Was ‘Crackity Jones’ from the Pixies song a real person?
Pixies were never ones to shy away from a strange and unsettling story in their lyrics. Lead singer and main songwriter Black Francis was fond of such tales of woes, and the more shocking the better as far as he was concerned. A cursory glance at some of the lyrics on their debut EP, Come On Pilgrim, will tell you that much.
And how about the “slicing up eyeballs” inspired by Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou on Doolittle opener ‘Debaser’? Or the true-crime inspiration for ‘Wave of Mutilation’, or the gleefully sinister ‘Gouge Away’? Well, top marks for shock humour across the board. But none of these tracks offers up something as utterly bizarre and left-field as ‘Crackity Jones’.
“Jose Jones, told me alone his story,” Francis begins, over a single, lo-fi guitar. “He got friends like Pacro Picopiedra La Muneca,” someone who, to this day, remains a mystery to most. The song explodes out of control as Francis cackles and howls his way through the two-word chorus, repeating the titular name in various shades of maniacal.
We later hear that even Francis is “afraid” of Jones, who he thinks will “cut” him if he stays in his company any longer. The character he’s describing also appears to have symptoms of schizophrenia, as Francis describes him as “chasing voices he receives in his head”. There isn’t much detail given here, but the perspective from which the story is told makes us wonder whether ‘Crackity Jones’ was someone Francis encountered in real life.
So, did he meet him?
In fact, not only did Francis encounter the character in the song, he had to live with him for six months in Puerto Rico. During his anthropology degree at the University of Massachusetts, he went to a university in the Puerto Rican city of San Juan for two semesters. He was holed up in an all-male dormitory on his own for the first month, waiting for his roommate to arrive.
When he did, Francis was shocked by the person who greeted him. “He did have some mental health issues,” the singer told Phawker in 2010. The roommate seemed to have cut his own finger on purpose and began ranting and raving about Fred Flintstone, using the Spanish translation of the cartoon character’s name “Pedro Picapiedra”. A translation that Francis himself butchers in the song’s lyrics.
Francis soon noticed that his roommate was talking to someone who wasn’t there, too, as he was hearing voices inside his head. Voices that apparently gave rise to potentially threatening behaviour. Francis couldn’t leave his lodging, or “hospedaje” as he calls it in the song, soon enough to get away from the unstable young man he was sharing a bedroom with. This is why he refers to Puerto Rico as a “stinkin’ island” at one point in ‘Crackity Jones’.
And that name? “I just made it up,” Francis has claimed. So there was no one called Jose ‘Crackity’ Jones in reality. Just the all-too-real character behind that suitably unhinged moniker, who maintains his right to anonymity to this day.
