by Ben Sisario
This joke-abstract, crass, crude-is a dig at the very idea of a love song. Such a term implies sincerity and originality. But of course the love song is a manufactured and market-tested genre perfected over time by skilled and disinterested professionals, like the patriotic country song or the romantic comedy movie. "In a vague wail it's mocking popular music," Thompson says now "Because it's like saying, OK, we've just got this nice little chord progression, what's the lyrics? `La la love you baby don't mean maybe.' You know; nothing, just the most throwaway-don't even write a verse for it. The chorus: `I love you, I love you.' Reduce it down to the most standard nine words in the popular music vocabulary." The "la la" bilge is sarcastically embraced as a kind of proof that pop music is by definition repetitive and banal. "If the song means something," he says, "then it's just to be a wiseass."
The sneer begins right away, in the opening few seconds of the song. David Lovering starts with a big come-on-getyour-drink-the-band's-started-again beat, and the first dumb joke is a call-and-response huzzah shouted over the traps. "Shake yer butt!" goes the first guy, presumably with one hand raising high a bottle of Coors Light. The response, barely audible, comes from one of the nerds in the back: "Not too barrrd!" The skit that follows unfolds with all the spin-the-bottle predictability of a real love song. Bass, drums, and acoustic guitar play it straight, while Joey Santiago does a smartass wink followed by various Martian interpolations of surf chords. Then come a whistle, a "yeah," and lots of "I love yous," sung tag-team style by each Pixie. (Santiago, panned right, can't seem to enunciate at the mic.) As if all this was not enough to indicate a spoof, Thompson had the drummer sing it. Turns out Lovering was perfect for the part-he's a cheesy crooner who can do a Rick Astley just as good as Rick Astley
"To me, the biggest fuck-sous are not a song like `Tame,"' Thompson says, "but it's a song like `La La Love You' that's the big fuck-you. In that it's sort of like, oh yeah, I can scream and shout and be abrasive or whatever like the rest of you motherfuckers, but I'm willing to be truly corky, you know what I mean? I'm willing to be silly."
"Number 13 Baby"
In the religion of rock, Charles Thompson says, the song is the true deity-not the album, not the guitar solo, not the set list, and certainly not the video. While the song is playing, nothing else matters. He is also fond of a few other metaphors for the primacy of the song, like the Surrealist short film, a confusing but arousing composite that, if done right, makes sense in dream logic. A song is also a place, a state, with boundaries and a language all its own. "Every song is its own entity, it has its own history," Thompson states, philosophically. "Like Beck says, every song is a country or a nation; it has its own rules and customs. That's true. It has its own personality"
"Number 13 Baby" is one of the great island nations of Doolittle. The song begins with a gorgeously raw G-sharp minor chord, held for five seconds as if Malcolm Young himself had strummed it. It then slides, smoothly but weirdly; into the keys of G major, which for much of the first verse is held up only by Kim Deal's one-note bassline. In comes Black Francis the lech, speaking a language of perversity that only he can understand. "Got hair in a girl / That flows to her bones," he sings, And a comb in her pocket / If the wind gets blown."
It's drooling voyeurism, and an echo of "Tame." The object of his desire is again a dancer, and again a clumsy one, whose "face falls down / when she go, go, go." But here it starts to diverge from "Tame," and from any of the other sexually driven songs on the album. The singer of "Tame" would snidely impugn the lady's virtue (and shred his larynx doing it); the singer of "Hey" might be fraught with guilt over his feelings, and lash out by calling the lady a whore. But in this country, Black Francis is willingly seduced. "Black tear falling on my lazy queen," he sings, never taking his eyes off her. "Got a tattooed tit, say number thirteen." Her dancing, and the "stripes on her eyes when she walks slow," have cast a spell on him. "I'm in a state," he exclaims, in a vocal recorded hollow and distant.
