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Debaser
There’s a cord progression, that’s the first thing. Then a word or a phrase at the most. Then a topic evolves around that. I thought of Un Chien Andalou and I thought an arty French movie was an equally dumb thing to write a song about.
Debaser fitted well because at the time of the movie the Parisiens were ripping up their seats in the theatres because of another film and the point of Un Chien Andalou was to debase morality. To debase standards of art. The classic film school shot is the razor slicing across the eyeball. Eyes are the main way people communicate; you can hold unspoken conversations. I guess that it’s the most important part of your body unless you’re talking to a blind person.

Tame
I don’t want to sound like a male chauvinist, but I have a male perspective, because I am male. ‘Tame’ is about women more than men. But the way some men treat their hair it’s incredible and I can[‘t] understand all that deodorant and stuff. I’ve never related to it. My family’s rather spartan.
It’s about putting all that time into sexual presentation. I don’t mean it in a dirty kind of way. Where I live in the city, women spend time presenting themselves and still come out forever bland and mediocre.

I Bleed
In the first two verses there’s no topic whatsoever; all this is just a rhyme structured AABCBDD. It’s all very automatic. The rest is about Arizona. There’s a very famous cliff dwelling there, with two or three storey houses about a mile up inside these cliffs. It’s about 900 years old and you can still see the handprints from the people who pressed the plaster onto the walls. And you can take your hand and place it in the print and it’s very wooh.

Wave Of Mutilation
Mostly I try to stick with more physical imagery just because it’s more tangible mentally than he or she or it, like ‘Little Red Corvette.”
The first line is a joke on The Beach Boys and Charles Manson. They hung out together and all that. And he wrote this song called ‘Cease To Exist.’ And supposedly The Beach Boys used a lot of his lyrics and gave him a sports car or something. And they had this boys loved girl song where they went ‘cease to resist’ and changed his lyrics around. They couldn’t have ‘cease to exist’ because it was all powerful suicide stuff! He’s just some glorified charismatic figure like Hitler. But he does say some interesting things, he’s a result of something but I don’t know what.

Here Comes Your Man
This is a pre-Pixies song that I wrote when I was about 15. It’s about wino’s and hobos travelling on the trains who dies in the California Earthquake. 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 ‘cos 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.

Dead
This is the story of David and Bathsheba of the Old Testament. King David was on his rooftop one nighttime watching a woman bathing in the nude and he was aroused, I guess. Anyway he sent some men after her and I don’t know whether it was rape or a seduction, but she became pregnant. So David arrange for Uriah, her husband, who was a soldier in his army, to be sent to the battle on a suicide mission. So ‘Dead’ is a metaphor for sex reduced to the most basic; ugly, bad lust with equally bad results.

Monkey Gone To Heaven
‘This monkey’s gone to heaven’ is not connected to the rest of the song at all, it was the working lyric and we couldn’t come up with anything better.
I’m not really trying to address any issue: the sky and the ocean are both very ancient, spiritual and mythological places. And I’m just trying to talk about them in surreal kinds of ways: there’s a hole in the ozone layer scientifically, but the unreal side is that there’s a hole in the sky and the sky means alot of things and has alot of implications to lots of people in different cultures in past, present and future, right? Like the man dying from the sludge in the water in New Jersey, is just me getting mythological again. It’s Neptune I picture dying from the pollution.

Grieves
It’s about the end of the world I guess. Mr Grieves is the Death character of mythology. The ‘man in the middle’ is Dr Doolittle, because if you could speak to the animals you would be the great link between mankind and the animal world. There’s this theory that if not smarter than us, animals are aware of what’s going on and if we could communicate with them, they could give us the answer of the future and make everything ok. But I’m assuming that a nuclear winter will mean that Mr Grieves is going to win in the end.

Crackity Jones
Joses Jones is a roommate I had in Puerto Rico. I lived in this men’s dorm that was half homosexual and I had this really crazy drug addict psycho weirdo guy to share with and this is all about him.
I would be speaking to him in Spanish so everything would be a little vague to me and he kept talking on and on about Paco Picopiedra and La Muneca. I couldn’t work out what he was talking about and it was Fred Flinstone!

La La Love You
There is no love in here. Not a drop. I’ve never written a love song. It’s just like an abstract sort of joke; ‘la la love you don’t mean maybe’. It’s just mimicking a really bad 1950’s song or maybe I should say 1980’s. ‘First base, second base, third base, home run’ is a very Shakespearian crass joke in America, a crude joke for full copulation. I’m just being as minimalist as I can, but it conjures up lots of images – well one image I should say.

Number 13 Baby
This is a collage of images of when I was growing up in Los Angeles. Number 13 traditionally means bad luck, but in America, especially in the 60’s among bikers and chicanos, the number 13 is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet: M for marijuana.
It’s a really goofy sub culture, but it’s kinda funny, and even today you can see it spray-painted on walls ‘The Meter Boys Number 13’. So it is about a Mexican girl or a Samoan girl, a boyish, sexual, adolescent collage of Southern California living.

There Goes My Gun
There’s nothing to this apart from that one line. It’s the hook right? It’s the chorus. I could have written a verse but it sounded cool without the lyrics so it’s much more effective and theatrical. These are just popular phrases I would associate with having a gun, ‘Looka me’ because it’s a position of power. I don’t own a gun, I’m afraid of them.
People keep asking me is this some sort of phallic symbol, you know ‘There goes my gun’, an orgasm. I mean I suppose that could be true but I get the impression that in the literary world anything that is taller than it is wide is a phallic, you know what I mean? I’m just talking about guns I guess. I just want to make a cool rock ‘n’ roll song.

Hey
It’s a relationship song about two classic sad figures. Myself or maybe not myself. Uh is the sound of sex and also of childbirth. I dunno I’m just sorta sad about about how sex goes the wrong way in a very basic sort of way and how it results in very amazing things like childbirth and stuff.

Gouge Away
Yeah, you’ve got it in one. It’s a story about Sampson and Delilah, you’re the first person that’s actually realised - probably because the song doesn’t actually mention Sampson or Delilah. It’s a sort of sex story: Delilah shows up as a secret spy of the Philistines and has an affair with Sampson. I don’t know what he was getting out of it. But enough sex and drugs and relaxation to give up his secrets. Maybe he loved her, I dunno. But they gouged his eyes out in the end.

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