College radio and remaining quirky: How The Rolling Stones led to the sound of the Pixies
When talking about those bands that reshaped the bedrock of rock without making much of a fuss on the charts, you’re really talking about the Pixies, whose influence spanned way beyond Boston, their brand of artistic rock becoming the soundtrack to Britpop, Nirvana, and in most student dorm rooms throughout the 1980s and ’90s.
Ironically enough, that’s where the band got their start, as Charles Thompson, also known as the vocalist Black Francis, met guitarist Joey Santiago at UMass Amherst University, and they kept to their roots. In an early interview, Black Francis explained how they stayed close to their peers while first getting their music out, saying, “Yeah…cause you can’t compete with the Stones starting out, so your first reaction is to go to college radio or underground radio”.
To keep his target audience engaged, the Pixies needed to speak their language, because, as Francis put it, “In order to present your otherwise normal pop songs to that audience you gotta just skew them a little…so it is a little bit intentional, I guess, to remain quirky”.
Their early work doesn’t suggest a master plan to evoke eccentricity, but the band hit the ground running as something different. Brash, peculiar, unpredictable, they straddled the surf rock you listen to while smoking up your mate’s dorm as much as they kept it punk and abrasive.
Their abstract, cryptic lyrics kept it surreal, and truly innovative: “We’re not avant-garde or anything like that, but it’s a lot easier to be esoteric than to appeal to a large amount of people and still be good. So, until we get really good at our quirkiness, I mean, really good at being good for 10,000 people, it’s better to just sort of be a little bit odd,” Francis offered sagely.
Although Thompson kept his humility with respect to the legends who came before, it’s quite a feat to have been so legendary to someone like Kurt Cobain. The songwriting prodigy openly admitted that their historic album Nevermind was Nirvana’s attempt at “ripping off the Pixies,” extending their music’s influence far beyond what was initially just a college radio stint.
Although the Pixies’ frontman was outspoken in his hope to one day becoming comparable with The Rolling Stones, the pioneers of British hard rock were making quite a different revolution on their side of the pond. While the Pixies were the moody teen kind of puberty, making eclectic surrealism and alternative indie, Mick Jagger’s boys were making blues punk, and sexy.
The Pixies’ later work gets a bit more into the grit of hard rock, with their 2022 album Doggerel sounding much more like something the Stones would make.
Thompson’s layered guitar and textured vocals in the album’s song ‘Dregs of the Wine’ are quite reminiscent of Jagger’s husky melodies, and warmly represent a full-circle moment in which the Bostonian rocker could finally dare say the Pixies can compete with the Stones.
