Producer Stories

Gil Norton – "Doolittle" (Pixies)

by Paolo Ciro

In late August 1987, Ivo Watts-Russell of 4AD, Chris Roberts of Melody Maker and producer Gil Norton boarded a flight to Boston to catch the show of a band Watts-Russell had just signed. Norton was actually heading to the US to work on new material with Throwing Muses, with whom he had already collaborated the previous year on their debut, but he happily showed up on the evening of the 30th outside The Rat club: on the bill were the Pixies. None of the three had ever seen the band fronted by Black Francis (born Charles Thompson) live, though it was clear to everyone that this would be something special. In truth, that night the Pixies were forced to perform as a trio due to a family emergency involving bassist Kim Deal, but the power of the set proved enough to leave a lasting mark on the memory of their future producer.

“They blew my mind,” Norton said. “Even as a trio they were amazing, and I was completely floored by the atmosphere and the energy I was picking up on. I grew up on punk music, but all of that had vanished in England by the time the Eighties came around. We got New Romantics and then electronic music; rock and roll bands had either disappeared or weren't doing too well. So going to America and seeing someone with that kind of attitude was genuinely mind-blowing, and also counterproductive in a way, because working with Throwing Muses a few days later gave me a completely different experience.”

The chance to connect with the Pixies came about just a few months later, when Watts-Russell brought Norton in to re-record some tracks from “Surfer Rosa”. The record had done quite well on the indiecircuit, but Ivo felt that none of the songs had what it took to become a radio single (in his view, Steve Albini had buried the vocals too deep beneath the instruments). The plan was to rework “Gigantic” and “River Euphrates”, possibly adding “Here Comes Your Man” as well, a track that hadn't made the cut on “Surfer Rosa” due to its overtly commercial nature, which didn't really reflect where the Pixies stood at that point (and indeed it was shelved once again).

Norton's new version of “Gigantic” added a fresh layer of polish to the band's sound without stripping away any of its essential character. The vocals sat higher in the mix, the instruments came through with generally more clarity, the bass had a bright tone, and the rhythm was almost danceable: something closer to the Curethan to the Hüsker Dü.

From that point on, the path to choosing the producer for the Boston band's new album was all downhill. There had initially been talk of Ed Stasium (Ramones, Motorhead, Living Colour), but without much conviction: Norton was more or less everyone's preference, thanks to his light, clean and unmistakably British style.

Gil had learned his trade in his native Liverpool, first working with a series of bands – China Crisis, Wall of Voodoo, OMD – as a sound engineer, before distinguishing himself in particular with the co-production of “Ocean Rain” (perhaps their most representative album) by Echo & the Bunnymen, in 1984. This current American interlude, however, seemed to be the beginning of something even bigger.

Back in Boston again in mid-October 1988, Norton began going through the band's various demos and had Thompson over to his apartment to review the material. They spent a couple of days playing through the songs on acoustic guitar, tweaking the structure here and there. Norton, in song-doctormode, kept coming back to the same request: that the songs be longer. “They were really good songs,” Norton recalls, “but they were really short, like a minute and a half. Verse-chorus and done.”

Persuading Charles to do anything more than that wasn't easy. His motto was: “If two minutes was enough for Buddy Holly to nail a song, why would I need more?”

Norton, on the other hand, considered pre-production work essential: “I prefer to make sure everyone knows what they're doing. You need to understand what and why you're recording, what matters for a song and what doesn't. In that sense, I think the band made huge strides on 'Doolittle', precisely because they put in so much work at the pre-production stage, working out all the arrangement questions.”

But the sound of the album as a whole was meant to be a step forward too. The band now had a budget sizeable following, and was being courted by Elektra (which soon secured a distribution deal to get them into record stores and onto radio stations across the country).

Three weeks in studio were booked for the recording sessions. Besides Norton, there were two recording engineers and two second engineers, with an estimated cost (excluding Norton's fee) of around $40,000: four times the budget of "Surfer Rosa", but not an outrageous sum for a major in 1989 (and in any case far less than what the band would go on to spend on later albums).

Despite this, the Downtown Recorders studio in Boston was equipped slightly below par, since it housed an console MCI JH-636, quite different from the SSL desks that were becoming the industry standard among professionals around that time.

On Monday, October 31, 1988, Pixies began recording sessions for the album that, at least in its early conception, was meant to be called "Whores".

Almost immediately, Thompson slipped into the role of Black Francis, the sneering crybaby. "I sing a bit differently when I'm with Pixies," Thompson has always claimed, "another little character comes into me, with a nasal voice and spastic behavior, or something like that." A theatrical method, capable of making a real difference expressively and, above all, in keeping with the album's simultaneously dynamic, schizophrenic, melodic and violent nature.

Norton worked hard to get a handle on that peculiar pop fragmentation, which in its attitude recalled the “White Album” of the Beatles(an album that, not by chance, Thompson and guitarist Joey Santiago were obsessively listening to at the time). Ugliness and beauty were constantly at odds: the comforting acoustic guitar of Thompson against the caustic, electric sound of Santiago, the angelic femininity of Kim Deal's voice against the demonic masculinity of Thompson's. An artistic play of opposites that was part of the band's core musical DNA, and one that Norton had set out to bring to the fore as best he could.

One of the producer's main concerns was the tempo of the songs. Most of the metronomic tempos were indeed perfect for properly bringing out Thompson's frenzy, but in some cases they didn't quite let the songs shine. While "Crackity Jones" remained unchanged, the same can't be said for "There Goes My Gun", slowed down from 140 to 120 bpm compared to the demo. "I always produce from the point of view of what I'd want to listen to, and I think that's an important thing to do: some people don't care about that, and that's fine too, but I think that if you're aware of your market and of who the people are that you're trying to reach, it's important to stay within their attention span."

