**The Making of Surfer Rosa by pixies - featuring joey santiago, david lovering and steve albini**

Intro:

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim.

Pixies formed in Boston, Massachusetts in 1986 by Charles Thompson and Joey Santiago. The two of them met as suitemates at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They put an ad in the Boston Phoenix looking for a female vocalist and Kim Deal was the only one who responded. Deal’s husband introduced them to drummer David Lovering, solidifying their lineup. They began playing around Boston when producer Gary Smith offered to record a demo. Ivo-Watts Russell, of the label 4AD, heard the tapes and signed them to a contract. Come On Pilgrim, an EP of their selected demos, was released in 1987. For their first full-length album, Watts-Russell suggested engineer Steve Albini, who met them in Boston and they began recording the next day. Surfer Rosa was eventually released in 1988.

In this episode, for the 35th anniversary, Joey Santiago, David Lovering and Steve Albini reflect on how the album came together. This is the making of Surfer Rosa.

Joey Santiago: Hey, my name is Joey Santiago and I'm here to talk about Surfer Rosa. Charles and I were suitemates, so I met him and he had his acoustic guitar and he was writing these wacky songs. I didn't have my guitar on purpose because I wanted to get a good start on grades, my grades. But as it turned out, I got 1.7, I did a lot of mescaline, so that was not good. That was not a good semester, but I did pick up my guitar mid-semester, but I remember him playing his acoustic guitar and spitting in the mirror of the bathroom. And I liked that. I go, “Okay, well,” I could relate to that. And we showed each other our album collections. So that's how we bonded, you know, musically. I remember having a stereo and then putting in mono so he could have one speaker and I could have the other if he chose to listen to it (laughs). But anyway, Charles and I, we actually had letter exchanges for what he sent me in Puerto Rico, and I found the letters recently. It's pretty cool, you know, it just said, “we gotta start the band now.” I was like, “Eh, sure. Let's do it.”

So we were in Boston, we dropped out of UMass. We were roommates for a good while. We put an ad out on the Boston Phoenix, which is like the LA Weekly here, “wanting a female vocalist, no chops into Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul and Mary.” Perfect. You know, no snobs allowed, no musical snobs, no hipsters, kind of getting rid of them too. Kim was the only one that answered, yes. She was the only one. We got introduced to David from Kim, because, Kim was married at the time and her husband worked with Dave at Radio Shack and he said that he drums, so we got him in. That's it.

David Lovering: Hi, this is David Lovering from the Pixies. Kim answered an ad that Charles and Joe put out, looking for a bass player. They were looking for a drummer. And then Kim being married to John, John made the suggestion of me, and that's how I became involved. Well, I remember meeting them. I went to Kim's apartment. It was Charles, Joe and Kim, myself. John was there, her husband at the time. And I didn't have any drums. And Charles just played acoustic guitar to the songs he had come up with, and I think they were all like, “Ed Is Dead,” maybe “Nimrod's Son,” songs like that. And to me, I mean, I was a background of like Rush. I mean Rush was my kind of background and some alternative kind of, I would say New Wave is what I was into, also synth pop. And so it was very eye-opening and very different for me to listen to those songs being laid out for me. And I remember just playing, (drums on table) you know, just hitting, playing on top of the table or something, just going along with it. But I got along with 'em and everything and then I learned to, I mean, open my eyes and really appreciate what the music was. And yeah, it changed me completely as far as music in a way. I mean, I was very busy on drums. I think the first album, or at least playing live, which was (makes fast drum fill sound), that's all because of Rush. And it wasn't because of playing and realizing what these songs really are. I had gone “less is more, less is more, less is more” just to accommodate the songs.

Joey Santiago: Musically, we could have expanded on our idea, but “No, let's just stay here. Let's keep it.” You know, my guitar parts, a lot of people go, “Oh yeah, those are the notes, why don't you fool around with it some more?” “No, that's it! That's what I got, man.” We had our sound already, that was it. We were doing those songs live well before we recorded it, just because we had to have a 40 minute set. So we recorded it. That's like the old school way of doing things. I wish we could do that now, you know, work on songs and then record 'em. Anyways, I miss those days. We recorded a demo, I think it was like 20 some odd songs and eight of them were chosen to be on, Come On Pilgrim. And a lot of the other ones ended up on Surfer Rosa. Yes, Surfer Rosa was recorded very quickly because we have played it a ton. We have played those songs live before we even went in there and we've been practicing it, obviously, and then testing them out live so, It was already proven that it was going to be good. You know, we were selling out shows already. And we know how to edit ourselves prior to even like going in there, we were editing it and whittling it down to what Surfer Rosa sounds like.

David Lovering: I mean, Surfer Rosa actually is my favorite Pixies album and I think it's just because, you know, we did Come On Pilgrim first, which was a demo really. Then Surfer Rosa, which was our first venture into like a real studio, rather than Fort Apache. So that was a big thrill and this all being new to us when we were young. It was just, yeah, a big thrill considering, Come On Pilgrim was, you know, demos we'd been playing around Boston a bit. We knew how to play 'em well. Surfer Rosa, same. We kind of worked out these songs, kind of knew 'em well. It was easy, really comfortable and easy and it gave you a confidence going in and recording them cause you knew them well. And it's funny cause I think Surfer Rosa was just, for some reason, the sound of it and just that era is like nostalgic for me. That's why I think it's my favorite album.

Joey Santiago: Surfer Rosa was the album that introduced us to the world and well, we had a producer that we weren't familiar with at all. And you know, we were still a young band, really anytime someone's recording us, was a pleasure. So I can't really say anything, what was going on in my head like, “Oh my God, we're gonna do an album for a label now.” It's like, it doesn't matter. You know, that doesn't really matter. What matters is that, you know, we're trying not to embarrass ourselves. That's always what the goal is. 4AD suggested Steve Albini to us, and we said, “Yes, of course.” They could've suggested anybody really (laughs), you know, but Ivo had an ear out for this guy's sound, and it turned out to be a great match. I don't know what his credits were, but I did like Big Black. You know, I loved that sound he had.

David Lovering: Yeah, that was our first producer and I mean, that was a big thrill. It's like, “Whoa.” Ivo Watts-Russell who was running 4AD, you know, he was into Big Black, knew about Big Black and stuff like that, and decided, “Wow, this would be a great approach to get Steve Albini.”

Steve Albini: I'm Steve Albini and I was a recording engineer for Surfer Rosa, the first album by the Pixies. So when he contacted me, it wasn't completely out of the blue, but it was pretty much out of the blue. Like I hadn't done any records for his label at that point. I hadn't done very many records for anybody at that point. Most of the records that I had done as an engineer at that point were either my own band's records or people within arm's reach of my own band, like my friends’ bands, my friends’ friends’ bands, you know, other Chicago affiliated bands, bands who I had met on tour or had some personal relationship with. So the Pixies were unusual in that they were a band that I had no prior relationship with. Most of my contacts with bands that I would work with in the studio came directly from the band. Like the band called me on the phone and I was speaking to the band. This one was weird by another degree because my first interaction was actually with Ivo at the record label, and subsequently they had a manager and I wasn't used to dealing with managers. So their manager contacted me and I didn't actually speak to a, a legit Pixie until I got to the studio in Boston. The night before we went into the studio, there was a kind of a cocktail hour, I guess you'd call it, where I met the band and we hung out for a bit, had dinner. I'm sorry, I genuinely don't remember anything about those conversations or what went down (laughs). Basically I was just relieved that they were normal people, that they weren't arch and, you know, pretentious and that they seemed comfortable forming an aesthetic and sharing their opinions. They didn't seem to be even the slightest bit familiar with other records I had done, or, you know, my band's music, that kind of thing. That didn't seem like it had penetrated into their world at all.

