Smith’s previous work with Throwing Muses had led the Rhode Island act to a record deal with the U.K. label 4AD, known for its dreamy synth pop. Now Smith was approaching Muses manager, Ken Goes, to see if they could convince 4AD to release Pixies music as well.
Ultimately, the English were the first to hear the perverted Spanish and siren-call guitars of “Vamos” and the manic acoustic strums of “The Holiday Song.” The reaction was swift and overwhelmingly positive. While Pixies took a low-budget tour of the U.S. in a cramped van, excitement was brewing overseas.
MURPHY: It wasn’t until they recorded The Purple Tape that Ann Holbrook sort of was dusted off for Ken Goes. They recorded that in March of ‘87, so Ken probably took over in summer of ‘87 when they were trying to get Ivo, 4AD to sign them.
HARVARD: Ann Holbrook was a very, very sweet girl who worked as a DJ, I’m pretty sure, at ERS, the Emerson radio station. She was tremendously well endowed physically and that drew a certain amount of attention from pigs like me. My read on the situation was, she just stepped aside because bigger and better things were happening for them. When they booked time, she was the interface that we had when I was talking to people about the session, and it was Ann who was popping in. I know she was hustling to get them gigs and shows.
SMITH: I was trying to get Ken to pay attention because I wasn’t a manager. Ken was managing Throwing Muses. Somehow he had taken the tapes that I had made in ‘85 and gotten them the deal with 4AD, so I figured, well, there’s a connection here. I don’t know whether 4AD wants a band like the Pixies, they like stuff that wasn’t loud rock, they liked the Cocteau Twins. But I thought Ken actually is a manager, maybe he can make this happen. And he sent it to some people and they all said no. At first he didn’t want to do it because he just didn’t get it. He admits to it now. He didn’t really hear it until other people started hearing it.
HERSH: I sat Ken down and made him listen to a Gary tape. I said, “You have to listen to this. They sound a little bit like the Violent Femmes, but they’re not derivative,”—and I know he didn’t know what the Violent Femmes sounded like anyway. So he just listened to thirty seconds and said, “Eh, this is a Violent Femmes rip-off.”
WATTS-RUSSELL: The Pixies were so lucky that Throwing Muses were in the same town, for a number of reasons.
DONELLY: Our manager became their manager; our producer, Gary, became their producer; our label became their label.
DENNISON: Hooking up with Ken Goes was a great move on their part because he already had his connections with 4AD and that is what totally worked out for them. My handful of regrets in life is that I didn’t end up managing the Pixies when I had my chance.
SMITH: And so then I started giving tapes to people. Ken was one of them. We made, I think, five hundred copies, I probably have an invoice somewhere because I file everything. I started sending the tapes around, and the band that I had been in had toured extensively and I had met tons of cool people. Then I sent what they called the G-card, which was the insert of the cassette. They had extra of those printed and used them as postcards, and I just wrote, “This is the next big thing,” and I sent it to all the people I had met on the road because I kept a very elaborate address book of all the people who let us sleep on their floor, or who we had opened for, or who opened for us.
WATTS-RUSSELL: I think I only knew recently that the Pixies actually sent demo tapes out to everyone before I got one.
DEAL: I kept my rejection letters. They were from SST, Elektra, everywhere. I was working in an office so I was able to use the mailing system.
MURPHY: Yeah, they’re like, “No, thank you, we listened, we don’t like it.” Luckily, Gary really, really loved them, because he kept pressuring Ken to give the tape to Ivo, and Ivo really liked it, which was cool.
HERSH: We had signed to 4AD long before we even played with the Pixies. We had been making demos since we were about 15 years old and we had quite the press kit by the time we were 17. I was living in an apartment called the Doghouse in Rhode Island and sending out press kits and demos all day long. But it probably wasn’t me that sent stuff to 4AD because I’d never heard of them when Ivo started calling our apartment. Normally, that’s not what a label guy would do. I didn’t know who he was, Ivo was a weird name, and I assumed he was just some local guy putting on an English accent and pretending to have a record label. Because the girls in my band were really hot, Tanya and Leslie [Langston] were gorgeous, so there were always men calling our apartment. I just figured he was trying to get one of them on the phone and I kept answering. So I’d politely excuse myself and get off the phone and try not to answer it the next time it rang. But he was saying, “Well, I don’t sign American bands,” so I didn’t really have any reason to stay on the phone with him anyway. And then eventually he called and said, “All right, I’ll sign you.” I was just like, fine, asshole!
