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“Give me some bait. Give me some bait! I’ll babble.” Black Francis, the lead singer and songwriter of the Bostonbased Pixies, looks up over his watermelon and smiles. So far they have talked about Angela Bowie, their parents, Southern California, how cocaine is processed and Los Angeles radio personality Swedish Eagle. They have not talked about their brilliant new album, Surfer Rosa, or about their first national tour, or why such a down-toearth band uses artsy-fartsy pseudonyms like Black Francis or Mrs. John (Kim) Murphy. If we were really stretching it, we could talk about their brilliant first album, Come On Pilgrim, since they haven’t taken a wild tailspin from album one to album two and, y’know, gone disco or anything.

“Directionless. We’re directionless. We have no politics, we have no opinions about anything,” grins Francis. “We just want to make some tunes. Make some tunes, make some records. People can buy the records and hang out with their friends and put the tunes on.

“What it all comes down to is a song like ‘Gimme Shelter.’ If you’re gonna sit around and analyze rock music, how it’s changed society and all that stuff, and how it’s a big platform for people’s politics. I don’t know why ‘Gimme

Shelter’ is the greatest song in the world, but it is. I don’t even know what it’s about. It’s all back to like campfires, with people sitting around with nothing to do, and telling stories and singing songs, and entertaining each other. That’s what records come down to. That’s why you want to be in a band, because you like records. ’Cause you and your friends sit around and drink beers and listen to records and talk about what you’re listening to. Passing the time.”

More and more people are passing the time listening to the Pixies. Why? Well, they slash and burn through raw, sumptuous rock territory, vocals skritching dangerously over a barbedwire fence of sound. It’s an all-overthe-place orgy of feedback, hit-or-miss harmonies and a beat that jolts like a sock in the gut. Alternative radio has become all foamy over “Where Is My Mind?” and “Bone Machine," perhaps having rediscovered energy in music for the first time in many a moon.

Rediscovery is a big part of the Pixies’ work. The motif that runs through both records is one of structure—lyrically, that is—bones and blood and broken faces and lost brains. It’s not violent, per se, it’s a violence of love, of emotional whiplash.

“I like to write about physical things, a lot better than personal pronouns:

me, you, I, she. I think it’s really visceral ’cause you can imagine, you can play along in your mind. If you’re talking about a little red corvette are you talking about love between two people? Physical things are easy. They’re like pictures, along with the words.”

While we’re on the memory jag, it seems there is a skeleton in a white polyester suit in everyone’s closet. No, they weren’t always skronking out “River Euphrates” to hordes of excited Violent Femmes fans.

“I was in a top 40 band,” says David, the drummer. “Cover music."

Mrs. John Murphy taunts him. “David did punk versions of ‘Under My Thumb.”’

He nods. “And the Animals medley. That was a good one.”

“Kim, tell ’em what you sang before,” says Francis. "I was never in a band. Oh, I was in a band, wasn’t I? In high school. ‘Car Wash,’ ‘Disco Inferno.’ I swear to God. We had to do moves and stuff. But you know what’s funny? We all make fun of those songs and I know every single word of them. I heard David Byrne talking about how he would love to do songs like K.C. and the Sunshine Band did. ‘I’m your Boogieman. That’s what I am . . .’ I wonder whatever happened to old K.C. anyway?” “Yeah, sure, I’d like to sell records, but, uh, who cares?” So says selfeffacing Ohio songbird Marti Jones, who really ought to be a pop star anyway. One can understand why, say, Robyn Hitchcock or Camper Van Beethoven may never score a hit single, but there's no good reason why this wholesomely blonde, musically straightforward Midwestern looker shouldn’t. Jones’s three A&M albums—Unsophisticated Time, Match Game and the current Used Guitars, all collaborations with producer/songwriter/instrumentalist/husband Don Dixon—bristle with passion, intelligence and good taste. But passion, intelligence and good taste don’t always shift units.

Arion Berger

“It’s always been hard for the record company to figure out what to do with me,” says Jones of her commercial dilemma, “because I’m not a haircut act and there’s no set pattern they can follow to sell me. But female artists are doing well now, so now they understand women. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I’m sure the reason that Used Guitars is being given more attention than the other two is because Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman and Sinead O’Con-

nor have had hits."

Unlikethose newly-acceptable females, Jones relies on other writers for the bulk of her material (though she co-wrote three of Used Guitars' tracks with Dixon). And since the art of interpretive singing has been devalued in the years since publishing greed took over and people figured out that they could make more money by singing their own compositions, Jones now finds herself something of an anomaly. "I could do an album’s worth of my own songs, and maybe I would have gained more respect with a bunch of shitty songs that I wrote myself. But I can’t settle for that, and I don’t have to.”

Unsophisticated Time (which fol-

lowed the breakup of Marti s first recording band, Color Me Gone) was a low-key charmer, with Jones and Dixon eventually extending the disc’s homey ambiance into a series of appealingly informal acoustic-duo performances which established the pair as a sort of musical Burns and Allen. Match Game—a hastily-conceived attempt to come up with radio-ready product—featured some impressive performances and memorable Dixon tunes, but the lack of a conceptual center(!) marredthe LP.

With that in mind, Jones and Dixon approached Used Guitars with greater care, and the effort paid off in the singer’s strongest and most consistent disc to date. "We really wanted to make sure we got this one right,” says Dixon. “We wanted to recapture the mood of the first record, which we felt Match Game didn’t have at all, and we wanted this record to reflect more of Marti’s sense of humor. We also wanted it to work as more of a structured whole, so we started with a concept approach.”

“We knew there had to be some kind of continuity,” explains Jones,

COLOR HER IMPRESSIVE

"so I just took my time, getting songs that were really great and trying to figure out how they were all gonna fit together. Originally, the title was gonna be Good Golly Svengali— because I was so sick of hearing people say that Dixon’s my Svengali—and the record was gonna be the whole Svengali story.

“But then," she continues, “we started getting all these great songs that didn’t fit in with the Svengali thing. So, I thought, let’s look at the record as a conversation between two women ragging on their boyfriends, with each song beng an illustration of a different point in the conversation.”

The results are there for all to hear on Used Guitars. As for market share and audience demographics, that remains to be seen. Still, Jones ventures, “I’m pretty sure thatthe yups are starting to tune in,” pointing out that the Match Game track “Crusher" was in heavy rotation on WBMW (geddit?), an upward-mobilityslanted Washington, D.C. radio station. “When fans come backstage now,” she adds, “they don’t bring us joints. We get banana bread and muffins instead.”

Harold DeMuir

A BUSH BY ANY OTHER NAME

Jeff Pezzati is the observer, the commentator, the mouth that roars out reflections on the American Dream gone awry. For someone whose musical persona is so brimming with anger and frustration, it’s surprising that he’s such a polite fellow. Same goes for the rest of Naked Raygun—drummer Eric Spicer, guitarist John Haggerty and bassist Pierre Kezdy. Together, they are the sound of punk rock 1988—a tuneful approach rooted in the jarring melodies of the Buzzcocks or Stiff Little Fingers, with the most tasteful of underground elements from the moment they formed eight years back.

“In the early ’80s there were bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Wire and the Stranglers. They all sounded totally different, yet you could still tell they were all coming from the same place, the same school of thought. I try to liken Naked Raygun to those types of bands, since we fit somewhere into an American punk scene, yet we’re not like 75 California hardcore bands,” says Jeff. “We’re just this band and we -do the Naked Raygun thing. The same goes for bands like Government Issue, Breaking Circus or Rifle Sport, bands that all started around the same time, sound nothing like each other but if you like one, you’re probably going to like them all.”

“Every aspect of music that we think is important, you’ll find in Naked Raygun,” adds Kezdy. “Melody and power is what does it for me from the first time I heard both the Sex Pistols and the Stranglers, and I think those are key elements to this band.”

Naked Raygun are part of Chicago’s great musical heritage. Home to the

likes of the now-defunct Big Black, Articles of Faith, the Effigies, Breaking Circus, Rapeman, Urge Overkill and a host of others, Al Capone’s Windy City might well be the most unrecognized of the American underground. John has played with members of Breaking Circus; Pierre—whose brother John fronts the Effigies—was in the longdefunct Strike Under; and Eric played in a number of obscure Chi-town outfits. In fact, none other than Big Black’s Santiago Durango slung the six-string in Naked Raygun for quite some time. “It’s gets pretty incestuous,” says Jeff, whose sister Patty gained infamy for adorning LP covers for Chi-town synthsters Ministry. “After a while you start to think that everyone is in everyone else’s band.”

With Jettison, the band’s third album, Naked Raygun continue their unblinking examination of the failed American dream. Slam-dance sociologists? They’re a lot smarter than that. Whether it be comic-book celebrations of Frank Miller’s modern-day classic portrayal of an aged, dying Batman in The Dark Knight (“Coldbringer”) or visions of the failed romantic (“Home of the Brave” from All Rise), the Naked Raygun outlook remains one of piercing abstraction. “There’s more than one way to skin’ a cat,” smirks Kezdy. “We try to be observant more than anything else and besides, we think that our music’s good enough so that people will also listen to what we have to say.”

“It seems that a lot of younger bands think that people will hear what they have to say if they bitch enough,” says Jeff. “Our answer is to write great songs so people will listen to them long

enough to figure out whatever we’re saying.”

True to the band’s initial nonconformist stance, Naked Raygun is a means of self-expression and artistic freedom for all four members. Although Pezzati works as an engineer and Pierre tends to chores as an office worker, they can’t help but feel youthful contempt for the “moustache, briefcase, suit & tie, nine-to-five world.”

“People, especially salesmen, lose track of what they’re doing,” says Jeff. “They" were supposed to go out and make money so they would live nicely. But unfortunately, they actually become these salesmen, some other creature that could only speak, deal and comb his hair like a salesman which is really disgusting. Not to mention wearing plaid jackets. What I started realizing at my job is that unless I start making a shitload more money, all I’ll be able to do is afford the clothes to go to work. I’ve bettered myself to the point where I can afford the suits. It’s pointless.”

“If you work everyday with assholes for assholes, it’s a constant reminder of what you shouldn’t become,” insists Pierre.

Of course, no “new” band profile would be complete without a stock “how’dya pick the name?” query. So what’s the cryptic meaning of Naked Raygun? For a bunch of swell, polite guys, the Raygun crew gets a bit incensed when this question pops up.

“Don’t ask us or we’ll turn into vampires and suck your brains out,” threatens Eric.

“It was fine eight years ago,” deadpans John, “but it was a bad idea. We didn’t realize it at the time. I bet the guys in Flotsam and Jetsam are saying the same thing. They’re sitting ’round the table saying, ‘shit, we’re too big now, we can’t change the name.’ Unbelievably, four people actually sat around a room and thought of our name. So my advice to young bands would be to pick a good name or at least change it before you get too big.”

Mike Gitter