by Ben Sisario
Part two of the story is the offspring. "Hey! / Whaddyah know?" Black Francis exclaims in the bridge. "Your lovely / Tan belly / Is starting to grow!" But it don't turn out so good. "Instead of it being love," Thompson explains, "the child is stillborn." (Not totally accurate: the baby lives seven days. Check II Samuel 12:18.) "This other guy gets killed and [David] goes into this long downward period after that," he continues, one hand on the wheel and the other waving around the cabin of his car. "So it's kind of his downfall. He goes from being a great person who's respected by everyone, being spiritual and close to God, to being a murderer, a rapist, and out of control. It's not a son; it's a dead stillborn infant that doesn't even ever come to life. It's all about death. It's all just tainted. It's toxic, the whole thing. But there's lust involved. That's the spark."
The song is driven by Santiago's scraping guitar line, which in the chorus locks in cockfight counterpoint with Thompson's rhythm part. The whole thing cacophonously jerks its way toward the finish like some high-speed Old Testament camel ride. But the disorientation is carefully choreographed, from the cross-eyed harmonies to the lopsided time signatures, which go back and forth between 6/4 and 4/4. A bridge provides a momentary dream of optimism (hey! that lovely tan belly!), but soon, with the cawing of a lone guitar, it's all over.
If nothing else, the song is an ingenious psychological reading of the story of David and Bathsheba, boiling David's thoughts down to two motives: sex and death. His desire is a self-destructive one, and in giving in to his urge he revels in the pure Thanatos of it all. "I'm tired of living, Shebe, so gimme / Dead!" During the second verse, in fla- grante apin' rapin', he confesses to her, sweatily, "My blood is working but my heart is / Dead!" Sex and death. The drives are equal and united, a twisted desire that leads to a curse. Like the singer of "Wave of Mutilation," who prefers to make out with mermaids and, possibly, with shellfish (now that is not kosher), David has usurped his role in creation and must pay. He knows it, being King David and all, and he tells Jehovah to bring it on: Bathsheba was that good. "That's the one thing motivating him, this woman," Thompson explains. "`I must have her, I must have her.' He's saying, 'Aaabb.' He knows better. Obviously he knows better. But fucking `give me dead.' Give me the dark side."
But the cleverest idea in the song is the compression of the subplot of Uriah the poor Hittite. In the Bible, David tries everything to trick this guy whose wife he has just raped and impregnated. He calls him back from the war, sends him home, gives him "a present," has him wash his feet (you know; so that his cleanliness might help him get in the mood with the old lady). Nada; Uriah sleeps outside that night. Then David gets him drunk and nudges him home. Again, nada; he won't go. So what does David do, now that he can't trick his cuckolded military schmuck into thinking that his seed lies in Bathsheba's belly? He sends him off to the front line, "in the forefront of the hardest fighting," where he quite predictably dies.
All of this Thompson dispenses with in four cynical words, which in repetition become a satanic chant:
"What happened to Uriah? Uriah hit the crapper," Thompson says now. "You come up with a line like `Uriah hit the crapper' -not an original line, because I didn't invent the word `crapper,' and I didn't invent the name `Uriah.' But in combination, `Uriah hit the crapper? That's pretty fucking good."
"Monkey Gone to Heaven"
Yeah, they were indie and dorky and proto-alternative and all, but the Pixies, and their American record label with its Rockefeller Plaza address, wanted a hit. For proof of this, look no further than "Monkey Gone to Heaven."
Selected as the first single for Doolittle, and thus the band's very first major-label American release, the song was its introduction not only to the majority of listeners, but to the nation's radio station programmers, MTV, and the music business as a whole. And with "Monkey Gone to Heaven" the band made a clearly commercial move, offering a slick, mid-tempo ballad featuring a string section and suave, Lou Reed-y vocals, on a topic that was oh-so-1989: the environment. More than any other song on Doolittle-"Here Comes Your Man" still carried the faint jangly reek of a thousand sub-R.E.M. college bands-"Monkey Gone to Heaven" had hit potential. Even now it remains their most famous song to the culture at large, heard alongside "Back in Black" and "Baby Elephant Walk" at Major League Baseball stadiums.
