Why did rock music sputter out after the 1990s? I don’t know the answer, but the anti-commercial pose that became de rigueur with punk and extended into the era of college radio and alternative bands couldn’t have helped.
Consider this song by the Pixies, the closest thing they ever had to a hit in the U.S., where it made No. 3 in the Alternative Airplay chart in 1989 (they were far more popular in the UK).
Written by frontman Black Francis (né Charles Thompson IV) in his mid-teens, band members scorned it as “the Tom Petty song” and only reluctantly recorded it for the demo tape they shopped around to record companies. It was left off their first two albums because it was “too pop.” It was considered as a stand-alone single, but the record company was afraid of alienating the band’s audience. When the band was recording “Doolittle,” Francis said he was embarrassed by the song but included it as a sop to producer Gil Norton, who loved it. And when it came time to make a video, the band refused to lip-synch — Francis and Kim Deal merely left their mouths open while the lyrics played. It was not put in heavy rotation.
Francis claims he was 14 or 15 when he wrote the tune, and his penchant for cryptic lyrics was already in evidence. “It’s about winos and hobos traveling on the trains, who die in the California Earthquake. Before earthquakes, everything gets very calm — animals stop talking and birds stop chirping and there’s no wind. It’s very ominous.” I never would have come up with that, but OK, if you say so.
Musically, it’s not ominous at all — as everyone involved with it noted, it’s pure pop, even if it’s from an unlikely source. I think that’s why people like the song despite all efforts to bury it. Color me nuts, but when an artistic movement takes the stance that selling its products is bad, it has pretty much doomed itself to oblivion.
Here’s the demo version from what was known as “The Purple Tape.”
As if to cement its place as a power pop standard, the tune was covered in 2000 by Teenage Fanclub.
