“It is a little strange but it’s good,” she says of 2013’s momentary stops at home. “My mom and dad are older and I have a cat so it’s really nice to be able to touch down and spend a couple weeks here. ‘Is everybody alive? Does everybody have a pulse? Okay, good. Does the cat have four legs? Okay, excellent. See you guys later.’ Then I’ll leave for a couple more weeks or however long then come back and do the same thing.”
Rejoining as The Breeders (1992 – 94 lineup) with sister Kim Deal, bassistJosephine Wiggs, drummerJim McPherson and guest cellist Carrie Bradley, began with a show in Brooklyn in April and has continued in a merry way. “Everything still seems to be going really well,” Deal notes. “We’re all still getting along; we’re all still enjoying ourselves.”
In London – and I blame Josephine for this, it’s her fault – she thought it would be a good idea if we played Last Splash and then, for the encore, instead of coming on and doing whatever songs we were gonna do, go on and play all of Pod (1990). From start to finish. So that was fun but it was nerve-wracking learning all these idiosyncratic leads. It was just super fun.”
If getting a band back together is a surreal feeling, then playing the album where it all came together – then eventually fell apart – must be even more so. “It does bring you back,” Deal confirms. “As you’re going from song to song, you do have memories. It is a period of time. It’s not just going from this song to another song; not that you’re thinking this while you’re playing it, but there is the idea of it.
“We didn’t have cell phones in ’94. So you couldn’t text. If somebody had a question on whether or not you went to a B or an Am or something. ‘Hey, does that go to an F there or what?’Just those little things, little time bubbles.
“But not really,” she adds, by way of qualification. “It’s not like I’m standing there thinking of a specific event or anything, but there’s just a similar patina from song to song. That’s the way I think I would describe that, instead of a different hue to each one…if albums were colours (laughs).”
Even so, The Breeders had previously not performed all of the songs on Last Splash live, or explored their colours. Once such song is Mad Lucas, though it seems understandable given the manner in which it was recorded. “I remember recording that song,” Deal begins. “Kim sat on one side of Carrie, I sat on the other side and we had her play her part as well as she could and we just sat there and tickled her. We went to town and tickled her under her arms and her only goal was to keep playing the song. Keep trying to play those notes. It didn’t matter if she got the note or not, the idea was to keep trying to play it. That’s why it’s so quirky and jerky and crazy and sometimes she gets that note and sometimes she doesn’t and you hear that slide. But how do you do that live?
“You just try and conjure that up, you know? And she’s really good at doing that, she goes back to holding the bow kind of really weird and you know, feeling it. It’s been fun doing that.” You’re not getting guitar techs to tickle her with feathers? “No,” Deal laughs, “but it was mentioned!”
While Kim Deal’s departure from The Pixies seems as complicated as that band’s dynamic always was, it seems The Breeders is a much more casual association. “No, it’s not like everybody left being mad at each other and were never speaking to each other again,” Deal explains. “Jim McPherson lives like 20 minutes outside of Daytonand we’d see him at shows and clubs and we’d see his wife around town. With Josephine, we’d actually played with her a couple times. She played bass with us for a 4AD anniversary thing and then when Mando (Lopez), our other bassist, when his wife had a baby, we had some shows scheduled and had to leave the tour and Josephine joined us to play the Last Splash songs. So we were all talking and stuff like that.
“It was more like, ‘are you guys not important enough in your jobs where you can actually leave your job and come and do this with us for a year?’. And luckily, that’s the case.”
If there were any doubts upon the re-grouping – and it seems there definitely weren’t – Wiggs’ bass introduction to Cannonball at the band’s first rehearsal was just the tonic. “Oh my God,” Deal exclaims, still sounding moved. “It was so weird. I’ve heard that bass part played by other people before. By fine musicians. They’re great musicians. But it never sounds like whenJosephine plays it. It’s bizarre. I’m sure it’s the way she plays it. It’s her bass. Her decisions that she makes on the amps. It’s just like, ‘oh my God. It’s that song’. And also, we’ve realised we can’t play it wrong. We cannot play the song wrong. It’s not possible.”
Given the nature of The Pixies one wonders if Kim Deal leaving The Pixies has perhaps freed her creatively, for her own musical projects as well as The Breeders? Her sister’s not to fussed on that. “Well, we’ve been playing Pixies music forever,” Deal notes. “Since we were 15. So it’s never really stopped her from writing, or doing music, or doing her own stuff. Nothing’s ever stopped her from doing different projects.”
Of course, not only does the Last Splash album and era mean a lot to the band, it means just as much, if not more, to the fans. It speaks of a different time in music and indeed in life. Memories, as they say, are made of this. “We talk about this,” Deal says. “Sometimes you do a show and you just feel there is so much love and excitement for the record and what it means to this particular group of people, that I don’t know if I can do the songs service. I don’t know if I could possibly play them as good to help with their memory.
“But I’m signed up. I’m completely into doing that for now. I’m happy to do that for them if it gives them joy. Just like I would like to see the Rolling Stones just play Some Girls again. That album…that was so good. My memories of that are fantastic. I have such distinct memories for myself. “So I know how that is. I respect it; it doesn’t matter who you are, you have that.”
In celebrating such memories, Deal is aware that the prospect of creating more is a distinct possibility. There’s plenty to draw upon song-wise, but it’s also important to take one step at a time. “I would love to do that,” she says. “Have you seen Kim’s website, kimdealmusic.com? She has beautiful songs. It’s a series of six or seven singles and they each have an A and a B side. I don’t know why we don’t do Likkle More. We could do Dirty Hessians, which is an instrumental. There’s another called Ranch On Castle, which isn’t out yet. I wanna know why we’re not doing those songs? But, as you say…first things first.”
BY BOB GORDON
