Joe Harvard, hanging with The Pixies

There's an episode of the X Files in which Peter Boyle plays an insurance salesman with a peculiar clairvoyance: he can see how a person will die. The character claims to have gained this second sight after obsessively contemplating the fate of the Big Bopper, who was killed along with Buddy Holly and Richie Valens in a plane crash - a trip that he took at the last minute after winning a coin toss. Boyle's character says something like "think of all the countless occurrences both great and small that led up to the moment when the question of whether the Big Bopper would live or die depended on the flipping of a coin". What does this have to do with the Pixies, you ask, besides the fact that this story and their story are both interesting? Just this: it made me think of how many little conditions had to be satisfied before the Pixies could record "Come On Pilgrim" at Fort Apache.

• First I had to get my pot from the same place as the band Lifeboat, so that I could meet guitarist Greg "Skeggie" Kendall. As we rolled up a fat bird to smoke I mentioned that I was in a hurry because I had to get to another appointment with my friend Matthew MacKenzie. Skeggie replied that Matthew's guitar work on the Richard Lloyd Alchemy LP was among his all-time favorites, and we had a long conversation about shared interests in which we instantly became the best of friends.

• Next I had to find a camera at a flea market, and take a super-8 film class. This led to the idea of shooting movies of a band on the road.

• There had to be tension among the members of Lifeboat, so that the presence of a stranger in the van became appealing as a personality buffer. Then they'd agree to my coming along so I could film the tour.

• After I became a huge fan of the band and worked with them for months in the studio Lifeboat had to break up. That way guitarist Gary Smith was between gigs and I could ask him to come to work at Fort Apache.

• Gary had to end up walking into a club and seeing the Pixies, while the Pixies had needed Kim Deal to be the only person to respond to their ad for a bass player in order that could achieve their unique sound.

• And leaving out a few thousand other pre-conditions that were also absolutely necessary, I had to have been in a good mood when Gary came into the studio visibly excited and broke following news:

"I just saw this band, they're called the Pixies. Ever heard of them? They're great, really intense and powerful! I think they'll be even bigger than the Muses. I really want to bring them in to record, but the problem is they're broke. They haven't gigged much and there's no kitty, though they think they can try to borrow a thousand dollars or so."
"Do they have any budget at all to spend?"
"They can probably get some cash together, but if we have to wait for that they may go somewhere else. I'll bet we could get money from Ken (Goes, the Throwing Muses manager at the time ) or from 4AD after the tapes are done. They sound incredible right now, though, the songs are fresh, and their sound is totally unique."
"They're that good, huh?"
Gary played me a tape of the group. They were that good, all right. I didn't really get it, to be honest, but then I'm more a roots-rock kind of guy. I remembered that I hadn't "got" Gary's last "discovery" (Throwing Muses) either, until I went to see them at their third or fourth live show and was completely blown away. Gary had a great ear for picking winners; I had confidence in him and a strong feeling that once they broke the Pixies would indeed be huge.
"Look, Gary, each of the original partners gets an allotment of free hours to do a personal project in. Technically you're not a partner, but you are a member of the team now so I don't see why you shouldn't take your own share of personal hours and use them for the Pixies. If they can come up with some cash later then that's great, you can throw it in the kitty. But if you want this project that bad I don't want to see you to lose it, so go ahead and bring them in whether they have the cash or not."

The rest is of course history. A much slimmer Charles White hung up a "Death to the Pixies" poster (1986 version, a decade before the record of that name) face-in to the wall and wrote a set list of the songs he wanted to cover on the back- I still have it. The band settled in for a marathon session, recording the songs in the order they fell on the "set list". This was meant to make the mix go faster by already having the songs in the correct order for sequencing, though I seem to recall there was eventually some deviation from that scheme. The short time and large workload meant that many of the more ambitious production ideas were shelved in favor of a live approach, and this makes these sessions the closest thing to the actual live sound of the 1986 Pixies available on record. Many of the arrangemental changes implemented during pre-production were retained.

