Amps
But that was her only songwriting contribution to the album, and indeed to the entire Pixies oeuvre. After that one moment of early glory she shut up and stood back while the head Pixie, someone calling himself Black Francis, grabbed all the attention. In a way it’s not hard to understand–Black Francis (who’s now calling himself Frank Black) is a consummate attention grabber, the kind of character who’s driven to prove himself the biggest voice in any room. But Deal seemed to crave a kind of anonymity; on the Pixies’ first album she didn’t even identify herself by name, referring to herself in the credits only as Mrs. John Murphy. (She’s since divorced.)
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She began pulling the record together in the miserable winter months following the Breeders’ tour, during a temporary retreat from the limelight in her hometown of Dayton, Ohio. With her sister (and fellow Breeder) Kelley in trouble with both heroin addiction and the law and the other two Breeders on break after a long tour, Deal began fooling around in her basement with a roomful of equipment and a four-track recorder–playing all the instruments herself and overdubbing the vocals. “I’m going to be called Tammy and the Amps,” she told Spin writer Charles Aaron earlier this year, “because I’m Tammy and I’m just playing with a bunch of amps.”
Now it’s just the Amps, and the original demos, for better or worse, have become songs–though they still sound like demos, complete with tape hiss and muddied, distorted vocals. I still don’t know quite what to make of the album; I played it more than half a dozen times in succession before I began distinguishing the individual songs. Yet riffs from several of the songs keep coming back to me at odd moments.
But for each taste of transcendence there are moments of disconcerting awkwardness. The song “First Revival” features not only some of the prettiest vocals on the album–and I mean that in a good way–but a guitar solo so thoroughly bungled it makes you wince. “Hoverin,” almost a throwaway song, starts with a burst of drumming that’s so sloppy even nonmusicians will notice the mistakes. “Breaking the Split Screen Barrier” is all buildup and no delivery, a stillborn rock anthem.
It’s clear enough she doesn’t want to fit into a prepackaged mold as a rock ‘n’ roll sex goddess. But that’s not all there is to it; her refusal is a tad too aggressive–it reeks of false bravado. “Of course, I know how my photos look,” Deal has said. “I know I come off lookin’ like a fuckin’ haggy housewife compared to all these other women in rock, and that’s fine with me, man. So I don’t wanna wash my hair, fuck you, this is how I look.”
In Making It, a book that has been meanly criticized over the years, literary critic Norman Podhoretz grappled with his own feelings about the prospects of success–and decided, after serious consideration, that he’d like success better than failure. Few people are so willing to admit it. “[J]udging by the embarrassment that a frank discussion of one’s feelings about one’s own success, or the lack of it, invariably causes in polite society today, ambition…seems to be replacing erotic lust as the prime dirty little secret of the well-educated American soul,” he wrote. “And since the natural accompaniments of a dirty little secret are superstition, hypocrisy and cant, it is no cause for wonder that the theme of success rarely appears in our discourse unattended by at least one of these three dismal Furies inherited from Victorian sex.”
