FEATURE:
La La Love You
Pixies’ Doolittle at Thirty-Five
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ON 17th April….
IN THIS PHOTO: Pixies’ Black Francis, Joey Santiago, Kim Deal and David Lovering/PHOTO CREDIT: JA Barratt/Photoshot/Getty Images
Pixies’ Doolittle turns thirty-five. Produced by Gil Norton, it was the second studio album from the Black Francis-led band. Francis, alongside Kim Deal, Joey Santiago and David Lovering released one of the best albums of all time in April 1989 (here are some facts about Doolittle). I am going to come to some reviews of this amazing and hugely influential album. Before that, I will come to some features about the making of. I will start with a feature from The Independent. They assessed and revisited Doolittle in 2019. Thirty years after this classic was released, they explored how songs with dark and unusual themes sparked a new Rock generation:
“At first glance, you’d worry for a world influenced by Pixies’ Doolittle. Songs about suicide, psychopaths, ecological disasters and mutilated eyeballs, delivered in a series of unholy screams, hisses, wails and growls. Sleeve images seemingly found in a serial killer’s scrapbook: human teeth lining the rim of a rusty bell, a dissected crab, horse hair curled around a spoon laid on a naked female torso. And its iconic cover, a halo-clad monkey hemmed in by quasi-religious symbols and numbers, was like a sepia snapshot from the cell of a sacrifice.
Yet influenced it was. Surfer Rosa, the 1988 debut album from these deceptively harmless-looking Boston college kids, had enraptured the music press and launched the underground cult of Pixies, with its dark, abrasive production courtesy of Steve Albini and its savage yet sweetly melodic songs pitting themes of incest, deformity, sexual abuse and violence against fun tunes about interracial sex (“Gigantic”), boy-next-door superheroes (“Tony’s Theme”) and existential snorkelling holidays (“Where Is My Mind?”).
But it was the 1989 follow-up Doolittle that turned the band into generational figureheads, as “Debaser” tore up the indie club dancefloors, “Monkey Gone to Heaven” crept seditiously into the US rock charts and the signature quiet/loud dynamic of tracks such as “Gouge Away” and “Tame” embedded itself into the burgeoning grunge scene – Kurt Cobain would famously claim that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was his attempt at writing a Pixies song. Released 30 years ago today and giving Pixies their first top 10 UK album, Doolittle was no mere indie rock breakthrough record; it was the seed from which decades of febrile rock brilliance would sprout.
The reception that met 4AD’s 1987 compilation of eight of those demos, Come On Pilgrim, and their debut album proper the following year, plus some hard global touring, had clearly instilled confidence, however. Pixies hit Doolittle with the wind in their soiled, sordid sails. “We were still young and fresh, but starting to kind of know what we were doing,” Francis told Esquire in 2014. “When we were done with the demos I think Joey and I felt that, ‘Oh yeah... something big happened.’ We felt confident.”
“We went to a practice space and [it’s like] we were arranging a flower arrangement,” Santiago told Yahoo of their intense rehearsal period, “that’s what we came up with and thought was perfect. And it made it to the albums … People should perceive that as how natural we sound. When we practised, that’s what we whittled it down to. We really worked on sounding simple.”
These were some pretty thorny flowers. When Throwing Muses and Echo & the Bunnymen producer Gil Norton, selected for the project after working on a more commercial single version of “Gigantic”, arrived in Boston and sat Francis down in his apartment to play through the songs on an acoustic guitar, it must have felt like scouting out an exorcism.
“I never thought he was crazy,” Norton tells me. “You’re with Charles and he’s very charming so you never feel intimidated by him. The thing I learnt in that period was that he doesn’t like to repeat himself so you have to try to find ways of exciting him into doing things. There’d have to be a reason to repeat a part… I was frustrating him because a lot of the songs were quite short – a minute and 20; very rarely did they get over two minutes.
“They were great ideas for songs but they didn’t feel like they’d been fleshed out, to me. I was trying to do that and Charles got a bit frustrated on day two; we went around to Tower Records and he pulled out Buddy Holly’s greatest hits and said, ‘Look Gil, look at this’. And he turned it over – if you look at Buddy Holly’s greatest hits, most of the songs, if he gets over two minutes with one it’s a bit of an epic.”