What goes around comes around, I believe that. Showing a little generosity towards our newly hired manager resulted in an enormous feather in the Fort Apache cap when the Come on Pilgrim album was eventually culled from those sessions. Pilgrim was the record that cemented the local reputation we'd built by the Neats, Turbines and Treat Her Right projects, and introduced the Fort to a far broader national and international audience. It also launched Gary's career in a big way, and that brought large dividends back to the Fort- especially later when I added a second studio and he became a partner. The Pixies and the Fort had lots more history to share together after that first project, too.

After the first Fort sessions Gary had helped the Pixies hook up with the Muses management (Ken Goes) and the Muses'label (4 AD), and even a few Muses gigs (like the dream show at the Rat shown in the ad to the right) so they made long, quick strides in their careers. Ivo at 4 AD wanted to hold back songs for other producers to work on so the original 14 tunes were pruned to eight for the Come on Pilgrim release. One of the songs that the band had recorded was "Heaven" from the film Eraserhead. When I told him I'd played with the song's composer Charles was interested to hear all about Peter Ivers. In 1980 Ivers had come to Harvard University as an artist in residence to write a score for a musical being directed by an old friend of his.

Peter Ivers had played harmonica for the Beacon Street Union, a well-known and moderately successful local group in the late 1960's. Having been a local (West Roxbury) musician who practiced martial arts and attended Harvard, Peter was interested in meeting with me; the only difference was I was from East Boston,not West Roxbury. We got on like a house on fire. Ivers showed me how he'd written "Heaven" on a tiny white Casio keyboard, and sang through an effects pedal to give his voice the required ethereal quality of a spooky little girl. Peter invited me to play guitar in the show he was scoring but I was already scheduled to leave for Pakistan so instead he enrolled Peter Bell from the James Montgomery Band. Ivers had secured a practice room at Aggassiz Theater and then spent an afternoon jamming with my band the bones. When we'd parted Peter promised to get together again and maybe arrange a little tour on either coast. He invited us to be guests on his ground-breaking LA television series, New Wave Theater. Charles was excited at the idea of the Pixies appearing on the show, and perhaps hooking up with Ivers for a gig or two. When I got in touch with mutual friends in LaLaLand, however, I learned that Peter Ivers had been brutally murdered. It's regrettable that these two great talents never got the chance to work together. That missed opportunity ranks in the "might have beens" up with the Jonathan Richman and Gram Parsons miniature golf story.

The second Pixies album Surfer Rosa was done at Q-Division, another well known Boston studio. While in retrospect I now believe it was good to "share the wealth" between studios I was disappointed at the time to lose the project. Especially since we didn't have to. The album went to Q because of a little tiff over the details surrounding Gary's involvement in the first sessions. Now that the issue has long been settled and all ill feelings have dissolved there's no harm in relating the details of how Fort Apache lost the chance to make that second record.

When Ken Goes became manager of the band and 4 AD signed them I wasn't the only one who felt that Gary had been a prime mover in the whole process. I was, however, close enough to have been around when Gary was making calls to Ivo and Ken and telling them how they had to hear these guys, so I knew he'd done way more than just throw them some free time. Gary had shrewdly set the Pixies down the path already cleared by the Throwing Muses and as a consequence it was far easier for them to get to the same point in their careers than it had been for Kristen and Tanya and company. There was no question in anyone's mind that they would have gotten there eventually, but Smittie's efforts on their behalf probably saved the Pixie's a year or more in an industry where timing is everything. The band was grateful, but when they signed with Goes management company someone had second thoughts about the production deal they'd made earlier with Gary.

