"Monkey Gone To Heaven" by the Pixies

Despite the fact that I was a music junkie since 1985 when my dad decided to put his old stereo in my bedroom, despite the fact that I had been interested in the lower end of the Weekly Top 40 and that I was listening to "alternative" bands like Depeche Mode and New Order in 1986, my first choice for the "Song That Changed My Life" is from an album that came out in 1989, four years and thousands of hours of staying up to watch 120 Minutes and listening to crap pop stations (because they only had crap pop stations back then, alternative wouldn't become a viable commercial option until the early nineties) for the one New Order song later.

I was a senior in a Pittsburgh high school in 1989. There was a great alternative station when I moved to Pittsburgh two years prior, and about half the kids in high school listened to it. Unfortunately, Gen X teenagers were living in a recession at the time, so they didn't have the same disposable income as their Gen Y younger siblings would have in the nineties. With the lack of ad revenue coming in (who wants to advertise on a station whose listeners had no money?), the station eventually went to a Top 40 format in 1988 (unsuccessfully I might add) and then to a "Greatest Mix of the 60s, 70s and 80s" station by the time I left for college.

The only source for alternative music other than the one-hour dance program that played intermittently on Sundays at 7pm was a weird little half-hour video show on, of all channels, the local PBS affiliate. Weirder still, one of the hosts was Scott Paulsen, a morning DJ on WDVE, a power rock station that all the guys with mullets listened to regularly for their Whitesnake and Poison fix. Kind of a strange choice for someone to host a video show of European shoegazer synth bands.

Anyway, my family must have been watching CNN or something downstairs because I was relegated to watching the ten-inch screen TV in the 'rents bedroom. I was waiting to get my Echo/DM/New Order fix, and the weird PBS video show was the only place to get it. For some reason, I'd been more interested in alternative music ever since I started listening to music -- maybe (at the risk of sounding like a precocious music snob) it was because I never really fit in with everyone else and my preference in alternative music was a manifestation of that ambivalence I had towards everyone -- shunning the mainstream yet wanting to be accepted somewhere. Or maybe pop music in the 80s was just utter crap.

I can't remember what season it was, or what I was doing other than watching this weird PBS video show. I do know that one of the videos was from this supposedly influential prog-electronica band, Wire. By influential, I guess they mean really annoying - the video was this random skinny chiqua wandering around some anonymous Brit city, and the song was blips and bleeps with an annoying falsetto voice singing what sounded like "Cheese Cloth" over and over again. The hosts were one the same wavelength as I, they started singing "Cheese Cloth" in a falsetto voice after the video.

I wasn't paying attention when they introduced the next video. I just heard this guitar and bass playing the same deep chords, and then this guy's voice almost half asleep intoning "There was a guy, an underwater guy who controlled the sea . . ." The bass was at the forefront for most of the song, playing the same notes over and over only to be broken up by jarring dissonant guitar chords. This guy's voice was a sleepy monotone for most of the song, accompanied by a equally sleepy female voice for the main chorus of "This Monkey's Gone To Heaven." The lyrics were surreal, though not in a bad depressed twelfth-grade goth girl writing poems for the high school lit journal way. More like in a Dali-esque limp watch sort of way. Soon, the sleepy voice started building up and worked into a frenzy, screaming "if the devil is six, then GOD IS SEVEN, THEN GOD IS SEVEN . . ."

The song didn't hit me right away. I dismissed it like I dismissed the crap cheese cloth song from Wire. Yet for the next week, I had that bass line in my head, and that female voice crooning "this monkey's gone to heaven," and that wild ass screaming of "THEN GOD IS SEVEN." The weird PBS video show played it again the very next week (though it never played the cheese cloth video), and that's when I learned about The Pixies. I bought the album from which "Monkey Gone to Heaven" came, Doolittle, and put it on repeat in my crap cd player (to be fair to my parents who bought me the CD player, all CD players were crap back then).

Even if the local alternative station survived, it would've never played the Pixies. Hell, even alternative stations now like KROQ don't play the Pixies. Yet, I would learn later after I started reading music mags in college, the Pixies had a devout following among other bands. Members of Nirvana would say that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" sounded for all the world like a Pixies song.

Now how did "Monkey Gone To Heaven" change my life? New Order, Depeche Mode and all the alternative bands I'd listening to up that point had satisfied a need for something different, a soundtrack to my life that wasn't part of the normal high school football popular rah rah rah life that everyone else seemed to be leading. Yet when I heard "Monkey Gone To Heaven" and Doolittle, I realized that I wasn't completely satisfied. New Order, Depeche Mode, and the rest of the Brit bands heavy on the synthesizers? They were different, but they were safe (don't get me wrong, I still listen to New Order, sometimes safe is what you need in a hectic world). They had legions of fans and radio stations that would play them. Hell, even now, the 00's version of the crappy "mix of the last 3 decade" stations my high school friends hated now played New Order and Depeche Mode on an hourly basis.

On the other hand, the Pixies weren't safe. Without "Monkey Gone to Heaven," my music tastes wouldn't be as open and ecletic as it is. On a more fundamental note (because "I would've had less CDs is not a huge life change), they opened my eyes to a different path. None of my high school friends and none of my friends now ever listened to them (though strangely, a couple of women I've dated listen to them, I don't know if that should be a red flag for my chosen lifestyle). Radio stations don't play them. Yet that doesn't change the fact that they still kicked ass, and that probably every alt rock band in the nineties folks listened to (e.g. Nirvana) listened to the Pixies. They followed a different path.

Maybe I'm about to stretch this path analogy too far, but it feels right to me. New Order, Depeche Mode? As I mentioned before, flip on any 80s radio station, you'll hear at least one song by them within a couple of hours. And the folks who tend to listen to these stations are well-educated white collar folk. Then there's the pop stuff on the radio, and the unfortunate nu-metal rap-metal crap-metal stuff on the alternative stations - those folks who listen to these stations are the blue collar folk. (Maybe an overgeneralization to be sure, but I never saw a Brittany Spears CD in a lawyer's office, well, not an unspoiled one anyways.) Sure, New Order is different from Brittany and Limp Sum Staind Bizket, but it's still a nine-to-five path their respective listeners lead.

You won't hear the Pixies on any of the aforementioned stations (except for maybe "Here Comes Your Man," a song Black Francis refused to play for a while because he felt it was too pop). But that doesn't change the fact that they were influential and they rocked. They showed that there is a path outside the nine-to-five path. It's not too far of a stretch to say that, without the Pixies, I might be still stuck in a career I hated because I couldn't see any other alternative, or even worse, see alternatives but not have the guts to take them.