The book that tells the story of the Pixies, the band that invented dysfunctional rock and that inspired PJ Harvey and Kurt Cobain

2024-01-21 22:52:33

Pop music is full of details that go unnoticed at the time they happen. It is a creative manifestation that starts from the immediate. Urgency as a form of expression and as an objective. Then, time does its work, and offers us perspective to analyze better. What seemed mysterious to us many years ago, today has an explanation. And despite this, the effect produced by that music remains intact four decades later. That’s one of the things you learn by reading. Deceive the world. The oral history of a band called the Pixies (Liburuak, 2023), translated by Eva Borrallo and Lucía Rodríguez. Nothing was coincidental in that lunatic band from Boston that arose from nowhere and that was outside of everything that was considered boastful at that time, the second half of the eighties. When the British press began praising them in 1987, the Pixies were unlike anyone else. They didn’t even fit into the record label that signed them, because the English label 4AD was known for releasing Victorian and Gothic sounds. Pixies were a dysfunctional group both because of their music and their image and the way they related to each other. Its four components also did not know to what extent everything that made them unique would prevent them from staying together for a long time.

Pixies, between nostalgia and wisdom

Written by John Frank and Caryn Granz, this biography recently published in Spain was published in English in 2005, shortly after the group overcame differences that seemed irreconcilable and that led to their reunion, ten years after their breakup. fool the world tells the story of a rock band that did something unique while heading towards the abyss. A story that began as these stories usually begin. Charles Thompson convinced Joey Santiago, son of Filipino immigrants, to start a group with him. Then Kim Deal came in, who worked in a clinic office. They placed an advertisement to find a drummer, but hardly any applicants for the position showed up (Claudia Gonson, who would later be in The Magnetic Fields, was one of them). Then John Murphy, Deal’s husband, suggested they try his best friend, David Lovering, who was an electrical engineer. For his part, Thompson, who chose the stage name Black Francis (he would later change it alone to Frank Black), was obsessed with biblical themes and had a mother who claimed to have seen UFOs. It was not a meeting of easy personalities, hence the energy and originality of their music. “I think we more or less knew what we didn’t want to be and that’s it,” Santiago concludes in the book.

From the first moment they were an irregularity in the Boston music scene, although they were neither the first nor the only one. Throwing Muses also did not follow in the footsteps of fashionable trends and was led by Kristin Hersh, a figure who was essential for the university rock that in the late eighties was shaping what just a few years later would become, thanks to REM, Nirvana. and to MTV, in alternative rock. The same thing happened to the Pixies as to the Muses, they had no obvious references. Boston had a very defined music scene and both groups moved away from those parameters that advocated power pop or the garage.

The book talks about previous local bands, such as Human Sexual Response, from whose split the Zulus would emerge, two groups that musically went their own way, and that left their mark on the Pixies’ music. One of the first professionals in the city who had faith in Pixies was the producer Gary Smith, who recorded the demo known as The Purple Tape (The Purple Ribbon): “Both Muses and Pixies were bands of ordinary people but, when they put on the music, they became something more, they transmitted something that can only be described as otherworldly.” Black Francis’s way of shouting projected a fury that had more to do with the divine wrath of the Old Testament than with the generational anger of punk. It is in those early times when one of the most notable inspirations also filters into the songs and that Thompson himself recognizes in the book: “If anything has had a true influence on me, it has been David Lynch. It is very about presenting something, but without explaining it.”

They sent copies of the purple tape to many major record labels, but none of them understood what they were about. By then, 4AD had already hired Throwing Muses and when they heard Pixies through them, they decided to keep the quartet as well. All the attention that their native country had denied them was provided by England. The mini-album came from that demo C’mon Pilgrim, which immediately put the spotlight on the group. Months later they embarked on a tour supporting Throwing Muses that further strengthened their popularity. 1988 and 1989 were the years of the pixiesmanía. England adored them and, as a result, Europe began to adore them too. That’s when the problems started. The fragile balance on which the band was based began to suffer as its members learned to work together. Kim was uncontrollable, chaotic at times. Furthermore, she sang the song that catapulted the Pixies. Even Iggy Pop let Frank Black know when he went to ask for an autograph: “Oh, yeah, Gigantic”.

Everything that has happened since that unstoppable takeoff that took place in 1988 with the album Surfer Rosaand which reaches its zenith a year later with Doolittle, the masterpiece that they will no longer be able to surpass, becomes the crux of a book that also reflects the impact of the Boston quartet. It is often said that Kurt Cobain was greatly inspired by them – Nirvana were about to be his opening act shortly before becoming the phenomenon they were – when it came to composing, but in fool the world There are also glowing testimonies from PJ Harvey, Courtney Love and Shirley Manson, vocalist of Garbage, who highlights the natural magnetism that Kim Deal emanated, because “there are very few women who are really interested in being musicians and who do not seek any type of attention that is not the one that originates from music.” That same naturalness was also the epicenter of conflicts. Her unpredictable nature put her in check at several moments. That, added to Francis’s jealousy, generated tension that was not beneficial for them. But they also generated tensions around them. They disliked making music videos at a time when being on MTV was everything for a band of their nature. In the end, the pressure of the business was suffocating them. The tours took their toll. The last album, Deceives the world, almost everything was composed in the studio. An album that, as keyboardist Eric Drew Feldman assures, is disjointed because the group that recorded it was already a disjointed group. The band’s separation was forged just when Nirvana had just inaugurated a musical era in which bands like the Pixies, strange, misfits, noisy, could finally reign. Black Francis embarked on a career as a soloist that never garnered the praise garnered by his former group. Deal, on the other hand, succeeded with The Breeders, the group he had founded with his sister Kelly to mitigate the growing frustration that being in the Pixies produced. But, even so, the lack of control got the better of them. fool the world It is the story of those four elements that only by being together can do something that will disrupt pop music.

Ten years later, the Pixies were resurrected because the pressure for them to return never abated. Shortly after that return, Deal, who had not spoken to Francis for 12 years, left again. They continued and the demand to see them perform did not suffer. They even performed at Lollapalooza, the traveling festival that established the power of alternative rock in the United States starting in 1991, in which they refused to participate at the time. During this second phase they have also recorded new albums, but none are at the level of their imperial stage. fool the world corroborates how important those Pixies were, how peculiar they were and how little chance they had of preserving their initial magic. Without a doubt, the comparison that J Mascis, from Dinosaur Jr., makes between Pixies and Ramones defines, with a sagacity that is also black humor, perfectly that human barbed wire that generated unrepeatable music: “I guess you can be together forever.” and then die all of cancer.”