With both Come on Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa in wide circulation in the U.K. (with limited availability in the U.S.), Pixies teamed up with their friends Throwing Muses for a European tour in 1988. For the fairly in-experienced Pixies—they’d only been together for about two years—it was their first taste of life as a full-time touring band. But they weren’t without guidance: once they landed on European soil they acquired a trustworthy tour manager, Chas Banks, a quick-tongued, road-tested, consummate professional from Manchester whose past employers included Curtis Mayfield and the Who. But nothing could prepare them for the shock of being suddenly adored on a massive scale.
WATTS-RUSSELL: There’s the infamous—quite rightly so—tour that the Muses and Pixies did together in 1988 when the Muses’ second album and Pixies’ first album were coming out in England. Come on Pilgrim had come out and Surfer Rosa had just come out that week of the joint tour. Both those bands were together and the whole fucking thing just felt like a merry prankster family—just fuck the rest of the world, but nicely, you know.
DEAL: 4AD had a tour booked to open for Throwing Muses. We still didn’t have a manager. So in April of ‘88 when Surfer Rosa came out we went over to England. We had a manager then, right before we left, we signed something in the airport.
MURPHY: The Pixies and Ken had a huge fight at the airport before they were about to leave, because Ken shows up with this disclaimer or something, and says, “You guys are going to have to sign this.” They’re all like, “What are you talking about?” They’re just about to go over to England for the first time and Ken shows up with this documentation. “You’ve got to sign this or else there’s no tour.” He basically had them over a barrel—what are they going to do, get a lawyer at that time? It was a late flight on a Sunday or something. I remember that being really difficult.
HERSH: It was our second European tour. Our first tour we opened for Cocteau Twins, so we just felt like the Beverly Hillbillies. With the Pixies we were a little more in context, and we were part of this little teeny American invasion, what was called “the Boston scene” overseas. We had never heard it called that before, we just thought we lived in Boston and played. We thought it was funny.
WATTS-RUSSELL: If the Pixies were coming over to tour by themselves at that point in time, the audience would have been half the size. Throwing Muses were really loved in the U.K., they were the big export, it was totally unusual.
DONELLY: As rock as we might have all felt at the time, there was something just very sweet about it. It was a bus full of kids, basically, which is what we were, but that’s how it felt, too—like we were going on a field trip. A field trip with lots of beer.
DEAL: It was so interesting, you know. ‘Cause I wasn’t a trust fund kid, I didn’t have my year in Europe after school, so it was really neat to come from Dayton to see England. I mean, I thought Boston was really interesting.
CHAS BANKS (former Pixies European tour manager): My wife Shirley and I are a team. We had this vehicle, which was specially converted, and 4AD were looking for a way of touring these two bands together. And they were also conscious of the fact that each band had girls in it, so the fact that we were a team made it particularly attractive. You know, if you need a tampon or whatever, it’s tough to go to the tour manager, the big six-foot-three guy, and say, “Hey, listen, we need to find a chemist’s shop.” I mean, Kim would be cool about it, but it did make it easier, the fact that Shirley was there. It’s kind of like an aunt and uncle scenario, only we were professionals.
Before that, I’d worked with the Who, Teenage Fanclub, Gentle Giant, the Kinks, Curtis Mayfield, the Replacements, the db’s, the Sugarcubes and Bjork, Joe Cocker, Van Morrison. Until we went for the interview for the job, I had no idea who 4AD were, I had no idea who Throwing Muses were, and even less idea who the Pixies were. The first time I heard them was three or four shows into the tour when someone said to me, “You know the support band are really good.” So I went and checked them out and it was like, wow, they were really good. They were fucking brilliant. The energy level, the commitment, Charles’s performance, his persona onstage, the balance, how can you put a finger on it? They were very, very, very exciting. It was a great interaction with the audience and the audience were obviously getting into it. They were really nice kids and they really tried hard. They were so polite, and easy to tour manage, easy to be with. They knew their place, they knew their position. There we were, all crammed into this bus, with the equipment in the back, they knew they were the opening act, they knew what they were there to do. No responsibility, no pressure, just enjoying themselves. They were happy. Very happy.
SANTIAGO: Chas Banks is a gentle giant. He just took us under his wing.
WATTS-RUSSELL: He was fantastic, and I don’t think that Ken has any idea how much Chas and Shiriey took on that really effectively was Ken’s responsibility, but Ken Goes doesn’t fly.
HERSH: Chas and Shirley! They were Mum and Dad. Chas is this big, red-headed Viking. He had a big beard, and when we’d come off-stage feeling all rockin’ and sweaty he’d pick us up and give us a hug. They were sweet as pie.
