Oh My Golly!

The Pixies formed in Boston in 1986 when guitarist Joey Santiago introduced his college roommate Charles Thompson, who’d started calling himself Black Francis, to drummer David Lovering. Francis placed a classified ad seeking a bassist who liked Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul and Mary. Kim Deal answered, even though she’d never played bass before. “Oh My Golly!” landed on Surfer Rosa, the band’s debut studio album. It came out March 21, 1988, on the British label 4AD.

Black Francis sings the song almost entirely in broken Spanish, picked up during a stretch of time in Puerto Rico. The lyric “besando chichando con Surfer Rosa” gave the album its name, a nod to a fictional island woman he’d invented for the song. The band recorded the album in November and December 1987 at Downtown Recorders and Q Division in Boston. Producer Steve Albini captured the sessions live and raw, with almost no studio polish. “Oh My Golly!” runs as track ten on the CD release, track four on side B of the vinyl.

4AD released Surfer Rosa in the UK, and Rough Trade Records handled US distribution. The album never charted in either country at the time. The lone single, a rerecorded “Gigantic,” reached only No. 93 on the UK Singles Chart. None of that mattered for long. Elektra Records picked up the catalog for a wider US rerelease in 1992.

Rolling Stone ranked Surfer Rosa at No. 390 on its 2020 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, crediting Albini’s razor-edged guitars and thudding drums with becoming one of the most influential rock sounds of the era. Nirvana and PJ Harvey both chased that same raw quality, and each eventually hired Albini themselves, on In Utero and Rid of Me.

Black Francis ended the Pixies in early 1993, announcing the breakup to BBC Radio before he’d told his own bandmates. Deal and Lovering found out by fax. The band reunited in 2004, and has toured on and off ever since. Surfer Rosa turns 38 next March. “Oh My Golly!” never got released as a single. It didn’t need to be.