Pixies
2002, SpinART Records
Almost nobody ever refers to it as their debut, but the first Pixies record is technically a self-released, small-press cassette nicknamed The Purple Tape. Whether copies made it to the racks of any cool Boston record stores back in the day or were sold at shows, I can’t say for sure, but this ambitious young band did send out stacks of them to record labels. (As of this writing, original copies of the tape command over $1,000 on Discogs.)
Its seventeen tracks represent everything in their arsenal circa early 1987. It’s all of the songs that they had finished, polished, and were playing in clubs. Sixteen originals and one cover of “In Heaven” from Eraserhead.
The 22-year-old Black Francis didn’t call these recordings demos. He wasn’t married to this cassette as a finished album, but the tracks themselves were ready for prime time. The band made them in a real studio (financed with a loan from Francis’s father) and, though they bashed them out in three days, they worked hard on them.
That’s when the 4AD label out of England enters the story and they liked the cassette, but they thought that an EP would be the best way to introduce the Pixies to the wider world. So, 4AD co-founder Ivo Watts-Russell selected eight highlights and that became Come On Pilgrim, the group’s really real debut.
That left nine unreleased tracks that became well-bootlegged over the years until they finally saw official release in 2002 on this starkly presented disc.
Gonna be honest, it took me a few years to pick up this one. All but one of these songs were redone later. Early versions of the likes of “Break My Body” and “Down to the Well” seemed like swell bonus material for a reissue or a box set, but buying them on their own felt like something for more serious archivists than I was.
In 2002, my old Pixies CDs had been cooling off on the shelf for awhile. I didn’t play them much anymore. I was into other things, such as Frank Black and the Catholics.
Had 4AD put this out, maybe they would have dug up some trinkets from their archives to beef up the presentation, but instead this was handled by the indie labels that Frank Black worked with for his Catholics releases and they seemed happy to merely tag along in adding to a major band’s legacy.
So this set collects the nine leftover Purple Tape tracks and nothing more. Some internet music info hubs even classify it as an EP. It’s a trip back in time via a peek through a keyhole.
March 1987. The underground still mattered. College radio still mattered. Records still mattered. A frontman who screamed like a maniac for no reason other than it sounded cool was still freaky.
Top 40 radio in the US was playing the likes of Bon Jovi, Janet Jackson, and Bruce Willis’s big hit “Respect Yourself”. College radio was playing new stuff from Billy Bragg, Beat Rodeo, and Husker Du.
I have an undying love for 1980s underground and alternative rock. Play some Dream Syndicate or The Teardrop Explodes at your house party and we will be friends. The eighties was every bit as fertile a period as the sixties when it came to music. A big difference is that eighties bands were more resistant to identifying as revolutionaries than their acid generation forebears.
Eighties underground rock WAS a revolution. Bands such as The Minutemen and The Fall expanded horizons and confused the right people.
However, these bands also saw what most of the old sixties bands had become. Corporate rock. Beer commercial rock. Old dudes with too much product in their hair and who have nothing to say to the young generation anymore. The Nike ad that used The Beatles’ “Revolution” in 1987 was a major moment that’s almost forgotten today, but that commercial was everywhere for a time and it turned John Lennon into a shoe salesman.
It might have been on TV while the Pixies were recording this.
(These days, no one cares if bands license their music to commercials, but it used to be heavy shit back in the day. Many big music fans loathed that sort of thing. This attitude faded around the early 2000s when internet file sharing became common. A generation proud to download all of their music for free suddenly couldn’t begrudge an indie band scoring a payday with a McDonald’s ad. An unofficial truce was called.)
Eighties underground bands are like the children of divorced parents. They’ve seen that the old ways of doing things lead to a dead end, so they try something else.
They question everything. They get personal. They get inscrutable. They don’t care if the previous generation understands them. Maybe they embrace total absurdity, which is what the Pixies did.
When you listen this Pixies collection, I recommend mentally transporting yourself back to 1987. Maybe you were there. Maybe you weren’t. Maybe you were ten years old like I was.
Whatever your image of 1987 is, I say focus on that when you listen to this music.
And now imagine a young twerp who calls himself Black Francis singing earworm songs with lines such as “There was this boy who had two children with his sisters!/ They were his daughters!/ They were his favorite lovers!” while a basic four-piece rock band does a strange, manic imitation of Mexican mariachi music.