They weren’t the walkover that Albini painted them as, then? “Charles was pretty opinionated,” says Norton. “I always think of Kim as the cool factor, so she’s always got a good opinion about what she wants and what she doesn’t like. They weren’t a walkover, but the thing I like about good bands is they’ll listen and try things and see where it leads them. By the time they got to that point they’d done quite a lot of touring and a couple of albums and their confidence as a band was maybe a bit bolder.”
Two weeks of pre-production rehearsals later, Pixies entered Downtown Recorders studio in Boston in October 1988, according to Santiago, “very ready”. For two weeks, they hammered home a song a day. Yet there was still space for the odd in-studio surprise. Wanting to record “Hey” as live as possible, Francis was forced to record his vocal in a cupboard to avoid being drowned out by the drums: “It was a really small broom cupboard,” says Norton. “He had to play the guitar with the neck facing up to the ceiling while he was playing and singing it live. I was so happy when we got a take of that that I was pleased with.”
During mixing, Norton also managed to convince Francis to include one thing on the album that wouldn’t be “portable”; a string section on “Monkey Gone to Heaven”. “We ended up hiring a string section from the Symphony Orchestra up there,” Norton chuckles. “They rocked up in their full evening dress – the girl wore a big long black dress and the boys had dickie bows. I remember Charles going ‘wow, this is amazing’.”
Other Pixies had revelations, too. Santiago found a frenzied staccato attack on “Dead” that he decided to adopt as his go-to style. “That’s when I found something – I finally found it,” he told Yahoo. “[I thought] ‘That’s one of the formulas I’m gonna stick to’.” And given the chance to sing lead vocals on “La La Love You” as a “Ringo thing”, Lovering unleashed his inner Rat Pack crooner. “He’d never sung and he was really nervous going, ‘I don’t know how to do this Gil’,” Norton recalls. “I said, ‘Let’s just try it Dave, it’ll be a bit of fun’. Once he started he was like Frank Sinatra. He started hamming it up – you couldn’t stop him once he got going.”
Doolittle was no fence-sitter’s album, though. It was an album of magical and mysterious pop tunes, often tripping over themselves to reach the next hookline, but shrouded in a crepuscular, menacing, close and corroded atmosphere. The mythologies inherent in the songs lent the album a sense of dark ancient mysticism, the violence and ecological portents gave it a very present air of danger and Francis’s unhinged deliveries spoke of a melodic master turned malevolent. It was as dark as Pixies would get and set their definitive tone and aesthetic – the best Beach Boys album ever made, losing its mind after months trapped in a psychopath’s well.
“I didn’t go in there deliberately to do that,” says Norton. “I always think of those sort of albums as a rollercoaster ride, once you got on it you don’t want to get off because it twists and turns in all these different directions. That’s why there are 15 songs or whatever on there – they’re not very long so it’s really nice that they’re like blasts of events, I suppose.”
Norton plays down the rising tensions in the Doolittle studio. Legend has it that Deal was frustrated at being sidelined as a songwriter and Francis wouldn’t allow her a front-seat role; her only writing credit on the album is as co-writer of the ruined country ballad “Silver”. Things would later come to a head on the subsequent F**k or Fight tour – Deal and Francis chose to fight, with Francis even throwing a guitar at Deal onstage in Stuttgart. The result was Deal’s seminal spin-off supergroup The Breeders, and a widening schism within Pixies that would ultimately prove fatal for their first era.
But not before they’d wrapped up their menacing masterpiece. “At the very, very end, on the last night of recording I was flying out, the band had left to go home and I was in the studio by myself for one night,” Norton recalls. “I had the cassette and I put it on and I remember listening to it thinking ‘this is gonna be a bit of a classic album’. I didn’t realise the longevity of it, but I thought ‘we’ve created something a bit special here’.” Santiago felt the same way: “We knew we had something special going on,” he told Alt Press.
Subsequent generations of fans and musicians concurred. Far beyond Doolittle’s formative influence on grunge and Nirvana’s breakout success, the record spawned imitators across the rock spectrum. You can hear it snarling in the background of the early works of Radiohead, mid-period Blur, Pavement, Weezer and PJ Harvey, and time has embedded it at the root of modern alt-rock, from Arcade Fire to Jack White, Wolf Alice and Idles. And according to Santiago, the new waves of wannabe debasers keep on coming.
