videos. You know, like "ceci n'est pas un pipe."
Press ink increased as the band toured the United States that summer, opening for Love and Rockets and, at three stadium concerts, the Cure. They had a good angle-dorky band with pretty girl and silly name makes weird music that critics dig-and that was enough to get their mugs and pullquotes splashed across every HeraldAmerican, Standard-Times, Standard-Star, Morning News, Student Press, Post-Gaette, News Star, Sentinel, Oak edger, and Beachcomber in the land. The coverage was almost uniformly positive, if occasionally clueless. "Pixies' singer Charles Francis says he's in a state," reads a headline from the San Gabriel Valley Daily Tribune of West Covina, California, in a reprint of Pareles's essay. People gave them a full-page spread, and even if the magazine did not quite get it ("Despite titles like `Gouge Away,' the Pixies aren't `into violence"')-hey; there's no bad publicity.
On tour in Europe, a cloud of bitchiness and fatigue began to form overhead. A journalist asked Kim: Is the band still a debating society? "It used to be but not very much anymore," she replied. "It's like when everyone is too afraid of telling the king he doesn't have any clothes on. You get intimidated by your own success." Charles, are you always glad to be a Pixie? "No," he said. "Every once in a while I feel like saying, `Fuck this band. I hate these people. I can't wait till we break up."' Deal showed up late to one gig in Stuttgart toward the end of the tour, and Thompson snapped, kicking an acoustic guitar across the stage at hera genuine Nigel Tufnel public outburst. Some time apart might have been good, but they had a four-month American tour all lined up (called "Fuck or Fight"), so they got back on the bus and each other's nerves.
Things began to fall apart after Doolittle. Subsequent recording sessions took longer, cost more, and resulted in less. Preparations were minimal; the band never again made very extensive demos, nor went through the painstaking preproduction work that had been so crucial to the quality and success of Doolittle. To Thompson's credit, he was jumping ahead a few semesters, experimenting in the studio and with his own songwriting. But for all the highlights of Bossanova and Trompe le Monde-and let nothing, absolutely nothing, be said against the transcendent "Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons," or against "Blown Away," the outer-space sequel to "Where Is My Mind?"-they lack Doolittle's cohesiveness and focus. They lack the puzzlemaker's master plan.
Not that the master professes to care about the puzzle very much. For him, it's about making fifteen or so cool little pieces. If they fit together, great; if not, who gives a shit. On tour for Doolittle, circa Switzerland, the band started to arrange the set list in alphabetical order, from "Bone Machine" to "Where Is My Xiind?" Thompson now shrugs it off as a purposeless, cutesy prank. But like many of his protestations of purposelessness, it turns out to be a front. This time, for nothing less than the Religion of Rock Music.
"It's a good statement of the way I feel about the music," he says, splayed across the sofa in the spotless white basement-nook-cum-entertainment-zone of his home after a long day in the Caddy. "It's slightly aloof about your own music. Just cut the crap, you know what I mean? Come on. You're going to play all these songs tonight. At the end of the day does it really matter the order of the songs? All that matters is the one song you're playing at that time. Because the song begins here and ends here. And it's three minutes long. And while that song is going on, that's the center of the universe. Nothing else matters. That's the kind of aesthetic I think that we had.
"You've got a song," he continues, "and hopefully a real personality of that song emerges. And that's all that matters. Otherwise we'd be writing songs that were twenty minutes long or a half-hour long, right? That's the way I see it. We'd be writing operas. Or symphonies. But we're not writing operas or symphonies. We're writing these-what's a rock'n' roll song? It's this long," he says, holding his index fingers in front of him about six inches apart. "It's three minutes, it's five minutes. So that's why I'm a little dismissive of albums and a little bit dismissive of set lists."
You're dismissive of albums?
"Yeah. I have my favorite albums and whatnot, but in the religion of rock music, the most holy sacrament is the song. You know what I mean? More than the bands. More than the solos. And more than the albums. It's the song. That's the experience. `Hey, have you heard this song? That fucking song is great.' It's the song that really means the most. That's why it's like, `Eh, let's do it in alphabetical order.' Because it doesn't matter what order we play it in. If we're a good band, get out there and prove it. I'd rather not prove it by all this kind of like showbizzy kind of like, now we're going to finish with our big anthem! Let's just do the anthem now They better all be anthems, right? They better all be amazing."