LOVERING: The first gig was at the Mean Fiddler. And that was shocking. That was the first time that I was just blown away. We had heard that it was doing well in England, people like the Pixies, but it was the first time I’d seen a crowd that was just flipping out. It was the coolest.
MICO: I remember going to the Mean Fiddler to see Throwing Muses, and the Pixies supported Throwing Muses. It was their first-ever show [in England], and I remember reviewing that. I have no idea what I wrote. They were astonishing. From the very start it felt like a Mack truck had driven through and taken no prisoners, it was unbelievable. It was one of the greatest shows on earth. We were all expecting wonderful things from Throwing Muses, and nobody really knew what to expect from the Pixies. Certainly they were a tough, almost impossible act to follow.
DEAL: I was a gymnast. At the first show, the Mean Fiddler, we did cartwheels on stage, just to piss people off, it’s so not punk. People actually went there to see you. On purpose. It was strange to start coming out onstage and people were applauding. Fucking pissed me off. Why are they applauding, we haven’t even played yet? Remember, we were doing the bar thing in Boston so much, and so used to nobody ever knowing us. The way I was used to, it was you get up and you play, then eventually, not a lot of applause, okay? If they’re not booing you and talking during your songs and saying “you suck” between the songs, that was good in Boston. You would hate to walk out to applause.
MURPHY: That was wild. They’d been playing in the U.S. to a couple hundred people at the most. And when I went to Europe for the first time there were at least a thousand, maybe eight hundred people—it was way more than what I was used to. It was all because of that first record. Everybody loved it and thought it was genius. Whenever they played the Town and Country there were thousands of people there, all in unison, body surfing, and pogoing and whatever they used to call it back then, slam dancing (that was premoshing). It was unreal. I was soaking wet with sweat in the middle of the crowd because I enjoyed it, I really did. It wasn’t just my relationship with Kim, I still think to this day they’ve gotta be one of my top ten bands of all time.
SLADE: They graduated quickly from being no ones on the local scene to being big stars in England.
DONELLY: I definitely feel like we started playing kind of harder and there was some influence from them. We had people just going crazy, knocking speakers over. The whole tour, people were just so excited about the Boston scene. It seemed cohesive to them, so it seemed like we were sort of representing our people. We would say, “There isn’t really a scene,” but they refused to listen. They didn’t believe us. But it felt like one, that’s the important thing.
HERSH: From the first time we played with Pixies we requested them at every show. It was purely for selfish reasons. It’s hard to watch a band that sucks and then play. You start to wonder why you do what you do, or what music is, or why you’re there. But with the Pixies we’d be thoroughly energized by watching their set. We’d play much better when we played with the Pixies.
JEFF CRAFT (Pixies international booking agent): The Pixies were basically getting better audience reactions than Throwing Muses because they’re more dynamic and in-your-face than the Muses were. And by the end of the tour we had to put Pixies on last because they were impossible to follow. Initially, when the tour was first booked, it was a Throwing Muses tour with Pixies as the support. But between the time it was booked and the time that the tour actually happened Come on Pilgrim had been released and there was a lot of media interest in the record. And of course, once the shows started the reviews were just phenomenal for Pixies. So by the end of the tour it made sense to change the whole thing to a co-billing.
DONELLY: We switched billing in Holland. I was relieved because who wants to play after the Pixies? When it was first presented to us by Chas, who was tour managing, we kind of saw it coming, but we had about an hour of feeling sorry for ourselves. Ultimately, I think it ended up being a good thing, and crowds were psyched to see us, too. It wasn’t like people were leaving after the Pixies. That’s a cathartic set, and once you’ve done that, we had a lot more subtleties and moments of fragility—it was very different, it’s a completely different emotion. And also, all of that anxiety of, like, “Oh my God! Now we have to play,” was lifted.
WATTS-RUSSELL: They got flipped when they went from England to Europe because our licensees for the Pixies were promoting the fuck out of it, while Sire for the Muses didn’t even know that the Muses didn’t have a male singer in the band. It was absurd, so that is why it got flipped, because Warner Bros, were doing their typically disastrous job. Every night Throwing Muses would come onstage and blow the Pixies away in England—that seems to be forgotten by history.
HERSH: The crowds were incredible. That’s what happens when you leave your planet and you realize someone else was paying attention. That’s what the Boston scene was, at least in England. It was huge. We just kept our mouths shut about not being famous back home. They knew all the words to all the songs. It was just an ocean of sweaty boys, all singing along. We were confused.
CRAFT: My recollection was that the A/ME very much got behind Pixies. I’m sure the other papers did as well, but a lot of kids who were into that genre of music would use the NME as their bible. I think it was because it’s a lot easier for English people to get eccentric bands. They were the kind of band that would’ve been more difficult for your average American to have understood. Whereas they seemed to just click immediately—and it wasn’t just with England, it was with a lot of Europeans as well. The French got them straight away.