“When we played the Doolittle tour [in 2009],” he told Alt Press, “and not only the Doolittle tour, but I would say since 2004, since we reformed – when you look out into an audience, the majority of it I would say is kids that weren’t even born when our records [were out], and they know every song, they sing every word… 10 years later – there are still the kids coming who are that age relatively, 14, 15 years old, who have heard about us and know all the songs. It’s fantastic. We’re a very fortunate band”.
In 2014, Doolittle 25 was released. Featuring demos, B-sides and live performances, it gave even more context and colour to an amazing album. I am not sure whether anything is planned for the thirty-fifth anniversary next month. In 2003, Rolling Stone reviewed Pixies’ Doolittle:
“As Kurt Cobain readily told anyone who cared to hear, Nirvana's Nevermind wouldn't have happened without the Pixies' Doolittle. When it came out in 1989, the Pixies' abrasive guitars and twisted, nightmarish vision were eclipsed by the bad-boy cool of Guns n' Roses and the frothy pop of Fine Young Cannibals. For angry, punk self-reflection, you had to comb the indie underground.
The Pixies changed all that, and with Doolittle laid the groundwork for Nineties rock. The album's breathtaking mix of noisy, almost surflike guitars, sweet pop melodies and primal-scream-therapy vocals inspired a generation of would-be rock stars: Nirvana adopted the Pixies use of quiet, mumbled verses and loud, crashing choruses, Courtney Love aped their banshee wails, and Beck drew inspiration from their catalog of surrealistic lyrics.
Doolittle chugs into action on a New Wave bass line and frontman Black Francis' adrenalized barking about a weird scene from a Luis Bu–uel movie. "Debaser," with its cool, crisp guitar line and lyrics about "slicing up eyeballs," sets the tone of the album. From there, the band careens back and forth from menacing to melodic, as Francis and bassist Kim Deal screech, snort and coo their way through tunes such as "Wave of Mutilation," "I Bleed," "Dead" and "Gouge Away.
" Despite the bizarrely violent song titles, the Pixies were schoolyard nerds at heart -- the only person Francis was scaring with his lyrics was himself. They turned out to be prescient: Within five years, awkward pop stars from Pavement to Weezer represented the new cool, and "Monkey Gone to Heaven" and "Here Comes Your Man" were classics”.
I will try and write about the album again before its thirty-fifth anniversary on 17th April. Influencing a whole wave of artists who followed – including Nirvana and PJ Harvey -, there is no denying the importance and legacy of Doolittle. Arriving in 1989, it was one of the most important albums of the 1980s. When Doolittle 25 was released in 2014, The Line of Best Fit were among those who reviewed it:
“The spring of 1989 saw the release of two landmark albums in the space of a month. Whilst they had little in common stylistically, each were crucial in refining and redefining the sound of guitar music to this day. These fraternal twins were The Stone Roses eponymously titled LP and Pixies second album Doolittle. Despite the fact their creators would go on to be usurped in commercial stakes by Oasis and Nirvana, both records were their creative peaks and still sound as timeless a quarter of a century later.
Doolittle, the artier of the pair, has been lovingly repackaged for its 25th anniversary and features a whopping 50 songs - 22 of which are previously unreleased - including demos of every song on the album, B-Sides and Peel sessions. Whilst many extended editions of classic records reek of cash in, Doolittle 25 is that rare thing amongst box sets, there’s very little in the way of chaff. It’s a real treat that’s not just for completists, but for anyone who loves guitar music. It’s both the story and a musical photograph of a band making their masterpiece.
When Doolittle was released there was an inevitability that it would be their breakthrough. They had the backing of Electra Records and were given more money to record it than its jaw dropping predecessor Surfer Rosa, their debut album proper after the startling Come on Pilgrim mini LP. The Doolittle demos come from the same place as the Steve Albini produced Surfer Rosa, rough and ready angular guitar rock, they could have easily released them as they were and the record would still have been remarkable. But the installation of Gil Norton as producer added more polish to the finished record and what it lacks in Albini’s bloody mindedness, which included the band chatting between songs, the shift from the demos to the finished record showed them sounding much tighter, and despite having more overdubs the songs had more room to breathe. Norton channelled both the ferocity of the songs and Francis's howl into something that certainly wasn’t mainstream but definitely more palatable. Whilst Black Francis’ scream would ultimately verge into self-parody - listen to "Rock Music" from Bossanova - throughout all the versions of the songs here it serves as a vehicle for a visceral energy, be that pent up aggression or frustration.