The second verse recreates the same scene, now with a "choir in the yard" and something going on that Francis relays as an alluring pagan sex ritual:
It is one of the most powerful and evocative lines on Doolittle, and as an image of sex as an irresistibly dirty and forbidden ceremony, it has few rivals in rock. But Thompson is typically unromantic about the lyric. It comes from his childhood in California, he says, when he lived next door to a Samoan family and watched their musical pig roasts from across the backyard. One girl there caught his eye, and in his song he conflates that memory with titillation of another kind-gangs. "The song is sort of about having the hots for a low-rider chick," he says, "even though it gets into talking about my Samoan friends." When he sings,
Thompson is conjuring the gangs, real or imaginary, of his old neighborhood. "Viva la Loma Rica was a gang that was around at that time, I think," he says. "I don't know anything about them but you used to see the spray paint every- where-VLLR, stands for Viva la Loma Rica, `long live the rich hill.' Thirteen of course is a famous number in gangspeak. The thirteenth letter of the alphabet, marriage and marijuana. You know, M." The juxtaposition lends the backyard scene a hint of danger and transforms the girl into a badass street moll-nothing tame about that. (But was it a real gang? "Well, I don't know for sure if that was a local gang, or just an individual, or a slogan, if you will," he says. "Whatever it was, it was gang-related, probably city of Carson. Where I got the info about what it stood for, I don't know I wouldn't have made it up; maybe whoever told me did make it up. Who knows?")
The effect of all this on Black Francis is palpable and beautiful. He gives the whole second half of the songalmost two full minutes-to a trancelike, erotic groove, a state of pure pleasure that is unique in the Pixies songbook. Bass, scratchy acoustic guitar, and drums lock in a simple, oblong pattern, while two electric guitar parts come in. Thompson plays droner; chugging eighth notes of just C and B-flat, adding a "stabby" high E, and Joey Santiago plays a succession of slithery; circuitous riffs, over and over. It is a perfect little perpetual-motion machine, made from prime Pixies elements. Norton's production keeps the instruments discrete while braiding them together tightly, and a key songwriting trick by Thompson puts the parts just slightly on edge. The first three bars are in 4/4 time, while the fourth bar is an abbreviated turnaround in 2/4. He stole two beats, meaning the section can never sit down and rest.
"The outro was a good example of us finding some good notes, just a few notes, that worked well together and occasionally tugged against each other in a slightly dissonant kind of way" Thompson says. "That illustrates the skeletal sound of the Pixies very well. It's mind-numbingly simple to play, at least my part is. Joey's part is pretty simple too. But that's what we're about. Simple parts, in a surfs kind of way Do what you can with a few notes. Don't be ashamed. Stand tall."
"There Goes My Gun"
Tucked near the end of the album, just before the tour de force that is "Hey" "There Goes My Gun" can seem a skippable trifle, a slow little surf ditty that is under two minutes in length and contains just ten words of lyrics. It is one of only two songs from Doolittle that the band did not play on its reunion tour-the other was "Silver," which the Pixies have never performed live.
But "There Goes My Gun" is a particularly notable songwriting accomplishment for Thompson. It's one of his finest moments as a minimalist, and, perhaps not coincidentally, one of the Pixies' most fascinating examples of the pop song as Surrealist short film. In three two-word verses split up by a four-word chorus, the song unfolds as the dam aged excerpts of a brief but vivid nightmare, with just enough information to piece together a storN.
"It's a scene," Thompson says. "The actor is shouting across some expanse of space. `Yoo hoo. Yoo hoo. Yoo hoo.' Obviously it's a space that contains potential danger. And `there goes my gun' is the result."
That's the first verse. The same thing happens again in the second, this time with more reverb on the vocals. "Looka me." And there goes his gun. "Frienda foe
," he shouts, his voice now jumping around the mix. "Frienda foe." There it goes again.
To this listener, the scene is of a soldier nervously attempting to make his way out of a trench. He's a young boy fresh to the front, and he's in the midst of a nighttime battle. His knees shake and his eyes dart around frantically, but he can't see a thing. "Yoo hoo!" he shouts-there's something out there. Blam. His gun goes off, a nervous and possibly unintentional reaction. Did he hit anybody? "Looka me!" Blam. "Frienda foe!" Who's out there, goddammit?! Blam. The three verses could represent the escalation of a single story, or they could be subtle variations of the same recurring dream. Either way, it brings the same terrible result again and again. The narrator never figures out who's out there, and he shoots wildly: Presumably somebody gets killed, maybe the narrator himself.