STEVEN APPLEBY (cartoonist, contributed illustrations to Trompe Le Monde): Music in the U.K. at the time of first hearing the Pixies—the scene was boring. Simple Minds, pre-punk, I guess in a funny sort of way. The Pixies dealt with taboos and you could listen to the lyrics and not be disappointed. It seemed to me at the time really unusual. I never had heard anybody scream and sing at the same time.
GEIGER: Charles was great in the press. He manipulated them, he told UFO stories and said obtuse things, it worked for the U.K. press. The Pixies got more press than almost anybody in the NME in the U.K. at the time, but only a few writers picked up on it in the U.S.
MICO: I was features editor at the Melody Maker at the time. I wrote a lot of features on the Pixies, I interviewed them many times. I found them to be charming and extremely interesting. I think they, like any artist, became mildly impatient with people that kept asking them inane questions. So if you ask inane questions you’re going to get short or curt answers. But if you ask Charles about UFO landings or what he would have liked to have invented in the twentieth century or CB radios or something that intrigued him or took his fancy, then you got really interesting things. He had many interesting things to say about many subjects, all of which are in print somewhere.
FLANSBURGH: Their career was so meteoric. I remember spending a long spell at the Columbia hotel in London where we were on some weird press junket and they were on some weird press junket. Nothing prepared any of us for the fact that we would become national or international acts. I think whatever confidence we had in the quality of what we did, it was at a time when it’s impossible to communicate how epically lame the mass culture was. It was really Rod Stewart’s world and we were just trying to get a little corner of it. The old rock regime was trying to hold on to its market share. They were really dug in, and there was a lot of things that institutionally went in their favor. And even the few superstar acts that broke out during that time—the Madonnas and other things like that—still had the epic lameness of big ’70s rock. There wasn’t much that seemed to have the spirit of rock music that I was into. The Pixies didn’t behave like rock stars, or at least, in most ways, and it just seemed amazing that they could become so accepted so quickly and not on the back of a hit single. There wasn’t a breakout song, they were a good band. I think the image of the band was such a looming question mark. They weren’t being sold as faces or young people or fashionable people or sexy people, they were just being presented as unknowable people, which is a pretty savvy way to present a band.
THOMPSON: We had nothing to compare it to. You write a bunch of songs, you book a nightclub, everybody says, “Yay!” and the owner says, “Come back on Friday night, you kids are pretty good.” You play Friday night and everyone says, “Yay!” and a producer comes up to you and says, “Hey, come record in my studio, you kids are pretty good.” You record something, and a manager guy says, “Hey, you guys are pretty good, you want to come to 4AD in London?” and you go, “Yay!” You get there, you’re on the covers of magazines, and everyone goes, “Yay!” We had been getting. “Yay!” since we walked into a club. So we didn’t have the grind that some people go through. There was no real struggle. I’m not saying we didn’t work hard, but we were out of there as fast as we could. I suppose had we become a local band who was popular or a regional band—you take what you can get. So any sign of interest from out of town was immediate. It was just like, “Let’s go! Let’s go to New York.” But everyone iiked us. Was it surprising to be popular in New York? No. It was like, “But of course. We’re the Pixies! Everyone loves us!” It wasn’t like we were the best band in the world, but we had a little thing going. People dug it.
CRAFT: Once the tour was under way and I got to meet them it was obvious that they were very unusual. My impression of them was that they were four completely and totally different people. And that was kind of what made it work. They appeared to have nothing in common at all offstage. In normal situations you would never get four people like that to come together. And I think obviously there was some magic in the air to get those four to meet up, because they are so different. And that’s kind of why it works. A lot of bands really have to work at how they present themselves onstage, and the magic of what happens when they’re onstage is not something that happens spontaneously, it’s worked at. Whereas with Pixies, as soon as they get onstage, there is just something you can’t put your finger on.
BANKS: For starters, there’s a difference between European bands and American bands. English bands have this thing about being mates, being friends, whereas with American bands it’s much more the work ethic being first. But the Pixies were four individuals. You’ve got to remember, it happened very, very quickly. From the day they got together and started rehearsing, it was virtually overnight. There was never a moment when there was no inertia. There was always constant forward movement, there was always something to keep them interested and keep them moving. So they were never forced into a situation where they needed to develop overly personal relationships, they didn’t have to try to pal their way through the bad times. But having said that, they were very funny with each other. They used to have a lot of laughs. They had these long bus journeys, and they’d get stoned and talk to each other and they interacted very well. They were really, really close when they were off duty. It was that difference between it’s not work time, they were very disciplined about that. But they had a lot of fun, they’d get stoned, have a laugh, play games, and do bad things.
