by Ben Sisario
The song's origins were not far from the drooling slur that it became. "That song is just about all these fuckin' stupid-ass students that live around this neighborhood," he told one British music trade when the album was released. "They are the rudest motherfuckers in the world.... These girls around here are just like, man oh man, what's wrong with them, they keep perming their hair! They could be sexy but they're not. They could be interesting people but they keep stuffing their faces with mozzarella sticks and buffalo wings and getting totally drunk and shaking their asses all over Commonwealth Avenue." In one early demo, the song was slower, with a piano part to accompany the vocal scorn, "to make it sound a little more Iggy," Thompson says now. Recording it for Doolittle, Gil Norton sped it up a little and altered the drum part, adding a slithery hi-hat pattern on the verses.
On the lead guitar, Joey Santiago engaged in a bit of one-upmanship. "That whole song is three chords," he says. And I was pretty proud of the fact that, if you guys are playing three chords, well, I'm gonna play one. So I just played one. One chord." That one monstrous chord, which Santiago plays on the chorus, is his beloved "Hendrix chord," an F7 sharp-9, and he scrapes it brutally against the bright chords played on Thompson's rhythm guitar, yielding a rainbow of grungy dissonance. Only extreme simplicity could create such beautiful madness.
"Wave of Mutilation"
Husker Du and Peter, Paul & Mary is what the ad in the paper said. But in "Wave of Mutilation," a few additional, lesser-known sources are lurking beneath the surface: the Beach Boys, Charles Manson, and Japanese suicides.
The lyrics are a fantasy of the afterlife as an underwater pleasureland, where one kisses mermaids and cruises with the crustaceans, far away from human cares. To get there, the singer does a kamikaze Ishmael. The sea beckons to him, he can't resist, and so he slams on the gas and drives right off the edge of the pier. "`Cease to resist giving my goodbye, drive my car into the ocean,"' Thompson talks his way through the lyrics as if it was a note just handed to him. "`You'll think I'm dead but I sail away.' Who's driving his car into the ocean? No one's going to be able to figure that out, but I was reading about Japanese businessmen doing murder-suicides with their families because they'd failed in business, and they were driving off the pier into the ocean. That's what was going on in 1989, you know, in the paper or whatever. Suicides are up in Japan. They're drowning the wife and the kids and the family, and they're driving off a pier into the ocean. It's kind of dramatic. So what does that have to do with anything? Well, I don't know, I want to do a song called `Wave of Mutilation.' Why is it called `Wave of Mutilation'? Well, I don't know, because a wave is powerful. It's not this soft, beautiful thing, but, like, this crushing thing that turns mountains into sand."
And there it is, the Charles Thompson songwriting technique, or at least the Charles Thompson songwriting analysis technique. Guy reads article in newspaper, thinks about the awesome power of the ocean, scratches butt, writes song. In an effort to avoid pretentious self-importance and "all that kind of precious singer-songwritery stuff," Thompson is often blunt and self-deprecating in discussing his own music. Time and again he has insisted to interviewers that the words don't mean anything, that they just sound nice together. But it's a smoke screen. He is, of course, well aware of the intense craft that goes into his songwriting. He is also aware that the opacity of his lyrics is an invitation to a curious mind. "The song is a puzzle."
His attitude toward analysis, he admits, is partly due to a couple of decades' worth of prodding by lazy rock journalists who tend to ask him the same few questions: (a) what are your songs about, dude?, (b) why all the songs about incest, man?, and (c) dude, is it true you hate Kim? 'Journalists typically generalize what I do," he says. "They don't ask me specific questions about my songs. What they do is they approach them from a generalizing point of view. I tend to deflect their questions if I sense that they're just looking for a nice little quote to simplify everything. If I sense they're not really willing to go on any kind of a journey with me."