David Lovering: I didn't even know Big Black at the time. I really wasn't even familiar with his stuff. I think maybe two years later I got into Big Black and was like, “Whoa, I love Big Black.” And then I saw him in an airport once I go, “Steve, I can't believe it. I love your whole band!” If my memory serves me right, it could have been the day before or the night before we met, and then we began the next day.

Steve Albini: Yeah. I mean, that's normal. Like I'm steeled in the independent music scene, in the punk scene, in the underground, you do everything by the seat of your pants, you do everything as quickly and cheaply as possible. You know, get in, spit on your hands, make the record and get out, you know, like that's my entire work ethic is kind of hardened into that way of thinking. So that seemed totally normal to me. Like nothing seemed unusual about that scenario. In fact, the schedule that we were given in the studio seemed lavish by my standards. Like having more than a week to make a record just seemed like an absurd luxury in my mind (laughs).

David Lovering: He came in and again, it was the same thing. It was, we were young and this was a big thrill, you know, a new studio and an actual producer. Yeah, he had little tricks up his sleeve and stuff, and he was very entertaining to regale us, you know, while we were recording.

Joey Santiago: He had a sense of humor. That's all that counted. You know, we don't want like a dead beat in there. If he had a personality flaw that we did not like, we would've not even entered that room. He seemed like a normal guy, and we went at it.

David Lovering: It was called Q Division, it was a 16-track studio in Boston. And I think maybe because of Ivo, you know, putting two and two together, maybe Steve would be the best thing suited for this, for what we were doing.

Steve Albini: They were naturally good musicians, naturally gifted musicians. They were well-rehearsed, they were in great shape to make a record when we did it. So going into the studio, I wanted to prove my value to them because they would have had reason to be suspicious of me. Not knowing me, not being familiar that much with the work that I'd done. And, you know, basically taking their record label guy's word for it, that I would be a good idea. So, the first thing I did at the studio was assess the limitations of the studio. The studio had a very modest control room. It was a 16-track studio with a very modest console, not a lot of outboard equipment. I used that as an excuse to buy a piece of equipment that I had wanted, a digital reverb made by a company called Klark Teknik. And so we had one of those reverbs at the studio. There was also a really great live room, like the acoustics in the live room at that studio were nice. One of the ways that I assess the studio when I first get there is to walk around in the live space and, you know, stomp my feet and clap my hands and whistle and see where the reflections are coming from and see what the ambient sound is like. And that room sounded great. Lively and boomy, it had a great low end, had a relatively high ceiling, so I was pretty confident we'd be able to make, at a minimum, make the drums sound good.

David Lovering: Yeah he brought in things like metal picks to play instead of plastic picks. So that was like a new thing to give it a little harder edge on some songs. And also another one of the tricks that he did was using a thing called a PZM mic. And a PZM mic is, it's a placement zone microphone, like a sheet with a microphone placed sideways in it. And he mounted it on the wall in the actual studio in the big room. So it gives you, if you listen to Surfer Rosa, you can hear that kind of ambiance, that kind of room sound. And that's really what that was. You know, even though the drums had microphones on them and close mics and overhead mics, that room mic back there gave it the real, the kind of live sound, which was something else. And because of that, I own a PZM today because of that (laughs).

Steve Albini: At the time, I didn't have a lot of options for accurate ambient mics. I did have a pair of PZM microphones, which were reasonably flat, and so I ended up using those for the ambient mics on the drum kit. So we always had flexibility of more or less ambient sound. Yeah, I remember David's drums, just acoustically sounding great and me thinking literally, “If I can get a photograph of that onto the record, then we're done.”

Joey Santiago: There weren't any gimmicks production-wise, it was just really recorded honestly. That was an honest version of what we were. The idea for Surfer Rosa, which is to document what we've done. You know, we needed someone to document it very well and have great recording technique and he had that.

Steve Albini: There was a dearth of other isolation areas other than the main recording space. There was a corridor, so keeping the amplifiers out of the drum microphones involved isolating the bass amp and the guitar amps in that corridor. And the sound in there was not ideal. And also at the time, the Pixies were using these small portable combo amps, which were great for gigging and small clubs, but didn't have an impressive sound. So walking around in the physical space of the building, there was a corridor that led to a very large tiled bathroom that also had really great acoustics. So I suggested that we rent some bigger, more powerful amplifiers and isolate those in that tiled bathroom so we could get a bigger, more ambient sound on the guitars. And they took that suggestion.

Joey Santiago: We did physically put an amp in the bathroom to get a sound that he wanted in his head. And he'd put the microphone there too, for the drum sounds too, you know, it doesn't have to be just, there was always a microphone there. But yeah, it was an interesting approach. I didn't go like, “Wow, that's a good idea.” I was like, “Well, of course. Why not? Let's just put it in there.”

Steve Albini: I'm a little uncomfortable with that because that seemed like that was the first instance of me suggesting something to them and them acquiescing, and that sort of became a pattern, like I would suggest something and they would say yes. That made me feel like I was having too big of an influence on the record, and that made me uncomfortable. As I mentioned previously, I wanted to prove my worth to them, and part of that involved me coming up with ideas that if they worked out, would validate them having brought me into the process.

“Bone Machine”

Joey Santiago: “Bone Machine” is a good way to just like introduce everybody, “Ladies and gentlemen, David, on drums!” You know, at that time, “Kim or Paz on bass.” And then we all join in. It's also a good song to start for our sound man, because we don't do a sound check. So we will do that for him and we would extend it.

David Lovering: And it's a great opener too, because everyone kind of knows it (sings drum beat) when we start a show. I can't say it was any, at least for “Bone Machine” going about that, how it starts with drums and bass and then the guitars come in, how that's structured. I mean, there wasn't any thought of how to do it, it just seems that's the way you do it, you know? So that's just an example of just what we're doing. It wasn't like any plan or anything. You know, when we started “Bone Machine,” when we started kind of, Charles was coming around, you know, playing it so we could kind of figure it out. I was playing, you know, “Bone Machine,” if you listen, it's like an Indian beat, it’s backwards. I wouldn't call it an Indian beat that's not, not going in that area, but it's “baah dadada baah dadada baah dadada baah.” Instead of like, every rock song there is is, “1, 2, 34, 1, 2, 34.” But this was, “1, 234, 1, 234.” And that was Charles's suggestion. Why don't you try this? Why don't you just play it on the one instead? Give it that ga-ga-ga feel? And we did that and that's “Bone Machine.” That really makes, it really, really does. And I think it's the only song that's out of tradition or what that kind of oddity where it's like just turning it around, going on the one instead of the three. Everything else we do, I'm doing, I'm very mediocre. I just play it on the three, just a regular rock beat, but “Bone Machine” is quite interesting.

Joey Santiago: By the way, “Bone Machine,” it has a certain timing. Like if one of us falls off, you can't join back in. It's really more tricky than it sounds. Like if I fall off the train, that's it, I'm off. I'm either chasing it or they have to catch up to me, you can't even tell. You're just lost. You just, you're just lost. We have to stop it. We've stopped that song numerous times because we didn't come in on time and it's tough to correct.

David Lovering: But the only thing is sometimes I can get really lost on it because I'm doing that 1, 2, 3, and I'm trying, and everyone else is playing the kind of the straight ahead, you know, one and three, I'm doing the backwards, so sometimes I'm like, “Oh!” (laughs) we gotta stop the song. Either start it again or go onto another song.

