Released in the spring of 1988, Surfer Rosa earned enthusiastic reviews from the British weekly music press and became a college radio hit in America in the U.K., the album made inroads on the pop charts. Albini gave the band a harder-edged, abrasive guitar sound, yet the group retained its melodic hooks. The Pixies convened to record their first full-length album, Surfer Rosa, with producer Steve Albini, who had pioneered the thin, abrasive indie guitar grind with Big Black. Impressed with the cassette, Watts signed the band and released eight of the demo's songs as the EP Come On Pilgrim in 1987. The demo, dubbed The Purple Tape, was given to key players within the Boston musical community and the international alternative scene, including Ivo Watts, the head of England's 4AD Records. In March 1987, the Pixies recorded 18 songs over the course of three days. At the Muses concert, Gary Smith, an artist manager and producer at Boston's Fort Apache studios, heard the group and offered to record them. Inspired by Iggy Pop, Thompson picked the stage name Black Francis and the group named itself the Pixies after Santiago randomly flipped through the dictionary.īy the fall, the Pixies had played enough gigs to land a supporting slot for fellow Boston band Throwing Muses. On the advice of Deal, the group recruited drummer David Lovering. John Murphey on the group's first two records), who had previously played with her twin sister Kelly in the folk-rock garage band the Breeders in her hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Advertising in a music paper for a bassist who liked "Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul and Mary," the duo recruited Kim Deal (who was billed as Mrs. Thompson dropped out of school and moved to Boston, managing to persuade Santiago to join him. Halfway through his studies at the college, he went to Puerto Rico to study Spanish, and after six months he decided to move back to the U.S. Following graduation, he became an anthropology major at the University of Massachusetts. Born in Massachusetts and constantly shuttling between there and California, Thompson began playing music as a teenager before he moved to the East Coast for good during high school.
The Pixies were formed in Boston, Massachusetts in 1986 by Charles Thompson and his roommate Joey Santiago. By the time Nirvana broke the doors down for alternative rock in 1992, the Pixies were effectively broken up.
Furthermore, tensions between leader Black Francis and bassist/vocalist Kim Deal, who wanted to incorporate her songs into the band's repertoire, crippled the band's progress. MTV was reluctant to play their videos, while even modern rock radio didn't put their singles into regular rotation. While the Pixies were touted as the band to bring indie rock into the mainstream, they simply laid the groundwork for the alternative explosion of the early '90s. From grunge to Brit-pop, the Pixies' shadow loomed large - it's hard to imagine Nirvana without the Pixies' signature stop-start dynamics and lurching, noisy guitar solos. The Pixies' busy, brief songs, extreme dynamics, and subversion of pop song structures proved one of the touchstones of '90s alternative rock. But the bandmembers were inventive, rabid rock fans who turned conventions inside out, melding punk and indie guitar rock, classic pop, surf rock, and stadium-sized riffs with singer/guitarist Black Francis' bizarre, fragmented lyrics about space, religion, sex, mutilation, and pop culture while the meaning of his lyrics may have been impenetrable, the music was direct and forceful. They weren't accomplished musicians - Black Francis wailed and bashed out chords while Joey Santiago's lead guitar squealed out spirals of noise.
Combining jagged, roaring guitars and stop-start dynamics with melodic pop hooks, intertwining male-female harmonies, and evocative, cryptic lyrics, the Pixies were one of the most influential American alternative rock bandsĬombining jagged, roaring guitars and stop-start dynamics with melodic pop hooks, intertwining male-female harmonies, and evocative, cryptic lyrics, the Pixies were one of the most influential American alternative rock bands of the late '80s.
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