The ambiguity makes other interpretations inevitable. Could it be another Western, like "Here Comes Your Man"? The Dust Bowl twang of Joey Santiago's guitar might indicate that. Could it tie into "Mr. Grieves," another joyless episode with a gruesome, never-explained death? Or are the rules and customs here not transferable?
Of all the tempo changes and tweaked arrangements wrought by Gil Norton on the songs of Doolittle, the most dramatic transformations occurred in "There Goes Xly Gun." As it appears on the album, the song moseys at 120 beats per minute, carried though by a crawling bassline and splashes of dirty surf guitar. Before the last chorus, there's even room for a little four-bar Duane Eddy solo. It's a slow, creeping shot with lots of dead space. But in its original form, the song was fast, lean, and mean. "It used to be a lot punkier," Thompson says, drumming the speedy beat with this thumbs. "Used to be twice as fast, like more Husker Du-ey or something. That was one where Gil slowed us down. Said, `Hey, slow it down.' Slow it down? It's a fast song! `Slow it down, trust me.' We were fine with it. I don't know if it was better, but it wasn't worse. It made it different. And it opened it up for the lead guitars to become surf-." He hums a little bit of Joey's solo. "That was nice."
In the demos made during the summer of 1988, the song charges at about 140 beats per minute, the rhythm guitar jabbing every note. The band played "There Goes My Gun" on tour, and as they neared the date of the album sessions, they were speeding up. The version recorded at the BBC for a John Peel session on October 9-three weeks before tracking began for Doolittle-is a bullet at 150 BPMs. That one timed out at 1:24, nearly half a minute shorter than the album cut.
Norton's decision to slow it down was fruitful. The fast versions, though caustic and invigorating-they really are like outtakes from Zen Arcade-lack the eerie deadpan that comes with the slower pace. Without the rhythm guitar slashing on every eighth note, the song is left with a fore boding emptiness that makes the skeletal storyline even more frightening. And Santiago gets to explore surf guitar in a depth he never had before, giving him a run-through for Bossanova.
What pleases Thompson most about the song now is its success as an experiment in minimalism. The idea had been intermittently present from the earliest days of the band, beginning with "In Heaven." (Lyrics, courtesy David Lynch: "In heaven, everything is fine / You've got your good thing, and I've got mine.") But on Doolittle Thompson went the distance with it. "Certainly with `There Goes My Gun,' or `La La Love You,' or even the whole record in general," he says, "I was into how you don't need much, you just need these three lines. You don't need much. You can repeat it. `Uriah hit the crapper. Uriah hit the crapper. Uriah hit the crapper.' I don't know if `There Goes My Gun' lyrically works as some beautiful poem. But in terms of the moviethe movie totally works."
"Hey"
Besides "Here Comes Your Man," which had been in the band's repertoire from the beginning, "Hey" is one of the oldest songs on the album. It had been a central part of the live set since at least early '88, before the band's first European tour. And it had actually been released already-in September of that year, weeks before the Doolittle sessions began, a live version of the song recorded at the Town and Country Club in London was included on an EP given away with Sounds, the now-defunct British music weekly. Every detail of the song, down to the solo, had been nailed with precision. Gil Norton dared not touch it.
So when it was recorded for Doolittle, "Hey" rolled right out without complication. In fact, the version on the album is a virtually unaltered live take. "The only thing we did," Norton says, "is Kim's background vocals, the `chained!,' the little chant thing. We had to do that because she was in the room playing the bass at the same time as the drums. And there was one cymbal overdub, one hit that we put on there."
"Charles played the guitar and did the vocal live," Norton continues. "The only way I could get isolation was to have him in this little cupboard. He had to have his guitar up towards his head; there wasn't enough room to have it down. He did the vocal in there with his guitar. It was one of those moments as a producer when you're sitting on the edge of your seat. We were halfway through it and we get to the solo, and I'm just going `Come on, Joey, just do it, please! This is going to be so fantastic!' As soon as we finished it, we knew we had done it. That was the one."