The band nail down their sound here. Lead guitarist Joey Santiago is one righteous surf-punk who can also serve a pop song. The rhythm section of Kim Deal and David Lovering keep up an infectious bounce.
Black Francis is the weird boy next door. As a rhythm guitarist, he provides a persistent chug, often on acoustic guitar here.
As a singer, his style is equal parts Gordon Gano and Iggy Pop. He’s a whiny-voiced pervert in one line and then a bellowing force of nature in the next one. The young Black Francis is a guy you will never trust to sing a “normal” song.
As a songwriter, his influences reflect a kid born in 1965 who grew up with the classic 60s and 70s stuff and then had his world shaken by punk. He loves energy and bombast and seedy subjects, but he also loves surrealism AND he wants it all to be fun.
He’s a loony bird is what I’m trying to say.
Listen to this disc to hear a loony bird.
One interesting piece of trivia about this set is that every Pixies album from their original run reworked something from this early session.
“Here Comes Your Man”, one of the first songs that Francis claims he ever wrote, is here in an early version and it’s pure candy and ready to get rejected for two 4AD records in a row for being too commercial.
“Subbacultcha” is also here and I can see why it took four years to land on an album. I like the song a lot, but its cool mix of beat poetry with Mark E. Smith wouldn’t jive with the slam-bang rollercoasters that were the early Pixies records. I like this early version from the young, eager Pixies, but I think the later, jaded, about-to-break-up Pixies sold it better.
Then there’s “Build High”, a splattery, salsa-flavored rocker that got overshadowed until the band needed a B-side in 1991.
The one truly unreleased song here is “Rock A My Soul”. It’s a head-bobbing party raver that reminds me of T. Rex, except that Marc Bolan would have surely lingered more on the opening groove in contrast to the impatient Pixies who attack you with the changes and finish off the song in a cool 1:45. That’s their way though, and if you’re digging this deep, you probably love that about them.
IN CONCLUSION, these recordings are fun, but they’re corpses. They won’t change anyone’s mind about anything. There are better versions of all of these songs out there (except for “Rock A My Soul”, which the band never touched again after this, as far as I know).
You listen to this disc to go back in time. You listen to it to hear something long gone. You listen to it visit a past that will never come back.
It’s dead. It’s been replaced. Things are different now.
When this disc’s closing track sings to us (and then SCREAMS to us) that “In heaven/ Everything is fine”, it makes sense.
I don’t think there’s any complicated reason for why the Pixies covered “In Heaven”. My best guess is that Francis saw Eraserhead at a midnight show back in the day and David Lynch’s otherworldly vision resonated with his own surrealist interests. I do love that they performed it though, and their version has acquired new relevance over time.
“In heaven/ Everything is fine”.
The Pixies aren’t the first rock band to cover the song. Devo and Bauhaus played it live years before. Tuxedomoon recorded it for an album. However, the Pixies worked a little harder to own the song. They nod to the slow, dreamy original in the intro, but that only sets off the (short) fuse before everything explodes and Francis starts to scream his head off.
“In heaven/ Everything is fine”.
That’s a simple sentiment that the movie and the Pixies turn into something strange. For David Lynch, who co-wrote the song and is a longtime booster of transcendental meditation, the repetition may be intended to have a mantra-like effect. For the Pixies, it was a call to rock out because rock ‘n’ roll is often also about repetition. Rock ‘n’ roll can make you dance or it can put you in a trance. Noise is versatile.
“In heaven/ Everything is fine”.
In an idealized past, everything is fine, too. In the past, bands who later lost their way are still great. In the past, bands who later fell out with each other still get along. The past can be paradise depending on how you look at it. If you polled a bunch of indie-rock fans back in 2002 about what band they most wanted to see reunite, the Pixies would’ve been way up on the list. People wanted to see the original band. People wanted them to make up. There was no indication yet that this would ever happen, but that only made it more of a Holy Grail. People wanted heaven and they wanted everything there to be fine.
“In heaven/ Everything is fine”.
The Pixies eventually did get back together and everything was fine while the original lineup cashed in playing old songs over and over again all around the world. Repetition makes things weird though and the reunion, in time, took a twist. It took awhile, but they eventually made new music. Not everyone liked it. We’ll get into all of that later.
“In heaven/ Everything is fine”.
No matter what happens later, we still have the past. We had several Pixies throwbacks by this point, but now here’s a little more. Enjoy.
Or not.
You’ve got your good thing and I’ve got mine.