MURPHY: I remember the Muses and Pixies traveled in the same bus and had fun together. They even did little sightseeing things. I remember going to this castle in Leeds at one point. I hung out with Tanya, mostly, and Kim. Coming back after the show was usually when they were more together again and hanging out. We’d sit in the back room and talk a lot, but I don’t remember them ever thinking to themselves, well, we’re going to be the next U2, or whatever, I remember them just thinking this is a lot of fun.
HERSH: Chas and Shirley woke us up really early one morning which is a big deal when you get in at five. We were all sharing hotel rooms and sleeping all over the floor, and everybody else was hungover—I didn’t drink, so I was just sleepy, but [the rest of the band members] were seriously ill, and they all got into the van thinking it must be a long drive. But Chas stopped the van at an aviary and some botanical gardens which were his big treats and everybody was just furious. So they all took naps, and I felt bad, so I went and looked at all the birds and the flowers.
DONELLY: We were in Berlin and we had just played and we got back in the van and Charles said, “Let’s drive around, let’s just drive around all night.” He and I had been listening to Lust for Life a lot, like nonstop, just passing it back and forth on the bus, and so we just played “The Passenger” over and over and over, thirty times or something, and drove around Berlin all night. It was really nice and there was just so much camaraderie and peace—it was a really nice night.
HERSH: We were following Skinny Puppy around, they seemed to play every club right before us. And I don’t know what they were doing onstage, but the mic that Charles and I sang into was always covered with blood and so was the floor all around it. Charles would be on his hands and knees with a paper towel trying to clean the blood off the floor before I played. It was very sweet.
I remember Charles taking a sharpie and drawing on the dressing room door, drawing a Muses song. He was really high. But he drew his conception of a Muses song, which was like this big pie chart but with all this filigree, and he said, “See, now this would be anybody else’s song, but this is a Muses song,” which I always thought was the highest compliment I’ve ever been paid as a song-writer.
And I lifted Joey bodily into the van once because some Germans were trying to kill him. All day he’d been talking about hamburgers, they were going to Hamburg, and he wanted to see a hamburger, and he wanted to go to McDonald’s and see if they sold hamburgers there. I went to McDonald’s with him and he was disappointed that they didn’t have hamburgers on the menu, they called ‘em something else, and then we played this really scary punk rock club. Narcizo got trampled by hobnail boots on the dance floor and we were kind of trying to escape. I was in the van first, by myself, when Joey grabbed this Hamburger, this German kid, big, scary kid, and held his face into the van and said, “Look, Kristin, I found a hamburger!” The kid got furious, but they were both really drunk, so he started chasing Joey around a pole, but they were each holding on to the other one, so they were just kind of ringing around the rosey around the pole. I thought the kid was really going to beat the tar out of him, so I grabbed Joey and pulled him into the van and shut the door while the kid pounded on the door going, “You stupid Americans! You take our money!” He was hurling abuse and Joey was just waving at him in the window. He was like, “You can pick me up! Little Kristin can pick me up!” And he told that story for years, every time we were together, he’d be like, “You gotta hear this. So I grabbed me a hamburger, little Kristin pulled me into the van!”
MURPHY: By the time I was with them they were probably twenty to thirty shows into it, so when I used to see them coming off the stage we went and watched the Throwing Muses, because they were pals, too, they became really good friends while they were on this tour. Different people clicked, like Kim and Tanya clicked, Kristin and Charles, Joey and Leslie, and the two Daves.
DONELLY: Kim and I hit it off immediately when we met, but it was on that tour that we started really becoming inseparable. I never had girlfriends like her in high school. She was my first “I’m gonna braid your hair!” kind of friend. “Let’s paint our nails!” I’d never had that before.
HERSH: Oh, they were great people. When we toured England and Europe together we were living in a van on the coffee and beer diet, playing these crazy little Belgian towns. And singing on the van every night! We were babies, singing “500 Miles Away From Home.” I remember Kim going into a bathroom (we called them Pee Worlds) in France, and Tanya and I were following Kim into the ladies room and Kim screamed at the top of her lungs, we thought there was, like, a body of a homeless person in there or something. Tanya went tearing in and busted up laughing. Kim had seen the French toilet, which was a hole in the floor with treads next to it for your feet, and, like, a grating. Kim was just screaming and screaming and wouldn’t stop.
MURPHY: Tanya was sort of in the same position in the band that Kim was in. Sort of second fiddle from a singing and songwriting perspective. She had that feeling that she had it in her. I think Kristin was a little more democratic about it, because they were obviously more than just bandmates [they were stepsisters, as well]. And Tanya never pushed it, as far as I know, she just sort of said, I’m happy with one song, two songs on an album, and one day I’ll do something different. Whereas I think Kim always felt she had it in her and repressed it on purpose for a long time, which I’ve got to give her credit for it. She was always used to being her own person and being in charge, when I first met her.