Joey Santiago: That riff I came up with, I liked it. It just kept going and going and going, very relentless. The only thing unrelenting about it was I would switch from minor to major mode on one. And every time I do that, it’s kind of like, you know, I forgot to do it live. I started doing it like on the last tour. I go, “Oh yeah, that's what I did.” And now when I do it, it's like, “Okay, there's the joke.” There's always gotta be some kind of joke, you know, with theorists proving you know, you gotta know how to break the rules, right? So that's how I was doing it. And the song came together well. I loved the solo that I did on that, just really just one chord. Wasn't one note, but it was like a chord (laughs), just kept going and going and going. Basically making, again, a joke out of what a solo is, you know, at the time. Plus that chord too, there was a hit by a guy named Prince. “Kiss” was the name of the song, and he was hitting a ninth chord. And that's what I did kind of like a tribute to that hit.

Steve Albini: You couldn't get more of a chalk and cheese kind of an arrangement like Charles's delivery has this kind of, you know, unhinged, playful kind of babbling quality. And Kim's vocal is so pure and so pretty and so precise. It's just such a stark contrast. It's kind of shocking that they were able to forge a synthesis between them because they are so diametrically opposite. I have the greatest respect for them for being able to synthesize a band identity out of such diametrically opposed aesthetics.

David Lovering: Well, it's wonderful, I think that they're the yin and the yang. I think having Kim in the band or a female compared to all us guys, it gave it a different sound, whether it be vocals or just how we were as a band. And it just works in vocals. Her background, any kind of female vocals, just, it just added to it.

Joey Santiago: Surfer Rosa had a lot of harmonies and they worked hard to do that, and I just witnessed it. You know, they had to do what they had to do, I was in my own head, I was just concerned about guitars, but the way it came out was great. Surfer Rosa was the way we bonded. We didn't have that much time, we were still working odd jobs, so we would rehearse and play. That's the only time we really saw each other. We had this rehearsal space and we were really just, we were the only ones practicing diligently. It seemed like everyone was just partying. There were like maybe seven other rooms there? Yeah and then we would open the door and they were listening to us (laughs). We were entertaining them with this muffly sound, you know. They liked it, you know, that's when we knew we had something.

“Break My Body”

David Lovering: That was a song unlike “Bone Machine,” “Bone Machine” was a little after the fact where we, I don't think we played it that much in the clubs but “Break My Body,” we did play a lot. I think “Break My Body” was one of the early ones from around the Come On Pilgrim era, I think an early, early Pixies song that we knew like the songs now that are like riding a bike, they're very, very easy to play. And it's funny cause “Break My Body” when I look back on it now, I love playing “Break My Body.” It was so easy and I was into it and doing that. Nowadays I play it and I still love it, I love all the Pixies songs, but it's not as easy as it was when I was a kid. And it's really a simple song, it really is. But it's a little more thought that I have to put into it and I have no idea why. I don't know, but “Break My Body,” I'm very familiar with it, we were all comfortable with the song.

Joey Santiago: “Break My Body” was, you know, a very groovy song, heavily bass driven. You know, it was busy. I mean, not busy, but there were a lot of notes going on already and I just put two notes on top of it. That's it. And the chorus was very simple too. I'm just trying to do the simplest as possible. I think the chorus was, I think Kim suggested that that riff or the holes in it. My main concern was the chord progression and the subject matter that he's been picking is good because it's not, it wasn't being done enough, I should say, that it wasn't being done enough. You know, we're not into dear diary lyrics cause we don't give a flying fuck what you did last night, you know.

Steve Albini: I took to Charles's aesthetic very quickly. I liked the kind of ranting gibberish quality to some of his stuff, this sort of non-sequitur, lyrical imagery. All of that seemed, you know, instantly charming and appealing to me. The nuts and bolts of the songwriting seemed very straightforward to me, although distinctive and well executed. But I couldn't pinpoint a lineage. Like I couldn't have said, oh yeah, this, this band is obviously emulating this other band.

Joey Santiago: Surfer Rosa solidified our sound. It really did. Surfer Rosa forever was, this is our mandala, this is our fingerprint. What we have done to Surfer Rosa is what people would've just skipped over. You know, they would've just flew over it. Whereas we just stopped and observed it and hung onto it. You know, we said, “Hello” (laughs). You know, I could imagine bands having that initial thing with their ideas, but they would go on and embellish on it. We didn't. Yeah I think a lot of bands would've just had that, could have had that if they just stopped at a certain moment, you know, cause they have it.

“Something Against You”

Joey Santiago: Oh “Something Against You?” Yeah, you know, that's just a good little ditty. “Something Against You” reminded me of the chords to “Passenger” by Iggy Pop. I think if you've slowed it down, if you slowed that thing down, you would kind of go like, “Oh, okay, it's ‘The Passenger.’” It's not exactly like it, but you could get the feeling that it will be. You know, (plays acoustic guitar chords to “Something Against You”). And then what's “The Passenger?” Oh shit. (sings “The Passenger” guitar riff and then plays “Something Against You” chord progression).

David Santiago: I didn't know “Something Against You” was on Surfer Rosa (laughs), that shows you how much I remember of that. But all those songs, a lot of those songs, I mean those were the punk kind of ones, the ones that were heavy. Yeah, that was just a batch of what we were about back then. I think that just heavy, that punk kind of thing. And I think a lot of the songs we have go from, you know, Charles had a lot of angst and I think some of those songs were just heavy.

Steve Albini: A lot of the bands that I work with are sort of grunty, ugly, brutish bands. And a lot of those bands like the vocal presence to be of a type with the other amplified instruments where they, part of their aesthetic is they like the sound of the amplified voice as opposed to the acoustic sound of a voice. In the same way someone would prefer an electric guitar over an acoustic guitar, they prefer an amplified voice over an acoustic voice. And so I have developed a number of techniques for recording a vocal through an amplifier so that you get this kind of burned up quality. “Something Against You” was one of the more energetic songs, one of the more like bitier songs and it seemed like a natural fit.

Joey Santiago: Charles sang it through an amplifier with a Bullet microphone. They looked like headlights from back in the era when people used to have headlights outside of the car. So that's how it was recorded.

Steve Albini: I also think that that sound, the sound of a vocal being roasted through a guitar amplifier, if the singer is hearing that sound, they can perform that as an effect almost, and it creates an expressive option for them. Like, you know, if you swallow the mic, you get more low end and you get more overload. If you back off from the mic, you get a slightly clearer, slightly more nasal sound. If you cup the mic, you get a kind of a filtery effect. Like all of those little performance details. If you're putting that into the hands of the vocalist, you can expect them to do something with it. Like you give them the expressive avenue, you can expect them to take it and do something interesting.

David Lovering: “I'm one happy prick” at the end, which (laughs) was quite interesting. That came up in the studio, but live, no. But we play it pretty much, it could be almost every night, but that I haven't heard it in a long time.

Joey Santiago: I have to remind him actually on the reunion “that that's what you're saying.” You know, “I am one happy prick.” And the song is to me when he said that, it had like, “Oh, I see.” It had a little meaning. You know, “I have something against you.” You know, it's your fucking dick. That's what I'm thinking. It's your prick. So at the end it's like, “Oh, okay. That makes sense. Makes a lot of sense (laughs).

“Broken Face”

Joey Santiago: Yeah that edit on “Broken Face,” I got a “beep”. You cannot get that edit now because that was a tape shutting down. You know, digital doesn't do that. It won't do that, it will never, ever do that. So that's cool. You know, little timestamp on that song.

David Lovering: Again, Steve Albini in the studio was, this was tape machines. It was all before digital, so there was a lot of cutting and splicing. So I think part of the beginning on “Broken Face” is just a lot of splicing that he did.

