Pixies / Surfer Rosa (Rough Trade, 1988)

 

The Pixies will be our Stones: the music we thrilled to as kids that ends up marking time between floors in elevators before we're forty. My cohort is hardly the first generation to find the anthems of our youth reduced to background music in increasingly less hip restaurants, but that doesn't lessen the sting, does it? One of my earliest music listening memories comes from an eighth grade spring when I gathered with my childhood friends John and Brent in John's bedroom and we put on my newly purchased copy of Doolittle and had our minds blown by his shitty boombox speakers pouring out "Debaser" at the best volume it could manage. Then just the other day I heard another song from that record wafting from the yuppie-cave sub-Adobe Grill hellhole around the corner from my apartment. The kind of place where everyone is over fifty and in sandals and the food sucks but nobody cares because their taste buds were the first thing to decay when soul rot set in. The Pixies in the 2010s—music to eat your decrepit enchilada by.

Do we just have to take it? Or should we let it drive us to music that's just too difficult to be played in an eatery? I doubt my friends who love Glenn Branca worry about hearing him in coffee shops anytime soon.

 

Surfer Rosa came a bit later for me in my Pixies chronology. Probably after Bossanova, an album that confused me at the time because it's space-rock production sounded like such a departure from Doolittle. In Surfer Rosa, though, I could see the rawness that had been smoothed away on the subsequent release. It helped define for me the band's trajectory, especially after I eventually heard Come On Pilgrim. (To this day I have never owned Trompe le Monde, or even heard it in its entirety.) As my inclination was always toward polish, it took me a bit longer to really get into SR, but I recall quite fondly a vacation afternoon in a Jersey shore motel when I got stuck on "Brick is Red" and listened to it at least twenty times in a row. I used to bring my CDs down to the shore in their jewel cases so I could look at the booklets, and worried that my mother would flip out about the topless lady on the booklet cover. (You chuckle, but this was the woman who just a few years earlier had made me return the cassette of Pearl Jam's Ten I'd won at a boardwalk game booth after she found out the lyrics included swear words. The booth guy looked at me like I was a sad asshole, which I surely was.)

This record came out in March 1988 in the UK on 4AD, and was imported to the US until August when Rough Trade released it here. I can't technically call this a Project 90s record for obvious reasons, though it was interchangeable in my boombox with the usual grunge suspects. Still, I'm guessing given the 1988 date that there's a bunch more of these kicking around than what came later; we hadn't quite hit the height of the CD era, and I'd imagine Rough Trade was game for printing more vinyl that any of the majors would just a few years later. The price bears it out, too, reasonable in comparison to some of the key Project 90s acquisitions.


A great example here of why a cover that works on vinyl sometimes needs to be reconfigured for CD. The printed lyrics for "Oh My Golly!" are a wonderful touch that would've been reduced to illegibility on a disc booklet, and so 4AD wisely cropped them for that issue. Plus it makes the uniqueness of the vinyl release that much cooler.

I don't pull my Pixies records out too much anymore; spinning this was the first time I've listened to Surfer Rosa in at least five years. Still love it, but it's edges feel sanded down by time now, and by the widening of my range of music experience. Or maybe they've just been swallowed up by the fruit of their influence.