As we were saying, things began to fall apart after Doolittle. Bitchiness. Goading by journalists. Thompson entering the studio without lyrics. Two recording facilities employed simultaneously to wrap Trompe le Monde on time.
And that tension. Lots and lots of tension. It began to work its way into the band's creative process, and kill some of its soul. Kim Deal's contributions, for example, began to disappear, and everybody noticed. "On Doolittle the backing vocals were really an incredibly important part of the songs," says No Watts-Russell. After that it seemed like she was being tossed a bone."
Charles Thompson: "Hey, she wasn't the only person getting squeezed out of the studio. The producer was getting squeezed out of the studio. Joey and Dave were getting squeezed out of the studio. Everyone's getting squeezed out of the studio. Because of me."
Not too many years ago, he would scarcely have spoken the name of the Pixies at all, let alone confess to crimes against studio time. But this is post-therapy, post-reunion Charles Thompson. (And post-reunion-money, too; the reconciliation story is ideal "Behind the Music" dish, and he knows that shit sells concert tickets.) His quote continues:
"But that's what happens when you're twenty-four years old, and you're learning really, really fast about the whole recording process, and it's your bag anyway. It's not like, `Oh gee, I don't know what to do for songs.' I was just like, zvbirrrr!, going totally full tilt. No one had a chance. When someone's like that, and they're at that age, there's nothing you can do. If anyone would have even tried to rein me in, I just would've been like, `Fuck you, I'm outta here. I'm gonna go start another band. See you guys the fuck later.' Because you're young and you're cocky, and you're like, `Hey man, I'm king of the fucking college-rock heap
here! No one's going to fucking tell me what to do.' You turn into like, `Hey man, I'm fucking Brian Wilson here. Don't fucking tell me what to do. I'm trying some shit out here.' You get, like, attitude-y."
Back in Boston at the end of the tour, the band played a doubleheader at the 2,000-capacity Citi club, and all the hateful entropy became too much. At the second show, Deal, "so drunk she could hardly stand," according to a Melody Maker review, flubbed "Gigantic," and as the show sputtered into chaos, it came Joey Santiago's turn to crack. Halfway through "I Bleed," he smashed his guitar against the floor, and when the instrument didn't shatter, "slammed it against amps and speakers, into concrete columns and anything else that would aid the demolition." He stormed off, and spent much of the rest of the show at the side of the stage, seething. (Turns out that Santiago damaged his hand worse than the guitar; he played Les Pauls, and those things are sturdy.)
The tour complete by late November, the band finally got some time apart. Santiago went to the Grand Canyon, Lovering headed to Jamaica, and both trips sucked. (Santia go apparently went in search of his soul. "He said he'd found it, but didn't like it," Deal said. "It chased him, so he ran away.") Deal recorded a masterpiece of her own with the Breeders, and got a taste of fame apart from the Pixies. (All those suck-up journalists were now asking her about lyrics for a change.) And on January 1, 1990, Thompson packed up his new (used) Cadillac and left Boston, heading west for Los Angeles. Two years and change later, the band played its last show, though by that point Thompson and Deal had ceased to communicate.
Albums are not defined by sales...but really, you know, they're defined by sales. And over the years, Doolittle has sold with a slow but steady consistency, the tortoise in a race of thousands of forgotten hares. When released, though no blockbuster hit, it held onto respectable numbers, selling about 100,000 copies in six months. And it never stopped. In early 1992, when the band was opening for U2, Doolittle was selling about 1,500 a week. In the middle of 1993, after the band had been officially kaput for six months and had not released a new album in almost two years, the album's weekly average was about 1,200. From there the curve sloped downward a bit but never reached too low Five, six, ten years after the breakup, it was still selling steadily, between 500 and 1,000 copies a week. By mid-2004, at the height of the reunion tour, it was back around 1,200. Doolittle was certified gold in 1995-meaning 500,000 shipped-and by the end of 2005 the best estimates put total American sales between 800,000 and a million.
