FEATURE:
I’m Amazed
Pixies’ Timeless Debut Album, Surfer Rosa, at Thirty-Five
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LOOKING ahead to…
PHOTO CREDIT: Rob Verhorst/Redferns
21st March, and that is the thirty-fifth anniversary of one of the greatest and most influential debut albums ever. Pixies’ Surfer Rosa was released on the British label, 4AD. Produced by Steve Albini. Even though Surfer Rosa is now regarded as a classic, it failed to chart in the U.S. or U.K. Surfer Rosa was rereleased in the U.S. by Elektra Records in 1992, and in 2005 was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America. The Boston band released something truly distinct in 1988. Prior to the release of Pixies' debut mini-album, Come on Pilgrim, in October 1987, 4AD’s head, Ivo Watts-Russell, suggested they return to the studio to record a full-length album. The plan was to use producer Gary Smith (who produced Come on Pilgrim), but due to a disagreement between him and the Pixies’ manager, Steve Albini was hired. The legendary producer (who went on to record Nirvana’s In Utero in 1993) was a superb choice – a name suggested by 4AD. To mark the approaching thirty-fifth anniversary, I will come to some reviews of the album. Prior to that, there are some features to bring in. Guitar highlighted and saluted the genius of Surfer Rosa for a feature in 2020:
“David Bowie called the album, which went Gold on both sides of the Atlantic, “the most compelling music outside of Sonic Youth made in the entire 80s”; it blew PJ Harvey‘s mind; Kurt Cobain admitted to ripping off Surfer Rosa; the artists not yet known as Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead were listening closely, too.
Surfer Rosa‘s origins lie in the Purple Tape, a demo recorded over six days in March 1987 using $1,000 borrowed from singer and guitarist Black Francis’ father. 4AD boss Ivo Watts-Russell was impressed enough to sign the band and put out eight songs from the demo as the EP Come On Pilgrim. By the time Pixies went into Boston’s Q Division Studios to record Surfer Rosa with producer Steve Albini in December 1987, they were a tightly wound unit. Countless hours of rehearsals in a sewage-soaked basement rehearsal room enabled the whole thing to be wrapped up in just 10 days, costing $10,000 – with 4AD paying Albini a flat fee of $1,500.
Wantonly unorthodox
Central to the chilling brilliance of this strange, unsettling album is the balance and contrast between the three main players – Francis (real name Charles Thompson), Philippines-born lead guitarist Joey Santiago and bassist Kim Deal. Francis’ more controlled rhythm playing is a steadying counterpoint to Santiago’s wantonly unorthodox approach, while Deal’s chugging basslines bring a melodic levity to the seething brew. Try to imagine Gigantic without her simple yet immediately evocative contribution, for example.
Both guitarists, who met at the University Of Massachusetts, wanted to use Telecasters on Surfer Rosa, but Francis got there first, deploying his blonde 1980s American Standard into a Vox AC30 for the sessions. Santiago settled on a Les Paul, borrowing Deal’s 1970s Goldtop and plugging in to a Peavey Special, while the bassist used an Aria Pro II Cardinal Series through a Peavey Combo 300.
“A Les Paul is a really good complement to a Tele,” Santiago told Guitar.com in 2018. “If you’ve got the Fender, you’re gonna have to have the Gibson to counteract it, unless you want to be a country act, and then you’re all Tele’d out. It’s Mick Jones and Strummer and all that good stuff…”
Both players were determined to carve their own niche, too, rejecting the histrionic hair metal tropes that dominated rock music in 1987. “Mainstream guitar had a lot of typewriting skills,” said Santiago. “The only thing that was impressive about it for me was the speed. But in the back of my mind I was like, ‘I don’t care’. It just wasn’t my thing.”
Francis and Santiago were ripping up the rule book, messing with song structures and pairing chords and riffs that sat uneasily, Santiago’s anti-solo stance at the heart of many of the album’s most memorable moments. Witness the thrilling sense of discord in the riff and churning unison bends on Where Is My Mind? That song’s solo, too, is unusual, Santiago playing notes from the B minor pentatonic scale over major chords.
“The music is unconventional,” Francis told Guitar.com. “There’s a lot of half-steps, a lot of chords that don’t theoretically go with the key, but it seems to work”.
