![]() Pixies offered bite-size chunks of punk-pop bliss: anguished, but shimmering, nuggets rooted in some twisted, B-movie, bloody-minded subconscious and unblemished by commercial concerns. ![]() Theirs was the art of noise, the joy of noise, and the love of pop. Pixies were a no-image/high-intensity band. These were some of my thoughts, reviewing 30 years ago at the Paradise club in Boston: They showed no signs of being affected by early success and maintained the songwriting/arrangement quality, increasing their live intensity. We want people to be happy – even though the songs aren’t.” We never want to scare anyone or make anyone sad. It’s more like we always look for some kind of lift, not anger. It’s more like when we laugh or when we smile - that means it’s right, it’s entertaining. We just go in there and go that’s f- hilarious. “Because we don’t go into the studio and go ‘Yeah, f- you! We nailed it!’ That was never the litmus test for any song we had. “I like that word: humor,” said Santiago. ![]() There was substantial hardcore-inspired frenzy in the music, but also surf music and pure pop and skewed love songs, as well. There was a lot of violence and morbidity in Thompson's songs, but also tongue-in-cheek humor and a good deal of cryptic thought. Pixies mastered the idea of a full-thrust, drop-back, then even-more-raging climax. Sounds opined Pixies "are a rock 'n' roll band without parallel at the moment, reaching some kind of dark heart while teetering deliciously on the edge of a precarious cliff of self-deprecating comedy.” In 1988, Pixies' "Surfer Rosa" was named album of the year in two British music weeklies, Sounds and Melody Maker. We didn’t do that as much with ‘Surfer Rosa ‘and ‘Come on Pilgrim’.” With ‘Doolittle’ we refined it, polished it up a little bit with pre-production. The next record after that, that’s when I thought we’re going to be a stepping stone to other bands, that we are going to influence other bands. “We were solidifying a style and we knew we had a niche,” Santiago said of that time period. Like Ramones and punk rock before them, Pixies became an iconic, driving force of a movement or genre they didn’t intentionally create. Years later, Pixies lead singer-songwriter-guitarist Black Francis told Reuters: “I’ll admit it - if Kurt Cobain ‘fessed up to it, f- it, I’ll agree with it, you ripped us off.” Knowing Black Francis, whose real name is Charles Thompson IV, a bit, I’m guessing he said that with a smile. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.” ![]() When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily that I should have been in that band-or at least a Pixies cover band. I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. You need go no further than the famous quote from Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, talking to Rolling Stone’s David Fricke in 1994 about recording their breakthrough album “Nevermind”: "I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. Pixies - a band their future pal David Bowie once referred to as “the psychotic Beatles” - inadvertently laid some important groundwork as they carved out an improbably long-lasting career in rock. Now, for the 30th anniversary, they have been combined into several artistic and well-annotated LP/CD packages called “Come On Pilgrim … It’s Surfer Rosa.” Released Friday, the reissue also includes a previously unreleased 1986 concert broadcast on radio. (Deal left long ago she was replaced by Kim Shattuck the new bassist-singer is Paz Lenchantin.) The band released “Come on Pilgrim,” their eight-track mini-album in 1987 and “Surfer Rosa,” their first LP, the following year. Pixies were Black Francis, Santiago, drummer David Lovering and bassist Kim Deal. “We’re one of the signposts, like Sonic Youth and Husker Du, whom we were influenced by.” It was the right combination of people to make that kind of music with different influences,” Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago said in a phone interview this week, from his Los Angeles home. As the ‘80s came to a close, something raw began to snarl out in Seattle, and elsewhere.īut some mighty seeds were sown by a four-piece band out of Boston, which came to town from western Massachusetts. Grunge - or whatever you want to call the edgy, grinding, guitar-driven early ‘90s alt-rock - would have happened without the Pixies. ![]()
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