Monkeys Gone to Heaven

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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. 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. Having engineered the whole record, towards the end I just thought it would be great to get a fresh pair of ears on this as well, because sometimes when you're producing and engineering it's nice to get a fresh perspective on the mix. So, I asked Steven Haigler to come in and help me with it, using the SSL at the Carriage House. At that point, I was used to mixing on SSL — I didn't mind what we recorded on, although I still don't really like recording on SSLs. I'd much rather be on a Neve or a Trident... or an MCI, or whatever, just to get another character in there, and then I do like mixing on SSL. To me, it's just like driving a car. It's very easy, you sort of know where you are, and I also quite like that sort of sound it gives at the end of it. If you've got all the bottom end and you've got what you want, it finishes it off nicely."

But really, this song isn’t about mythology or anything like that per se.Rather, more to the point is the said figure being depicted as getting “ killed by 10,000,000 pounds of sludge”.So in actuality what the vocalist is alluding to, in a poetic way, is the issue of water pollution, thus setting the tone for the rest of the piece to come. As such,the issues dealt withthe second verse are the depletion of the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect, the latter of which in more contemporary times tends to be referred to as global warming or what have you.And the vocalist once again approaches these issues using metaphorical, and shall we science-fiction inspired language. The Bible I love a hook. I'm a glutton for it, and I love '60s pop music. I just think some of the best songs ever were in so many different genres of music during that era. It's what I grew up with, and at the end of the day I'm a pop producer. That's what I want to do, and that term 'alternative producer' always used to freak me out, really, because I never set myself up to be an alternative record producer. I just want to produce good records, and I never knew what it meant to be alternative to whatever. All I wanted was for the Pixies to be the biggest band in the universe. I don't think we went into any of the stuff that we did thinking 'We want to be quirky and arty and not have anyone like us.' 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.'"They were from a local orchestra and they were really cool," remarks Norton, who in addition to producing and engineering the Pixies' two subsequent albums, Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde, has since worked with artists such as James, Del Amitri, Counting Crows, Foo Fighters and, most recently, Gomez. "They had just done a show and they were still in their tuxes and gowns. I sang to Arthur what I wanted to be played and he just sketched it out for me. Then we fine-tuned it, because without an arrangement we needed to find out if it was going to work or not, and the musicians began playing, and within two hours we had the bits that we wanted." To The Mix 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). 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 Goldman, Marlene. "Here and There and Everywhere". Alternative Press Vol IV, No 22. September 1989. 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 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." Not that Gil Norton had an arrangement when the string session took place at the Carriage House Studio in Stamford, Connecticut, with violinists Karen Karlsrud and Corine Metter, and cellists Arthur Fiacco and Ann Rorich. 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. In that sense, I think the band understood more about what they were doing when we did Doolittle, just because we had worked hard in the pre-production area and we had the arrangements sorted out. We never messed around or overdubbed a lot — the band played live, and while certain things such as vocals were overdubbed, pretty much everything was done in that vein."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. 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.

Strings recorded on December 4, 1988, at Carriage House Studios, Stamford, Connecticut, United States

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'. Some of the songs on Doolittle were newish and others they'd had for a while," Norton says. "For instance, they'd had 'Here Comes Your Man' for quite some time, and the version that appeared on the album was the third time they had recorded it. I listened to the different versions and came up with that arrangement of the song.

The way I work with bands is I do a lot of pre-production, and I make sure everybody knows what they are doing," Norton explains. "I think you've really got to understand how you're recording, why you're recording and what is important about a specific performance in terms of what is good and what isn't. I try to get a band to think about that as much as possible, because I can tell them that something's good or bad, but if they don't understand that then they're not going to do anything different, because they're just thinking that everything's great. So, there's a lot of playing with arrangements during pre-production, and by the time we hit the studio everyone's got an understanding of what they're supposed to be doing. Whether or not we achieve that is a different matter. At least it isn't confusing. I don't like my approach to be confusing to artists. 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. Very few Buddy Holly songs were over two minutes, and that was an amazing thing for Charles to do, really, because how could I argue with him? Some of the best, most classic songs that anybody remembers are the Buddy Holly songs, and they were short and sweet, bang-bang-bang. That was very educational for me on so many levels, and it increased Charles's trust in me when he could see I was taking that on board." Portable PixiesSince 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 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. 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. And then as far as the title goes, as reported by Rolling Stone the reason Frank decided to name the song so is because the titular phrase, to him, “sounds neat”. So there’s really no need to dive into what “ monkey gone to heaven” is supposed to mean since, according to the author himself, it isn’t meant to actually point to anything. 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.