WATTS-RUSSELL: The very first connection with the States was enough to put me off for a very long time. It was with Modern English, it had the single “I Melt With You” on it, we licensed that through Sire and just a dreadful experience. Until that point I had nothing to do with a major label, nothing to do with any other label, it was to do with me, to do with exploring, doing it innocently, and then suddenly I was exposed to the anonymous non-caring megacorporation, and I loathed it. I was 27, I was old enough to be wiser, but I’ve always been pretty naive. I got drawn into the business an idealist.
DONELLY: Ivo didn’t want to sign us originally because he wanted to keep the label English, but he did want to make sure that we were well placed, so he flew over here and met with labels on our behalf and tried to find somebody, and when he couldn’t find anything that he thought was appropriate he just signed us.
WATTS-RUSSELL: I heard the Muses demo in the post—99 percent of things I got involved in were from being handed a demo—sent to me from Boston, Ken Goes, I guess. It was very different for the label, an amazing energy and originality. Tanya, all of them, lovely people, they were kind of the trial run for the Pixies in a lot of ways.
This is the one that gets confused with the [first time I heard] Pixies, but I was literally stuck in traffic and I took the Muses tape with me and by the time I got back to 4AD I had listened to it four or five times and I was just really excited and I called Ken right then.
DONELLY: It is true. I remember always thinking, that’s sort of a backhanded compliment. I was trapped. Trapped with you! Well, it’s like, if you’re trapped with something you’re going to like it eventually.
HERSH: We were teenagers and we had never really heard of 4AD. They just had the best offer. We were talking to independents and majors and all of the offers at the time were “a gazillion records, we can drop you whenever we want.” All I wanted was one record so that we could tour on the back of something, and that was 4AD’s deal. And it continues to be 4AD’s deal—you just sign for every record you make with them, which is unbelievable. The only problem was, we were only available on import in the States. And everyone thought we were English. And all the other bands on 4AD were extreme English. Suddenly we realized we were in the company of bands like the Cocteau Twins and Dif Juz—they’re all real gauzy and beautiful and ethereal and we just so weren’t.
DEAL: Goth rock was big back then. 4AD, a lot of it is based on the goth rock period of time, Bauhaus. There were a lot of goth rockers who loved Ivo Watts-Russell. Most of the people who went to our shows when we first got out of the state didn’t know who we were, they knew we were on 4AD. After the show people would come up and ask us, “What’s Ivo Watts-Russell really like?”
MARC GEIGER (Pixies agent; cofounder, Lollapalooza): If you knew Ivo, and you knew his taste, even though I think the label had an ethereal trademark—because the artist Vaughan Oliver was so distinct graphically that it lent itself to sort of the ethereal, beautiful sound of Love and Rockets, the Cocteau Twins—his taste was very pure, but it wasn’t genre specific. The Pixies really fit the pureness of it because he was looking for greatness.
HERSH: We were playing, like, country punk, and we were so goofy and dorky, so American, that whenever we played a show from then on we were just like, “And the Pixies also have to play.” At least put us in a better light. We were playing with bands that we didn’t really go with. It was fun to be in Boston and be playing with the Volcano Suns and Dinosaur Jr. and Uzi and the Five, that was great, you’d play with five or six bands a night and no one seems to be headlining. Then we were just buried in noise. But when we were actually headlining a show, it was just confusing if we didn’t have a band like the Pixies to play and make us look cooler.
DONELLY: The Birthday Party was the only band I’d heard of when we signed to them. And Bauhaus a little, from college radio. But I don’t think we really knew how strong their aesthetic was until we realized that we’d messed it up.
