Pixies: Classic or Dud

answering machine, while we're (you're) talking Pixies and Nirvana, how do you rate Husker Du?

I like the Huskers better than both, I only use Nirvana as an example because they'd always talked about ripping off the Pixies' soft-loud-soft dynamic -- Nirvana's just as dated, if not more so. FTR I don't dislike the Pixies at all, I really like a lot of their songs -- was just kind of wondering why they tend to get more recognition than groups like Husker Du or The Mats or whoever from that era.

it's probably because they like un chien andalou and the mats didnt

can't deny they have loads of great guitar riffs. they got more and more cloying as they went along but their songwriting may have gotten better.

wondering why they tend to get more recognition than groups like Husker Du or The Mats

I feel like this has gone in circles - when I was a teenager in mid-90s UK (so I wasn't "there" for Pixies or the Replacements, but while I was too young to see Nirvana live I was at least of record-buying age when Nevermind broke, so they were a big deal to me), Husker Du and the 'Mats were bands you should have heard, whereas Pixies I barely remember hearing anything about until Death To... came out

(and I was already a Breeders fan and had some Frank Black solo stuff by then, so I dunno why it took me so long, really)

of course, being in the wrong country, I have no idea if the same applies in the US or anywhere else. but if Husker Du had put out a best-of in say '99 instead of SST disappearing and making their back catalogue hard to find maybe HD would be talked about more now? I dunno, I don't know enough young people to be aware of them not being talked about, I guess

It was the opposite for me, also teenager in early-mid 90s UK - the Pixies were quite popular but nobody I knew listened to Husker Du (although I had at least heard of them because of Sugar) and I hadn't even heard of the Replacements until I started using the internet to find out about music in the late 90s.

"pixies vs nirvana" is a strange argument, especially if you consider an assessment of their musicianship.. In either case, I don't hear musicians who fail to match exactly what their music calls for.. Santiago's surfer-guitar is just as essential to the Pixies as Grohl's thunder-drums were to Nirvana.

Nirvana's angst and guttural crunch sound extremely dated to me
It REALLY bothers me that newer guitar-based bands who play a bit louder than most immediately get pinned with a "90's revival" tag.

I think at this point of my life, half of my friends were born in the late 80's so I've grown accustomed to people saying dumb shit about 90's music.

even though lazy writers bring up the pixies' over and over and over in regards to nirvana, these two bands don't really sound very alike. at all!

yeah i agree, i'm not sure why they're being compared in the first place.

if Husker Du had put out a best-of in say '99 instead of SST disappearing and making their back catalogue hard to find maybe HD would be talked about more now?

this could be true.. I've heard a lot more IRL talk about Replacements and Husker Du over the past 3 years.

yeah i agree, i'm not sure why they're being compared in the first place.

Because Kurt himself said many times over that all he was trying to do was "ripoff the Pixies"!

Okay, it was specifically in reference to "Teen Spirit", but:

“I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it. When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily that I should have been in that band — or at least a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.”

i mean, i *know* why they're compared -- because cobain said he was "ripping off the pixies" when he wrote "teen spirit." and i dunno, maybe that's the closest they got, but a quick listen to either of these bands should make it clear they were very very different.
xp

i mean, are there other nirvana songs that sound remotely like the pixies?

xpost I think that was just an abbreviated way for him to say "ripping off the pixies + 20 other bands"

The key element they borrowed from Pixies was the loud/soft thing IMO.

why they tend to get more recognition than groups like Husker Du or The Mats or whoever from that era.
best guess -- and it's just a guess, but an educated one because i was in high school during pixies heyday (and caught the tail end of the replacements, but they were making super adult music at the end and pixies weren't) -- everyone i knew had doolittle in 1989, even borderline normal people, and that is mostly because of "here comes your man" iirc

Not really and I get what you mean, I was just pointing out that that quote led to a lot of the "lazy" comparisons. They do use the quiet-LOUD thing in quite a few songs though.

(xpost)

"Francis Farmer" sounds like Pixies IMO

more so than Teen Spirit does

yeah i guess i can see that.
not making a big deal out of this -- the pixies should be listed among any "influences" nirvana might've had. but in terms of sound/vibe nirvana has more in common with, say, black sabbath than black francis and co.

I pulled out "Come on Pilgrim" a couple of months ago and it sounds brilliant, as fresh as it did when I got it (someone is doing surf music!) - I have such good memories of that period.

When Cobain says their breakthrough song was almost not included (allegedly) because he thought it sounded too much like the Pixies, then the link to the Pixies becomes direct. Same with Husker Du and the Pixies, for that matter. The Pixies rarely sound like Husker Du, but there are more than a few resemblances when you pay attention (compare "Wave of Mutilation" to "Green Eyes," say). One of my fave Black Francis quotes was that when he was in school, he only had something like five records, and three of them were Husker Du.

Hey, Musician magazine, 1992 (other interview subject was Mould):

MUSICIAN: Let's talk about how you both constructed such drastic style. Real huge sounds.
FRANCIS: I grew up in L.A. when bands like Black Flag were around, but I never listened to them. I was buying used records for 50 cents, and didn't socialize, really; I was lost in headphone-land. I did get to see a Hüsker Dü show when Joey and I dropped out of school and said, « Let's start one of these groups. » And I saw an excellent show by the Hüskers at the Paradise in Boston, where you did « Ticket To Ride » for an encore. Fantastic show, so I knew that Hüsker Dü was a tape I needed to get. I had those albums, a couple of Iggy albums, one Captain Beefheart and a tiny studio apartment. That handful of stuff got me through that particular season. I used to play « Green Eyes » [from Hüsker Dü's Flip Your Wig] over and over. A classic chord progression. Same thing with Iggy's « The Passenger » - one of those repeat songs. At the start of the Pixies I only had four or five albums and the Hüskers were two or three of them.