Well, I've been sitting in his car with him for two days; that seems to count as a journey. So, dude, what's with the "cease to resist" line? It's a snippet, he says, of what was blowing his mind at the time he wrote the song. "`Cease to resist' is a Beach Bovs/Charles Manson reference," he says. "`Cease to Exist' is a song that Manson wrote for them, and they changed it to `Cease to Resist,' or something like that." ("Never Learn Not to Love," released on the Beach Bovs' 1969 album 20/20, is credited to Dennis Wilson but was allegedly written by Manson, who lived in Wilson's house for a year and ingratiated himself into the Beach Boys' circle. It begins, "Cease to resist, come on sav you love me...") OK, warped Manson/Beach Boys reference, newspaper story about Japanese guys flooring it off the pier, good. Power of the ocean, good. Almost have a song. Just add a beautiful major-key reverie sped up with barre chords, and a refrain that will evoke poetic mystery for decades to come, and you've pretty much got it.
The song also sets up one of the key themes of Doolittle: willful submersion into the sea, that great evolutionary toilet bowl. With layers of breathy, ethereal voices-a technique Thompson toyed with in demos, and which got the master stroke by Gil Norton-it tells of a suicide gone wonderfully right. It's like the dream had by the guy in that Ambrose Bierce story who is about to die in the gallows but in the few seconds before his neck snaps has a long and vivid fantasy of his escape. "I've kissed mermaids, rode the El Nino," Thompson sings as gently as he can. "Could find my way to Mariana," he exults, as if he's met the girl of his dreams, and he surfs those waves of mutilation with joy. Death is a liberator, drowning is pure pleasure. The underwater theme is later picked up in "Monkey Gone to Heaven" and ` Nlr. Grieves," but with sinister developments, as the sea becomes the arena for man's devolution and destruction.
Right now he's just riding the wave.
"I Bleed"
"Here's a song where I'm a slave to the rhyme scheme," Thompson says, and grabs my notebook and pen out of my hands to make his point. Still driving, he flips to an open page, sings the lyrics and writes the pattern out in ABCs:
"So the only concrete thing I really have going on is the repeated refrain, `I bleed,"' he says. "So that's the punch line, even though there's no narrative."
Lyrically, the song is an ambiguous jumble. The first verse is ostensibly about vampires, but it also might simply be about a hangover-the ringin' bell pounding somewhere inside his head. Verse two is an uncharacteristic philosophical reflection delivered Scarlet Letter-style: "Prithee, my dear / Why are we here?" The music, too, is thuddy, slow; and gothic, with a headache bassline by Kim Deal pushed high in the mix and some of Joey Santiago's most atonal guitar squawkings. (Which Santiago is quite proud of, by the way. "No one would have the nerve to do that," he says. "Part of that style, where I'm coming from, is probably lack of technique. I can't really do anything else but what I do.")
"I Bleed" adheres more closely than any other song on the album to the Surrealist MO. It plays by a small number of rules, but within those restrictions allows for all kinds of devilish wordplay and contrasting imagery. Thompson held firmly to a rhyme scheme with no goal but to get to the final line, "I bleed." And so he did. But the lyrics are not extemporaneous, not throwaways. The demos show that the lyrics were completed months before the album was recorded and remained largely unchanged; the only alterations were structural, with the intro extended a bit and a bridge added to ease the transition into the final verse.
It's an unusual song for the Pixies not just for its sound and lyrics, but for how it is played by the band, with a heavy bassline leading the way. While Thompson sing-speaks his way through the rhyme, teasing out each syllable to emphasize sound over sense, Deal echoes his vocal in a hollow and repetitive two-note pattern. The result is closer to goth-rock than anything else in the Pixies repertoire.
But as if to conclude that this goth shit is not really his thing, Thompson abruptly drops the "prithee" stuff on the third verse and digs into his
own experience, painting a vivid picture of the dusty caves he saw in Arizona while on a college archaeological excavation. Providing his own squealy and semi-retarded backup vocals, he is out "in the buried West," standing "in a cave / with a house in it," and wondering if the place was made by visiting Martians. We're still in the dark, but here the brilliant desert sky is just at the edge of the frame. Back in Oregon in 2005, listening to the CD while driving, Thompson sings along on the final verse: "The holes of hands / You can place / A hand in hand."