BANKS: It was Charles’s band, he was the main man. You never felt when they were on the bus that it was Charles’s band, though. He wasn’t a bully, he didn’t dominate them or say, “We’re going to go here.” He was very, very polite and treated them all with a great deal of respect. Charles was calling me “sir.” It was a big opportunity for them. There they were in Europe, Throwing Muses were a big band. Overall, they were good kids. It’s difficult to sum any of them up in a sentence. Dave was a great drummer who knew what his job was and got his head down and did it. He had a great sense of humor, he was the class clown. Joey was kind of a quiet, shy kind of guy, really, until he’d had a couple of drinks, like anybody. And Kim was just crazy, she was insane but lovable with it. She had a lot of talent. They were very polite.
WATTS-RUSSELL: One thing that you’re never going to see, on that tour Kim kept journals and she would pass the journals around. You saw Kim, she’d be writing in them, she’d give ‘em to you and vanish. People wrote in them but they also got to read them as well. Just absolutely brilliant, funny, really open—I remember reading some stuff she had written about Charies and at the end of the paragraph she wrote, “Oh my God, if anybody were to read this they would think we were having an affair.” But yet this was a book she would pass around and let everybody read. That was early on, when everybody was getting on fantastic. There have been many rumors about what exactly their relationship was at that time, it was just sort of funny, too, I never knew if it was a double bluff that she wrote that or a double double bluff. They had a great relationship at that point. She was like nobody I ever met in my life and you just kinda came into her orbit and were just so inspired by it. Just an openness and a sense of humor, all you had to do was see her on the stage, high heels, skirt down below her knees, and a T-shirt with a dreadful painting of a kitten on it. It was the perfect Mrs. John Murphy, just adorable and complicated. Maybe people were drawn to her because she would talk a lot more than anybody else. Charles would talk specifics but. Kim would hold court.
HERSH: Kim’s gibberish was the best part! She was still doing that in Europe when they didn’t even speak English. In Holland she was telling them that their canals smelled like shit in between songs. The not shutting up was great, we loved that about Kim. She was a cheer-leader, you know, and she was still a cheerleader. Plus, she was married, which was just so weird. She was a grown-up, we were tiny babies and Kim seemed like this lady. I also remember that her pony-tail got higher and higher and higher as the tour went on. It started in the back of her head and gradually rose up the back until it was, like, cheerleader height, and it kept going until it was at the top of her head like a fountain, and then all the way up to her forehead.
HARVARD: I don’t think playing in a band with Kim would ever make anybody’s job easier. She’s a pirate and she’s a beautiful, multifaceted pirate. And that’s a great thing for rock’n’roll. Not necessarily the best thing for the road manager to deal with when he had to gather everyone up and get ‘em in the van.
BANKS: By the time we got to Holland, Kim had started to be late. And so I let it slip and slip until the point came where we were all sitting in the bus and still waiting for Kim. She had gotten used to me or Shirley going in and phoning and saying, “We’re all waiting for you,” but I didn’t say anything and I waited for time to go by. So as she came out of the hotel I jumped out of the van and walked to meet her so that I didn’t have to have the conversation with her in front of everybody. And I was like, “Kim, they’re all there, we’re all pissed off because you’re late. I don’t want you to be the person that we’re all pissed off at every day. You can be late, you can take your turn to be late, but don’t you be the person who’s going to be late every day because otherwise it ain’t gonna work.” And she said, “Cool, I understand.” And that was it. And that took us a long way. It was a long way down the line before she started being late again.
DONELLY: [When we got back from Europe] I think Kim and I were both at the point where we were starting to entertain the thought of moving on, but we’re both very deliberate people, so it took many years to actually do it.
DEAL: We recorded “Gigantic” the summer when we were overseas, when we were touring. At the time I didn’t think [it was a big deal to sing lead] but I think maybe it turned into a big deal. I don’t think we knew we were doing a single when we went in. I think we just thought we were rerecording for a release. We did “River Euphrates” over again, we did “Gigantic” over again, and there was a couple more songs we did over again. And then Vaughan did the art-work. And you know there’s no names on it, ‘cause they’re not singles like a Britney Spears, so it wasn’t called “Gigantic the Single” or anything, nobody referred to it like that, it wasn’t getting played on any radio. People liked it. People sang along even then.
GIL NORTON (producer, Doolittle, Bossanova, and Trompe Le Monde): Ivo didn’t think there was a radio single on Surfer Rosa, so he asked me if I could redo “Gigantic,” which is the first time I recorded them, to redo “Gigantic” for the single. I was a bit nervous, actually, just because I was redoing something Albini had done and I liked the band so much. It went really well, well enough that they wanted to do Doolittle with me.