Thompson, on the other hand, told Rolling Stone at the time, with a hint of resentment: "I think this record can basically be described as Norton trying to make us more palatable while we tried to keep a ramshackle sound alive."

Norton wanted to push the band's recording boundaries further. This is evident right from theopener, "Debaser", in whose ending a layering of guitars materializes that Thompson initially found hard to swallow, to the point of wanting it off the record.

On "Here Comes Your Man" (finally ready for its recorded debut, after a long series of reworkings), Gil had to push Charles pretty hard to get one more verse.

The small string section on "Monkey Gone To Heaven" was suggested by Norton after he heard Kim Deal play a few piano notes in the chorus: the string part had to be just as minimal, and it was played using pizzicato strings.

The only track Norton didn't dare touch was "Hey", one of the oldest songs in the band's whole repertoire, captured on the record as a live take. The magic of that recording was one of the high points of the entire sessions. Halfway through the song, Santiago cut loose with his solo, while Norton, on the other side of the glass, was crossing his fingers that nothing would disturb that moment ("Joey can play just a single note," Norton claims, "but he manages to pull things out of it that nobody else has ever been able to.")

At a certain point during the recording sessions, the tensions between Thompson and Deal became visible to everyone for the first time. There were arguments, outbursts and passive-aggressive standoffs; recording studios, where every tick of the clock has an equivalent dollar value, can be highly stressful places. It became obvious that each of them saw the band in a different way; despite this, Kim managed to add a fairly significant stamp of her own, singing the lead vocal on "Silver", a collaboration with Thompson that hadn't originally been planned as one of the album's tracks (and one that Thompson himself never included in any live setlist anyway).

Pixies To finish the mixing, the whole team then relocated (on November 28th) to Connecticut, at Carriage House Studios, a residential facility that allowed for both the isolation needed to escape the usual distractions of the city, and the sharing of domestic chores like cooking (Norton, for instance, would make a roast every Sunday).

The daily schedule called for a tight pace, averaging a little more than one song a day across the thirteen booked in total; but there were also several overdubs to be done on some of the tracks. Norton put engineer Steve Haigler in charge of the mix.

While Steve Albini had captured the jagged edges of the Pixies' sound on "Surfer Rosa" in a fairly uncompromising way, Norton and Haigler decided to steer a bit clear of that approach, trying to brighten the sound and place greater emphasis on the band's pop sensibility: "Charles hated anything that sounded artificial. He loved things that were genuine and unforced, so we had to stay within a pop attitude while keeping the effects very sparse. It wasn't easy, but in the end we managed by using only reverbs and delay, because they kept things honest to a certain degree. For me, recording and mixing are part of the same process. Nothing can be considered finished until you commit it to half-inch tape. It's still material in progress, decisions still need to be made."

This phase of work, quite demanding for Norton and Haigler, corresponded to an undemanding one for the band, whose only job was to help keep spirits up ("They'd already played all their parts," says Norton, "they could sit in front of the mixer all day and just say 'wow'"). For the first time, the four of them were able to relax and take the time to watch a recording become a finished product (on December 12th the tapes were sent to the masteringstudio) thanks to someone else's work.

It was decided that the album's title would become "Doolittle", partly because the earlier "Whores" was too harsh, and partly because everyone felt a reference to Dr. Doolittle would hint at the animal nature running through the material. Not that "Whores" didn't do that too (the image of feeling like prostitutes had come up as far back as when they first decided to flirt with the music business) but it gave away the surprise of confronting the record's raw, unsettling content.

A record of oblique pop whose lyrics veered between sex, religion and depravity needed a reassuring name.

Released on April 17, 1989, “Doolittle” was very well received, especially in Europe (in its first week out it reached No. 8 on the UK charts). Critics were still seriously smitten with the band, and the prospects for touring exceeded even the rosiest expectations.

But nothing was the same anymore in the Pixies camp.

The friction between Thompson and Deal dragged on throughout the tour, to the point that, on later material, the bassist's contributions (she was by then devoting more and more time to her original project, the Breeders) began to vanish almost entirely. Tension crept into the band's creative process until it killed off part of its soul.

Norton was brought back in for “Bossanova” (1990) and “Trompe Le Monde” (1991) as well, but he could no longer work the way he was used to.

Le sessions recording sessions were taking longer, costing more and yielding less. Preparation was minimal: the band no longer wanted to commit to the meticulous pre-production work that had been so crucial to the quality and success of “Doolittle”.

After the Pixies broke up in 1993, Norton went on to work on records by other Nineties and Noughties rock names (Terrorvision, Counting Crows, Foo Fighters, Maximo Park, Gomez, Sum41), while the Pixies became a kind of posthumous legend. Like the Stoogesor the Velvet Underground, they started selling far more records than they had while still active.

Everyone, from Polly Jean Harvey a Thom Yorke, from Bono a David Bowie, lined up to hail them as the Mozarts of alternative rock, brilliant minds gone before their time.

After all, they had nobly raised the bar of conventional rock, developing an irrepressible, idiosyncratic, noisy, ironic and extremely refined style, one that has often served as a reference point for Kurt Cobain ("With 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' I was trying to write the ultimate pop song, basically ripping off the Pixies. I had such a deep connection with their music that I should have been in that band, or at least in a Pixies cover band").

Norton's work on "Doolittle" (together with Albini's on "Surfer Rosa") had placed them on a pedestal that remains unassailable to this day, regardless of the ups and downs of their post-reunion (officially confirmed on record in 2013, without Kim Deal – an absence that, frankly, weighs heavily), currently comprising three Ep, “Indie Cindy” (all still produced by Norton) and “Head Carrier”.

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Paolo Ciro, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition