LSXX

Before they could legally drink, the Deal twins, armed with one guitar and two mics, were fixtures in the scuzziest bars of Dayton, Ohio, where legend has it their salty-sweet harmonies could make even the motorcycle dudes cry. The year was 1978, maybe 79. Like the bikers, Kim and Kelley listened to Hank Williams and the Everly Brothers; when Kelley was 16 she watched The Song Remains the Same on acid and the souvenir she kept from her trip was this dead-serious conviction that she wanted to be Jimmy Page. Other people's songs were too hard to figure out, so they made up their own. Nobody else would play with them (Kim: "This is Dayton, Ohio. You know the NGA kids: No Girls Allowed. Motherfuckers."), so they played with themselves. The angel-voiced twins kept booking scuzzy bar gigs and kept writing songs with no greater ambition than staving off boredom. "There was no scene," Kelley recalled years later, "You made up your own fun."

Kim considered herself a guitarist first and foremost. She'd been playing since she was 11, but shortly after she moved to Boston in her mid-20s, she tried out for a band called Pixies whose two current members suggested she learn bass. All the better that she'd never played one before; the Boston Phoenix classified ad she'd answered had said, "Please, no chops." They asked Kelley to be the drummer but she didn't feel like leaving Dayton, so she said no. For the next seven years, Kim sang backup and played bass in the Pixies, but mostly she was cool for a living. The kind of cool that people mythologize in songs years later. The kind of cool that dominoes immeasurably: in the same way that we'll never know exactly how many babies are on this earth because of Sade, we will never know how many girls picked up bass guitars and started bands because of Kim Deal's grinning, invitingly normal, yes-even-you-can-do-this-too charm. It was the kind of cool that irrevocably scrambles people's ideas of what cool actually is. "Kim would come straight from work, so she had skirt-suits and office pumps on a lot," recalled Tanya Donelly, then of Throwing Muses, who accompanied Pixies on their first European tour. "So many people in [the Boston scene were] trying to look cool, and meanwhile the coolest person there is dressed like a secretary. I have to say, in a day it changed my perception of what was cool."

As the Pixies' cult fanbase grew throughout late 80s and early 90s, Kim's artistic contributions diminished with each record. Depending on who you ask, she was either almost kicked out of or almost quit the famously tumultuous band a few different times before Frank Black sent out indie rock's most notorious fax in the summer of 1992, letting everyone know that the Pixies were through. In the liner notes to the 20th anniversary reissue of Last Splash, the phenomenal second album from her other band the Breeders, Kim sums up the Pixies' explosive seven-year run in a single, tellingly faceless sentence: "[W]e started by driving ourselves in a van with no record contract, went on to appear on front covers of the English music press (while still largely unknown in the States) and ended when the lead singer quit the band to pursue a solo career."

The Breeders began in earnest when Pixies and Throwing Muses came off that first European tour, at some point during which Kim and Donelly decided they wanted to make a record together. They recruited a British bassist they'd met on the road, Josephine Wiggs, and their Boston friend Carrie Bradley would play violin. In 1990, they released the great, eerily primal Pod, which Kurt Cobain loved, cited as an inspiration on Nirvana, and later dubbed, "an epic that will never let you forget your ex-girlfriend." After that, Donelly left to form Belly, Dayton's Jim Macpherson became their permanent drummer, and the Breeders found themselves in search of a new guitarist so they could go back into the studio with the bouncy, grungy demos they'd been writing in 1992. Kim knew somebody back in Dayton. Could she play well? Well, the thing was that she couldn't play at all. But she figured she could teach her pretty quickly, because she was her twin.

That's some of the psychic energy fueling one of alternative rock's most unlikely platinum records and most enduring masterpieces, the Breeders' Last Splash: an indie-famous frontwoman who'd spent the last couple of years feeling increasingly fed up and creatively muzzled at her high-profile day job; an untrained lead guitarist joyriding up and down the fretboard and riding high on the freedom of please, no chops; and maybe above all else a decade-delayed bar band family reunion. It's no wonder that 20 years later, Last Splash still sounds as sloppy and beguiling and warm as the day it was pressed. Although the songs were meticulously crafted and revised, and although the post-Nevermind boom had made the audience for a record this singularly weird suddenly visible, in the end the Breeders sound like a couple of kids from Dayton (and one like-minded Brit) making up their own fun.

Last Splash is a noise-pop record in the fullest sense of both of those words: It is a symphony of feedback but the melodies holding it all together are sweet enough to rot your teeth. From the squalling, rhythmic dissonance of "Roi" to the melodic Lynchian lullaby "Mad Lucas", the record is full of warm, damaged beauty. Fresh off a tour with Nirvana, the Breeders drove to San Francisco in a blizzard to record Last Splash with veteran producer Mark Freegard in the winter of 1993, and the reissue’s liner notes describe the process as a series of sonic experiments. What's that corrosive whir that opens "S.O.S."? It's Kelley's sewing machine fed directly through a Marshall amp, because why not. The distorted vocal on "Cannonball" happened because Kim (who shares a producer’s credit with Freegard) wondered what it'd sound like to sing through a harmonica mic and when they play the song live, they still get that particular tone of the iconic opening vocal ("Ahhhhhoooo-oooh/Ahhhhhoooo-oooh") not through some custom pedal, but by putting a styrofoam cup over the mic. At times they resorted to measures even more DIY than that. The best take of Bradley's warbling strings on "Mad Lucas" was the one where, by her account, "Kim and Kelley grabbed me on each side and shook me and quaked me while I played."