The Pixies' 'Caribou' owes a lot to Hüsker Dü's 'Find Me'. Chord sequences, Black Francis's vocals mimicking both Bob Mould's fury vox plus Grant Hart's more ethereal backing vocals. Both great songs but for me, it's all about Hüsker Dü.

CRAIG MONTGOMERY (Nirvana soundman)
We drove down to L.A. from Seattle to film the “Teen Spirit” video and do some shows. And I remember being in the van, and Kurt was in the back and he played me “Teen Spirit” on the boom box. And he asked me, “Do you think it sounds too much like the Pixies?”

Nothing more sublimely odd to me than Pixies being cited as the "influence" intermediary between Husker Du and Nirvana...

I agree with tylerw about Nirvana & Pixies being not that similar, though Kurt pays homage everywhere: the oft-cited similarity between SLTS & Gouge Away (the rolling bassline during the quiet verses of SLTS is an obvious lift), enlisting Albini for In Utero, assorted moments of angular ferocity all over the Geffen albums (Drain You is not soft-loud, but it sounds kinda Pixies to these ears)...

I've written this before, maybe even earlier in this thread, but I think the whole idea that 'soft verse-loud chorus' was a formula that Pixies came up with and Nirvana stole doesn't really hold up. Yes, Pixies used it, but they never banked on it, certainly never relied on it, and in their hands it never codified into a 'formula': none of these things can be said about how Nirvana used 'soft-loud.' I mean, they use it in 'Gigantic' but then use the exact opposite formula for 'Where is My Mind' where the most electric-loud rock element in that song--Santiago's seesawing lead--drops out completely during the chorus. Don't use it for "Here Comes Your Man", kind of use it in "Monkey" but there--even though the tension builds up in the verses to be let off in the choruses--the real dynamic movement is the way that the verses get progressively louder and how that contrasts with the melodically-fixed chorus (ie the loudest part of that song is not in the chorus but the "AND GOD IS SEVEN!" part in the 3rd verse).

Which brings me to my main point, which is that even though Pixies used 'soft-loud' frequently and with great effect (Gouge Away, Tame, Into the White), it was just one element among many in their experiments with structure--their desire to weld together what the SPIN Alternative Record Guide referred to as 'raw' and 'cooked' punk, or, as Simon Reynolds put it, 'luscious' sounds with 'haggard' ones--and they were just as apt to reverse it, to offset it with weird elements, or to jettison it altogether.

I feel a more common signature element of Pixies music was their fondness of the lopsided musical phrase, which is why I think the Toadies sound more like Pixies than Nirvana ever did...

Nirvana had way more metal/hard rock in their blood than the Pixies.

i always thought they sounded like the b52s with some hispanic chordage & the sexual content you would only at the time find on a prince record. as a teen i found that exciting. some hispanic chordage.
i love albini's oft-quoted typically trolly statement. not sure just how "superior" or different big black were - verse chorus verse songs with singing. how quaint!
for me it all went to pot with that awful JAMC cover & songs about UFOs, although i love love love alec eiffel & that 1st frank black solo record

U-Mass and Alec Eiffel are pretty rad but to me the real keeper off Trompe is Sad Punk...

Of all their A+ great songs, I think the relatively minor "Letter To Memphis" might now be my favorite.

Yes, but for me that song is inextricable from "Palace of the Brine" and "Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons". If I want to listen to one of them, I have to listen to all of them.

i think trome le monde is pretty great. it's different from what came before, maybe not enough kim deal, but i like or love every song. and yeah, it's got a great flow, feels like a big long song suite.

*trompe*

All of Trompe Le Monde is awesome fuiud

I turn it off after Motorway to Roswell...

For real, this whole interview c. Trompe is great:

http://aleceiffel.free.fr/bf_bm.html

lol that's funny about them having "Ratt or Ozzy" next door to their rehearsal space. makes perfect sense now!

I should really pick up Trompe Le Monde sometime

i really do think the reason it's less loved is because kim deal doesn't supply a lot of backing vocals -- or at least not as many as on previous albums.

I turn it off after Motorway to Roswell...

Me too!

In my case, I was super super super obsessed with Surfer Rosa and Doolittle and didn't get the same level of POW BANG AWESOME enjoyment from the subsequent albums (except for "Planet of Sound"), so I never got them. 20 years later, I'd probably like them a lot more.

yeah it'll probably sound fresher. i've pretty much had pilgrim/surfer rosa/doolittle inscribed in my brain, so bossanova and trompe are the ones i reach for more these days.
turning it off after "motorway" -- you've only got two minutes to go! and i like the playfulness of "navajo know"

I usually sort of forget that it's there though.

Trompe le Monde is my favourite Pixies album, haters = crazy. Though as I said upthread I wasn't there at the time, so maybe favouring the widescreen epic (ugh) over the pow-bang-rush is a luxury of not having been there at the time to build up an image of the band and be disappointed over the course of several years, of course.

yeah, i got into the pixies pretty much right after they broke up, so all of the albums were treats, didn't have the chance to be "disappointed" by any of them.

I've never listened to planet of sound I don't think

navajo knows ruins the ending of a perfect album

Seriously, all these albums are so full of so many good ideas. I remember another story of the record label taking issue with the songs on the last album being so short, and Black Francis basically handing them back a Buddy Holly best of and noting how if all of the songs on there were 2.5 minutes, then it was OK if his were, too.

I've never listened to planet of sound I don't think

navajo knows ruins the ending of a perfect album

Wait, what?

oh wait I thought planet of sound was an album

that was a poorly-formed "post" on my part, sorry

oh I see - in my mind 'planet of sound' was an imaginary pixies album that had the bossanova cover art because it looks like a planet, do you see