Happy 35th Anniversary to Pixies’ debut album Surfer Rosa, originally released March 21, 1988.
In 1985, Kim Deal moved with her new husband John Murphy to his native Boston. The couple met in Dayton, Ohio, where Kim had grown up with a twin sister, Kelley. In high school, Kim was a cheerleader, but she and Kelley were also music-obsessed, playing as a duo and writing songs together in a makeshift studio in their bedroom. The twins’ obsession was further fueled by a friend who knew someone on one of the coasts, who would send mixtapes of the coolest bands. “Being in Dayton, you have to find your own stuff,” Deal says in Fool The World: The Oral History of A Band Called Pixies. “Dayton is not a place to tour.”
When Deal was 11, she taught herself guitar. By her teens, she was writing her own songs, with the goal of one day becoming a professional songwriter. She was disenchanted, however, by the role she saw for women in bands. “The role for chicks in Dayton at the time was to sing the Pat Benatar song and shake a tambourine,” she recalls. “Maybe a couple of keyboard parts on other songs. Really cute, real tight skirts and stuff. Just really makes you puke.”
When she met her husband John, he was working as a contractor at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where her brother Kevin also worked. Kevin introduced them, and Murphy ended up staying in Ohio longer than the six months he had planned. “We had made an agreement early on in the relationship that after a year-and-a-half I’d like to go back to Boston, and Kim said that would be good for her, too, and maybe she could use that as kind of a springboard for any aspirations she had as far as music went,” Murphy says. “We got there in January, and I think she was in the Pixies by March.”
Deal still remembers seeing the ad in the Boston Phoenix. “The ad [said they were] looking for a harmony, and I liked it because it said, ‘Hüsker Dü, Peter, Paul and Mary,’ and it said something like ‘please no chops,’” Deal recalls. “Back in ’85, people were all about chops.” Turns out, she was the only one who answered the ad, placed by Charles Thompson, a UMass dropout, and Joey Santiago, his former UMass dormmate.
After dropping out of college, Thompson had spent a year in Puerto Rico, and Deal remembers him serving her Puerto Rican food. “I thought that was really nice,” she remembers. She thought Joey was quiet, and Mexican (he’s Filipino). “Santiago. Sounds Mexican to me,” she says. There wasn’t really an audition, and instead Thompson and Santiago played for her. “I heard Charles play ‘The Holiday Song,’ I said cool, and I was in,” she recalls. There was a compromise, however—both Thompson and Santiago wanted to play guitar, so Deal would have to learn bass.
Deal couldn’t have known it at the time—none of them probably did—but this small, informal “audition” would sow the seeds for so much—for one, the Pixies’ incendiary Spanish-themed debut Surfer Rosa, which would change rock music as anyone knew it. It also contained the tiny fissures that would lead to Deal’s eventual falling out with Thompson, who would insist that because he had actively placed the ad, and she had passively answered it, the Pixies were his band. And, finally, none of them could predict their very strange success, which would make them wildly popular in England and parts of Europe, while remaining obscure throughout much of the United States.
At the height of Pixies’ ’80s fame, I was an American army brat living in Germany, but even with those circumstances I wouldn’t hear about the band until the early ’90s, around the time they broke up and Nirvana began crediting them as a major influence. In the late ’80s, I was still in middle school, and although my brother and I often hung out with an older skateboarding crew who introduced us to punk, English alternative, and Jane’s Addiction, the Pixies never got a mention. That’s not to say that we just weren’t brought into the loop, but given the Pixies’ oddly uneven fame at the time, it seems more likely that those kids, like us, had yet to hear of them.
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It’s also possible that I was oblivious due to the Eurodance craze. My friends Valerie and Kara lived off of the army base in a town called Rauenberg, where they’d attracted the attention of two boys, Stefan and Armando. Valerie and Kara’s parents weren’t thrilled at the idea of their middle-school daughters hanging out with older boys who smoked cigarettes, so it turned into a Romeo-and-Juliet situation, with notes tossed over the sisters’ balcony and rendezvous planned. We’d meet them at the local ice-skating rink, which doubled as the town’s discotheque. Have you ever skated to “Ride On Time” with lasers guiding your glide? Armando had a couple of cousins his age, so I went for the Italian boys, but after a while I was there for the disco, too.