What happened was this: Gary and the band had an agreement whereby he'd receive two points on the record if and when it was released. Now Goes Management (on behalf of the band) disputed the numbers and offered Gary one point instead of two. At the time it was unclear how much Come on Pilgrim would benefit Gary's career ( a lot!) and the income from Elektra's purchase of the rights to their catalogue was still well off in the future. So it seemed, well, ungrateful and rather mean of them to renege on the agreement, at least from Gary's point of view (as I understood it). I definitely thought it was a slap in the face, and though I can't speak for Gary's feelings on the matter his reaction was one of frustration and disappointment. I suspected that this was Ken's way of trying to prove right off to the band that he was a capable manager by saving them money. There may also have been a territory-marking ritual going on, precisely because Gary had been so influential with a band now in his stable. Whatever the case there was tension in the air at that time, and wounded pride made the conflict that resulted inevitable.

The sessions for the second Pixie's album were all booked, I think they were using three weeks or a month to do it in. About a week and a half before the start date I get a call from Ken Goes. He confirmed the days we'd scheduled and some other details, then at that point in the conversation when you'd usually say "OK, I'll talk to you later" and hang up he interjects- in much that same tone of voice -"OK, so now all we have to do is settle on a price". This was strange, as I'd given him our 16-track rates well before he'd booked the time, and I replied that they hadn't changed since we first talked.

"Well…I think since we're booking so much time we should be getting a price break. This is after all our second project at the Fort."
"Look, Ken, I've got Big Dipper coming in to take twice as much time and it's their third record here. Most of our sessions are with return clients; I can't give you a break without stepping on a lot of faithful toes. And keep in mind the band got a pretty good rate for the last record."
"Well, gee Joe, this could be a real deal breaker. If we can't get a rate I'll have to look elsewhere."

It was all I could do not to call him a greedy ingrate and tell him to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, but I liked the band and the people in it and this was a real prestige project, one which I hated to lose. On the other hand my own sense of justice was incensed by the shabby treatment Gary was being handed by a guy who'd essentially been handed the biggest act he'd ever manage. Sure Ken was doing his job, but this went beyond that- it smelled more like a pride-driven control issue. It would have been easy for me to say "OK Ken you get a 10 percent break" and keep the project, but I couldn't do it.

"Ken you're asking me to disrespect my own partner and a number of other valuable clients who also happen to be friends and take your side. I could possibly justify a price break vis-à-vis our clients because we've given them in the past, although frankly they were in need and you're using record company money so you aren't. But I won't go against my partner. I'll ask Gary and leave it up to him. If he has no problem with this then I don't."

When I told Gary he was as angry as I ever have seen him, and all he could do was repeat "The nerve of him, the nerve!" several times. I could see this was one stand-off with no winners except Q-Division. Ken insisted it was a purely fiscal issue, Gary said it was a policy issue, and I could see that it was neither nor but my hands were tied. We had to scramble to fill the dates left open on such short but we ended up only losing a week or so. And so it was that the much-anticipated second sessions never arrived at the Fort. Later when things settled down the band seemed embarrassed at not having steeped in on Gary's behalf, and we got most of the special projects and B-sides like "Into the White" and the Neil Young tribute. Kim returned with the Breeders demos but more on that in a minute.

Of all the Pixies I saw the most of Kim Deal. I bowled in a candlepin (small balls) bowling league with Kim's ex-husband John Murphy. Late nights after bowling there were parties when we jokingly discussed starting a league band. John proposed calling it Mente after the slang for the Latino superlative "excellamente", a phrase bandied about by the homeboys when he was growing up. The idea was that the band should be mostly guys who didn't play an instrument, or who could barely play one. Before long the joking morphed into planning and then into a band. The debut of Mente was at our league's end of season Bowling Party, held in my back yard in East Boston. That was followed by a few local gigs, by which time I had been replaced as drummer for being "too good" (despite the fact that drums weren't my real instrument). Kim helped out Mente in a number of ways, not least of which was to appear as a guest at the first few Mente shows, ensuring big turnouts for an otherwise unknown entity. At first it was just the association of Kim's name with Mente that drew people in, but before long crowds were flocking to see the band on its' own merits. Ted Widmer and John wrote some hilarious songs, and John's "slide" solo with a dead fish on "Schrod, Cousin to the Cod" was always a big hit- and a big mess. Ted and Mike "Mazz" Mazzarello played great guitar and bass for people who'd never so much as looked at an instrument before, and bass player Greg Mahoney was a natural as a drummer. They even had a song about the "Umlaut", that double dotted accent above certain German words. (Ted and Mazz later went on to play with Nat Freedberg's toney baloney band the Upper Crust

Kim is a voracious player and I admired her for her willingness to get up and jam, playing songs without rehearsing them if necessary. She was a regular drop-in at the weekly Plough and Stars shows that I hosted for over two years. Kim was a busy woman and we never had a chance to rehearse, but I made up a set of ten songs that she could jam with us on that were all either one, two or three chords. "Low Rider", "Pablo Picasso" and "Rocking Shoppin Center" were among the numbers she played bass on, but the undisputed, all-time favorite Kim request was for her to sing Hot Chocolate's "I Believe in Miracles". Kim sang this in the sort of sweet waiflike voice that you'd expect from some slutty teenage Lolita who had died, become an angel and got a nightclub gig. Or something like that. All I know is I could hardly even look at her on stage when she was doing that number without simultaneously laughing and becoming, er, well...aroused. Sorry Kim and hubbie, but it's true. Plus I had a secret, unrequited crush on Kim during the period that those shows occurred in. The photo below was captured from a home video of one of those performances taken at the Middle East. Below is an excerpt from the Boston Phoenix article "A Tale of Two Nightclubs" written by Ted Widmer, describing Kim's dauntless maneuvering to attend the Plough jam in Cambridge on the same night she was playing two Pixies sets at the Citi club in Boston.

When the Kim and Tanya Donnelly started the Breeders they recorded demos with Paul Kolderie engineering and Gary producing informally. The afternoon before Kim was to leave for London to hand deliver the demos to Ivo at 4AD she called me at home. She had been listening to the demos, she said, and was unhappy with the way they'd turned out. She either wanted to remix the songs with me or else she was bagging the trip and scrapping the demos. I explained that Paul was really a better engineer than I was, more technically able and capable of much cleaner sounds, so I could hardly hope to improve on his work. She wasn't satisfied with the sound precisely because they were too clean, she replied. She'd heard some of my projects and liked their noisier qualities, and she wanted to participate more in the process while I re-mixed the songs. So we got together that night and remixed all but one of the songs. Kim was glad to let me try odd things and we did some fun stuff, like putting the vocals in "Lime House" through a Scholz Rockman ( made for guitar) for a compressed, chorused fuzzbox effect, then running it through a noise gate to be triggered during sections. A few of these spontaneous ideas were duplicated on the eventual 4AD release, and that's always flattering. Kim was very happy with the tapes and took them to the UK the next day, where Ivo loved the material and committed to signing the Breeders.

Speaking of unrequited crushes, I had suffered mildly impure thoughts about Tanya Donnelly since I'd first met the Throwing Muses, which was of course when they were all too young to drive! Gary had seen them in Newport and he came back raving about them to anyone who'd listen, so I drove down to see them play at the Blue Parrot. I wanted to see what the big deal was, having (as I said earlier) heard their first demo but not "gotten it" right off. One live show was enough to make me a believer, however. Kristen was like some Sufi dervish poet, all explosive emoting but in a controlled framework that funneled the eruptions for maximum impact, and the band was strikingly original and un-derivative. Later we all talked- Gary was already courting the band in the super-focused way he had when he fell in love with a new group. I think he convinced them they had to move to Boston if they were serious about their careers, and not long after they did. Because no one in the group had a license, never mind a vehicle, I drove them to some early out-of-town gigs (they took cabs to local shows), feeling like fucking granpa because I was 27 and had a car! Kristen was beautiful and Tanya was just as cute as a bug. As the years went by and the Muses spent mucho time at the Fort recording House Tornado and a mess of B-Sides, I watched T. grow more and more sophisticated and lovely. By the time she left the Muses to join the Breeders she was heartbreakingly sexy. So when we recorded the demos for the Breeders album (the one that never happened) I had all I could do to concentrate. Those were sessions worth commenting on.