Yet it is one of the band's biggest curveballs. Like many of Thompson's most memorable songs, it is built around a single utterance, delivered with mystery and zip. "This monkey's gone to heaven." It popped into his head long before he wrote the song, but when he did first set it to music he rushed to Joey Santiago and played it for him. And they... giggled. "It was early in the morning, I was still so tired," Santiago says now. "`Hey Joe, I need to come over. I need to show you something.' He showed me `Monkey.' It was awesome, really good. He had the `If man is 5' part there, and he was laughing. Oh yeah. It was hilarious."
The idea of an ascendant primate pushed a number of big conceptual buttons for Thompson-debasement of religion and humanity, confusion of man's place in the universe, and the idea that man is destroying what he has no right to destroy. Take the ocean. "On one hand, it's this big organic toilet," he told an interviewer in 1989. "Things get flushed and repurified or decomposed and it's this big, dark, mysterious place. It's also a very mythological place where there are octopus's gardens, the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, and mermaids, and all that sort of thing." Neptune, the god of this realm, the "underwater guy who controlled the sea," hung out down there, the personification of man's harmonious relationship with the earth. And what happens to Neptune? He gets "killed by ten million pounds of sludge from New York and New Jersey." (A provocatively specific image of ecological ghastliness if ever there was one.) Same thing with the "creature in sky," who gets stuck up there in a hole in the ozone layer. Man the divine manifestation effectively dies, and what remains is his degraded animal nature; the chintzy halo stuck on the primate's head is the symbol of that unhappy fall.
The twist comes in the final section, the one that the kids at the concerts first need one hand to do, and then two: "If man is 5..."
Thompson pulled it out of his ass. "It's a reference from what I understand to be Hebrew numerology, and I don't know a lot about it or any of it really," he told Alternative Press magazine. "I just remember someone telling me of the supposed fact that in the Hebrew language, especially in the Bible, you can find lots of references to man in the 5th and Satan in the 6th and God in the 7th.... I didn't go to the library and figure it out." But the line becomes one of the most sincere and powerful on the album, revealing that not only does the song have nothing to do with a monkey, it doesn't have anything to do with Earth Day either. At heart it is a gnostic reflection on man's relation to the divine, written in one of Thompson's most effective forms, the slow spiritual boil (cf. "Levitate Me"). As the beat drops out and is replaced by a bed of rumbling electric guitar, Black Francis preaches like a man just come down from the mountain with stone tablets, his voice rising to a possessed shriek. "If man is 5 / Then the devil is 6 / And if the devil is 6 / Then God is 7!" It's an epiphany, but really it's a warning. No matter who he has crushed and burnt and destroyed, man is low on the scale, down there below Satan. God is uncrushable, and man is basically a monkey.
And what is the sound of an ancient sea-god gettin' squashed by 5,000 tons of garbage? Big guitars! On one level, the song is a power ballad. It's the sound of a loud rock band taking it down with spoken verses and cellosthis was the age of "Silent Lucidity," remember-and then building it back up to dramatic heights with good old Marshall stacks. But "Monkey Gone to Heaven" does not match the pattern of the classic power ballad, that heavy-metal schlock vehicle whose ever-profitable formula is basically Broadway torch song plus electric guitar solo. Instead, "Monkey" has a wall of amplified sludge that comes in and out of the picture, leaving room for painful contemplation. Blender magazine has called the song the first grunge ballad, an apt designation. It opens with the pounding of four burly, fee-fi-fo-fum chords
that fade out as quickly as they came, leaving the verse to be carried along by Kim Deal's bobbing bassline. Lovering keeps a spare beat with a cold, "English" snare, and Black Francis narrates in the quietest, most childlike voice we have heard from him. The sludgetide comes back in the twelfth bar, those four ugly chords warped in the way only Joey Santiago can warp a guitar chord. But Black Francis and Deal's voices hover just above the waterline.
To slick it up, they added two violins and two cellos. While mixing the album at Carriage House in Connecticut, they had the studio owner, John Montagnese, bring in the string players for one evening session, which took place on Sunday, December 4, 1988. In those days Carriage House had a fruitful business recording the orchestral scores for Bmovies, and Montagnese called in a few regulars, all classical players with broad session experience. Arthur Fiacco, a cellist, showed up first, still dressed in black and white formal attire; he had come directly from an afternoon concert of Bach and Vivaldi in Scarsdale. Fiacco was surprised to find there were no charts written out for the musicians to play, as there normally would be in such a session. But he liked the singer-"what was his name, Black something? Black Sab- bath?"-and wrote out a part based on riffs Thompson showed him, holding close to the bassline. The two violinists, Corinne Metter and Karen Karlsrud, also had no charts, but followed direction from Thompson and Norton. Another cellist, Ann Rorich, is credited on the album, but Fiacco-who was paid $80 for his work-says she was sent home and he doubled his parts in her stead.
