Pixies' Doolittle turns 30: Five of the album's weirdest references, explained

Seminal: Black Francis of Pixies
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Jochan Embley11 April 2019

Doolittle — the superbly strange, surreal and shocking second album from Pixies — turns 30 on April 17.

Arriving little over a year after their ground-shattering debut Surfer Rosa, it was a collection of songs from a band at their creative peak, with 15 seminal tracks swept up in a 38-minute whirlwind.

It struck a strange contrast. The album’s production, overseen by Gil Norton, was markedly more polished than the rudimentary coarseness of Steve Albini’s studio work on Surfer Rosa, making the Pixies sound more palatable to a mainstream audience than ever before.

But lyrically, things reeled even further towards the weird. Frontman Black Francis tore through a maniacal songbook of creepy, lurid tales, influenced by everything from 1920s films to hideous mass murders.

Here, we’ve picked out five of the darkest and most peculiar references on Doolittle, and explained the stories behind them.

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Surrealist cinema in Debaser

It’s the very first reference on the album and probably the most famous. In many ways, Un Chien Andalou, the surrealist masterpiece by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali that inspired the opening song on Doolittle, is a fine counterpart to the album as a whole — it is alive with grizzly, open-ended imagery and narrative lurches, somehow repulsive and alluring at the same time.

As a student, Francis was a fan of the silent film, and used it to coax himself into writing Debaser. The references are all over the song, from Francis’ garbled pronunciation of the title — he apparently thought it sounded “too French”, so added a Spanish slant to it — to that famous line, inspired by a gruesomely iconic scene: “Slicing up eyeballs/ I want you to know.”

A Charles Manson joke in Wave of Mutilation

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Memories of Charles Manson, the murderous cult leader who carved a swastika into his own forehead, and family-friendly doo-woppers the Beach Boys seem irreconcilable — but the two actually share a sinister connection. The story is one of chance: while driving through California in the summer of 1968, the band’s co-founder Dennis Wilson stopped to pick up two hitchhikers. He dropped them off at their destination and continued on his journey.

As it turned out, these two young women were members of Manson’s cult, and the encounter eventually led to Wilson and Manson meeting. The former become enthralled by the latter, gravitating towards his enigmatic persona — one which would of course only fully reveal its deathly tendencies later on. The pair even worked together on music, but Wilson later renounced Manson entirely upon learning the full evil of his crimes.

Knowing all we do now, the fact that these two people came together seems inconceivable — but it’s true. Check out the song Cease to Exist by Charles Manson, and then listen to Never Learn Not To Love by the Beach Boys, released in 1968 — the similarities, at least lyrically, are eerily similar. Francis clearly saw a dark humour to it all, and made the opening line of Wave of Mutilation: “Cease to resist/ Giving my goodbye.”

Japanese suicide pacts in Wave of Mutilation

As if a world-famous pop star being misled by a bloodthirsty cult leader wasn’t a heavy enough reference to pack into the first six words of Wave of Mutilation, the very next line arrives with more. The lyric “Drive my car into the ocean” might read like something fanciful or hyperbolic, but there’s a grim story behind it.

As Francis explained in a 1997 interview, the line is “about the phenomenon where Japanese businessmen were putting their whole family in the car and driving off the dock.” It seems more likely that he was referring to a one-off incident, linked to the greater phenomenon of shinjū, roughly translated as “love suicide”. It’s the term used to refer to groups of people collectively taking their own lives, usually bound by love or familial ties. It has a particular prominence in historic Japanese culture, with the word appearing in a play all the way back in the 18th century.

A crazy former roommate in Crackity Jones

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As a student, Francis spent time in Puerto Rico as part of an exchange programme. It was not a success. His inability to speak Spanish meant he struggled to get a job and lived penniless for weeks. After scraping together some money, he crawled up 50 storeys of an apartment block and lived with someone he described as his “weird, psycho, gay roommate”.

Whether this newfound companion was actually called José Jones, as suggested in the first line of the song, remains unclear, but what follows is one of the most unhinged tracks on the album, both lyrically and sonically. Amid the clattering punk of the band, Francis paints a picture of his roommate, a person who loves the Flintstones, but who also hears voices in his head and might be prone to violence: “I’m moving out of this hospedaje/ I’m afraid you’ll cut me, boy.” It's little wonder Francis decided to move out after only a few months.

Biblical lusting in Dead

Religion was a formative part of Francis’ adolescence — his mother and stepfather were fervent followers of an evangelical church — and it's something that bled into his songwriting. The final track on the album, Gouge Away, tells a twisted story of Samson and Delilah, but on Dead, it’s all rather more sordid. It tells recounts the biblical tale of David and Bathsheba, seen through the lens of the king’s lust. The general story is: David sees Bathsheba, falls in love, realises she’s married to Uriah, impregnates her, engineers the killing of Uriah, marries Bathsheba and lives not-so-happily ever after. The whole thing is told in trademark Francis style, crude and ludicrous, culminating with the repeated line: “Uriah hit the crapper.”

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