The biggest underground bands typically have one song that the masses accept, making them suddenly exposed to a much wider audience. R.E.M. had “Losing My Religion,” and Nirvana had “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Pixies “arrived” when they released their second single from the album Doolittle. They were never going to outsell Guns N’ Roses or Aerosmith, but when the song approached the level of becoming a hit, the band refused to play it live. Let’s’ take a look at the story behind “Here Comes Your Man” by Pixies.
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Outside, there’s a box car waiting
Outside the family stew
Out by the fire, breathing
Outside, we wait ’til face turns blue
In the Beginning
Pixies singer/songwriter Charles Thompson, who used the name Black Francis in the band, wrote the song in his early teens. The band played it in its earliest days and even recorded an early version in 1987. Thompson told journalist Ben Sisario, “It’s a sweet little chord progression thing that I wrote when I was like 14 or 15. I probably liked the word ‘boxcar’ because I heard it on the R.E.M. song from their first record. That’s probably where I got that. I probably just liked the word ‘boxcar.’ Where do you go with that? I don’t know. Hobos?”
I know the nervous walking
I know the dirty beard hangs
Out by the box car waiting
Take me away to nowhere plains
There is a wait so long (so long, so long)
You’ll never wait so long
An Earthquake
In 1989, Thompson told NME, “It’s about winos and hobos traveling on the trains, who die in the California Earthquake, peeing their pants. Before earthquakes, everything gets very calm—animals stop talking and, birds stop chirping, and there’s no wind. It’s very ominous. I’ve been through a few earthquakes, actually, ’cause I grew up in California. I was only in one big one, in 1971. I was very young, and I slept through it. I’ve been awake through lots of small ones at school and at home. It’s very exciting actually—a very comical thing. It’s like the earth is shaking, and what can you do? Nothing.”
Here comes your man
Here comes your man
Here comes your man
Big shake on the box car moving
Big shake to the land that’s falling down
Is a wind makes a palm stop blowing
A big, big stone fall and break my crown
Too Normal
When Pixies signed a record deal with 4AD, the song was left off their debut album. Producer Gary Smith said, “There was some reluctance to do ‘Here Comes Your Man’ because it was too pop; there was something too straight about it.” 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell didn’t’ even consider adding it to the album. He agreed with Smith, “Slick is maybe not the right word. … I was concerned that it was a little bit normal.”
There is a wait so long (so long, so long)
You’ll never wait so long
Here comes your man
Here comes your man
Here comes your man
Here comes your man
Change of Producer, Change of Heart
In 1988, the band rerecorded the song. This time, Gil Norton produced it. They all still avoided using it. However, Norton heard something he liked. He worked with Thompson on three more demos of the song and edited parts of all of them into one piece. Norton said, “We wanted to try and capture all the energy and cool things of the other versions. I listened to it all to find the best bits that I liked and then made a version that got all the cool bits of everything in there so that everybody’s favorite bits got in the end product.”
After the song was edited, it needed another verse. Thompson put in the earthquake verse and revealed the untimely end of the main character as a stone hits him.
There is a wait so long (so long, so long)
You’ll never wait so long
Here comes your man
Here comes your man
Here comes your man
Here comes your man
The Band Resisted Playing It Live
Doolittle‘s sales picked up as the video for “Here Comes Your Man” played on MTV. The band resisted playing the song live and avoided performing it in promotional appearances. The Pixies didn’t want to have a pop hit. It was the college-rock attitude where anticommercial equals legitimacy.
Guitarist Joey Santiago remembers a typical situation: “We were like little runts, little wise asses. We were in L.A., already doing a bunch of stuff. Arsenio Hall asked if we wanted to play on the show, and we weren’t playing ‘Here Comes Your Man’ at the time, you know? The tour manager asked, ‘Hey, Arsenio Hall invited you to come on the show.’ We said, ‘Well, what do they want to hear?’ He said, ‘Here Comes Your Man.’ No way. We told them we would love to go on, only if we did the song ‘Tame.’ And they said, ‘No, thank you.'”
Here comes your man
Here comes your man
Here comes your man
Here comes your man
Doolittle Pays Tribute to Surrealism
In 1989, Thompson told The New York Times: “I got into avant-garde movies and surrealism as an escape from reality. There’s nothing surrealistic about everyday life. To me, surrealism is totally artificial. I recently read an interview with the director David Lynch, who said he had ideas and images but that he didn’t know exactly what they meant. That’s how I write. Lynch’s Eraserhead was a particular potent inspiration. A stark but hilarious dramatization of the primal fear of fatherhood, it portrayed the unwanted baby as a twitching, wormlike turd born ‘premature,’ Jack Nance, throughout the film are what might be called a choir of whores, women who are angelic and cruel at the same time.”
Here comes your man
Here comes your man
Here comes your man
Here comes your man
Here comes your man
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