Adding strings to the track was risky, since the rockband-plus-cellos effect very often comes across as a corny and pretentious gimmick. To Norton's credit, the stringsparticularly the pizzicato violins in the chorus, where they are joined by a few twinkling piano notes-are blended subtly and unobtrusively into the mix, and the cello holds beautifully in the bare verses. But what really makes the strings work is the guitars. Coming in big, oily gushes, they create a recurring contrast against the soft beauty of the strings, emphasizing the song's theme of violence against nature.
"Mr. Grieves"
Following the storyline of "Monkey Gone to Heaven," "Mr. Grieves" opens in the water with another grisly death. This time it is the sea-god's child who has been violated. "What's that floating in the water? / 01' Neptuna's only daughter." From there the story only gets more grim. The end of the world arrives, brought on by man's foolish criminality on two counts-his metaphorical murder of the ancient gods, and his quite literal self-destruction through the technology of war. And it's ugly, vividly so. In "Monkey," doom was alluded to as part of a broad spiritual reflection on God and stuff; here we see a cold, detailed picture of the death of mankind, one straight out of a 1980s nuclear-apocalypse flick.
The song is another miniature, with only about a dozen significant lines. To make it fit, Thompson gave just a few scratchings of detail. His synopsis: "The situation is, verse one, Neptune's daughter floating in the water. That's the sign, the omen. If the daughter of Neptune's dead, then all is not well, right? So next verse, `Pray for a man in the middle,' meaning, you know, your salvation is nowhere near, but pray for someone who is in between man and the animal kingdom. That's sort of a premise that even though we're more intellectual than the rest of the animal kingdom, there's some deep truth to the psyche of fish or dogs or elephants. `One that talks like Doolittle.' In other words, someone that can talk to the animals."
So does it work? Does man find his way out?
"`Got bombed, got frozen,"' he sings, continuing the story. "See, that's just a time jump. You go from Neptune's daughter to trying to work the situation out, to oops-the situation didn't work out, did it? At least not to the benefit of mankind. `Got bombed, got frozen'-nuclear winter. `Got finally off to finally dozing'-become part of the fossil record. The eternal doze. Giving the planet over to the next group of folk who will rule. Whether they be cockroaches or, I don't know, jolly green giants."
Though the song is thematically close to "Monkey Gone to Heaven," the band took a left turn with the music on "Mr. Grieves." It's a vaudeville number, opening with Black Fran cis appearing as the mad master of ceremonies. "Hope everything is all riiiight!," he cackles, over a jerky syncopated prologue played reggae style-that's reggae "in a kind of not-thought-out, half-assed kind of way," Thompson says. Thankfully it ends quick, and the song moves into a stiff English strut. It was influenced by Ray Davies and the Kinks, at least in the old-fashioned music hall vibe. "It's got that kind of stompy, ragtimey thing," he says. Thompson is fond of describing his songs as short films, but here theater is a better comparison, with a cast of two-dimensional characters like the emcee and the specter of death. The song also contains a curious part by Joey Santiago, who, drawing from Pere Ubu or Captain Beefheart or some unknown alien genius, plays a twisted, spooky version of surf guitar over the verses. It's easy to miss but does a lot to establish the creepy drama of the piece.
" lir. Grieves" might be a stomps cabaret number, but it is the most cynical song on Doolittle. Here mankind has a foil, a personification of his drive toward extinction. "Mr. Grieves is the Death character of mythology," Thompson told the NME in 1989. And death waits patiently and unavoidably while man dithers ("do you have another opinion?") and wages war. The "man in the middle" could be a savior, or he could be man's pathetic last resort after he bombs himself back to the Stone Age. Either way, we blow it. "There's this theory that if not smarter than us, animals are aware of what's going on and if we could communicate with them, they could give us the answer of the future and make everything OK," he said. "But I'm assuming that a nuclear winter will mean that Mr. Grieves is going to win in the end."