"You know, adobe cliff dwellings in Arizona," he explains. "These old adobe houses that are up in the cliffs, they made them by hand. And you can see the handprint." He pauses. "That's all. Got nothing to do with anything."
"Here Comes Your Man"
The most successful underground bands usually have one highly accessible song that suddenly propels them to a wide audience, and as a result the band often runs away from that song in fear or shame. Nirvana had it with "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Radiohead had it with "Creep," and the Pixies had it with "Here Comes Your Man." The band had long been uncomfortable with it. Though part of the Charles Thomp son songbook from the beginning, it never quite fit with the Pixies' sound, and despite the fact that it became one of its only songs to approach the level of a hit, the band long avoided playing it live.
Its chords and melody are some of Thompson's earliest juvenilia. "It's a sweet little chord progression thing that I wrote when I was like fourteen or fifteen," he says. It became one of the two dozen or so songs that constituted the Pixies' early set list, and it was recorded by Gary Smith during the Purple Tape sessions. That recording, short on lyrics but long on twangy and ponderous guitar, has a resemblance to early R.E.M., who may have partly inspired its lyrics as well. "I probably liked the word `boxcar' because I heard it on the R.E.M. song, from their first record," he says. "Boxcar, pulling out of town, boxcar,' that's probably where I got that. I probably just liked the word `boxcar.' Where do you go with that? I don't know Hobos?"
Thus landed the conceptual dart, and with that image in mind, Thompson wrote a few lines of reverie. The song had some of his most rhapsodic but ambiguous lyrics-"family stew," "nervous walking"-and was in many ways his version of Michael Stipe. So much so that when No Watts-Russell was putting Come On Pilgrim together, this one didn't come close to making the cut. It was too plain, too unexciting, too..."Slick is maybe not the right word," Watts-Russell says now "It was far more rock'n'roll in the first version of `Here Comes Your Man."' (Here "rock'n'roll" is not a compliment.) "I was concerned that it was a little bit normal." Nor was the song included on Surfer Rosa, which is perhaps understandable: Steve Albini is not known as a lover of ballads. But when it was recorded in May 1988, in the band's first session with Gil Norton, it was again scrapped; the label chose to go with re-recordings of "Gigantic" and "River Euphrates" rather than release this gem. Watts-Russell, and the band, were still iffy about it. It was just so...POP.
Despite the ambivalence, the band continued to work at the song, and it developed into a palimpsest of demo tapes. During preproduction for Doolittle, Norton went through at least three demos of the song and, working with Thompson, edited down the variants to a single master. "We wanted to try and capture all the energy and cool things of the other versions," Norton says. "I listened to it all to find the best bits that I liked and then made a version that got all the cool bits of everything in there, so that everybody's favorite bits got in the end product."
It also received, at Norton's request, a second verse. The urtext of the song, as recorded on the Purple Tape, had eight lines spread over two brief verses. But for Doolittle, all of that was combined into a single stanza (from "Outside there's a boxcar waiting" to "Take me away to nowhere plains"), leaving a hole the size of Oklahoma where another verse should be. Here Charles Thompson the Surrealist scriptwriter kicked in, churning out some lines to satisfy the director. "'Another verse, really?"' he says, dramatizing his interaction with Norton. All right, if you insist!"'
"So the boxcar," he says, "it goes somewhere." He doesn't know where. But the lines Thompson spit out for his director are particularly revealing because they show his creative focus on deadline, just at the time of the recording of Doolittle. His vision, revealed piecemeal throughout the album, is grim, with man meeting his end in ways big and small. The second verse of "Here Comes Your Man" is the first major appearance of that obsession. Where does the boxcar go? We don't find out-it never arrives. Instead, the nostalgic pastoral becomes a disaster picture:
"That's earthquake weather," Thompson says, "when things get real still. So the boxcar's out there in the West now. 'A wind makes a palm stop blowing.' So you know, I guess the hobo got hit by some kind of rock falling down." The mild hobo, the Woody Guthrie character, kicks the bucket courtesy of the unaccountable forces of nature. It's a pointless death, but in its obscurity it is an epic one as well. He could be any hobo, could really be Woody Guthrie. "Here comes your man, here comes your man." Well, who is he? The line has no referent, no connection to the verses. It's sung so sweetly that it implies some kind of romantic reconciliation, though nothing else in the song supports that interpretation. If anything, the song simply juxtaposes a sepia-tone daydream with its negative-image nightmare, and unites the two through a single blank-faced character.
