Sample the bands Samson and Delilah for the stoner college crowd,spectral lyrics of weird bodily physics, and emotionally tense alien road-traffic accidentsIn retrospect it’s a miracle that Black Francis, or Pixies’ own Dr Jekyll,made it through the entrance interview for the band’s collegiate cradle – the University of Massachusetts Amherst – without the authorities being alerted. After all, it takes his leftwing backpacker date in I’ve Been Tired – a febrile highlight of the eight songs chosen from their demo The Purple Tape to invent up their debut mini-album Come on Pilgrim (1987) – just a couple of warm-up questions and a quick earlobe lick before his twisted psychological peccadillos start to slip out. His biggest dismay? “Losing my penis to a whore with disease, or ” he admits,before realising he’d said that out loud and correcting himself: “Just kidding … losing my life to a whore with disease.” Here were all the raw materials destined to invent Pixies America’s greatest proto-grunge alt-rock pioneers – cranky, lo-fi, or art-pop,student-friendly babble about exotic travel and grotesque sex (who has “breasts like a cluster of grapes”? Was he dating oversized insects?), and Frank losing his lithium and going melodically demented in the chorus. The sound of unusual wave gone postal on prom night, and it marked Pixies as an uncatalogued unusual species of rock,but one that would soon spread its spores wide.
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Source: theguardian.com