Pixies are the ‘psychotic Beatles’
David Bowie once referred to the Pixies as the “psychotic Beatles,” calling them a band that created music “just about the most compelling of the entire ’80s.”
This week I had the chance to see the Pixies live at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas one night, and the next, enjoyed a career retrospective of The Beatles through Cirque Du Soleil’s “Love” at the Mirage.
It was a sonic one-two punch for any music lover, and it really got me thinking about these bands’ place in history and how they fit together in that story.
The Beatles and Pixies comparisons don’t come as often as they should, partly because much of the Pixies’ music, when not being completely accessible in its pop construction, veers in the completely opposite direction in its dissonance and paint-peeling volume with thick sheets of feedback from Joey Santiago’s unconventional guitar style or Black Francis’ blood-curdling screams and usually indecipherable lyrics.
If all that comes to mind about The Beatles is “Meet the Beatles” and its era of “hand-holding” and “helping” and “hard day’s nights,” that comparison isn’t going to work for you. Rather, what was hinted at in “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” starts to become fully realized in “Sgt. Pepper” through the White Album and “Abbey Road.”
The Beatles themselves in the second half of their career become more defined as individuals, their styles diverging as their personal interests and personalities did, the music becoming increasingly challenging as their relationships, the transitions a little more jarring, daring and unexpected.
The results at times were still albums dripping with the syrupy sweet pop melodies of their past but later interspersed with pure shards of broken glass. “A Day in the Life,” for example, is seemingly forged together from separate parts candy and cancer, a clear case of a widening divide between John Lennon and Paul McCartney as songwriting partners and friends. “Happiness is a Warm Gun” sounds as close to any modern dirge with that angry, dissonant guitar riff announcing an almost bubbly doo-wop chorus (“bang, bang, shoot, shoot”).
That is the Pixies in two paragraphs: A band fraught with inner turmoil, a fanatically religious love of traditional pop music and a punk heart and willingness to deconstruct everything they know about songwriting and soundscapes.
Black Francis has one of the most memorable howls in all of rock music, setting the tone and mood with his ghostly falsetto and turning it up with a piercing scream and a thundering rasp with no effort whatsoever.
It is Francis’ vocals backed by drummer Dave Lovering’s extremely tight and complicated drumming that really seemed to be the heartbeat of the quiet-loud-quiet template the Pixies are credited with pioneering and passing on to bands like Sonic Youth, and of course, Nirvana.
In the truest sense of a band, though, the remaining members fill out the empty spaces to create something wholly unique.
Santiago’s guitar compounds on the most challenging aspects of Francis’ vocals and abstract imagery to make something almost unlistenable. But it’s in the pick squeals, the feedback, the pitch bending and an obviously intentional lack of regard for the traditional role of a guitar player that Santiago manufactures high drama and a wall of sound that cannot be duplicated, mostly because it comes out of necessity of not knowing how to play all that well.
Then comes Kim Deal, a solid bass player holding down the low end with a reliable throb. Her strength comes in being the yin to Francis’ vocal yang, providing the breathy, high-pitched, clean counterpoint and counter melody to his shredded throat.
There is a reason that after Deal quit the band last year, Francis has consistently filled her role with revolving female bass players. The space she filled in the sonic range is every bit as important to the make-up of the band as any other piece. Her “girly” vocals, both lead, co-lead and simply background vocals, are usually signature to every Pixies song, intractable and irreplaceable.
It also seems like no accident that Francis has told the rock press before that he was heavily influenced by The Beatles’ White Album during the writing and recording of the Pixies seminal “Doolittle” album from 1989.
From start to finish, one could argue “Doolittle” emulated the White Album in dynamics and the way the songs seemed so distinct, as if written by different people with different influences, in different head spaces, although Francis is the primary songwriter.
In the end, it’s always safe to trust Bowie, as a musician and as a student and critic of modern music. He knows from whence he speaks.
This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Feb. 28, 2014.