13 Baby,” which moves to 2/4 every fourth bar (same as in the verse of “River Euphrates”) the shift to 6/4 in the first three bars of the refrains of “Wave of Mutilation” the 6/8 “CB break” in “ Trompe le Monde.” Shifting time signatures, for instance: see the long outro of “No. More often, it meant monkeying with structure. “There’s a lot of half-steps, a lot of chords that don’t theoretically go with the key, but it seems to work,” Santiago said in 2008. But only to break them, such as by throwing “wrong” chords into a sequence. “I want rules, I want standards,” he said in 1990. The Pixies were askew formalists, with Thompson comparing his songwriting to doing crossword puzzles or math equations. “If you can keep stripping stuff away and still have it be fascinating…like rock music that anyone can play. “If you can get it down to one chord, a beat and no melody…that’s the best song,” Thompson told Sounds in 1989. Santiago and Thompson grew up listening to Sixties pop (Deal was more of a Seventies rocker Lovering mostly liked Rush) and shared a taste for surf music, first heard in Santiago’s lead lines, later becoming a strong color in the band’s sound in Bossanova. the end of “Funtime” with “Tame”) the Cars’ “muted and clicky” rhythm guitar lines and, especially on early tracks like “ The Holiday Song,” Gordon Gano’s phrasings in the Violent Femmes. Some of their influences were open-the “1-2-3-4! here’s a chorus, and another, and another” pace of the Ramones Iggy Pop’s Tarzan yells (cf. Deal was their charismatic because she talked between songs. They’d do setlists in alphabetical order, slot them by length or tempo. Live performances differed little from recordings, apart from songs sometimes going louder or faster. They’d hone a piece until it was sharp, and that was it. It was as if they’d crystallized upon forming. the Bear’s performance from October 1986, about a month after their first gig, & a January 1987 WERS broadcast). Rehearsing in Lovering’s parents’ garage in Burlington and in a grotty room near Fenway, the band became, in under a year, the Pixies as we know them (see this T.T.
Deal, a guitarist, was the bassist by default while Lovering “was always a drummer,” Murphy later said. They found Kim Deal, an Ohio transplant working in a Brookline doctor’s office, via an ad in the Boston Phoenix (“no chops”) and David Lovering via Deal’s then-husband, John Murphy, who’d worked with him at a Radio Shack in Burlington. They dropped out, moved to Boston, worked in warehouses, formed a band. Thompson was an anthropology major Santiago studied economics. They appeared to have nothing in common at all offstage.” In 1983, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Charles Thompson, a South California ex-Pentecostal and UFO believer, met Joey Santiago, whose family had fled the Philippines after Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972.
Their booking agent Jeff Craft described them in the Fool the World Pixies oral history as “four completely and totally different people. They may well be heard more today, if you compare their streams to ca. Their appeal to kids isn’t a mystery: their songs are (seemingly) easy to play, fun to sing, geeky, filthy. Of the late Eighties/early Nineties US “alternative” bands, barring Nirvana, the Pixies could go the furthest distance. Idling through YouTube, I was struck by how many videos there are of teenagers doing Pixies covers.
But where the world needs reminding of the Muses, the Pixies are fixed in the firmament. They shared a manager, opened for each other. Throwing Muses and the Pixies: both New England quartets, both American 4AD acts. Four Muses + four Pixies take Europe, Melody Maker,
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