We were all very careful about respecting territorial limits at the Fort, and the Pixies / Breeders work was the realm of Gary and Paul. Tanya has liked the work I did on Kim's demos, though, and was eager to try something new for the demos she was making for the second Breeders album. Since these were only demos there was no objection to her request to use "fresh blood" and we booked time for sessions in my favorite format- eight track. Since we would be using just Tanya's voice and guitar without a rhythm section I wanted to get the fattest sound possible, and I saw a unique opportunity to do so at that time. The Fort had fitted 16-track heads onto our two inch 24-track machine in order to re-mix tapes recorded during Bowie's Station to Station tour- that was the standard back then, two lovely inches for only 16 tracks! I sandwiched in two session after the Bowie remixes but two days or so before we had to send the 16-track heads back to New Jersey or wherever (the other was with the Peecocks).

We "split" the tape in half so it acted as if there were two separate eight track reels (instead of one reel of sixteen). To do so we used 8 tracks of the tape (1 through 8) for the first song, then rewound and used the next eight tracks (9 through 16) for the second song. Moving back up to tracks 1 through 8 we placed the third song after the first, then rewound and put a fourth song on tracks 9 through 16. I'd asked Tanya to show up with just her main guitar, and to use my amps and other guitars to get different sounds. We did a bunch of tunes that way, with Tanya playing and overdubbing herself, though I played lap steel on one song. I love those songs and the way that they came out. We tried all sorts of techniques, and there were several firsts Tanya had never tried in the studio before that we explored that night such as playing slide and acoustic twelve string. We used an Vox Super Berkeley slaved to an AC30 to create a tremolo rumble that served as "bass" for one song, and put deep reverberated vibrato tones onto Feed the Tree using a Gretsch Chet Atkins and a vintage Ampeg Reverbrocket. The limited time we had the tape heads for gave the sessions a certain edge as we knew we wouldn't have any second chances, no "fix it in the mix" mixes down the road.

The sessions were fun, but the work was pretty intense with a dozen songs planned initially to get through that night. Much needed comic relief was provided in a nunlikely fashion when Kim Deal showed up to lay down a guitar part. The plan was for her to place this short passage onto a song in two spots, and then to double it by overdubbing herself- that made four sections to be played, each about 25 seconds in length. This was before I went into recovery for my drug habits, and aside from the more harmful narcotics I was a confirmed pothead of toxic proportion. I happened at the time to have a "special blend" I'd thrown together made up of the ends of three bags thrown into a fourth. There were bits of a brown Thai, green Vermont "skunk" sensimilla, and a high altitude Mexican mixed in with the principal contents-a killer chocolate-flavored brown Jamaican. I'd smoked several bones already and was rolling another when Kim came into the control room after laying down her first section. I'd never know Kim to smoke weed so when she asked for a hit I warned her "this is very strong cheeb, are you sure you'll be OK?" So she of course said she was cool, and as I smoked so much all the time I underestimated the effect great pot has on normal people with blood counts below Rasta-level. I handed the spliff to Kim and she took a couple of hits. I have seldom seen someone get so stoned, so quick. Now, it had taken Kim about two minutes to practice and one pass to lay down the first of the four sections she needed to record. The weed took effect almost instantly, and Tanya and I sat in the control room giggling for almost an hour while Kim tried to get through the second section. Take after take she would make a mistake, come in early or miss the cue entirely and just sit there as the section rolled by. I finally patched together the second section out of three other failed attempts and we abandoned the idea of Kim doubling the part- Tanya played it herself. I was apologetic in the extreme, but Tanya was good natured about it. As Kim sheepishly exited the studio I shook my finger at her like a maiden aunt and said "no more weed for you in the studio, young lady!" She had arrived her alert, energetic and somewhat bubbly self and we'd sent her home in a box- or, if you will, in a bag. I filed this one under "things not to do in the studio with Kim".