Steve Albini: There are a lot of little quirks about studio practices, like depending on the, the way the tape machine works, when you start or stop it, it has a distinctive sound that's captured on the recording. Like the sort of starting up or a stopping sound or you know, the tape spooling off the reel, all of those things are kind of failure modes in the studio, but if you've worked in the studio, they become familiar. And I liked the idea of introducing those sounds and those eccentricities into the finished product where normally you would take great pains to avoid having those kind of eccentricities on a record because they were, like I said, they're sort of failure modes. It became a kind of an identifying feature of that record was that the sound of the session underway was part of the record and it sort of became a thing, like a feature of the record was that you could hear the process of making the record and the interaction of the people and the personalities. And I think that's charming and that's the rationale for doing it.

David Lovering: It was another kind of punk song. I know that we played it around and we kind of had that one down a lot earlier, or we knew we were a little more confident with “Broken Face” compared to maybe “Something Against You.”

Joey Santiago: And later on people love that lyric, “I got a broken face.” I mean, it's a biblical reference, you know, so he wasn't writing anything about what he did last night (laughs), you know, or what his plan was. So it was all biblical references. We're cool with that. You know, the Bible has great stories. So I'm told, never picked it up.

Steve Albini: I found out after the fact that when Charles was younger, he was into the Christian rock, the burgeoning Christian rock movement, and in particular a guy named Larry Norman, who I was familiar with. Cause there was an exchange student that stayed at my house when I was a kid in high school who was into all of that Christian music and I had gone to see Larry Norman. He was like the one guy in that scene who wasn't just tragic, like his music actually kicked a little bit of ass and he was an interesting performer and I thought it was notable that Charles would bring that part of his earlier identity in music into the Pixies who were not making Christian music.

“Gigantic”

Joey Santiago: I remember writing on a sharpie, on a rehearsal space that it's something to the effect that, “When you're not making a sound, you are actually being heard.” So that's the key there. And I liked it, I always liked when we were putting together the songs and I hear the rhythm section, “Oh God, I could listen to this forever. You know, this is really cool.” So, you know, you gotta let it happen. You gotta let the audience have that joy too. And anytime that can happen, we'd let it happen because it's really hypnotic.

Steve Albini: The Pixies were absolutely part of that developing aesthetic of intimacy then exploding into like drama, like they were definitely part of that aesthetic. I don't think it's dumb to call them a quiet to loud band. I think that's perfectly reasonable. They weren't the only ones, you know, it's not a novel idea, but it was definitely a trend. Trend makes it sound capricious, that's not what I mean. It was definitely an aesthetic that was sort of sprinkled here and there throughout the music scene, beginning in the middle to late eighties.

Joey Santiago: We already had that going anyway. But yeah, the dynamic, I mean, when he comes in, just the way he mixed it, the dynamics really worked. Just because, he had perfect recording chops.

Steve Albini: There developed an aesthetic that allowed for small intimate sounds, which then exploded into big enveloping sound. That I am associated with it is a temporal artifact of the fact that I was working in the studio with some of these bands who had that as their aesthetic. Like I did a Slint record that had a lot of quiet to loud dynamics. I did a Pixies record that had a lot of quiet to loud dynamics. I did a PJ Harvey record that had quiet to loud dynamics. That's not me, that's them. I do think that I am given significance in sonic elements that are none of my doing. And the quiet, loud, quiet, loud dynamic is definitely one of those. That's what the bands were doing on their own left to their own devices. That was their aesthetic, and my job was to try to make that happen in somebody else's living room.

Joey Santiago: “Gigantic.” Charles had the chorus and he wanted Kim to sing it and do the lyrics.

Steve Albini: And the songs where Kim's vocal is prominent, have a completely different tone and mood, despite it being the same band to the songs, the sort of more frenetic songs that Charles is leading.

David Lovering: “Gigantic,” I think it was definitely, it was a Kim song. It was the female, female portion singing, but it's a nice change. I think that anything, whether it be, you know, “Gigantic” or if it was “La La Love You” or something, it's a nice little, it's a little change. It makes dynamics a little different than having the same thing. I'm not downplaying or saying anything bad, but it just gives it a little more dynamic, I think. So it was always a highlight and the crowd always loved hearing “Gigantic.”

Steve Albini: Kim Deal has just one of the most beautiful natural singing voices ever on Earth, like top five singing voices on Earth. My friend and bandmate, Bob Weston, has described Kim's vocal style as, “It sounds like she's smiling when she's singing.” And that's really true, you can hear this sort of angelic sweetness in her voice sometimes. But then she uses her voice to like, open up on some very dark themes and some kind of creepy, you know, suggestively sexual stuff. And it's like a nice contrast, but it's also like, it kind of gives you the willies, like maybe this is something I shouldn't be allowed to listen to right now (laughs).

I think she's got a really effective vocal presence. A lot of her vocals were recorded either directly into a mic. A Sennheiser 421 was the mic. That's a very bright, very crispy, very present mic. So the vocals of hers that were meant to be very up close and whispery and intimate were recorded directly into the 421. Literally as close as she could get to it. The ones that were meant to be spooky and atmospheric were recorded in the toilet at a distance.

Joey Santiago: And she sang it just like that at David's garage. It was, she was very bashful at first with it, and I could understand why. But you know, it was filling the space, the chorus was there, the subject matter was interesting. I think initially Kim said that it was gonna be about a mall, you know, big, big mall. Hmm. That would've been interesting.

Steve Albini: Just in general, there's nobody I admire in music more than Kim. Like the records that she's made with the Breeders, I think are, each one is distinctive and unique and absolutely masterful at executing the sound in her head. She is the most relentless in pursuit of a very specific sound or idea of anyone I've ever worked with. She does not care if it takes years and tens of thousands of dollars to exercise the demon of the sound in her head, but once she's got it, she recognizes it instantly and the case is closed. I think that kind of tenacity developed over time. She definitely didn't behave that way in the Pixies on that first, my first exposure to her. She was very much willing to try anything, very much willing to go with what the consensus was on decision making. Super competent as a bass player, like I think she's a generally very good musician, and playing bass seemed like a trivial task to her, but she didn't feel demeaned by it. She just saw that as her role. It was like, “I'm gonna play bass in this band, so I'm gonna knock it out of the park.”

Joey Santiago: That had like a, definitely a Velvet Underground influence, you know, “Sweet Jane” would be the reference to that. It came together pretty good.

David Lovering: “Gigantic” was a fun song to play out live. I think we knew that very well before going into the studio. The only thing I remember about it, I got a brand new China cymbal. They sound like a garbage can kind of thing. And that was the first song that I used it on, on “Gigantic.” Where at the end there's these little crashes that keep happening during the choruses or something like that. And that's what got employed. And the funny thing about that was when we, our next producer was Gil Norton and Gil Norton hated China cymbals. With Gil Norton records that we did, I don't think you're gonna hear a China cymbal on it, but on Surfer Rosa, you hear the China cymbal (laughs).

Joey Santiago: Steve Albini put an amp in the bathroom to differentiate it maybe from other songs. I think it was my Peavey amp. Yeah, we had Marshalls too. But the Peavey sound made it on that album that was pushed in a lot. I like the sound of it. You know, I think it might have been called The Bandit. And it had the saturation control, which was cool. And also that amp was very portable. I can, you know, haul it around different gigs.

Steve Albini: The basic track recording was done with their stage gear, which was these small amplifiers. And Joey had a little Peavey amplifier, like, you know, the size of a Kleenex box, that kind of little crappy combo amp and that does have a really biting sound. And we used that on for some of his leads where he wanted a really crispy, really dry, raspy sound. But for the burlier stuff, for the heavier stuff, we used the rented Marshalls in the big tiled toilet.