"Crackity Jones"
The fastest, loudest, and most musically aggressive song on Doolittle is also one of the silliest. Ushering in a quick twosong sideshow of much-needed comic relief, "Crackity Jones" has nothing to do with death, nuclear war, the Bible, sexual loathing, the ozone layer, hobos, or vampires. Rather, its theme is one that has been central to thousands of episodes of bad TV a wacky roommate.
Thompson was in college, on his six-month study trip to Puerto Rico (the "stinking island" that is "thirty miles by / hundred miles by"), and found himself in a squalid high-rise dormitory, wondering when his assigned roommate was going to arrive. "He didn't show up for about a month," Thompson says. "First thing he said to me, he had cut his finger or something. I had never even met him. It was like out of a David Lynch movie. Suddenly there's this guy standing in my room, the guy who I thought, and suddenly realized, he was the guy that didn't show up, and now here he was, and he was going to be my new roommate. And I was loving this! Man, I got the room here with no roommate-"
OK, so your roommate finally shows up...
"It's this crazy all-male dormitory in San Juan, Puerto Rico. And finally he shows up and he's standing there, and looking a little disheveled, and kind of looking at me, and he's got blood on his finger. And the first words out of his mouth, he's like"-he widens his eyes and does the standard-issue sing-songy lunatic voice-"'I cut any finger!' That was his greeting to me."
This young puertorrigueno, who was not actually called Jose Jones-Thompson says he can't remember the guy's name-turned out to be quite a talker, testing his American roommate's patience and Spanish fluency with loopy blath- erings about Fred Flintstone and the voices in his head. (Flintstone is known to Spanish-speaking viewers as Pedro Picapiedra; Thompson incorrectly sang "Paco Picopiedra.") Charlie was freaked. In press interviews after Doolittle, he called his roommate a drug addict and said the dorm was "half homosexual," "like a Roman bathhouse" even. We can almost see him there, late at night in a stinky room lit in high-contrast Eraserbead chiaroscuro by a single bulb, glaring at his roommate with the frightened fascination of Jack Nance. This dude was weird! To deal, Thompson did what any self-respecting gringo would do and got the hell out of that bospedaje.
The song clocks at 1:24, a length worthy of Buddy Holly or the Ramones. And indeed "Crackity Jones" is one of the Pixies' punkiest son
gs, with a Tommy Ramone beat set at a frantic 150 clicks per minute. Yet it's remarkable what varied and imaginative playing the band packed into that minute and twenty-four seconds.
The rhythm guitar, recorded bone-dry, might be doing your standard punk-as-fuck eighth-note downstroke, but the chord progression is not exactly "Blitzkrieg Bop": with a Gsharp and an A hovering over a C-sharp, it is distinctly Spanish. Twenty-six seconds into the song, the second verse strips out the power chords and takes a swift turn toward a ridiculously accelerated jig ("please forgive me, Jose Jones"). Twelve seconds later it changes again, into an escape scene at night, led by Joey Santiago's drilling guitar and Thompson's harried whisper ("thirty miles by"). Lord knows who's doing the "goofiar" and why it's "en crushing automovil," but with twenty seconds to go the punk downstroke is back as Thompson howls and barks like a coyote, channeling Crackity Jones "chasing voices / he receives in his head." Crack, crack, Crackity!
In the panicked final seconds of the song, as the band nails a high-speed finish, a faint muffled voice can be heard buried in the depths of the mix. Perhaps it is a vestigial remnant of a line Thompson had included in the same spot on the demo of the song. Just to drive home his point about of Jose, he shouted, in a deep stentorian jaccuse-"You're crazy!"
"La La Love You"
It is the jokiest, cutest, dumbest song on the album, an upbeat goof with foxy-lady whistles and a Woody Woodpecker guitar riff that is all about love, love, love. "All I'm saying, pretty baby / La la love you, don't mean maybe."
It's bullshit, of course. "There is no love in here," Thompson told the NME. "Not a drop. I've never written a love song. It's just like an abstract sort of joke.... It's just mimicking a really bad 1950s song, or maybe I should say 1980s. `First base, second base, third base, home run' is a very Shakespearean crass joke in America, a crude joke for full copulation. I'm just being as minimalist as I can, but it conjures up lots of imageswell, one image, I should say."