WATTS-RUSSELL: That was one calculated thing I suggested they do, was to rerecord three things from Surfer Rosa with Gil. Two were on an EP, “Gigantic” and “River Euphrates,” the third still to this day has not been heard, the definitive pop hit version of “Here Comes Your Man.” Come on Pilgrim was a mini-album so it doesn’t really qualify for traditional charts, it just got a good response. The response to that was not as much as the Throwing Muses record. The main explosion was on that tour. That was really exciting. We had never been involved with a group that just virtually took off overnight and were really good—it just got bigger and more exciting. At the end of that tour, both bands came back to England and they had done two nights at Town and Country at the beginning of the tour, and they came back to do two nights at this tiny little pub, the Mean Fiddler, and that was just incredible—the audience just singing the words to every song, I’m talking about both bands. That was really just a big part of musical history. And the band, the Pixies, they got on really well. 4AD as a label was kind of staffed up properly, there were six of us—still a small number, but six very fascinating, good people working.
BANKS: When a band becomes successful at a rate they became successful, in a lot of ways, it’s easy. Most young American kids are inherently ambitious, it’s an ambitious society—I’ve worked with a lot of American bands, a lot of English bands, and a couple of nationalities in between, but the American bands, you do notice their ambition. It’s a brighter flame, it’s easier to spot, because it’s not something you apologize for in America. It’s something that’s expected of you, that you would want to be ambitious and want to be successful. And they all shared that, so it gives them a unifying force. There’s a group of you, you’re in a foreign country, and you’re there striving to do well. It kind of brings you together, you stick together, you’re a team, and you’re on foreign ground and you can moan about the food and about what you miss and what you don’t miss about America. You’ve got this great unifying influence. There’s a lot you put up with. You’ll put up with lack of sleep, you’ve got this excitement of doing well. And they were doing very, very well. So if there are any underlying problems, they tend to pale in significance compared with the big problem of how are we going to do this show tonight. So initially, there weren’t any problems. It was very exciting. And then later on, problems arose, and there was the famous personality clash, the classic personality clash, and their problems became bigger than the prize, I suppose. And that’s what happens. There isn’t a band out there that don’t have arguments. And if you found a band that doesn’t have arguments, chances are they’ve not been successful, or they’re not likely to be successful.
MURPHY: Charles thought a lot, like, let’s go back and make another record, his creative juices were flowing. He introduced songs during the tour, which was pretty cool. He would introduce them and end up playing them. The song “Hey” they were playing on the Surfer Rosa tour and it was really on Doolittle. And they had other songs that they hadn’t recorded yet, officially, but they had already been playing for years. Like, “Subbacultcha” was from the first show, that’s an old, old song. And “U-Mass” he wrote before he even met the rest of the band. At the time, he goes, “It’s just a riff,” and as it turns out it was, but it’s a cool song. I just remember them being excited about being in the band and having some success. They certainly weren’t like, “We’re going to rule the world!”
DENNISON: I remember their big show at the Rat, their homecoming show after they came back from England. All of a sudden it was nuts. Everybody wanted to be on the guest list and every radio programmer and writer and everybody was like, “Pixies are the best thing that’s ever happened to music!” It kind of came out of left field for all of us who had been around and seen them struggling for a long time. My friend Julie Farman, who was booking the Rat (she ended up marrying David Lovering), and I were laughing that night because it literally was one of the biggest shows ever at the Rat. And I was there every night of my life for almost eight years.
ST. THOMAS: The Pixies played at Jack’s a bunch, but I never saw them there. I remember the first time I heard them because I had to make a commercial for them. I remember hearing “Caribou” and thinking it was the weirdest band I ever heard. They didn’t seem like a Boston band, they had some weird air about them because they had played in England and other Boston bands hadn’t done that. It made them seem very cool.
HERSH: We were like the same band, the same family or something, and after that it was over, it was really over. You know the difference really is they were always rock stars, they were rock stars from day one and they expected people to like them, they expected to be valuable. We just felt like we were on our own planet and that’s where we were playing. We were not rock stars. We were not larger than life. We were way smaller than life, and we were playing for ourselves and that was it, and that was appropriate for us.
BANKS: Very quickly the Pixies came back and we did a club tour, which sold out, all over the U.K. and Europe, and that was in the van. And then we did another club tour very quickly, within four or five months. Headlining. Sellout shows, everywhere. They made the transition through all the venues in Europe increasing in size.
SANTIAGO: [Things changed], I think, when Kim started doing her own stuff.