“River Euphrates”

Joey Santiago: My favorite moment still is “River Euphrates.” I love the vocals in the beginning when they’re going, (sings) “Ride, ride, ride, ride.” And they're doing until they're pretty much running out of breath.

David Lovering: “River Euphrates,” when we play it now, when that part comes up with it's (sings) “Ride, ride, ride, ride.” And they're both going, whether it be Paz or it was Kim or whenever they're doing it, I have really got to turn that off in my head. And the reason why is cause I'm trying to keep this beat. And when they do that, “Ride, ride,” it's not always in time. it's kind of a little jaunty like that. And that throws me for a loop. If I start hearing that, I gotta, “Oh no, no.” And so I always on “River Euphrates,” I have to sit there and count during that part. One, two, now I'm just counting in my head so I don't get thrown off the beat.

Joey Santiago: Guitar part-wise, you know, I'm bending up, I'm hitting so many intervals on the way up, you know. I just love the way the guitar, when it goes out of tune. Cause it has this like natural, like tremelo, you know. And it becomes a sawtooth pattern, which I like, so it becomes a synthesizer at that point, you know. You're just doing sound design and it does, that guitar part does reach unison and then I go back down, but it has to hit that unison at a particular point, I forgot when, but then I go back down to dreamland or nightmare for Berklee students.

Steve Albini: I'm not normally an advocate for multiplying band members. That is doubling parts that are played organically by one person. I'm not normally an advocate for that, because often I feel like it's done as a defensive measure, you know, “Well, that sounds kind of dull, let's double it and see if it sounds special. Yeah, I guess it sounds special. Let's leave it.” You know, like that. That seems like a lazy approach to making a record. In Joey's case, as mentioned, he had this kind of feeble Peavey amp that he used for the basic tracking, and we had access to the fancy Marshalls for the overdubs. So that gave us a natural experiment of playing the song with the Marshall and see if it sounded better. And if it did, we could use that, but if not, we had the original take that was done on the Peavey. And then as a byproduct of that, you have these moments where you have two versions of Joey on those songs where it seemed like the guitar sounded thin with the original guitar. Joey would do a run on the Marshall and then we could compare them, play them simultaneously, see what it sounded like.

One thing I noticed immediately about Joey's lead guitar style was that he wasn't like hung up on the sort of, bluesy scaler stuff that a lot of other guitar players sort of gravitate to. He had more of an ear toward abstraction and sound effects and stuff like that.

Joey Santiago: I listened to a lot of surf music because I knew it was gonna serve me well because I don't sing (laughs). So instrumentals were really the key to me to listen to. And, you know, there's a trick to not to get in the way. You know, you gotta be heard but not get in the way. It's really, really, really a tricky, tricky little job.

David Lovering: Joe is a lot of the sound of the Pixies, his guitar. I think it's very distinctive the way he plays. And I have no explanation how he does it, but it works. It's perfectly apropo. For, “Where Is My Mind?” Joe's guitar, it's just typical Joe. I can't, I cannot explain it. It's just, whether it be simple or whether it be hard, whatever he has has a certain Joe sound to it. And what he gets for each song, I think it really is very distinctive Pixies.

“Where Is My Mind?”

Joey Santiago: Charles moved in with his girlfriend. We just decided, he moved out. We were making, we got established so we can afford our own apartments now. But he showed it to me, us, all of us, and I didn't do much to it other than that was the first riff that came to mind. I knew I wanted to do that. Yeah. I knew I wanted, like that was it. That's the only thing I wanted to do. And it sounded good. I said I'm done. That's it. Cool. My job's done with this song.

David Lovering: “Where Is My Mind?” I think is one of the songs that we kind of honed on the road rather than in the studio. I actually don't recall why it's so simple as far as even my drums. It's just (sings drum part) “ba ba gah,” there might be a cymbal, a hi-hat. “Where Is My Mind?” is interesting though, because when we reunited in 2004, I played everything cause it was like riding a bike. It was very easy to do. We weren't doing any new material. It was all our old laurels that we were playing, all those old songs. And “Where Is My Mind?” I mean, I can't think of a simpler song. “Cactus” might be as simple as that, but with “Where Is My Mind?” It goes, “ba ba gah” and there's a little hi-hat thing. So anyway, 2004 comes around and we're on the road, we're playing all these shows and we're doing, “Where Is My Mind?” every night. And I didn't realize it, but someone said to me, I think it was maybe, oh, I guess a year into playing, “You're not doing that cymbal, that little cymbal opening that happens throughout the song.” And I was like, “What?” (laughs). And I had to listen to “Where Is My Mind?” to realize, “Oh, I've completely forgot about that” (laughs).

My snare hits in the past, and even today, I play hard. I definitely changed my drumming for the Pixies coming from a different background of the way I played. It was getting too busy. The fills were just stupid fills that shouldn't be there, or fills all the time. So that had all changed just to cater to the music or what we were playing. And again, the Pixies songs were stuff that I'd never played before. That kind of, a lot of these punk things or halftime stuff, and that was all new to me. So it was a wonderful experience as far as learning how to play that or just trying to cater to what had to be done.

Joey Santiago: I'm not a muso by any means, I mean a theorist, but I know enough of it, you know. So he's doing an E and then I'm in major mode. Then he goes to minor mode. I'm still there. I'm still hitting those two notes. I mean, it's just, you know, little tricks like that. That solo. Okay, that solo, someone pointed out to me. Cause it sounds right to my ears. It’s a B major chord and I'm doing the minor mode over it. It just sounds right. I'd like to do it properly and see how it sounds. It’s probably not gonna be good or I'd just have to get used to it. Yeah, it was just a good solo and when there was gonna be a solo thing, I remember suggesting, “Let's just please, for the love of God, if I'm gonna have a solo, let's just have one chord.” You know, that way I don't have to think. And obviously I didn't even think about it hard enough because I was playing in the wrong mode.

David Lovering: Well, I think, “Where Is My Mind?” it's definitely surprising cause it's, at the time it was just, I don't even know if it was a single, I don't think it was. I don't recall. But I would blame Fight Club. You realize the power of a movie or how that's changed that song, or at least given a new, a new generation or people who know us only from that song or just being aware of it from that media and that was astounding.

Joey Santiago: Jeez, it's everywhere, huh? “Where Is My Mind?” was in an Apple commercial. Fuck? Yeah I had no, I mean, people told me that it was in a big commercial, but I didn't know it was Apple. Fight Club, that was great. That was a good one. I don't know if he gave it to any other movies. I think it just belongs in Fight Club. I don't think we should really share that. I mean, you know, I'm not Charles, but I think it should be a Fight Club song.

David Lovering: And it's grown ever since. It's become bigger and bigger and bigger and I think it's a song that we have to play, along with some of the other ones that we do, but definitely “Where Is My Mind?” is in there.

Steve Albini: So at the end of that song, the tape actually ran out on the tape where they were doing a vamp at the end that they were intending to fade out and the tape ran out. So you hear the band stop abruptly at the end. And as a way of masking that, I created a reiteration of Kim's backing vocal just by soloing her backing vocal her woo woo. Backing vocal through the reverb and recording several instances of that and spliced those onto the end. So you have this, so the effect is that this ethereal voice is insistent and unstoppable, but the band like glitch stops and the woo woo continues. You know, Kim Deal unstoppable by machinery.

“Cactus”

Joey Santiago: “Cactus,” it's one of the few times I listened to the lyrics and I like it, you know. I like the fact that he wanted his girlfriend to put blood on a shirt, but in a very specific way, with a cactus.

I suggested spelling it out, spelling “Pixies” out as a nod to T. Rex cause it kind of sounded like a T. Rex song. “So let's just do a tongue in cheek and spell our name.”

