Monkeys Gone to Heaven

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By 1983, Norton was also producing, and soon he was being managed by John Reed, who takes care of his career to this day. Work with Throwing Muses in Boston led to Norton watching their support act, the Pixies, perform at a hip local punk club named The Rat (formerly the Rathskeller). Artist History— Pixies". Billboard.com. Archived from the original on September 29, 2007 . Retrieved 2007-04-20. Charles would have all of these little ditties — minute-and-a-half songs consisting of verse, chorus, verse, beat-beat-beat-bang, out, we're finished. I would go 'Uh, this is really short. Can we double this bit and can we do this again?' and he'd say 'Why? Within that minute and a half I've said everything I'm gonna say.' We had this ongoing thing when we first worked together, where I'd be trying to transform the raw material into song arrangements and he'd just go 'Look, I'm not going to play that twice.'" Since we had under three weeks to record, most of Doolittle was a song a day, and we managed to keep to that except for 'Monkey Gone To Heaven'. It was a case of 'Oh, it would be great just to try putting some strings on that,' and because we didn't have enough time in Boston, we had to wait until we got to the Carriage House in Connecticut." Going Downtown

Hence the need for 15 songs on the Doolittle album, only three of which make it past the three-minute mark. "We'd usually work on 22 or 23 songs for a Pixies album, and some of them would end up as 'B' sides and others would be scrapped halfway through," Norton states. Monkey Gone to Heaven" includes references to numerology in the lyrics "If man is five/then the Devil is six/and God is seven". Francis later expanded on the significance of the lyrics in an interview to Alternative Press, saying "It's a reference from what I understand to be Hebrew numerology, and I don't know a lot about it or any of it really. I just remember someone telling me of the supposed fact that in the Hebrew language, especially in the Bible, you can find lots of references to man in the 5th and Satan in the 6th and God in the 7th. [...] I didn't go to the library and figure it out". [5] The song's numerology is alluded to on the single's cover, which features figures of five, six and seven, and also a monkey with a halo. I think within every genre of music the best songs can be played on an acoustic guitar and they've got a great melody. That was the case with Doolittle. It was routined on an acoustic guitar and all of the songs work on an acoustic guitar. I think that's the way to start, and then how you shape things after that is the art of making a record, really, or being a good band. The song has to work on its own, it has to stand up, and you have to be able to play it. You can't rely on bells and whistles to make things work, it has to be already there within the structure of the song, and that was certainly the case with 'Monkey Gone To Heaven'.

When Monkey Gone To Heaven was released as a single on 20 March 1989, the cover depicted a benign simian with a halo over its head. By the following decade, however, it was becoming clear from research and data analysis that the world was hotting up. Issues such as the destruction of rainforests and the use of ozone layer-damaging CFC gases (chlorofluorocarbons) in industrial and commercial use became more commonplace and many celebrities and musicians began to bring wider attention to the problems the planet faced. The songdidn’t make a lot of noise on music charts. However, it most notably peaked at number five on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay listing.But as such stories sometimes go, the tune still went on to be recognized as a “Single of the Year” by the likes of Rolling Stone, NME and The Village Voice.And even more impressively, it landed on the 2004 edition of Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest of All Time” list (though it has been removed from the ranking since). More Facts The connotationbehind it all is that the devil is superior to man, with God trumping both.And needless to say, such terminology can lead to a number of speculations as to why the Pixies would include such an idea in a song which appears to be primarily about the environment in the first place.

Rolling Stone: Monkey Gone to Heaven". Rolling Stone. 2004-11-04. Archived from the original on October 1, 2007 . Retrieved 2007-04-21. New York City senior health inspector, Roy Jelen holds up a syringe found on the beach at New York's Staten Island in July 1988. I just remember someone telling me of the supposed fact that in the Hebrew language, especially in the Bible, you can find lots of references to man in the 5th and Satan in the 6th and God in the 7th." Francis explained to Alternative Press. "I didn't go to the library and figure it out."Dimery, Robert, ed. (2010). "Pixies: Monkey Gone to Heaven". 1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die. Octopus Publishing Group. p. 631. ISBN 978-1-84403-684-4. The cover art to“Doolittle”features the image of a monkey (with a halo) as well as the numbers six and seven.The artist behind it, Vaughan Oliver, conceptualized the imageryafter listening to“Monkey Gone to Heaven”.Also as originally intended, Frank was going to entitle the album “Whore”.But after seeing the cover art which Oliver put together, he opted not to.

Frank, Josh; Ganz, Caryn. Fool the World: The Oral History of a Band Called Pixies. Virgin Books, 2005. ISBN 0-312-34007-9. With the rhythm section set up in a live formation, Dave Lovering's kit was positioned at the far end of the studio. Standing nearby, Kim Deal's bass was DI'd and miked with a U47 on the cabinet, while the guitars were amped with Marshalls or Peaveys — sometimes a combination of the two, split and then mixed together — and miked with 57s or 414s. One thing I do is pay a lot of attention to detail. It's important to me to get these little things right, the things that other people might not think are important, and I think that sort of excites Charles in a certain way. He's got quite a weird mathematical brain and he likes things that excite him. He likes detail and he likes things that sound simple but are not. So, in a working situation we got on well together. I helped him bring out his pop sensibility to a certain extent, and he helped me on a quirky level as to where and how you choose to do things; how to avoid doing the obvious but do what you normally wouldn't do and make things more interesting. Mynamemyway from Not Tellin', VaIn biology class, we were talking about the pollution of the ozone layer and I was dissppointed to find that I was one of the few who believed in it. After the discussion, we took a test and, after I was done, I wrote down the 2nd verse of this song on the front and turned it in to my teacher. I thought it was witty. Gil Norton and engineer Al Clay with Theremin player Robert Brunner, in a photo taken during the recording of the Pixies' later Bossanova album. Photo: Gil NortonThe second verse concerns the damage to the ozone layer, claiming that "everything is gonna burn, we'll all take turns, I'll get mine too."

Echo from Normalville, MaCan't believe no one's commented for this! it's a perfect example of the Pixie's amazing way to put something so complex and serious into something so light and seemingly nonsensical.As the Pixies' chief songwriter, Charles Thompson was very insistent that their songs should not outstay their welcome, a point which led to much discussion with their producer. "As a producer, the whole [ pre-production] process with Charles was very educational for me," says Gil Norton. "It made me think about why you want an artist to do things — if you do something twice, can you make it different? Can it grow? What can we do with it? How can we approach the whole element of dynamics, and what can we introduce to make it better and not have it sound like we're just doing the same thing over and over? I think things should develop, and that's an approach I've taken throughout the rest of my career up until now — 'OK, I've done that on the first verse. What's going to happen on the second verse? What's going to happen in the middle? Is a harmony going to come in or should it remain the same?' I think there are a lot of questions you have to ask yourself to make sure you come up with the right result, and in that pre-production area there are lots of things that you can try out as well. The song peaks with the frontman screaming a nursery-rhyme style lyric that invoked some weird numerology: "If man is 5, then the devil is 6, and if the devil is 6, then God is 7!" Pre-production took place in a rehearsal room normally used by singer-songwriter Juliana Hatfield, with the band set up in a circle. The Doolittle songs had mostly already been demoed with Gary Smith, the producer who had discovered the band in 1986 and taken them into his Fort Apache Studios to record what became the eight-song Come On Pilgrim mini-album.