come on pilgrim

The Pixies made their propulsively pioneering premiere with the tantalizingly twisted teenage tension of this mini album drawn from their self made demo.  'Come On Pilgrim' started out as a seventeen song demo that the band recorded at Fort Apache studio in Roxbury, Massachusetts in March of 1987.  Studio owner Gary Smith produced the sessions with Black Francis (Charles Thompson) on guitar and lead vocals; Kim Deal (Mrs. John Murphy) on bass and vocals; Joey Santiago on lead guitar; and David Lovering on drums.  The band's manager Ken Goes was also the manager of the Throwing Muses and delivered the demo to the president of the British 4AD label, Ivo Watts-Russell.  Impressed with the power of the songs on the demo, he decided to remix eight of them for a mini album, rather than have the band re-record them.  

Francis admits:  "I hate to dumb it down too much, but basically I'm the guy who just shows up with the chord progressions, so obviously I'm going to play the chords, many times chunky as they typically are in rock music, and he is the "lead guitar player" so he is gonna play higher and more single note stuff. Sometimes he does a solo, and sometimes a repeated riff, a motif. So we start out from a sort of Joe Blow place…I'm the rhythm guitar player 'chugga chugga chugga' and he's the lead player 'reeneeneeneenee' you can reduce it all to that. That's not to say that we play in a conventional way, although sometimes we play a combination of really conventional stuff and oddball stuff. That's probably true about the Pixies in general. It sounds kinda normal, but there are subtle oddities going on. I would say that Joey is the 'unsung hero' of the Pixies...maybe not now but in the earlier days, a lot of magazines were personality driven and they wanted to talk about the grouchy lead singer, or the drunk bass player, and what's going on between those two...so our guitar player got left on the back burner. I think there are several things that Joey does though that has made his style stand out. He'll play something that's seemingly very simple, and his whole subtle touch just sort of makes it sounding classy and makes it pop out in the song."

Santiago recalls: "Back in the old days, I'd just record Charles on his acoustic, or the practices with a cassette tape, remember those things. Then I'd take it home and practice, and come up with my stuff."

Kim Deal had moved from Dayton, Ohio (where she played in clubs with her twin sister Kelley) with her husband John Murphy and saw an advertisement for a bassist that liked both Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul & Mary.  That was when she took up the instrument:  "The thought just excited me. That I could pick up this thing and go, ooh, it's got four strings! This one goes all the way up there! And all the way down there! I also liked the idea of making music that sounded as real as I could, without any frills."

'Come On Pilgrim' became a defining moment for alternative music.  Lowering says:  "In 'alternative', I can only classify it as being just different. We're different in some way and I think that being different is the key to anything and whether it be our song verses, loud verses, loud choruses, that sort of thing. As well as the chemistry of the band, I think plays a key part, how opposite we are of each other in our musical tastes. I think that's what really makes us different as far as the sound of it. All of us combined that's what really does it. The pixies have to be us four. That's it."

Francis considers: "When I started out I was very much into abstraction and very short songs, and a certain type of surreal thing in my songs...When you're young, you tend to try to be a more avant-garde type of guy, and when you do it long enough, you want to go where others have gone before and hold your own. You're not as embarrassed to embrace formulaic or highly stylized things. When you're young you're trying to avoid horrible cliché's and mediocre music, so the last thing you want to do is 'hey, let's do a country and western song'...you're all about breaking everything up. You do things for awhile, and you're less conscious of people thinking your dorky. I think you learn respect for some of the forms of music that will live on...The first Pixies stuff represents my earliest songwriting, and as they say, you have your whole life to write your first album, and six months to write your second, so the first two Pixies records represent a lot of the writing that started when I was a young teenager."






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'Come on Pilgrim'
full mini-album:




All songs by Black Francis except "Levitate Me" by Black Francis/Kim Deal/David Lovering/Jean Walsh

"Caribou" – 3:14
"Vamos" – 2:53
"Isla de Encanta" – 1:41
"Ed Is Dead" – 2:30
"The Holiday Song" – 2:14
"Nimrod's Son" – 2:17
"I've Been Tired" – 3:00
"Levitate Me" – 2:37




'The Purple Tape' 
full demo album: