The band Dave Grohl thought could have had Nirvana’s fame: “We were blown away they never got big”
There are no rules when it comes to pop music. Even though some bands might get all the glory for changing the world of music overnight, there’s a good chance that they’re only playing what they’ve heard in their record collections and are riding the coattails of acts that never got to hit the big time. So, while Dave Grohl was more than happy to expose the world to alternative music with Nirvana, he admitted that Pixies should have probably been the true pioneers of the genre’s mainstream breakthrough.
At the same time, Pixies are just one in a long line of great alternative musicians coming out of the 1980s. Most of this stuff would have been considered either “left of the dial” or, at the very least, “college radio” in the US, but even though acts like The Jam and The Smiths were lighting up the hit parade overseas, Pixies were the closest that most people got to discovering an “underground” act.
While Grohl readily admitted his Pixies influence, there was also a little band named REM from Georgia that Nirvana wouldn’t have existed without. Cobain was never shy to heap praise on Michael Stipe’s music, and when discussing their decision to go pop on Nevermind, he recalled that his first attempt at a pop tune, ‘About A Girl’, was to directly lift from REM.
If we’re talking purely from a musical perspective, though, Pixies are probably the purest version of what Nirvana was capable of. Yes, Frank Black had a style all his own, but when looking at the way that they constructed their songs, most of Nirvana’s greatest moments came from them copying their shifting dynamics.
Just listen to ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’ from Doolittle. It’s nowhere near as hooky as ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, but when you hear the band start soft and come crashing in on the chorus, it’s nearly identical to how Nirvana used dynamics to get their foot in the door once they signed to a major label.
When asked if Pixies could have taken Nirvana’s place in rock history, Grohl even wholeheartedly agreed, saying, “We were all kind of blown away that they never made it big. There are songs on their last album that really could have been radio songs. They could have been MTV’s new favourite band, but they weren’t.”
They didn’t get that response in their time, but it’s not like all the alternative kids didn’t go back to them. Despite only getting minor play on MTV, tracks like ‘Here Comes Your Man’ and ‘Where is My Mind?’ are the kinds of songs that would have absolutely killed had they been released in the era of Pearl Jam. But since the biggest name in the world at the time was Madonna, no VJ was going to touch this with a ten-foot pole.
While music seems to evolve every day, Pixies is one of those legendary acts that should have never been lost in the shuffle. Had they decided to stay the course and keep everything fairly tight, though, who knows? Maybe we would be talking about Frank Black like people talk about Cobain today.