David Lovering: The chant, the “P-I-X-I-E-S.” I don't know if that was originally the way it was or if it was a suggestion. That's tough to recall, but I know that that's my job now. Every show is, I'm the one with the “P-I-X-I-E-S,” and it was tough for a while because, this shows you how, how I can get by just barely. It’s “bum bah, bum bah, “P-I-X-I-E-S.” I'm trying to say that and still keep in time. I know it's easy as heck, but it's not. It's not, but I'm able to pull it off.

Joey Santiago: Yeah when David Bowie covered “Cactus,” that was, that was something else. That was something else. I mean, wow. Big influence, David Bowie, for us, you know, not only that, but as a producer of Iggy Pop. But for him to do that was very mind boggling. It really was. It was just like, “Fucking David Bowie covering, you know doing ‘Cactus.’ That's just crazyville.” That's a good nod.

David Lovering: We were Bowie fans and he was a fan of the Pixies, and when he did “Cactus,” that was a big thrill. That was a thrill. In fact, when we did a, there was a benefit after Bowie had passed in New York for something, I forget what it was, but it was just a Bowie big thing in New York. And we went and everyone was playing a Bowie song. We went on, we played “Cactus” because (laughs) Bowie played “Cactus.” So we got away with playing our own song at a benefit that everyone was doing covers. So that was a thrill.

Joey Santiago: That was our welcoming to the music world. He welcomed us. He goes like, “Come out.” You know, “You guys, by the way, with your low self-esteem is part of the musical community now.” And he wanted to advertise us too. He thought that we weren't big in America and we weren't. We weren't at that time, partly because we toured Europe a lot more.

Steve Albini: In the immediate term. The Pixies were not a big band in America in particular. They were not a particularly well known band. They got more well known in Europe, and then their fame in Europe filtered into the American underground scene through avenues of people who were buying English and European music. You know, people who would have every record on 4AD would also have a Pixies record, and eventually more sort of normal music fans crossed paths with it and took a liking to it. But their success in the U.S. was not meteoric like they were much more popular, much quicker in England and Europe than they were in the U.S. It took a while for them to catch on over here. And in the underground scene, there was a suspicion of bands that were sort of foisted on the audience top down. Like, “Here's a band that arrives fully formed with a label backing and a big tour that you've never heard of that you know nothing about that you know they've never been written about in the zines, you've never heard anybody speak their name in your word of mouth circles.” Just this band appears out of nowhere with the backing of the industry that those bands were met with suspicion in the underground, and rightly so. Almost all of those bands were atrocious. The Pixies were an exception in that they were a working band in Boston who just didn't develop much of a following. And they caught the ear of an influential record label and things snowballed from there. So they came by their success and their adulation legitimately. They weren't a manufactured phenomenon in the way that some of these other bands were.

“Tony’s Theme”

David Lovering: “Tony’s Theme, I think it was one of the earlier ones, not extremely early, but it was one of the first ones. I think that before a lot of the other songs on Surfer Rosa. I think it was very easy to record because I think we knew it pretty well. We played it out.

Joey Santiago: That's a fun one. I love bicycles. I'm a cyclist, so to hear that, and Tony's a brother of mine and Ed's a brother of mine too. Jesus, what’s he doing? So I loved it, you know, that simple riff. Well, he's doing that boogie oogie thing, and I'm just doing this angry thing on top of it. But it came together very well. And yeah, I like the introduction a lot.

David Lovering: Today's interesting because I'm getting older and it's like all those little fast songs, not the punk songs, but the ones with a lot of eighth notes, it's a lot more work than it was years back. But it's fun to play, the audience likes that. And it's kind of a crazy song. It's one of the songs that I like playing, cause it's kind of, it's like “Vamos” is a fun song, or “Nimrod’s Son” is a fun song to play. “Tony's Theme” is the same. It's just, when it goes down to Joe's solo and then it goes back and then finally “To-ny” when it jumps on the end. It's just, it's fun, i's fun. It's just the way the song is built as far as drums are, the way it changes, I'm a fan of.

“Oh My Golly”

David Lovering: “Oh My Golly,” that was a tough one. “Oh My Golly” was a tough one because the beginning is (sings drum part) “dun dun dun dun duh.” It's this weird, to me, it's weird, not to the rest of the band. They had no problem doing it, but it was a nightmare trying to figure out that timing and because of it, I don't think that we played “Oh My Golly” a lot. We might have done it at the time when Surfer Rosa was released, but that song kind of fell a little by the wayside now. Especially in 2004, when we got back together. We never played it and it wasn't until we had to do the Surfer Rosa 30 year anniversary, and now it's the 35 that we had to relearn it. And I just learned how to do, how to write words to beats. So (sings) “I don't like roast beef” or whatever. I don't know what I wrote, but I had it written on my toms for, “Oh My Golly.”

So I could just, (sings rhythm) “Don't eat meat duh duh duh today.” Then I would recite these words and that was the only way. By reading it, I could pull that beat off. And I knew it went six rounds cause I had it written six times, same words, and then I write the six, then I look at Paz and I just, that's the end and that's where we go into the song. But “Oh My Golly” is not an easy one.

Joey Santiago: Surfer Rosa had Spanish lyrics on it. Coming from an American band that's, you know, it's a shtick. Plus Charles is very fluent in Spanish. It's very impressive. So it made a lot of sense for him to flex that muscle. Yeah just being in Puerto Rico, Charles, I could imagine him, by himself in a strange land, and just working on lyrics, perhaps learning the language and misinterpreting it and, you know, coming up with his own interpretations. I could see him playing with words down there.

David Lovering: Charles's, Spanish, it just gave it a different flavor on some of the songs, him doing that. And I think it made us popular in South America as well (laughs). Just that kind of stuff, but I know some of it was Spanglish as well, so you've got a lot of correction on, on fixing stuff. But it's nice, it's part of that Pixie style I guess.

Joey Santiago: “Oh My Golly,” I have my guitar all tuned to an E on that one. Every single string. I wanna make it sound like a bumblebee. So we did it. I'm always bashful about making suggestions, you know, but I remember doing that. Saying it to Steve Albini that I wanted to have all the strings tuned to E and then he reminded me to do it. I go, (sighs) “Oh, okay. All right, let's try it.” And we tried it. I had this slide and it was entertaining.

“Don't touch my stuff.” I think that might have been a joke that we had in the band. “You can't touch my stuff. No, you can't,” you know.

David Lovering: I remember that the interactions between Charles or Kim speaking, that was just the tape rolling and Steve Albini didn't tell us, but just put it on, put it in with the mixes and I don’t know, it worked. It made it different. It made it a little more personal, I think, in some way. But that was something I think all Albini, just throwing it in there and surprising us.

Steve Albini: I was coming up with ideas for them on the spot. On reflection, in the end, I feel like some of those ideas are kind of intrusive. Things like, while the band was doing takes, the guide vocal microphones that Charles and Kim had, those were being recorded because their banter, their interaction was charming. So I just set up a quarter inch machine and started recording their talkback mics and those little conversational snippets ended up being edited into the record. And that was another bright idea of mine that they acquiesced to. And again, I felt weird about it at the time, but it also, in the end, it seemed to validate itself.

Joey Santiago: The banter between Charles and Kim on this album. It's very unique. I don't think I've heard of a band ever doing that, but he always had a DAT machine, digital audio tape, this thing that just kept going in the background. You know, those cassettes are cheap, so he just records and yeah, he put that in. I thought it was funny, you know. And sometimes you can't get the reference because he's talking to a microphone. There's not really a dialogue per se. You're just hearing one side of the story. So that's kind of surreal.

