Monkeys Gone to Heaven

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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. Luiz from PortugalI always tought that the number was a geometric progression: the man is 5 which is the smallest and the devil is 6 which is bigger than 5 but smaller than 7. "Then god is seven..." 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. 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."

Monkey Gone To Heaven opens with a tale of an "underwater guy who controlled the sea" who comes a cropper from (presumably) the "Syringe Tide" and the other effluents that were being dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. "The man dying from the sludge in the water in New Jersey is just me getting mythological," said Francis. "It's Neptune that I picture dying from the pollution." 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. 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 Rolling Stone: Monkey Gone to Heaven". Rolling Stone. 2004-11-04. Archived from the original on October 1, 2007 . Retrieved 2007-04-21. 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.'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. 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." 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 Pixies Frank, Josh; Ganz, Caryn. Fool the World: The Oral History of a Band Called Pixies. Virgin Books, 2005. ISBN 0-312-34007-9. 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).

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. 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'. 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.Goldman, Marlene. "Here and There and Everywhere". Alternative Press Vol IV, No 22. September 1989.

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!" 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 MixThe 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 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. 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. 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.