HERSH: Kim was writing songs on tour, and Tanya and Kim were talking about doing something, but that’s kind of what you do, you always talk about songs and projects. But they were also the girls. Leslie and I were the vegetarians, they were the girls, the other ones were the boys.
DONELLY: I think at the time it was just kind of like, well, our bands are both kind of taking a break so we’re going to do this. It was with everybody’s blessing, so there wasn’t any tension about it at that time.
I think that Kim not singing as much [over time in Pixies] was fallout from band problems, which happens in every band, and it’s that classic thing where you have this group of extremely different personalities which is what makes the music and the band what it is, but that’s also what ultimately blows it apart.
ALBINI: The two of them [Deal and Donelly] got along well and they sort of felt like kindred spirits in this whole circle of bands touring around England.
MURPHY: They went to see the Sugarcubes at Axis in Boston and the music between sets was dance music, and Tanya was like, “We can totally do this, let’s do a dance album together,” because they were drinking and whatever, and they were like, that’s a great idea. I think they both realized it wasn’t going to work, so Kim said, “Well, I’ve got a bunch of songs that I’ve been working on,” and Tanya said, “I’ll help you with them.”
DEAL: Yeah, we wanted to play. So she would show me her thing, and I would say, “Oh look it, I know this thing.” But then we started having songs. Like “Oh, that’s good, you can do this there.” “Oh yeah, that’s cool.” She thought it would be a good idea, she wanted this song to be a disco song. And so we thought, oh we should do a disco song, that would be so fun, so we tried to enlist some people to help us and some people did. David Narcizo helped, and there was another drummer in town that helped, too. That was fun. We even went to a rehearsal space—me and her and Narcizo, to try to come up with this disco song. But we didn’t. But anyway that started getting us to think, oh yeah, we could do these songs, and these songs. There was a lot of time.
DONELLY: It was a way to extend the tour a little bit because we were enjoying hanging out. And so first we were just playing for fun, and then Kim decided that she wanted to do it more seriously. We used to go out dancing every night after the tour and we used to go dancing in Boston. We loved dancing to, like, Black Box, Neneh Cherry, and a lot of English dance stuff—we just would dance to anything. So we just decided we were going to do it, too. I think if we had put a little more backbone into it we could have done it, but it just wasn’t happening for whatever reasons. I think probably we weren’t quite ready for a concept project at that stage in our lives. So that kind of just morphed into doing the Breeders. And that would actually be mach two of the Breeders, because Kim and Kelley had been called the Breeders when they were teenagers. I didn’t even meet Kelley until probably a year after I started hanging out with Kim. So she was not interested at that point, it was only after I left that she came into the fold.
MURPHY: And then Kim started talking to another friend of theirs, Carrie Bradley, who was a violinist and singer in another band [Ed’s Redeeming Qualities]. So those three formed the crux of the original Breeders, and they had four drummers coming in and helping them do the demos. The bass player on the original demos was another friend of ours, Ray Holiday, but Kim is a perfectionist, so she redid some of his parts. Then they produced this demo and they played one show only with that lineup at the Rat, and it was billed in the Phoenix as a Boston girl supergroup, and they brought the tape to 4AD because everybody told them it was good, which I did, too. So then when they submitted it into Ivo they were like, this is great, we’d like to do this, but we’ll get a real producer and do the songs over again, because they treated it purely like a demo. To this day I think the demo tape was more accessible than Pod, the first Breeders CD.
DONELLY: [Writing Pod] was really fun, just hanging out at Kim’s house while John Murphy was at work. After they split he still had [his semi-serious band] Mente, he was still doing stuff around here, and I think it was relatively amicable. [Kim and John’s breakup] wasn’t long after we got home from the big Pixies/Muses tour. I think there was just kind of a shift in what they wanted in life.
HARVARD: Once the Pixies were flying, Kim obviously felt the need to do something else and something that was even more enlightened. Because it had more of a female element, let’s face it, it was more enlightened. And I think they felt the need to push that further than they could in the Pixies, where she was one out of four, so they did the Breeders. So Kim had done her demos, she did six tunes, “Lime House,” “Doe,” and “Only in 3’s,” and Paul Kolderie who was the best engineer we had at that time, had engineered the Breeders stuff, and in Kim’s world, it was too clean, it was too perfect. “I want it messed up.” Not surprisingly, she would ask me. She said, “I don’t want to send it to 4AD this way,” so I went in and remixed five of those, and that turned out really well, we had fun. We sent it to Ivo, he actually called me, I had never talked to Ivo, he said, “Joe, this is absolutely magical, beautiful stuff.” What happened was Tanya’s songs for that second Breeders record became the first Belly record because she left the Breeders right after that.