HERSH: We were very lonely over there and that’s why we were so desperate to get the Pixies to sign with Ken and record with Gary and sign with 4AD, because everybody over in England is English! We involved ourselves with the Pixies just because we were so damn lonely!
WATTS-RUSSELL: I think the reason I was in Newport when Ken gave me the Pixies tape was to try to [have a] face-to-face [conversation with Ken]. Throwing Muses’ one-off record got a lot of attention and suddenly Sire was interested in them. I felt like, well, I can’t control an American band’s career from England. If they want to sign with Sire, that’s fair enough, but for God’s sake, I knew they wouldn’t sign with them in England because we all got on, and fuck it, we were a good label! But they were going to sign to Sire in the rest of the world and I just knew it would be a mistake. Sire/Warner Bros, in Europe is like the pop label, nonsense. So that is why I was over there in America, failing in convincing Ken or the group not to sign to Sire, and out of that I got the Pixies tape.
I guess Ken had picked me up from the airport, and he handed me a tape that David Narcizo from the Muses had given him. He had told Ken that he thought he should manage them. Dave really liked it, handed it to Ken, Ken wasn’t sure and handed it to me and it all had a positive result, he ended up managing them.
I absolutely adored it from day one, because my day one was marching around New York with it in a Walkman. It was very exciting. It was the obvious things, Joey’s guitar playing, and the Spanish aspect to it. Throwing Muses were the first American band that we worked with. The most obvious thing to do next wasn’t to go and sign another American band, especially one managed by the same person. And also the “rock’n’roll” thing, I was interested in the label developing more in a less definable way. And my girlfriend at the time, Deborah Edgeley, did the press for us and I said, “You know, I really like it but I don’t know if this is what I want us to be doing,” and she said, “Don’t be so fucking stupid. This is brilliant, we have to work with them!”
KOLDERIE: Ivo jumped right on it, he had some money. That guy started a label and did as good as you can do. He put out some of the most important records of the late twentieth century. A really good instinct for not only what was commercial but also really good. He’s really mellowed a bit; he was a pretty snotty Englishman for a number of years there.
SLADE: Ivo was a real crusty English chap. I assume he’s mellowed.
GEIGER: To this day, I think Ivo is one of the most innovative A&R guys in the world and I wish he would come back to the business. He’s intense.
THOMPSON: They were in England. All I knew was that they were in London, and it sounded cool to me. It sounded exotic to me. We didn’t give a hoot. What do we do? “Hey, will you guys work with this guy, Albini? He’s really cool.” Yeah, sure! When do we begin? “Hey, we’re going to use our art guy to do the records.” Sure! Whatever! Let’s go! “Hey, can you rerecord ‘Gigantic’ and ‘River Euphrates’ as a single?” Yeah, let’s go, Where’s the studio? Sounds good! Europe! Woo-hoo! Let’s go!
HARVARD: I’m not sure to this day that the Pixies realized just how extraordinarily easy it was for them in relation to what other bands go through to get signed and get established. They came out of the box, they got Grandma Gary there, the ultimate one-man support team. He’s making calls immediately, and if you think about the road to music business success as something like Westward Ho, the Muses had cut the trail. It was like, they took that famous double play—Tinkers to Evers to Chance—it was Gary to Ken Goes’s management to Ivo at 4AD for them.
WATTS-RUSSELL: Charles, David, and Joe, I met first. I was in Boston and they were playing and Kim wasn’t there because a relative had just died, a brain aneurysm, and she had to go to a funeral somewhere. So the first time I saw the Pixies was without Kim, it was as a trio. And you know, it was good. Even then it was good. Kim is such an important part in the initial impression of the Pixies, though. In those early days, she sang backup on a lot of songs, and her big smiling face onstage is still a sight to behold.
KOLDERIE: I remember after we did the Pixies record Ivo came to town and wanted to see where we did the recording. He showed up and he was appalled, like, “No, this can’t be it.” We were like, no, this is where we did it. And he said, “Okay, I’ve seen enough.”