The songs we recorded that night remain among my very favorite work I've ever done. Tanya was writing beautiful songs and with the sparseness of our approach they were laid bare for all their treasures to be seen. Ivo sent me a message that said "you're a genius" and said he loved the lap steel part as well. I always hoped they would someday be released as a sort of unplugged bonus track set and it's really too bad for fans that it wasn't. Just as with the the Pilgrim sessions and the original Breeders demos there were qualities that made these versions interesting and worthwhile in more than an historical way. Of course Tanya left the Breeders before the second album, so the tunes in question actually became the core of the new Belly repertoire.

My last Pixies story is short. When I had moved to Columbus, Ohio in 1991 to try to kick heroin I found myself in really bad shape. What money I had coming in from my Fort salary went towards servicing the loan I'd taken to buy the lease on the new Fort Apache North space, and the remainder to the rent on a place in Columbus' own crackville: 12^th Street and North Fourth. Strung out and busted and pretty much unemployable I managed to get a job at Freakin' Pizza, where I cooked and did deliveries with my barely operable Aerostar. The radio station would always order a few pies when they had a band in for an interview, and the boss would take these himself to meet the groups and wrangle free passes. One day Kirby announced "I'm going down to the station to deliver these pies to the Pixies". So I said I knew those guys so I'd like to come along. We walked in and Charles was just walking out with his road manager in the lead. Kirby offered them the pies but the manager said they'd eaten and had no time and really had to split right then. So as they blow out the door Charles stops with this funny look and turns around and says "Joe? Joe Harvard!" and gives me a big pizza-crushing hug. My boss is now very impressed. Charles asks if I'm going to the show and I said "if it isn't sold out I am". "How many tickets do you want- 2, 4, more?" I asked for four and he left me those and backstage passes at the door. My boss was clearly impressed, and every once in a while after that night he would look at me kind of funny and ask "so, why are you in Ohio again?"

After the show we go backstage and as I walk up to the dressing rooms I see Kim leaning against a wall. She'd already changed into dry street clothes. She looks at me and doesn't say a word, which is unlike her. It had been a year or more since I'd seen Kim or the others, and I was thinking she had turned into some kind of snobby, too-cool-for-school type rock star. I walked over and pointed to her shirt and said "hey what's that on your shirt there?" Of course when she looked down I whammed her in the nose with my index finger- but I got carried away and did it very hard -and I said "now don't be such a friggin' snob next time" . As I walked away laughing she shouted after me "whatever you do around here you're fired!"

When we reached the dressing room I stopped to talk to Joey for a minute. Then I noticed is that Kim had somehow gotten upstairs ahead of us, and had changed her clothes. Even odder than that, she was once again covered in perspiration and had changed back into her stage clothes. Kim threw her arms around me and shouted "Joe Harvard! What are you doing here?", which left me thoroughly baffled. Then I remembered: Kim has a twin sister! A second later Kelly Deal walked into the room, glaring at me and asking "who is this wise guy", and we all had a laugh after I explained. Kelly is a bit tougher than Kim and I consider myself lucky she didn't haul off and smack me, downtown Dayton style.

The next time I saw Kim she was passing through Columbus with the Breeders and a year had passed. She was engaged and her fiancee was her very capable road manager. In fact she had parlayed the Breeders into quite the cottage industry. Sister Kelly was of course a member of the band; with future hubby running things already she had hired her mom to drive the bus and handle concessions. I asked her why her father wasn't working for her as well and she said "he would be but he already has a real job." I was impressed at Kim's business acumen. It makes damn good sense to practice a bit of nepotism in the rock and roll world, so that there can be many taps on the fast-drying keg of fickle fame and its fiscal benefits. And, oh yeah, she was as beautiful as ever.

The last time I saw Joey we shared tales of rumors going around about our own supposed massive drug habits- his were false, mine were not, though that situation has changed drastically on my end in the last 3 years, which is when we last met. The last time I saw Charles White he'd gone from Black Francis to Frank Black. He and his lovely wife were at the original Newbury Comics on Newbury Street, and he was as charming and regular as ever. I can hardly wait to find out who he is going to become next!

Joe Harvard