David Lovering: I think it sounded cool. It was kind of interesting. I think that idea, I don't think anyone complained or there wasn't any, I don't think there was any discussion on it. It was just, “Yeah this is pretty neat.” And plus again, you know, we're a baby band with a producer and it was, you know, “You what you're doing” (laughs).

Steve Albini: Over time, like those little conversational snippets started to weigh on me. Like, I felt like the band were constantly having to answer for some stupid gimmick that I had hung on their record. And I think it shows a lot of grace on their part that they don't hate me intensely for it (laughs).

“Vamos”

David Lovering: I know, “Vamos” was done on Come On Pilgrim, and then we did it again for Surfer Rosa. I think a few songs I think were carried over for Surfer Rosa. “Vamos,” I think along with “Nimrod's Son” and “Ed is Dead.” I think those three were kind of the core songs that we played around Boston a lot that were fun to play and I think they represented the Pixies a lot as far as that music. I think that was very definitive for what we were.

Joey Santiago: Yeah, Ivo wanted to re-record it. That's a weird one to re-record. Perhaps maybe he saw us live and, you know, wanting to get that feel of the live thing. Yeah, “Vamos, “those quick little slidey things. It's fun. It was fun to do, you know. My fingers have gone through some burn marks at times, if I don't do it properly. I get a burn mark on it and it's pretty permanent. Yeah that's the song that gives me the callouses.

Steve Albini: On the song, “Vamos,” for example, he did a solo that was conventionally a bunch of quick slurred notes, and they'd already released that song and I suggested that they do an extended version of it where the solo could be extrapolated on. And we could do like a weirder and more perverse version of the solo. So when they got to the solo section of the song, they just extended that by many iterations. And Joey did many, many extemporaneous variations on his playing style where he was like making noises and chirpy sounds and various effects on his guitar. And then on playback, they made a little menu of the parts that they liked the best and we edited the solo together.

Joey Santiago: So we spliced a lot of things up, you know, made weird noises. I threw tennis balls at it, at the guitar, you know, made scraping sounds. I was just trying not to make it sound like a guitar. It's very random. I don't know what I do, you know, it just, whatever it is, is an anti-guitar solo.

That was Kim's goldtop guitar. And then she wanted it back. I think she was getting very concerned that I was gonna ruin it on “Vamos,” cause that solo on “Vamos,” I kind of go shit house on and yeah, rightfully so. I have a special guitar for “Vamos” that I could kind of ruin, you know, not ruin, I don't really ruin them, but you know, they're gonna get physically abused.

David Lovering: When Joe plays a solo during “Vamos,” it’s fun because I think it's entertaining for us. If Joe feels like he's gonna have fun that night, it's entertainment. You just sit there and just watch. Yeah. I'm gonna try not to watch, but I'll be watching what he's doing and what's interesting about it is, you know, “Vamos” is four, depending on Joe’s solo, it could be five minutes long. That's the song. And when he's doing that, I'm just, I'm just doing this (plays drumbeat on table). I've had so many people look at me, even the band like, “Oh, it must be killing you. You know, you gotta keep doing that, keep doing that.” But the thing is, “Vamos is one of the most easy songs to play. Cause even though it's like this (plays drumbeat), I can't explain it. It's just like a halftime, I could just keep going all day with that. And it's so, it's very easy to play “Vamos” and it's probably one of my favorite songs to play.

Joey Santiago: I think I put too much pressure on myself to do that, you know. Yeah, I put too much pressure into it. Right now I'm trying to find something else that I could do to the guitar that I haven't done. You know, I used to put it on a guitar stand. So it would be truly a guitar solo, you know. And I tell the lighting guy, “Don't even like light me, just light the guitar.” And I could make it feedback, you know, play with the modulation, tremelo, my wah and you can do a whole slew of things with that thing, you know, and it's a guitar solo.

Steve Albini: The concluding part of the solo was done as a tape collage where he literally just made random sounds with his guitar on quarter inch tape, and we did another little editorial listen, and I remember Kim having like a stenographer's pad that had nicknames for each of the sounds and the order in which she thought they should appear. Like, “This one should be a backward zip, and then the two piddly piddlys and then the ding dong, and then then the final kablam,” you know, that sort of thing. And so then that tape collage was assembled, or it wasn't a collage, it was sort of a sequence was assembled and then that was played onto the master as the concluding bit of the solo. So the bulk of the solo is Joey playing his guitar, there's a bit at the end, which is Joey playing his guitar on a quarter inch tape, which was then assembled into a collage and burned onto the tape in lieu of a live performance.

David Lovering: When we redid “Vamos,” we did the whole song and then we had to, I forget what we were doing, an edit or something, but he had erased the entire end of “Vamos” while we were in the studio. So it was going up to a point where Joe's solo was, and then it just disappeared, it was gone. So we had to, I think we played it again or he found another old mix or something like that because the other one was missing and we spliced them together. So we spliced that part, which was missing to that. So if you listen intently to the Surfer Rosa “Vamos,” and you're sitting there and you listen, you're gonna hear at one point the frequency goes up. It's like, (sings) “pfft,” and that's where the edit is, and it's just the end of the song. But it's just an interesting Pixies thing that happened in the studio.

Steve Albini: So there were two takes of the song. There was one take that was the proper take, and then there was a take that was just them reiterating the solo vamp for Joey to solo over. So the final master was a multi-track edit, which was the bulk of the song from the original take. Then the solo section, which was spliced in, there's one kind of interesting thing, if you listen carefully to the solo section, the song is in, I wanna say the song is in 4/4, but because of the way that the edit worked out with the little extemporaneous noises that Joy was doing, there's one measure in the middle, which is in six beats instead of four. And that sort of inverts the rhythm that David was playing. So like the rhythm is going along normally, and then there's this one bar that has two extra beats in it. Then the rhythm is inverted from there until the end of the song. Then that's just a byproduct of me doing the splicing, probably unintentionally. Although I remember David bringing it to our attention and everybody listening to it and saying, “Yeah, no, that's fine.” And then the coda of the song, like the outro of the song was spliced on to the end of this assembled solo section.

Joey Santiago: When we record, there's always banter going on. There's other things going on. You know, we just don't say, “1, 2, 3, 4.” That's not all we do in the studio. We have fun. We make light of things, we talk. So it's good to hear that, it is really good to introduce us as a band that has fun.

Steve Albini: I had been rebelling against the conventions of album presentation. Like all the songs are short, neat little packages that are separated by three seconds of silence. And you know, you have your hits up front on side A, and then you put the trash on side B. Like there are conventions of the structure of an album that I was kind of bristling at, and one of them was this idea of having the little silences between the songs. I liked the idea of having a bridge from one song to the next, and there were several records that I made during that period that embodied that. There's a Pussy Galore record, there's a Slint record, and this Pixies record that all have these little interludes or interstitial moments between songs or linking songs together, or songs that segue one into the other, things like that. That was a conceit that I brought with me and applied to the band. You know, the more time away from something you have about something like that, the more you think about other implications of it. And it made me feel like I was trying to claim authorship of some aspect of that record by insinuating myself into these decisions and choices and sort of themes on the record. And I grew very uncomfortable with that and one of the things that sort of spurred what I consider a maturation of my work practices as an engineer, and I feel like I have made better records since by removing myself more from the creative decisions involved in making the record.

David Lovering: The banter that was going around that was being recorded, had no idea, or you wouldn't think at the time that was gonna be content, but it ended up being. And yeah, I don't know, it makes Surfer Rosa quite interesting, I think. And at least during the 30 year and maybe the 35 year anniversary, we're trying to do it verbatim. We're trying to have that discussion, you know, to just, to make it exactly like it is. So, it's fun to do that.

“I’m Amazed”

Joey Santiago: (sings guitar riff) “I'm Amazed,” the guitar part that I have kind of slows down the song. “Dam, bam, bam.” Because everyone else is kind of like doing this fast furious thing, right?