As recorded, the song is unmitigated pop, and in some ways is barely a Pixies song at all. There are no screams in "Here Comes Your Man." The opening chord, originally just an open D, became a jagged open-string thrum that instantly conjures the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night." (Thompson continued to play a straight D major, but the secret ingredient is Santiago's beloved "Hendrix chord," here a D7 sharp 9; a loose open E also rumbles faintly underneath.) With a comforting D-G-A acoustic part, a Byrdsy main guitar riff (Santiago double-tracked a twelve-string Rickenbacker and a Telecaster to get the effect), and an effortlessly catchy chorus, the song had significant hit potential. And indeed it got them pretty far. A video was in rotation on MTV, which kept the album hovering in charts, however low But the Pixies might have found greater success if they had been more willing to actually perform the song. They rarely played it live, and resisted doing it at promotional appearances. It was vintage college-rock 'tude-the hit, the pop song, should be avoided as inauthentic, while the aggro, anticommercial song represents legitimacy.
And while the Pixies were rarely confrontational, they had their moments of pointed noncooperation. Joey Santiago remembers a typical fuck-you. "We were like little runts, little wiseasses," he says. "We were in LA, already doing a bunch of stuff. Arsenio Hall asked if we wanted to play on the show, and we weren't playing `Here Comes Your Man' at the time, you know The tour manager asked, `Hey, Arsenio Hall invited you to come on the show' We said, `Well, what do they want to hear?' He said, `Here Comes Your Man.' No way. We told them we would love to go on, only if we did the song `Tame.' And they said, `No, thank you..';,
"Dead"
As often as Thompson blabbed in the early days about the influence of the Old Testament, few songs on Come On Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa actually have biblical sources: "Nimrod's Son," perhaps "Levitate Me" and "Caribou" in a spiritual sense. But on Doolittle he delved deeply into the sex-anddeath grotesqueries of the Bible with two swift and cinematic glosses on Old Testament scenes, "Dead" and "Gouge Away."
A version of the David and Bathsheba story from II Samuel told from the point of view of a villainous and nihilistic David, "Dead" is a miniature Grand Guignol piece that blasts by in two minutes and twenty-one seconds. In demos, it was barely a minute and a half, and to expand it for Doolittle the band added some filler sections but no new lyrics. One of the most densely constructed stories on the album, the song contains just sixty-one words.
It opens sounding tribal and atonal, with Joey Santiago's guitar squawking on an insistent, off-key D-flat like a wounded animal. David Lovering and Kim Deal play a mechanical slave-ship rhythm, and as Black Francis mumbles in boredom ("I can't think of nothi
n"'), Santiago establishes the song's rotten melodic heart. In the verses Black Francis engages in rancid harmony with the guitar, setting David's tone as lifeless and evil. "You crazy babe Bathsheba, I wancha," saith the gangsta psalmist. He pulls her into his realm and luxuriates in sin. 'We're apin' rapin' tapin' catharsis / You get torn down and I get erected."
Speaking about it now, Thompson provides a speedy synopsis. "OK, there's this gal, there's this big powerful guy, he sees her bathing on the rooftop. He's so smitten with her beauty that he must have her. He sends his thugs to go get her, so he can bed her. She's powerless, of course, because she's a woman, and he's the fucking king. No one's going to question his authority. She becomes pregnant and sure that she's going to become his wife. Her husband Uriah is a mil itary commander in his army, and he ensures that Uriah is put into the heat of the battle and killed in battle. So he doesn't have to deal with him, either because he would find out about it, or he would feel guilty being reminded about it by seeing this guy"