Before getting to a review, there is another great feature that is worth sourcing. The Quietus marked the thirtieth anniversary of Surfer Rosa in March 2018. Aside from the wonderful production and compositional brilliance, The Quietus argue that it is Pixies’ strange and often disturbing lyrics that helps give their debut album (and subsequent Pixies albums) its unique and urgent edge:
“Surfer Rosa was, and still is an amazing record. It’s Pixies’ best, something that becomes ever more apparent with the passage of time (reviewing Bossanova for Melody Maker in 1990, Bob Stanley remarked that he didn’t really get the genuflection before Pixies albums, since they had so much filler; he’s largely right, but Surfer Rosa is by a distance the one with the least filler). It’s a landmark record because it doesn’t sound of its time, whereas so many of 1988’s other critical favourites do sound of their time, for reasons of technology or fashion or context: NME made Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back it’s album of the year, with Surfer Rosa at No 10, which was a perfectly reasonable position to take - Millions is a great, groundbreaking album - but 30 years on, Surfer Rosa is the one that has aged into timelessness rather than becoming a period piece.
I think the reason Surfer Rosa sounds timeless, sounds classic, is that, at heart, it is a very traditional album. Listen to it closely (even better, don’t listen closely; just have it on in the background). It’s not a revolutionary statement of musical intent. It’s a Classic Rock album. No, it doesn’t sound like Boston or the Stones or ZZ Top or any of the behemoths of American radio formats; it’s a bluesless album, a product of the great schisms of the late 70s in which not just punk but hard rock, too, expunged the shuffle from guitar music that wasn’t specifically celebrating the blues. But so much of its DNA is in Classic Rock that it’s easy to see why British audiences seized on it: while satisfying fetish for newness that British music fans like to identify in themselves, because of its dervish noise and lyrical perversity, it offered so many familiar comforts that you didn’t need to be a maven of the underground to love it. Conversely, maybe it was neglected in America because the underground tastemakers noted Pixies’ conservatism, while it remained too leftfield for the actual Boston and ZZ Top fans.
The clarity of that spacious sound – unusual in the mid-to-late 80s, when engineers and producers were taking advantage of new technology to make records as full and overwhelming as possible – made Surfer Rosa very easy to listen to. It might not be lush, but because it eschews maximalism it means the melodies – the vocal melodies, the guitar lines, the countermelodies of the bass – are always foregrounded. All its hooks are evident, and for all the ferocity of the guitars, the instrumental set-up never conceals them.
Now, one might plausibly argue that had Pixies made the exact same album musically but paired them with the lyrics of, say, The Wonder Stuff, then history might have been different: would critics have frothed over the Surfer Rosa with quite the same urgency had they not been singing about incest, violence, more incest, more violence, and sundry other unsettling kinkiness? Had the critics not frothed – this being an age when the weekly music press still wielded influence – would the indie public have embraced them so wholeheartedly? Had the indie public not embraced them so wholeheartedly, would they have passed into pantheon of great bands, or would they be another of those groups who get occasionally reissued, gushed over in the specialist press a bit, then forgotten again, like The Feelies, a pioneering American indie band who remain consigned to the margins?
Surfer Rosa endures. It will continue to endure. Teenagers will continue to discover Pixies – you see them at the shows – thrilling to the lyrical transgression; adults will continue to listen to them, reliving a past. Younger bands will continue to acknowledge them – Kings of Leon, of all people, cited them as an inspiration when the two groups shared a bill in Hyde Park last summer. Nowadays, the notion that Pixies are a classic band isn’t something to dispute. It’s only a hop from there to accepting them as Classic Rock”.
Unsurprisingly, the reviews for Surfer Rosa in 1988 were phenomenal. Retrospective ones have perhaps been even more constructively positive and amazed. This is what AllMusic observed in their review of one of the finest and most enduring debut albums that has ever been released. It is clear that Surfer Rosa is this majestic and astonishingly consistent and faultless work from the sublime Pixies:
“One of the most compulsively listenable college rock albums of the '80s, the Pixies' 1988 full-length debut Surfer Rosa fulfilled the promise of Come on Pilgrim and, thanks to Steve Albini's production, added a muscular edge that made their harshest moments seem even more menacing and perverse. On songs like "Something Against You," Black Francis' cryptic shrieks and non sequiturs are backed by David Lovering and Kim Deal's punchy rhythms, which are so visceral that they'd overwhelm any guitarist except Joey Santiago, who takes the spotlight on the epic "Vamos." Albini's high-contrast dynamics suit Surfer Rosa well, especially on the explosive opener "Bone Machine" and the kinky, T. Rex-inspired "Cactus." But, like the black-and-white photo of a flamenco dancer on its cover, Surfer Rosa is the Pixies' most polarized work. For each blazing piece of punk, there are softer, poppier moments such as "Where Is My Mind?," Francis' strangely poignant song inspired by scuba diving in the Caribbean, and the Kim Deal-penned "Gigantic," which almost outshines the rest of the album. But even Surfer Rosa's less iconic songs reflect how important the album was in the group's development. The "song about a superhero named Tony" ("Tony's Theme") was the most lighthearted song the Pixies had recorded, pointing the way to their more overtly playful, whimsical work on Doolittle. Francis' warped sense of humor is evident in lyrics like "Bone Machine"'s "He bought me a soda and tried to molest me in the parking lot/Yep yep yep!" In a year that included landmark albums from contemporaries like Throwing Muses, Sonic Youth, and My Bloody Valentine, the Pixies managed to turn in one of 1988's most striking, distinctive records. Surfer Rosa may not be the group's most accessible work, but it is one of their most compelling”.
I am going to end this feature with a review from the BBC. They note how the lyrical mood and themes had shifted quite a bit from Come on Pilgrim. There is something altogether more serious and darker on Surfer Rosa. Even though the lyrics are a bit different, Pixies ensure their debut album is eclectic, elastic and has plenty of light and layers. It still stands up and sounds fresh thirty-five years later:
“Though the specialist subjects of sun, surf and dubious sexual encounters of their debut ep (1987’s Come On Pilgrim) had been retained, the overall mood masterminded a year later on their first full length record was altogether more unruly.
The Bostonian quartet, formed by guitarist and singer, Charles Michael Kitteridge Thompson IV - who for understandable reasons of alt rock credibility rechristened himself Black Francis – fell in with producer Steve Albini to create an album which though failing to chart at the time, had a telling influence on those picking up on the harsh, surly undertow of its (at times) frat-house humours.
Albini’s production simultaneously amplifies The Pixies’ endearing naiveté and hectic energies, contrasting the polarities of throwaway trash (the tongue-in-cheek nerdy B-52s-type hero worship of “Tony’s Theme”) versus the snarling thrash of “Vamos” (a remade carry-over from Come On Pilgrim) which does much to lend the album its unsettling volatility.
Although “Gigantic” co-written and sung by bassist Kim Deal, shows they were more than capable of delivering hook-laden pop, it credibly opened up the kind of territory which Kurt Cobain and pals would later claim as their own.
Indeed such was its legacy, David Bowie covered “Cactus” on 2002’s Heathen. Somewhat sanitised on that occasion, the original version here has a don’t-go-there edge to it, and is one of the best songs ever to burst in and shine an FBI-style flashlight onto the darker, closeted recesses of obsessive love; ‘Bloody your hands on a cactus tree/ Wipe it on your dress and send it to me.’
The left-field locations continue with “Bone Machine,” the limelight veering between Francis’ tale of parking lot molestation and a wonderful solo by their ingenious lead guitarist, Joey Santiago. Beginning like James Brown’s “Sex Machine” being not so much taken as frog-marched to the bridge, it rapidly leaps into a revved-up blast recalling one of King Crimson’s Robert Fripp’s patented chordal solos; a genuinely thrilling 18 seconds that you never want to end. Though the follow-up, Doolittle (1989), ultimately widened their appeal, this is indispensable warts-and-all stuff that set the benchmark”.
On 21st March, one of the all-time great albums turns thirty-five. The all-conquering Surfer Rosa is a debut masterpiece from Pixies. The album had a profound effect when it came to shaping the sound of Grunge and Alternative Rock. Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain explained how the album formed the basis and inspiration for their Nevermind. You can hear a lot of Surfer Rosa’s dynamics and themes in 1991’s Nevermind. That connection alone shows how phenomenal and important Pixies’ debut album is. In reality, the album has had a gigantic impact on the music world. Ahead of its thirty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to highlight the brilliance of…
THE amazing Surfer Rosa.