When Pixies first got together after Deal answered that fateful ad, Thompson decided not to start looking for a drummer until the middle of that summer. “They wanted to get the three of them to know the songs, so that when they added the drummer they didn’t have to figure out the arrangements, they just needed to add that extra piece,” Murphy recalls. When the time came, they auditioned several drummers, including Kim’s twin Kelley. “I didn’t want to be in Charles’ band, I wanted to be in Kim’s band,” Kelly decided, before flying back to Ohio. Then, for a while they found a guy named Mikey Dee, who quit before they could play any shows. Finally, they found David Lovering, who worked with Deal’s husband at Radio Shack.
Lovering’s favorite band was Rush, so when he first heard the other three play, he didn’t get it. “I wasn’t very worldly—I don’t think I heard it at first,” he says. “I liked it, but it took a little while before I was like, oh yeah, this is really, really good.” Despite the initial difference in tastes, the chemistry was immediate. “We started getting better and better,” Santiago says. “There was definitely chemistry there and Charles knew how to direct the drums and the bass and everything else, and let us do whatever we wanted, too. At one point or another it clicked.”
They practiced at Deal’s house when her landlord wasn’t around, and then in Lovering’s parents’ garage, and then in various rented rehearsal spaces around Boston, including one that contained a sewer-hole cover. “When it flooded, the place would fill up with these bugs and it stank like shit,” Thompson recalls. Their first show was at place called Jack’s in Cambridge. “There were probably nine people in the audience, four of them we knew,” Deal says.
Early on, the band designed an attention-grabbing poster that read “Death to the Pixies” and featured Thompson naked. They hung it up all over Boston, hoping to generate enough of a buzz so that they’d be picked to play at the Rat. They had their friend Jean (later Thompson’s wife) pass their demo to the club’s booker. “We had Jean Walsh do it because she dressed so cool,” Deal says. “We were just so scared because the Rat was a really cool place.”
At the Rat, the Pixies met Gary Smith, manager of a local recording studio called Fort Apache, where they would record a cassette known as The Purple Tape due to its color. “So much as I would like to take credit for somehow finding the Pixies—like they were living under a manhole and I heard noise coming through the cover—it wasn’t really like that,” Smith said. Ivo Watts-Russell, cofounder of 4AD Records, begs to differ. “Yes, undoubtedly Gary discovered the Pixies.”
Smith had helped another Boston band, Throwing Muses, get signed to English label 4AD, and so he approached Pixies with that leverage. He believed in the Pixies so much that he offered to record them at a significantly reduced rate, and engineer Paul Kolderie agreed to work for free. “So we went in, we did 17 songs, and that was the original Come On Pilgrim,” Lovering says. (Many songs from the Purple Tape made it onto their EP Come On Pilgrim, but there were others, like “Subbacultcha,” that didn’t’ come out until the fourth album.) Smith asked each of the band members how they’d like to be known, and that’s when Thompson chose his stage name Black Francis, and Deal, as a feminist joke, chose “Mrs. John Murphy.”
After hearing the Purple Tape, Watts-Russell signed Pixies to 4AD. For the Pixies’ first full-length album, Surfer Rosa, 4AD suggested the band record with an engineer named Steve Albini, formerly of Big Black. “His vision for recording naturally is just quite extraordinary, and his ability to record guitars out of fade so you get this extreme left and right pan if you really want your guitar to sound like it’s coming out of one speaker,” Watts-Russell says.
Albini first met the Pixies for cocktails at Lovering’s house, and the next day they were in the studio. “Steve does kind of that Led Zeppelin-y thing by miking the room,” Lovering describes. “You mike all the instrumentation but have room mics up also. And that gives a live feel to it. And then you use metal picks, and that gives it the edge. That was kind of his little thing that he did—ambiance.” They recorded the album over the course of 11 days at a Boston studio called Q Division.
Alternately stomping and swaggering, “Bone Machine” features that big, bombastic drum sound that would later factor in Nirvana’s choosing Albini to record In Utero. The way Thompson’s and Deal’s voices play off one another is classic Pixies, as well as the track’s loud-quiet dynamic. Thompson is a masterful lyricist, and Pixies’ songs always manage to spark strange imagination—in this case, murkily sanctioned infidelity: “I dropped you off with your Japanese lover / And you’re going to the beach all day / You’re so pretty when you’re unfaithful to me.”