LOVERING: Oh, it was unbelievable. But the most amazing part of it was it was so exotic that we’re on 4AD. And I didn’t know much about 4AD, and I heard about how much of a cult label it was. “Ooh, we’re not just on an independent label, we’re on a British cool label!”
WATTS-RUSSELL: They were friendly, enthusiastic, polite people who were just genuinely [thrilled] that somebody was going to put their record out. I don’t think they knew much about 4AD at all. The only thing I truly remember from my first meeting with three of them was Joey saying—I was flattered to think that he thought I had the power or ability—”All I care about is that you make me famous in the Philippines because the chicks are really pretty.” That’s probably the most I ever heard Joey really say.
DEAL: No, never heard of ‘em. Well, it wasn’t really a deal. It was a one-off. And it was import. It’s not like it was actually sold in America. But they did put it out. In vinyl form.
THOMPSON: Back then they used to call it a “p and d” deal. It’s a pressing and distribution deal. You used to record your own record using your own money, and you’d find a little indie rock label somewhere, and you’d get the label to press it up and distribute it, so that’s what we did. We recorded a demo with the intention of releasing it as a record. We recorded the demo, they took about half of the material and put it out as a sort of mini-LP.
WATTS-RUSSELL: My opinion of the tracks on the original tape was that there was too much that was just not that good, there was a certain smoothness to that recording. I just picked eight songs minus “Here Comes Your Man” because I really liked “Here Comes Your Man” but it felt just too obviously commercial and I didn’t know what we were doing with them. It’s not like I was rushing over to America all the time to go, “And here’s the Pixies, I think this is quite good, I’ll go back to see them play.” We didn’t have that sort of money, so it was just sort of a question of, well, look, I’d like to put these eight songs out. I felt that those eight songs were a bang in your face, left you wanting more, and I thought that the recorded versions of the other songs that were on The Purple Tape were not that great. And I think it’s lucky because the next recording they did was Surfer Rosa with Steve Albini, and he kind of raised the benchmark in terms of the power and rawness that the Pixies could have.
SMITH: I was pissed. I thought this collection of seventeen songs was special. And that they should all be served up at once because that’s how you would get a sense of how colossally important this band was. And then they cut it to bits! They went on to put out the songs on different records, different types of production. That was a lot of their work as it turned out, they mined that material for years. And Ivo, he thought he did the right thing, he wanted it as a teaser, he thought they would do greater things and they did, I suppose. But to my mind, hearing that unadulterated body of work, as pure as it was, as rapid fire as it was, was the most important thing about it. I didn’t care what else they did, why didn’t they write new songs, do something else—that was the recording that we had made! But they didn’t really see it that way, they were just like, “A record deal! Yippee!”
WATTS-RUSSELL: As it turns out, it was lucky that I did do that. Imagine if I had not, and we had released The Purple Tape—every record thereafter would have been different. It did not take the world long to realize that Charles, once he kind of got through a batch of material, didn’t really have any, so he ended up sort of writing it in the studio.
SMITH: [During preproduction] I think there were some other songs that we mixed. One is a song called “Watch What You’re Doing,” which never came out, which I just recently discovered sitting on a shelf in my house. It was composed not by them, but by the fellow from whom Charles had swiped the lyric “Come on, pilgrim, you know He loves you!”—Larry Norman.
THOMPSON: I discovered Larry Norman’s records probably because either I went to a concert and I saw him or there used to be a music store that I would go to when I was 13 or 14, it was a Christian bookstore, the Carpenter Bookstore in La Meda, California. In one room they had the books and in another room they had the music store, and they just had records and guitars. I had a job at a pharmacy next door, so I would go and hang out there, I bought one of my first guitars there at the religious bookstore. I don’t think Larry Norman was necessarily respected by religious people. He’s too weird. He had more of a rebellious rock’n’roll kind of an image. He was like Willie Nelson, he’d come out with this beat-up classical guitar, leather jacket, long hair down to his ass, he was really dry and a little bit sarcastic, and he had a lot of humor in his performances. He used to be in a secular band called People, they had a minor hit called “I Love You” in, like, ‘68. He was a little bit goofy and taking the piss out of convention, and when I was 14 I really dug him. I dressed like him, I looked like him, he was my total idol.