DONELLY: For contractual reasons—because of her contract with Elektra, my contract with Reprise—we couldn’t both be the primary songwriter on the record, so the concept was, and it was an extremely idealistic one, was that she would write the first record and it would come out on her label, i would write the second, it would come out on mine. Under hopefully “the Breeders,” but if either of them balked at that we would change the name of the band. To something. I don’t think that was ever really figured out. The whole first Belly record is demoed at Fort Apache, under the Breeders, and Kim plays on it, because that’s what it was gonna be. So the demos for the first Belly record Joe did with us, and it was me and Kim and it said Breeders on it, because that’s what it was supposed to be for. So he produced those and they came out really great. I think I have the tape somewhere, I think Ivo’s the only person that has a copy of it, though.
WATTS-RUSSELL: I had a good working relationship with Kim. “Well, okay, so you want to record, let’s go to the studio in Scotland, we will get Steve Albini out there, it will be fun for you to be out there,” done in time off that Tanya had in Throwing Muses before she left. I don’t know if she had the best of times with Albini on that record [Pod].
DONELLY: I loved Big Black, which I think really surprised Albini because he had sort of a warped impression of me when we first met. He told me that if he drank my bathwater he’d probably piss rosewater. He thought I was just kind of girly. We ended up getting along really well and he’s a very sweet person. I’m probably going to requote Joey right now, it’s probably the last thing he’d want anybody to say about him, but I was just so impressed by him in the studio, too, just how decisive he is and he just knows how to get a sound that he has in his head. He also made decisions about cutting down some of the harmonies which we balked at initially, but he was 100 percent right. Some of the parts, it’s just better having her single voice, it makes it more effective and sadder and sort of just more focused.
ALBINI: Kim had some songs and some demos put together with a version of the Breeders that used a slightly different lineup and she asked me if I knew of any drummers that would be appropriate and at that point my favorite band in the world was this band from Louisville called Slint and I suggested that she talk to Britt Walford, the drummer from Slint, who happened to be in Chicago when she was in Chicago. So they got together and talked about it a little bit. And, I think, partly on my recommendation, and partly because I don’t think she took the decision very seriously, she had Britt come over to play drums on that Breeders record and I think he made a big difference on that record [on the liner notes, Walford is listed under the pseudonym Shannon Doughton].
I instantly preferred it to the Pixies. I instantly could tell that it was a unique perspective. And that there was a simultaneous charm to Kim’s presentation to her music that’s both childlike and giddy and also completely mature and kind of dirty. And I instantly liked that it had the sort of playful nature of children’s music and it had this sort of girlish fascination with things that were pretty but it was also kind of horny. That was a juxtaposition that, at the time, was unusual. You didn’t get a lot of knowing winks from female artists at the time. But I also think that musically it was quite distinct from everything else that was around at the time.
Pod was a dead easy record to make. I think they had two weeks booked in the studio and we were done in a week, so they sent up a TV crew to film a video and then they had us record a [John] Peel session and they just kept throwing more shit at us. Like, well, you’re gonna be there for another week, you might as well do this, you might as well do that. Go ahead, knock out some B-sides.
MURPHY: [The Beatles cover] “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” that was actually a request from Ivo, he wanted them to do it, that’s what Kim told me. Ivo said, if you could just do this one song . . . They did a good job on it.
DONELLY: I think of all the records I’ve made, that one is the truest—it’s like the truest to the experience of making it, if that makes any sense. It really feels exactly the way it was when we were doing it. We did it quickly, we did it in our pajamas, we actually ended up going down to the pub in our pajamas a couple times.
ALBINI: I remembered there was a discussion at the time that Kim getting to make that record was causing some friction within the Pixies. It was an unrelated enterprise. I don’t personally see why it would matter, but I think it was an affront to Charles that he had had to put his band together and get signed and then be allowed to make a record, where Kim sort of was in that band and by default was allowed to make a record. And a lot of the same people were involved. It was a 4AD record. Ivo was behind it. I was working on it.
DEAL: [Later, during a discussion that took place before Bossanova] Charles started talking about [how] I got $11,000 to record Pod. I guess Surfer Rosa cost less or something.*
DONELLY: I left the Breeders in ‘91. Because I made Safari and then that was it. At that point, Kim had decided to stay on in the Pixies for another record and I had decided not to stay on with the Muses, so I wanted to do my own thing, and that’s when I formed Belly. Some time after that Kim decided she wanted to do the Breeders full time and sort of tried to coerce me in subtle and not so subtle ways to come back. We had one night, we were in Dayton and she locked us in the bathroom of this bar that we were in. We were talking and getting stuff out, and when we left the bathroom there was nobody in the bar, the bar had closed and the doors were locked. We had to break out of the bar and walk home by ourselves on the highway.
*Marc Spitz, “Life to the Pixies,” Spin, September 2004.