The Pixies by Alan Cross

Author:Alan Cross [Cross, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781927002148
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2011-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

Fast Facts

Black Francis believed in what he called the 90-second rule: the meat of the song should be piled into the first 90 seconds. Anything beyond that is the outro of the song (e.g., a repeated chorus).

Steve Albini was an ex-music critic from Chicago who had gone into music. While he was still playing with Big Black, the Pixies’ Surfa Rosa was his first major success as a producer. Based on his work with the Pixies, Albini would later get producing gigs with the Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana and Bush.

Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly of the Throwing Muses have been friends since the days both bands were playing the Boston college circuit. They started making demos for what they jokingly called the “ultimate disco album” as far back as 1988. Donelly was the guitarist of the Breeders for their first two records.

Deal met Josephine Wiggs during the Pixies’ first UK tour, when Wiggs’s band, Perfect Disaster, supported the Pixies at the Mean Fiddler on April 8, 1988. They kept in touch and eventually joined forces in the Breeders when the Pixies went on hiatus in early 1990. Their debut album, Pod (produced by Steve Albini at a studio in Edinburgh, Scotland, over just 21 days and interrupted briefly by when the roof of the studio caved in), was issued that spring and was an immediate hit in the UK, peaking at number 22. In some parts of the world, Pod outsold Bossanova, a fact that caused Black Francis great consternation.

The name Breeders was taken from a folky duo Deal had formed with her sister, Kelley, when they were teenagers. According to the sisters, that version of the group “played a lot of truck stops” and died a natural death when Kim moved to join the Pixies in Boston.

The Gigantic EP was released on August 22, 1988 to coincide with a triumphant tour of Britain. With all four songs sung by Kim Deal, this was the Breeders’ first experience with British producer Gil Norton.

Once Elektra won the right to sign the Pixies in 1988, it issued a promo-only live album (PR8127) that remains a coveted collector’s item.

The Pixies liked to mess with their audiences a bit. Sometimes they’d perform their set in alphabetical order. On other occasions, they’d leave the stage after the first song only to return to play an encore of 15 songs.

Doolittle was finally certified gold (US sales of 500,000 copies) on November 10, 1995, six years after it was released. Most of those sales came in 1994 after Kurt Cobain was quoted in Rolling Stone that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was little more than his attempt at trying to write a Pixies song.

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