DEAL: Larry Norman, Why does that sound familiar? Sounds like a guy who’s on a TV show. A Christian rocker? Is he the guy who did the Come on Pilgrim thing? You know, I might have heard a tape of him once, saw it on TV or something.
WATTS-RUSSELL: The title was a sort of perverse, oh, I must have just been being cocky, Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut book and film. Whatever. It was just a suggestion. I would have not been surprised if Charles had said fuck off.
DEAL: I didn’t sequence it. And Vaughan Oliver did the artwork. That hairy man [in the cover photograph]. I thought that was Vaughan Oliver. And I don’t know if it is or not. I mean, I don’t think it is actually, but he might have been wearing that hair shirt.
SIMON LARBALESTIER (photographer, contributed pictures to all Pixies albums): He was a friend of mine. It had nothing to do with the Pixies. It was a series of work that I was making based on reading the book The Temptation of St. Anthony by Gustave Flaubert. There were all sorts of weird imagery within that. And I produced a lot of work which was inspired by that work, of which those two were particular images. Not the fact that there was a hairy man in the book, but there were references like the fish and things like that. It was very much a part of an experimental period for me, created sets, using friends; it was all very slow and controlled. It was probably very hard for that guy to sit under that hot light because I was very slow to do it. So he was very patient. I didn’t work a lot with people, I was much more happy with still lifes and landscapes. He is still around, I haven’t seen him for a number of years.
KOLDERIE: For us it was a real key, it unlocked a whole career. I was engineering for Gary a lot then and we were trying to land the gig doing the Throwing Muses’ first real album for Sire, it was called House Tornado. It was going to be their next major label album and it was a big budget, and the label was kind of like, “Well, who are these guys in the commercial laundry warehouse?” and then all of a sudden Ivo put out the Pixies and it was instantly a real big hip record. And it came out just at the right time where we could point to this and be like, “Well, look, we did this!” And they said, “Oh, well, that’s great, sure you can do the Throwing Muses.”
WATTS-RUSSELL: It was an interesting time for 4AD. It was kind of the end of the best period, the purest period, and right before I said let’s put this record out we were experiencing this absurd rocket success of this single by M/A/R/R/S, the “Pump Up the Volume” thing.
GEIGER: The Pixies were a baby band out of Boston, they had a really nice guy agent named Bob Lawton for a minute, and as things started to heat up I got a call one day from their manager, Ken Goes, saying we need a more powerful [representative]. “This band’s happening, will you get into it?” I was already a huge fan, this is just after Come on Pilgrim was released. And I said absolutely. He got recommended to me because I did every single band on 4AD. I was a fan and I went over when I was a young agent and spent a lot of time with Ivo. Everybody from The The and Burning Blue Soul to Love and Rockets, I did a lot of Beggars stuff, too, Dead Can Dance, Cocteaus—I was doing them all anyway.
WATTS-RUSSELL: Within a matter of six months they got to make another record. If people hadn’t responded to the record, I suppose relationships could have soured fast. They were touring their asses off in front of ecstatic crowds after the first record.
NME REVIEW BY JACK BARRON, OCTOBER 1987: These tales of dark-lands and deeds are illuminated by smiling tunes veined with quick-silver flashes of guitar. It’s this sleight-of-hand, together with a morbid humour which surfaces slowly upon repeated plays, that makes Pixies so addictive.
