THE BOSTON TEA PARTY

A Pixies retrospect

by Gary Smith, producer of Come on Pilgrim

Literally a few days after conceiving the idea of Rock A My Soul fanzine, I decided to approach Gary Smith about doing an interview. I phoned him at Fort Apache in Boston and we agreed that I would send him a questionnaire and he’d return it with his answers.

I felt flattered when he took some of my questions as inspiration for the following article, which, I guess, is something of a first draft (be it eight years early) to the liner notes he contributed to the Death to the Pixies compilation.....

Fort Apache Studios was started in 1986 as the joint venture of four Boston engineers and producers: Joe Harvard, Paul Kolderie, Sean Slade and Jim Fitting.

Boston is a costly city in which to live and work, and commercial space is often prohibitively expensive. As a result, the four founders of Fort Apache, found an inexpensive warehouse space in Roxbury which is an economically depressed and crime-ridden area in the southwest of Boston.

I was in a band which was one of the first clients of the studio, and I immediately fell in love with the vibe of the place. Unlike other studios I had worked in, the Fort was incredibly rock. Just going there made one’s adrenaline surge and not just such a frightening place.

The studio itself was just a big cement room with a separate control room and about a million vintage guitars and amplifiers. I think it cost something like $9,000 to build the whole place, discounting all the sweat and effort of the four guys and their friends. All of us, engineers, producers and bands alike, had come out of the independent music movement of the late ‘Seventies, and for that reason the studio seemed particularly important to me.

It wasn’t (and it still isn’t simply a business; it was (and most often still is) one piece within the post-punk scene.

Unfortunately or otherwise, the band I was in was in its death-throes by the time Fort Apache got going. On 3 January, 1987, just months after recording our demos there, we played our last show, I left my job in architect Moshe Safdie’s office and I signed on as manager of the Fort.

Two albums had been made there: one by the Turbines, one by the Neat and a third was underway by Treat Her Right. All three were local bands on independent labels, though Treat Her Right’s $800 eight-track record ended up on RCA.

Sometime before I started working at the Fort, I had recorded the first demos for Throwing Muses, through which they got their deal with 4AD, and after which their career was more or less launched.

These demos were my first real production experience, and the Muses changed the way I looked at music for ever.

The amount of press coverage which met the demos in Boston and New York gave me some amount of credibility as an indie producer and, more importantly, a strong desire to produce again!

I saw every show the Muses did, except those few which happened while my band was on tour. Before one of those shows at the Rathakellar in Boston, I caught the support band’s soundcheck. I was completely floored by what I heard and when the whole thing stopped, and the freshfaced lead singer said, “You are the son of a motherfucker!” I knew this was not your average local music fare. This was The Pixies!

I had a couple of bashful words with them after the soundcheck and I watched their show from a spot right in front of the stage. Afterwards I talked to Charles Thompson and told him we had to do something together, and slipped him my phone number on a paper napkin.

A few days later I met with him (still not the Black Francis we all know and love) at a local breakfast place, and explained to him what I wanted to do: to record the songs, all the songs, inexpensively, but well enough to be released as an album if all else failed. This was my approach with the Muses the year before, and to this day that remains my biggest piece of advice to new bands: never waste any time, money or effort waiting for some A&R person to give you a break. Always make your own breaks.

After that meeting, my band went on its last American tour and from the road I sent Charles a postcard that said simply, “I won’t sleep until you guys are world famous!”

When I got back, I had Charles over for what I call my “Sing for your Supper” series, in which I record local musicians on my four-track in exchange for supper. Usually I get the better end of the deal.

On acoustic guitar in my living room, Charles played maybe twenty songs in varying degrees of completion. To date, it’s one of the most powerful things I’ve heard, and it was the first tape I played for Ken Goes on the way to a Throwing Muses gig. Also in the van was a reporter from Melody maker who, like Ken, was immediately enthralled. The Muses were some of The Pixies’ earliest fans with the exception of Ann Holbrook, who was their first manager.

Within two weeks I was n rehearsals with The Pixies in their practice space, and after about a month and six hundred bottles of beer and wine, we arrived at the Fort for our first sessions.

We did three days in a row, working twenty-four hours a day to save money. We recorded seventeen songs (eighteen if one counts the secret one I have stashed away!*). While it is true that much of the material was recorded live, most of the lead and acoustic guitars were overdubs, as were all the percussion, vocals and backing vocals.

The vocals were recorded in the empty warehouse space outside our studio, and were most often done on three tracks: one close mike and a stereo pair in the corners of the space. I had a thing against digital reverbs back then, so most of the ambience you hear on Come on Pilgrim is the actual ambience of that big room.

We took a week off before doing a three-day session of mixing. We were renting a TASCAM MS-16 sixteen-track machine by the day for these sessions, so it made sense to get the most out of it.