“Break My Body” furthers the slinking and swagger, with its chorus of “Break my body /Hold my bones” possibly suggesting rough, passionate sex—or grisly murder. Thompson’s and Deal’s voices explode together as the guitar slithers in between, and we’re ultimately brought to an abrupt, single-smack catharsis. Next, “Something Against You” starts out with sunny surf guitar, and then dissolves into a beautiful cacophony as Thompson screams like he’s dying. (“Scream it like you hate that bitch,” a neighbor once told the teenage Thompson when he first began incorporating shrieks into his songwriting.) Appropriately, the next song “Broken Face” is careening, a little bit punk and playful, and all about, literally, a broken face.
For “Gigantic,” Albini achieved the song’s huge sound by miking the studio’s bathroom and recording the Pixies there. “This bathroom was completely made out of cement, and that’s where that big echoey sound comes out of it,” Murphy recalls. Deal fashioned the lyrics based on the 1986 movie Crimes of the Heart, starring Sissy Spacek, whose character has an illicit affair with a Black man. (Due to Deal’s heartfelt singing, and the gorgeously dramatic swells in the instrumentation, the song seems to celebrate the love affair rather than fetishizing it, even though some of the lyrics are rather irreverent).
“River Euphrates” paints a vivid picture of wild terrain in its lyrics, and through the careening guitars and shouting harmonies of “Ride, ride, ride,” it takes us on a sonic helicopter ride over a shaking, snaking body of water. Conversely, “Where Is My Mind?” provides an almost alien feel —a desert Roswell vibe—though we’re told “I was swimming in the Caribbean.” That feeling is furthered on “Cactus,” a galloping track full of high-noon doom. The mounting suspense breaks on “Tony’s Theme,” a wild rollercoaster ride in celebration of a superhero named Tony, replete with chants of “Tony! Tony! Tony!” that one might hear during a frat-party chugging contest (and brings to mind the Pixies’ later song “UMass”).
The party turns fiesta on “Oh My Golly!,” which carries over onto “Vamos,” featuring sublimely sick guitar by Santiago, as Thompson sings/screams in broken Spanish. (In 2018, Tatiana Tenreyro wrote for Billboard about her complex feelings regarding Puerto Rico’s influence on Surfer Rosa. She concludes that while it’s cool that Puerto Rico makes such a big, rare appearance on a renowned rock album, she wishes Pixies made touring the island more of a priority. “The island wasn’t just the place where Frank Black briefly lived before forming Pixies—it gave Surfer Rosa life,” she asserts.)
To lend the album further ambiance, Albini recorded little snippets of the Pixies’ conversations, including a story Deal tells about a former teacher who was “into field-hockey players.” During another conversation, Thompson jokingly tells Deal, “I’ll kill you, you fucking die,” which then gets drawn out as Albini feigns ignorance over it being said in jest.
“I’m Amazed” is another punky rocker, with metallic guitar trills and frenetic rhythm. The album ends with the two-minute “Brick Is Red,” bluesy and shimmying and mostly instrumental save for a few well-placed harmonies.
Following Surfer Rosa’s release, Pixies and Throwing Muses embarked on a huge European tour in 1988, and the kids went crazy. “They graduated quickly from being no-ones on the local scene to being big stars in England,” says Sean Slade of Fort Apache. Their agent at the time, Marc Geiger, agrees: “The Pixies got more press than almost anybody in the NME in the UK at the time, but only a few writers picked up on it in the U.S.”
During the tour, cracks started to appear in Deal and Thompson’s relationship. Most bystanders seem to agree that Thompson was jealous of the adoration Deal was getting from the crowds. Then, “Gigantic,” the one song on which Deal sings lead, was chosen as the album’s single, which seemed to push things further.
Throwing Muses’ Tanya Donelly and Deal hit it off in Europe, where they, like me, were bitten by the Eurodance bug. “We loved dancing to, like, Black Box, Neneh Cherry, and a lot of English dance stuff—we would just dance to anything,” Donelly recalls. The two decided to make a dance album together, but eventually they abandoned that idea for their own rock album, under the name The Breeders. Deal’s side project would lead to more resentment from Thompson, although her substance abuse has also been cited as a factor in their final falling out.
I missed seeing Pixies (the iteration with Kim Deal) perform over their four-album run in the ’80s and very early ’90s, but I managed to catch them on their reunion tour in 2004. Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City was bursting with people even younger than me who only knew the band through lore, but the show had all the boundless energy and bombast I imagined those English kids witnessed on that very first Surfer Rosa tour. “Pixies Sell Out,” read the U.S. tour shirt, and it was a triumph.
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