"Hey" is a single seamless gesture, a rambling paragraph of sexual anxiety that is a bravura performance by Thompson and a moment of great finesse by the whole band. It's the first real oasis of quiet on Doolittle, and it is delivered with a level of intimacy found nowhere else on the album. The only comparison in this regard is "Where Is My Mind?," and "Hey" occupies an equivalent spot in the Pixies canon as a window into the soul of this guy called Black Francis. In both, he is profoundly vulnerable despite his cat-in-a-corner screechings. "Where Is My Mind?" dramatized mental/spiritual/time-space-continuum "collapse," but "Hey" pictures a frightened boy lashing out over thoughts of lust and betrayal. The singer wants a relationship with a woman-"Hey / Been trying to meet you," he offers gently as he fingers his best Stax/Volt guitar lick-but before long his extended hand twists into a jabbing finger as he sees "whores" everywhere. Whores grunting, copulating, making the same noises as a woman giving birth. Hey, they're linked, chained.
Thompson says the song was to some degree inspired by thoughts of his mother and father, particularly in their wild younger years. They grew older and split up, though they remain forever bound by their connection to their son. And in the time leading up to the album sessions, Thompson's stepmother became ill. "She was dying during the tour and then she did actually die, I think while we were recording Doolittle." He says it may have even been when they did "Here Comes Your Man"-a plausible occurrence since Norton remembers that Thompson was not present when the band cut the backing track for that song. Mother, father, stepmother, divorce, sex, death-all are chained together. "That could've been something psychological that played heavily into the record without my realizing it," he says.
The key there, the connection on the most basic animal level, is sex, and "Hey" is an unmediated braindump on the uncomfortable but unavoidable associations the subject evokes. "I don't know that sex is a totally beautiful, normal thing the way that the gods intended for a lot of people," Thompson says. "I think it can end up that way, and people can get there. But I think mixed up with that are a lot of other feelings. Because hey. There's something to be said for how it's all about sex and death, or whatever. Maybe that's why people like the Pixies..."
"Silver"
Doolittle was a premeditated act, with almost every detail thought out long in advance. One of the few exceptions is "Silver." A harmony vocal number with a folks arrangement, it is a musical oddity on the album, and one of only two titles in the Pixies catalog credited to both Thompson and Deal-the other, of course, is "Gigantic," not only one of the band's very best songs but one of the most transcendent moments of 80s alternative rock.
But "Silver"? "I don't even know what it's about," Thompson says. "Kinda throwaway rhymes. `Stranger/danger' It was just kind of a quickie lyric, and maybe it means something to Kim. I don't know Because she helped write the lyric. But to me, it's kind of throwaway and ambiguous.
And more about the feel of the thing. I don't even know how good it is, really."
Strictly speaking, it was not the last time that Deal sang a lead (or at least half a lead) on a Pixies song. She also sang "Into the White" and "I've Been Waiting for You," both Bsides. Her vocals, once such an integral part of the Pixies, were being faded out.
As Thompson tells the story, "Silver" was a mere collaborative scrap that made it onto the album as an afterthought, recorded during Doolittle's mixing sessions. It was written toward the end of the band's first European tour, in early May 1988, its genesis witnessed by No Watts-Russell in London. He says he entered Black-wing Studios one day during the band's sessions for the "Gigantic" single, and was taken into the control room. "Hey, have a listen to a song we wrote last night," they told him, and played "Silver," with Deal thumping a bass drum. It was a career highlight for the record label don, but just another tune cranked out in short order for Charles Thompson. "Kim and I were hanging out in the studio," he says, "and we started some kind of folky, high-voiced thing, with a triplet feel. And it probably got put on the back burner until we were mixing Doolittle. One more thing to stick on there, last-minute addition or whatever."
But it wasn't totally forgotten about between London and Stamford, Connecticut. A demo was recorded along with the rest of the songs for the album, and it closely matches the final version. Deal evidently continued to work on the song, perhaps without Thompson's knowledge. She played it at early Breeders gigs and recorded a demo version of her own, adding another verse and a violin part (played by Carrie Bradley, the fiddler on Pod who was also a member of the Boston band Ed's Redeeming Qualities).