All of which might make Last Splash sound like a haphazard and amateurish affair, but the collection of demos and the 1992 live show included in the extensive LSXX reissue tell a more complex story. Unlike their Dayton buddies Guided by Voices (the Breeders' own cover of "Shocker in Gloomtown" made the reissue, along with the rest of 1994’s excellent Head to Toe EP), the Breeders crafted, road tested, and revised their tunes. Check, for one example, the completely reworked demo of "No Aloha" against the one that made the album. As all the extras on the reissue attest, the genius of the Breeders lies in the balance between being tirelessly tinkering perfectionists who still understand how to embrace creative serendipity. So Last Splash is a tight record that's also alive with happy accidents. Perhaps the most famous example: the bassline's hesitant entrance on "Cannonball"-- and we're talking about one of the most iconic basslines of the 90s-- was actually the product of a fortunate mistake. In a rehearsal, Wiggs played the last note of the riff flat (twice in a row) but everybody thought it sounded cool, so it became a part of the song.

Wiggs and Macpherson are the unsung heroes of Last Splash; a driving-but-just-loose-enough rhythm section, they gave the sprawl a backbone. But the Deals are the record’s charismatic center. It’s hard to imagine a frontwoman more perfect for a record so fixated on the tension between distressed textures and gleefully hooky melody. From her mirror-fogging enunciation of “No bye/No/A-lo-ha” to the way she delivers the title syllable of “Hag” like a cutting sidelong glance, each note comes out of her mouth affixed with a halo of cartoon dirt, like the one that hovers over Pigpen. Expressive yet enigmatic enough to cover a whole range of emotions, Kim’s voice embodies that dirty-prettiness that makes Last Splash’s appeal so complex and hard to pin down. In a 1995 issue of Spin, Charles Aaron called Last Splash "the rare album that had all the I-need-you and you-gross-me-out emotions seamlessly bound together." It can be mean one second ("You’re a nuisance, and I don't like dirt") and then deliver something as vulnerable and classically tender as "Do You Love Me Now?" the next. That it doesn’t always want to admit that it’s a romantic record only makes it more of a romantic record. The point is that it's sweet and gross and guarded and needy and cutting and gleeful because love can be all of those things too.

The reissue is available either as a three-CD package or a vivid, electric-brite vinyl box set, though either prompts a fair question: “Why should I spring for a special edition of an album I can probably still find in the dollar bin?” For any Breeders fan, though, the extras make a convincing case. The live album (recorded in Stockholm in 1994) and disc of rarities and demos put the finished product in context, while the array of EPs show off the wide stylistic range of everything the Breeders could do well. They’re all worth a listen, though the wooly pop of Safari (Donnelly’s last recording with the band) and the later, comparatively aggro Head to Toe (featuring the great, Wiggs-penned title track-- a fan favorite) are the best of the bunch. The less essential Divine Hammer EP is notable for featuring “Do You Love Me Now Jr”-- a fittingly titled duet that features J Mascis, who recalls his amusingly ill-fated attempt to produce some Breeders tracks in the liner notes. “I was not the best producer. I only wanted to work until 7 p.m. Kim got up about 3 p.m., so that didn’t leave much time before I would bail.” And as the duet proves, their voices are about as compatible as their working hours.

Still, it was Mascis who once succinctly summed up the irony of Deal’s two great bands: “The Breeders seemed bigger than the Pixies, and now the Pixies are way bigger than the Breeders.” In both instances, it was a matter of being at the right place at the right time. With Last Splash, the Breeders were poised to ride the cresting alt-rock wave that the Pixies had inspired but just missed out on, and when the Pixies reunited in 2004, the mounting nostalgia for late 80s/early 90s indie rock made it the perfect time for a long-delayed victory lap. But now it’s the Breeders’ turn to bask in a little bit of that nostalgic glory. LSXX is proof of an enduring benefit of sounding like nobody else: 20 years later, these songs still sound fresh. The undeniable “Cannonball” may have made Last Splash an unlikely mainstream hit, but as Kim reminds us in the liner notes, “This is an indie record. Put out by 4AD.” She says “indie” proudly-- like it means something personal. And Last Splash proves it still can. As big as it made the Breeders, it has a scrappy intimacy that captures what those early, unrecorded, make-your-own-fun Deal sister bar gigs must have sounded like. A million alt rock fans and all the bikers in Dayton, Ohio can't be wrong.