Doolittle opens with the notorious “Debaser”. Following a similar structure to Surfer Rosa’s opener “Bone Machine”, alongside the piercing vocals sits Joey Santiago’s astonishing guitar playing, Kim Deal’s bassline that’s more a guitar riff than a rhythm instrument and David Lovering’s metronomic drums. And lyrically it matches the ‘You’re so pretty when you’re unfaithful to me” line of “Bone Machine” with the equally disturbing “I want to grow, grow up to be, be a debaser.” And here’s where the demos earn their money. The first demo version features hardly any lyrics at all; instead it’s a slew of phonetic sounds from Francis. The now infamous “I am un chien andalusia” a reference to Luis Buñuel’s film Un Chien Andalou which inspired the “Slicing up eyeballs” line was originally “I want you to shed Apollonia!” (Apparently a reference to Prince’s Purple Rain film), But it’s not all highbrow, Francis would always use the most direct form of language if the story demanded it and never as succinctly as on the line “Girl, you’re so groovy, I want you to know.” Yet even then he stills sounds like a serial killer.
An interesting back story to the record is the friction between Deal and Francis, resulting in her forming The Breeders to get her songs heard. Whilst you can hear her laughing on the demos, compared to Surfer Rosa, Deal doesn’t get another “Gigantic” on Doolittle (the closest to it is “Into The White” on the demos and B-Sides) and her lead contribution to the finished album is the swamp blues of “Silver”, and the demo is beautifully sparse, the lack of reverb allowing the insane harmonies to be heard properly.
For all that Doolittle dealt with macabre themes of surrealism, death and the Bible, there was a tender heart beating amidst all the carnage. The 1986 demo of “Here Comes Your Man” is just, well there’s no other word for it, lovely. It’s a little slower than the album version but as equally delicate as The Velvet Undergrounds version of “Sweet Jane” on 1969 Live.
It’s also an album steeped in sex and never more so than on the Peel session version of “Tame” where Francis plays Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, when he abandons the lyrics to exhale a repeated ‘Uh-huh, Uh-huh, Uh-huh…’, to be joined by Deal mirroring it with a much sweeter but no less coital coo, you feel that you really shouldn’t be listening to such intimacy, it’s the sound of two people having sex. Deal’s harmony isn’t on the original demo, and its absence is marked, the lack of her counterpoint makes it sound more like masturbation than consummation.
Comparing the finished versions alongside the nascent ones and hearing how they develop organically is fascinating, there are only subtle changes to the arrangements. “Monkey Gone To Heaven”, sounds identical right down to the “Rock me Joe” line, “Hey” is note for note, but with a gorgeously tender vocal on the demo. Amidst all the goodies a special mention has to go to “Wave Of Mutilation (UK surf)”, which sounds like a Christmas song, maybe John Lewis should consider it for the soundtrack to their next yuletide advert. It sounds sweet as you like, but without the sturm und drang of the original. And the demo version flies by at a blitzkrieg of speed, clocking in under 90 seconds.
It would be very easy to view this as a cynical cash in, especially with the release timed to coincide with the Christmas period, but Doolittle 25 is a beautiful reminder of what a gravity defying record they made. Yes, they’d see other bands reap more commercial success, but to paraphrase “Hey” This… is… the… sound… of a band so spectacularly ahead of the competition they were out of sight. Like their fraternal twin The Stone Roses, they’d have a bitter split, reform to play deliriously blissful concerts, but they never sounded as good as they did here.
If Doolittle was released today it would still without doubt be crowned a masterpiece. Even though it’s now twenty five years young it sounds as contemporary, yet out of time as ever. Doolittle 25 is the unedited musical story of how a bunch of weirdo’s from Boston rewrote the rulebook. There are certain records that have been labelled as classic’s which need to be part of your record collection, but with Doolittle the proposition is somewhat different, this is a record you need to keep listening to and finding new nuances. The sheer scope of material here will keep you entertained, thrilled and occasionally a little bit freaked out for years to come. To quote “Dead”, “Hey, what do you know, you’re lovely".
On 17th April, we mark thirty-five years of Pixies’ Doolittle. No doubt among the most influential albums ever released, I know that it will get a lot of new love and inspection ahead of its anniversary. I wanted to nod to it before then. If you have not heard Doolittle in a while then make sure that you do. It will blow you away. We got a classic second album in 1989 from…
THE mighty Pixies.