Black Francis is currently without shelter. His biggest fear, as he tells an ardent liberal intent on seducing him, is losing his penis to a horrible disease. Feel free to give him room on your record player, but keep your toilet locked, and whatever you do don’t throw water over him. You won’t live to regret it.*
REFLEX MAGAZINE ARTICLE BY JAY BLOTCHER, MAY 1988: Come on Pilgrim offered twisted rockers and ballads, guitar-scarred and coddled, celebrating incest and animals and sex so fine (with an elevator operator). They’re charged with a sound as rewarding as scab-picking was when you were a kid.†
JON DOLAN (senior associate editor, Spin magazine): Come on Pilgrim has this sense of playful ruined teen dementia. Francis’s vocal on “Caribou” is the best punk rock physical comedy since Johnny Rotten. On “The Holiday Song” you get this sense of joy before the void. The big thing about that record, and Surfer Rosa, was that the Pixies were daringly fusing two diametrically opposed underground rock impulses: American indie-noise and British art-goth. In the ’80s, the whole point of American indie rock was to be funnier, punker, more irreverent, noisier, more rocking in opposition to all the fey eyeliner foppery coming out of England. There was some bitterness since American bands deemed themselves too raw to get on the radio or MTV, meanwhile goth and synth pop were more successful. But there was also a sense of being confrontationally unpretentious. Pixies had the angry mid-American noise thing, the goofy self-loathing of a Paul Westerberg, the poetic pop sense of a Husker Du, but they also dabbled in artistic impulses that were more in line with Brit art sensibilities. This really forecast a crosspollination that would become alternative.
COURTNEY LOVE (former Hole singer/guitarist; musician): Fucking are you kidding?Come on Pilgrim, I heard it and I was in Minneapolis and I was a scenester and it was all Sonic Youth, Evol, and Richard Kern pictures, Pussy Galore, and all of a sudden there’s a pop record—a pop record that is not only approved but classic. And it was a lifesaver. I can do that. Yay. Because otherwise, I was surrounded by performance art, frankly.
WATTS-RUSSELL: I never experienced anything that immediate, it went so goddamn fast, so positive. Come on Pilgrim got four-star reviews everywhere.
TED MICO (former editor, Melody Maker): I was a friend of Ivo’s and I was a huge fan of a great deal of what was on 4AD. I heard a demo and thought, oh my Lord, yes, and the demo ended up on Come on Pilgrim. So then Chris Roberts from the Melody Maker went off and did the first interview. The Pixies were fascinating people. I remember reading the interview and thinking these guys are really strange, and then we looked at their pictures. You sell music magazines to a certain extent on glamour, definitive looks, something that’s trenchant and eye-catching and pops off the stands, and when we got the pictures of the Pixies they were not exactly in that mold. In fact, they broke the mold. I remember having a massive row with the editor over it. There was a faction of the paper that thought it’d be a disaster to have people who look like plasterers on a cover, and then there were those who thought this was the thing that had to happen. And of course it happened, everybody started to get interested. One of the first things I remember reading about Kim was in the Chris Roberts interview—she gave some profound comment, and then she had to leave and Chris said, “What are you going to do now?” and she said, “First I’m going to piss like a racehorse, then I’m going to dance like a black woman.” And really, honestly, that was a quintessential Kim Deal quote.
DENNISON: When the record came out and it was so intense for everybody, and all of a sudden everyone was like, huh? They were opening up shows two months ago. They were doing something really special that only a few people were hearing at the time.
KOLDERIE: I remember that “The Holiday Song” started getting played in discos, no kidding. You could dance to it, I mean, it wouldn’t make it these days on the dance floor, but they were playing it in dance clubs. They were doing things people just had not seen—the quiet to loud cocktail, Joey would just go up there and kick the shit out of his guitar, huge reverb explosions—they just came at you. Charles was screaming at you. We went down to the Palladium after the record came out and they were blasting it out of the speakers on the dance floor. And the song “Isla de Encanta” was picked up and put into the movie Married to the Mob. Within a few weeks all this stuff was happening. It just seemed to get to the culture really fast.
JOHN FLANSBURGH. (They Might Be Giants cofounder/singer/guitarist): They opened for They Might Be Giants at the crummiest of clubs in Boston, in Jamaica Plain at Green Street, and I remember it well. They definitely blew us away, they were just absolutely transcendent. I guess they had just signed the deal with 4AD, and they were very excited about that. They vibrated at a completely different frequency than any other band, they just were at this velocity that was different than any other band that I had experienced. The quality of the songwriting and the general kind of ultravivid approach that they had was so immediate and grabby.