David Lovering: “I’m Amazed,” was definitely an earlier song. And it's also, I've always said this over the years, it's I think a minute thirty? Somewhere around there, a minute, just under a minute something. And the way I explain, “I’m Amazed” is, “Well, if you like it, it'll leave you wanting more. If you don't like it, it's over before, before you know it.”

“Brick Is Red”

Joey Santiago: “Brick Is Red.” Steve Albini initially wanted that just like, “Let's just keep it as an instrumental. It's cool. It's also, that's a pentatonic scale. I know I make fun of the blues scale a lot, but that is just straight up. Every note is on the pentatonic. I hit all five of them (laughs). That's how I know. And it's that shape, it's the first shape you learn as a kid.

David Lovering: “Brick Is Red” is a fun one to play because of that (sings rhythm into stop). and then come back into it. It's a blast to play. It's another Pixies song that's quite different than some of the other ones, but it's Pixies.

Joey Santiago: I also like what I'm doing for the chorus on that. It's odd. I'll tell you how I did it. How I came up with that interval was because I was watching David Letterman and Will Lee did this sound like, like he was clearing his throat, but he did it unison, those two chords he was doing that. It's like, “Oh, that's cool. Let me just, you know, I'm not gonna make the sound on it,” but you know that interval over the chords. It's really good. It sounds like a question mark. The whole time was a question mark.

Steve Albini: My practice was always to do that thing as a group effort and to put the sequence together and play it through and see what people thought. So I'm sure we did that. And then the little interstitial things were either conceived of as the introduction to a song or the or an addendum at the end of a song. So those interstitial things traveled with the songs that they were already associated with. I remember really liking the record, feeling very satisfied when we finished the record. There was one long droney abstract song on there that was a kind of an experimental move that Charles was championing. And I remember having a, taking a phone call from Ivo where he said, I don't remember the name of the song. I want to say that it was called “Gouge My Eyes Out” or “Gouge Away” or something like that. I know that they had a song called “Gouge Away,” I don't know if that's the same song, but there was a long meandering droney song that was sort of interrupted one side of the record. It was like kind of an obstacle on one side of the record. I was kind of into that conceptually. I kind of liked the idea that you'd had interrupting the flow of an album, with this thing that people had to get through to get to the, the jazzier bits, you know. And I know that Charles had affection for that song just as a piece. And I remember getting a phone call from Ivo saying that, “he couldn't conceive of the album including that song.” Like he just thought it was such a scar. He wanted to put his foot down and say, “You can't put this song out.” And that seemed out of character for him. And it's also the kind of thing that if it were my band, I would've told him to go fuck himself (laughs). But yeah, I think in the end, the band did take that song off the record.

Joey Santiago: When he started mixing it and we were listening to it, we were there the whole time on the mix process. It was amazing. When we listened to it back in the speakers, it was just like, “We love it. I love this.”

David Lovering: Oh, it's fantastic. I remember, I mean, you definitely hear Surfer Rosa. We heard it in the studio, in the control room when we were recording it. It wasn't until months later when 4AD came to visit us and they brought the actual record and they brought it to Kim's apartment. So it was the first time actually seeing, and I think that we actually played Surfer Rosa on a record player. And that was a thrill because it was, it was so different. It was our first real record. I mean, when, when you think of, Come On Pilgrim, which was, 4AD put that out, but those were demo tapes that we did. We did a demo tape and that turned into a record. But now we went for the first time into a studio with a real producer and had a real, like Vaughn Oliver, I mean he did Come On Pilgrim as well, but he designed this crazy cover for Surfer Rosa. We were just, you know, stunned looking at it, it was something else. It was a big, big, big treat.

Joey Santiago: You know, speaking for myself, I'm also thinking like, “I hope we piss some people off for this one.” You know, in a sense, like, “Why didn't we think of this?” You know, those moments, you know, like it could be anything, inventions, a jacket, a tire, whatever. Well, you know, it's too late for the tire (laughs). But why do I think of this? Why didn’t I think of that?

Steve Albini: You know, I can't credit any one record as being pivotal really for me, but I mentioned that they were one of the first bands that I worked on who weren't already friends or associates. So that marked a kind of a development for me in terms of my professionalism as an engineer, not having to merely rely on the people who were already in my Rolodex, you know? And I know that that record did catch the ear of other people, who then contacted me because they liked the sound of that record. So I'm grateful for that. You know, on a base level of getting more work out of it, which seems kind of cheap, but I do appreciate that. When they first started to become more well known in the U.S., a lot of people in underground circles were suspicious of them. They were a bit naive about the workings of the music industry, I guess is the way you'd put it. And they seemed very credulous and I talked about that a little bit with respect to me influencing the album by making suggestions and them acceding to all of my suggestions. I wrote some rather glib and unflattering things about that in a fanzine in the immediate aftermath of that record, and I'm ashamed of the way I treated them. They didn't deserve that.

Every now and again, I have cause to hear the Pixies album that I worked on in context somewhere, like I'm in a bar and a song will come on, or I'm watching a movie and a song will come on, and I think it's a better record than I thought it was at the time. At the time, I had all of these like conflicting intellectual perspectives on it, and I couldn't just listen to it for its effect. And now when I hear it as a finished record, I think it sounds very good and I think the band sounds very good and I don't find a lot to criticize.

David Lovering: Surfer Rosa was, I think just another step in where we were, as the Pixies. I mean, we started out with Come On Pilgrim. Surfer Rosa, we were doing this and then kind of increases in popularity and I think Surfer Rosa was the one that really opened us up to Europe and the rest of the world. I think people became more aware of Surfer Rosa and because of that it just made us more of a working band and in popularity as well. And it just afforded us the opportunity to do Dolittle and Bossanova and Trompe le Monde and then keep going on. It's a joy to play it because all those early records are like riding a bike. They're kind of in there. It's unlike a new song and new songs I know and you can play them and stuff like that, but those old ones like riding a bike, it's almost like second nature. You can just go on autopilot and not think about a thing, which is nice, and that's what Surfer Rosa can do. I think more so than Dolittle or even Trompe le Monde, or even Bossanova or any album later, they're just, they're more built into us.

Joey Santiago: We got lucky. We got lucky because we worked hard being lucky (laughs). I guess now that we were talking about it, about Surfer Rosa, it really started us. That was it. Like I said, it'll always be in the back of our minds when we're writing songs. We will always have it. Do not worry (laughs). We will always have that sound, but we're not gonna do the same damn album again. We're not gonna make that. But you could hear it. You could hear it from our latest record. There's gonna be a hint of it. We always have to do a nod to it. It's like, “Don't forget what made us special, was that record.”

Outro:

Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about Pixies. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase Surfer Rosa. Thanks for listening.

Credits:

"Bone Machine"

"Break My Body”

"Something Against You"

"Broken Face"

"Gigantic" (Francis/Deal)

"River Euphrates"

"Where Is My Mind?"

"Cactus"

"Tony's Theme"

"Oh My Golly!"

"Vamos"

"I'm Amazed"

"Brick Is Red"

All songs written by Black Francis except “Gigantic” which was written by Mrs. John Murphy and Black Francis

Published by Rice and Beans Music

Recorded and Mixed at Q Division, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

Produced and Engineered by Steve Albini

Black Francis (Charles Thompson): Vocals, Guitars

David Lovering: Drums

Mrs. John Murphy (Kim Deal): Bass, Vocals

Joey Santiago: Lead Guitars

Episode Credits:

Intro/Outro Music:

“Bunny Love” by Charlie Don’t Shake from the album, 1.800.Charliedontshake

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam