Pixies
Surfer Rosa
1988, 4AD/Elektra
Surfer Rosa is one of those great albums that a band makes once and then never makes again.
That’s not an insult to the other Pixies LPs, all of which I like. The later albums may even have better songs overall, but this one is uniquely apocalyptic. Every crazed and ridiculous (and infectious) song on it feels like one piece of an atomic bomb. Once it’s all put together–BOOM!
They can never do what they did here again. You shouldn’t expect it from them. They will never be this age again. It will never be 1988 again. Their ideas will never seem this strange again. They will never again have the energy of a band who don’t know if they have a future so they’re using up everything they’ve got right now.
At the very least, an upstart band who are capable of could-be/should-be hits such as “Gigantic” and “Where is My Mind?” will almost always try, in time, to make records that are at least a liiiittle bit more slick and shiny than their first. They’re clearly ambitious. They’re not dedicated to being noisy scum-rockers. They’re going to evolve.
Hey, it’s only a sell-out if it sucks.
In this house, the Pixies never sucked. They scored triumphs right up until they bitterly ended. They were the kind of band who show other bands how it’s done. Ask Nirvana.
Still, I can’t listen to them anymore. Oh, the duality of man!
Revisiting Surfer Rosa for the first time in fifteen or twenty years was fun, but after a few spins I felt ready to go another fifteen or twenty years until I play it again.
Part of it is because I simply over-played it eons ago. When I first heard the Pixies in 1995, I flipped my fuckin’ lid. Every Pixies album was in constant rotation for me for about four years. I held them close. As a result, I know them all backwards and forwards.
The other part of it–the larger part of it, I think–is that the old Pixies records don’t age with you as you become a crumbling old bag like me. They kicked up a great noise, but they didn’t make the kind of records that you hear new things in over time. Black Francis was 22 when Surfer Rosa was released. He was brilliant and had a unique vision for how surrealism and rock ‘n’ roll can meet, but he didn’t have much to say beyond that. He hadn’t lived enough. There is no wisdom on the old Pixies records, just aggressive (and terrific) nonsense.
They have a young hellraiser’s energy. And they did it so well that they have legions of fans who weren’t even born yet when Surfer Rosa came out.
The Pixies touched a nerve, one worth millions in reunion tour money sixteen years later. You can’t deny that.
But I don’t have a lot of deep thoughts about Surfer Rosa. I like it for the same reason why I like the girl with the peachy ass who strolled by me at Whole Foods yesterday. It’s satisfying on that level.
Surfer Rosa is not profound. What it has is a strut and a sway, as well as a curious sort of danger and sexiness. Also, it just rocks.
So, let’s talk about how much it rocks.
Each track sounds like a manic episode. It’s a train that threatens to fly off the tracks, but it never really does. The songwriting is part of what keeps things in line. Francis’s songs are these weird, reptilian things that sound tossed off with barely a thought, but they’re still great. They achieve that rock ‘n’ roll effect in which the song rules, but comes off like it was written on a napkin.
That’s a compliment, by the way.
Favorite song: “Cactus”, the sensitive story of a guy in prison who wants his girlfriend to send him one of her dresses, but only after she’s filthed it up with her own sweat and blood and food and wine, because he wants to wear it whlie he masturbates (“I put it on when I go lonely”). It’s got a bluesy edge. Longtime Pixies cheerleader David Bowie would later cover it for his album, Heathen.
Meanwhile, you can’t not mention Steve Albini’s production work. When he’s asked about this record, he puts on his frowny face and doesn’t have much nice to say. It was just a job. Just another of the hundreds of bands he’s recorded. No matter that it’s on the shortlist of albums that earned Albini his status as a budget studio wizard for bands who want to sound vivid and raw.
Albini’s an irritating grump, but you have to hand it to him: the guy knows how to mic a drum kit.
Albini treats drummer David Lovering as the star of the record. His playing is huge and brutal, right in your face, sounding live in your room. His pounding sounds like gunshots.
Bass and guitars come next in the pecking order and Albini drains them–the guitars, at least–of as much warmth as he can, but to an effect that makes them sound alien in a way that works for this band who WANT to sound far out and strange.
Last come the vocals. I’ve read that they were all recorded in a single day and I believe it. Sometimes they’re buried low in the mix, but you can still hear them (most of the time, at least) because there’s so much natural air between everything. You can tell that Albini doesn’t care much about the vocals. To him, they’re a sound no more important than anything else, if not less important.
This worked out great for the Pixies because they’re a band who don’t care about being understood. Black Francis’s fixation is surrealism in a rock ‘n’ roll context. He doesn’t need to make sense. He can sing a whole song in Spanish and it’s fine. His vocals can be so distorted that they sound more like a vacuum cleaner than a human being (“Something Against You”) and that’s fine, too. When you can hear the words, they’re usually aggressive nonsense (“Bone Machine”) or something disturbing (“Broken Face”, another incest tale delivered as breakneck, splattery punk). Or they’re asking “Where is My Mind?” and never find the answer.
That the album’s single, “Gigantic”, isn’t sung by the group’s actual lead singer (though he co-wrote it; from what I understand, Francis came up with the music while Kim Deal wrote the lyrics.) stands as just another example of them being weird.
The noise is what matters and noise would never matter more to any Pixies album than it does here.
I haven’t owned copies of the old albums in awhile, but when I decided to write about Frank Black’s body of work, I bought them all again like a good law-abiding citizen.
These days, you can buy a plain ol’ Surfer Rosa CD or you can get 4AD’s fancy deluxe edition triple-CD set, Come on Pilgrim… It’s Surfer Rosa. It’s about the same price as buying Come On Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa individually, PLUS it includes a live disc. So that’s what I snapped up and I’m glad I did because it’s great. The third disc is pure gold.
The date is December 15, 1986. The place is the radio station at the University of Massachusetts Lowell for a Monday night live set broadcast as part of a show called The Fallout Shelter. The band are young and scrappy and they don’t have any records out, but their screamy vision is already intact. They fire out these fifteen songs like bullets. The Pixies play like they know that they’re going to be a big deal soon, but they also bring a disarming sense of fun. Even the host of the show, in the closing interview, remarks that the band look like they’re having a blast when they play.
When I first heard Surfer Rosa in 1995, I, with my amazing 19-year-old powers of perception, imagined the band being these very serious, intense artist types.
Then you listen to this live disc and hear that they were just a bunch of young goofballs. They were silly. They were serious about their songs and their perfomances, no doubt. But about themselves? Not at all.
Maybe that’s how you make great rock ‘n’ roll.
Maybe the band’s ability to take a potentially pretentious idea (rock music colliding with a surrealist aesthetic) and make it sound totally unpretentious is their genius stroke in the end.
Maybe the Pixies of old are wiser than I thought.