THOMPSON: We went on our first tour with the record not even being released in this country, in the United States. So we went to West Virginia.
DEAL: We really didn’t have a manager at that moment. But we got a tour booked. So we rented a cargo van, you know, no seats, and David ingeniously found a way where we could push all our cargo to the back. See, the problem with cargo vans is that once you put your cargo in, there’s no place to sit. So David built a plywood thing and was able to brace it in so we could actually sit, with the gear behind us, on the floor of the cargo van.
LOVERING: We rented a van, and I put a board across the back seats and put a mattress in there. Actually, the equipment went in, too. There was nowhere to sit in the back. You could have a person driving, a person sitting there, and you’d just lie on an air mattress in the back.
DEAL: We had a CD player. Charles’s wife gave it to him for a present, we brought it in the van on the first tour. I was just like, wow, I heard about these. I remember thinking, wow, it skips a lot, because it didn’t have the shock thing going on yet. I still don’t like CDs. I think they sound funny—thin and weird.
LOVERING: We would drive around, we did little tours down to, maybe North Carolina, something like that.
DEAL: Well, we had played a place in New York, the name of the place was the address of the place. New York City in ‘87: It was fucking bleak, man. It was black, none of the street lights worked, it was desolate. I would see down this dark block, and it was a line of people with their backs facing the street and their fronts facing the building, with just sparks alight, it was all the people trying to shield the wind so they could light up their pipe. I mean, lined up, like twenty people in a row. No cops around, nothin’. It was really crazy. It was wild.
LOVERING: I remember the first time we played New York. We stayed in the cheapest hotels. And we learned all the little ploys. You know, you do a gig, if it’s a long travel day you’ll leave after the show, you’ll drive, you’ll get to the next hotel early. Not early in the morning, I mean, four o’clock in the morning or something like that. You walk in, say, “I got here really early, is it possible I could check in right now?” So you still have that morning to sleep, you do your gig and you still have that one for that amount of day. And that used to work frequently. We’d also go in and just get one room, and split the bed—split it off and have the box [spring], and then the mattress.
DEAL: It was exciting going to New York. ‘Cause I remember coming over the bridge—I forgot which bridge it was, ‘cause we were coming from Boston—it was the first time we heard the stuff off Come on Pilgrim on the radio, I think it was “Isla de Encanta,” when we were on the bridge to New York City to play our show. That was exciting. On the college station. We didn’t get played on any real radio. But we didn’t all go, “Oh, cheers, everybody,” we were just like, “Wow!” [Come on Pilgrim] was import-only. And we played like North Carolina, I remember, Chapel Hill. I think we hit some place in Virginia. People used to come up, when anybody came up at all, and they’d say, “So what’s Ivo really like?” Nothing about the music or anything like that. We had 4AD fanatics at our show.
SANTIAGO: We just played the club, drank at the club, and went to the hotel. I don’t think we went to any parties at all.
DEAL: Charles didn’t really drink a lot. Joe went out a lot, but he was always girl hunting. That’s fine, ‘cause I’m there for the beer, you know. It’s cool. I think he was probably bringing me so he gets a little recognition. Just to be there if he needed it. “I’ll do my best, Joe.” Meanwhile I’d be at the bar. If it’s going well for him, I probably wouldn’t see him. If it wasn’t going well, he’d probably drink a beer with me. David didn’t socialize a lot like that, Joe went out more. And if me and Joe walked into the bar together it might look like we’re hooked up, for the people who didn’t know that we weren’t or something, so that had to be dealt with. We didn’t really walk in separately, we just didn’t walk in too close together.
*Jack Barron, “The Pixies: Come on Pilgrim review,” NME, October 1987.
†Jay Biotcher, “The Pixies: More Fun Than Picking Scabs,” Reflex Magazine, Vol. 1, Issue 4, May 1988.