All told, about a thousand dollars were spent on the project, including printing costs, cassettes and beer.

In those six days we recorded and mixed eighteen songs, all of them characteristically short. Sequenced and tightened up, it was mind-blowing. Almost everyone who got a copy seemed to agree.

After hammering Ken Goes with Pixies propaganda for two and a half months, he committed to managing the band. Ken liked the tape as much as anybody.

I made a cassette insert and bad several hundred printed up, but unlike the widely circulated Throwing Muses demos two years earlier, The Pixies sessions were sent only to a few people in the industry, Ivo at 4AD among them.

I wasn’t surprised in the least that these recordings were released. In fact, proud though I was that Come on Pilgrim came out on 4AD, I couldn’t help but be disappointed that most of those recordings went off into oblivion.

Someday, somewhere, somebody will bootleg the whole thing and put it out with my blessing if not The Pixies’ (or 4AD’s, whom I assume own the tapes).

Ivo has a great ear for music, and I admire his ability to get the music to the people. And 4AD is probably the coolest record company in the world, but I sure do wish they’d release the whole thing, just as we made it.

It was almost two years until I worked with The Pixies again, and by then, Fort Apache had a new twenty-four track facility in Cambridge. To some extent, Come on Pilgrim helped to promote business at the studio, and our crowded calendar gave us reason to expand. By then, Joe Harvard was the owner of Fort Apache and, with the opening of the new place and his invitation, I became a financial partner.

This time the accommodations were considerably more swank and the neighbourhood undeniably more upscale. The financial possibility of the new place made it decidedly less punk if you know what I mean, but we tried to maintain the same atmosphere, albeit a little shined up, at the twenty-four track studio.

Winterlong was part of the sessions for Manta Ray and Dancing the Manta Ray. I started the sessions with Paul Kolderie engineering in January, but in the middle of a week of work, my grandmother died and I had to go back to Newport for the funeral.

It was a cold January weekend, cliched though that sounds, and I played through the rough mixes for Winterlong on my way to the cemetery. Consequently, the song still gives me a strange feeling.

In answer to you questions about the songs which Gil Norton has redone from those first sessions, I can only say that I enjoy most of what I hear.

Some of them might never have the same feel they had when we recorded them (Here Comes Your Man is a good example), but many songs benefit from Gil’s extraordinary production.

Gil has a much more sophisticated sense of the symphonic that I do, and the depth that he brings to his production is usually very successful.

In my work, I have a tendency to focus more on the naked spirit of what’s happening and do my best to get that spirit on tape. Often that’s enough. This is not to say that I don’t spend long hours on the arrangements and the performances, but rather that I quite like the bare bones approach to recording.

Most of the bans I work with, would suffer greatly from overproduction; so, I’m usually very cautious about how much goes on top of what the members of the band are doing.

This is usually the case with Blake Babies and Pylon, and most often true for the Muses as well. these bands are the antithesis of big slick music-biz product and no amount of meddling is going to make them different.

I don’t respect them for their mainstream pop appeal. Much to the contrary, they demonstrate that the ordinary and the simple are often the most extraordinary and profound contributions we can make.

As for The Breeders’ record. I worked some demos which I thought were quite good, but I assume Kim and Tanya through little of them. they not only scrapped the whole thing and moved on to work with Steve Albini, but also changed the entire direction of the music.

The versions which I worked on were very pop and very upbeat by comparison tot he versions which 4ad/Rough Trade released.

I’m still not sure which one I like more. Albini’s record is much moodier than the demos, and for that reason these times are much more better suited to the finished versions than the demos.

Kim turns out to be a very talented songwriter; a fact which gets unfortunately hidden in her work with The Pixies.

The next record promises to show off Tanya’s work, which has always been first rate.

* In a later conversation with Gary, he told me the eighteenth song from The Purple Tape was Watch What Your Doin’. In Andy Barding’s interview with Kim, he was unable to determine the track, but Rush (a Canadian stadium rock band) recorded a song with the same name on their first album in the ‘Seventies. Is it the same song?

Fort Apache holds Christmas parties, and in one from 1988 J Mascis from Dinosaur Jnr played a version of Gigantic with Kim and David. It’s no patch on the Pixies versions.

[Gary went on to manage Tanya’s band Belly.]

The running order of The Purple Tape: Levitate Me, The Holiday Song, I’ve Been Tired, Break My Body, Down to the Well, Rock A My Soul, I’m Amazed, Build High, In Heaven (The Lady in the Radiator Song), Caribou, Here Comes Your Man, Subbacultcha, Vamos, Broken Face, Nimrod’s Son, Isla de Encanta, Ed is Dead.

Reprinted from Rock a My Soul #1 (with additions by site author)