Taking a Plunge With Kim Deal of The Breeders

From her hotel room in the middle of Utah, Kim Deal can’t help but show me just how horrible the sky is outside. She leaves her laptop on the desk and goes to the other side of the bed, pulling the curtains back and trying to narrate a brightness that is skewed heavily by the pixelation of a camera lens. It’s loud and, in her own words, looks like a “biochemical laboratory” or a “grow room.” Let the record show that this is occurring only a minute into our interview and that the not-so-picturesque view Kim has been sequestered to in-between gigs in Big Sky, Montana and West Valley City, Utah has clearly been on her mind for a good while before she logged on. But Kim and her music have been such an important, enduring fixture in my life; I’d be happy to listen to her riff on cross-country landscapes and metropolitan business for hours. Quickly, though, she sniffs out that I’m from Columbus, Ohio—just a stone’s throw from her home in Dayton—and quickly brings up how good it is to have Joe Burrow quarterbacking the Cincinnati Bengals. If you were a fly on the wall of this Zoom call, you’d never believe that the agenda today was to talk about Last Splash.

I grew up on Kim’s music, be it hearing her sing lead on the Pixies’ “Gigantic” for the first time as a teenager or seeing her and The Breeders play an opening set during Nirvana’s Live and Loud performance in 1993 via a low-resolution YouTube video. When you come from Ohio and you learn that the greatest rock musician you’ve ever caught a glimpse of is also from Ohio, there’s no greater gravitational pull than the energy emanating off of that shared orbit. Kim and her sister Kelley grew up in Dayton in the 1970s—or the “sevs,” as Kim affectionately puts it—when the city was the unofficial funk capital of the world. The twins were—and still are—the only members of their family who were not born in West Virginia. By the time they graduated high school in ‘79, the Midwest was largely populated by rock bands who toured through Ohio constantly—like Rush, Ted Nugent, Black Oak Arkansas and The Outlaws. “Marshall Tucker Band!” Kim blurts out, after humming the Outlaws’ song “Green Grass and High Tides.” She and Kelley would hole up at the Hara Arena in the Trotwood suburb, siphoning all they could from the wayfaring troubadours who’d pencil Southwest Ohio into their itineraries.

It was the time of the guitar hero for Kim, be it Nugent or the Schenker brothers. She’s quick to note that the Eagles never played gigs at Hara, but that UFO did. She tells me about some of her most precious and formative concert memories—like seeing X play to a near-empty room at Bogart’s in Cincinnati or seeing a triple-bill of Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Moody Blues and Lynyrd Skynyrd at the Riverfront or being mesmerized by Heart’s opening set before a Beach Boys set. Kim’s older brother was a disco guy and would wear white suits and go out to bars with his friends and dance and try to pick up women. “That was their thing, I thought it was stupid,” she asserts. The funkified world of Parliament and Ohio Players and James Brown was always in a close proximity to her, but she was much more drawn to the Heartland heaviness and Rust Belt attitudes of rock ‘n’ roll. Kim learned how to play guitar at 13 and began writing songs shortly after, and she and Kelley would start doing four sets a night at the Ground Round—playing covers and original songs. For her and Kelley’s birthday one year, she asked for a Yamaha keyboard and—after they got it—they used their grandfather’s toilet seat as the stand and would lug it around to bars across the Oregon District.

Kim made folk music with Kelley for much of high school and then for a few years after, while she was cycling through different colleges—including Ohio State and, eventually, Kettering College, where she would get an associate’s degree in medical technology and work in the cellular biology field as a lab technician. It was when she got married to John Murphy in 1985 and moved to Boston with him that she’d tumble into the music industry in a real meaningful way for the first time. “I was thrilled,” Kim says. “I thought the city was very vital and very interesting. Back then, there was no internet or anything, so what you would do is you would look at the Boston Phoenix and flip to the back pages and you’d see all of these bands looking for musicians. And a lot of them would be like, ‘Need a drummer. Professional attitude only. Chops: A must.’ I was like, ‘Gah, some people. Some people.’ You know, you just look and see what’s going on and then, there was one where it said something about no chops. It was so great. That’s who I called and they were looking for ‘bass player/harmony’—so we started playing together.”

That band was the Pixies, and Kim would go on to become an integral force for them for seven years—playing bass and singing on Surfer Rosa and Doolittle, two of the most important alt-rock records of the 1980s. It was there that Kim became a rock star and a living legend, inspiring an entire generation of women to pick up an instrument and absolutely shred. There’s a photo of Kim from way back then where she’s smoking a cigarette during a Pixies gig, and I’m absolutely positive that no musician has ever looked so cool or made smoking seem like such a worthwhile hobby to pick up. She’d co-write “Gigantic” with Black Francis, and it endures—in my opinion—as the best Pixies song; her slide guitar on “Silver” lives rent-free in my brain to this day. When I interviewed Jenny Lewis earlier this year, she mentioned that the defining moment for her wanting to become a musician was seeing Kim play bass at Dodgers Stadium in 1989, when the Pixies were opening for The Cure. Log into Twitter any random day and there’s a high probability that someone on your news feed is talking about how great of a musician and how badass of a person Kim Deal is—and it’s usually just an unprompted extension of gratitude someone picked up after listening to “Cannonball” or something.

During her time in Boston with the Pixies, Kim met Throwing Muses and became close friends with their frontwoman, Tanya Donnelly. The two bands would tour together and become labelmates until—around 1989—when someone in Throwing Muses got pregnant and had to take a hiatus, and Kim and Donnelly began playing guitar together in their apartments. Shortly after, 4AD’s founder, Ivo Watts-Russell, caught wind that the two women were playing together and asked them to make some demos. At that point, The Breeders were born—and it happened organically. “It wasn’t like, ‘I will bring Tanya here and we will begin working on our monumental album,’” Kim adds, mimicking an epic, towering inflection. “I wouldn’t have even said we were making demos. I would have just said we were recording what we were making up. The record company would probably call them a ‘demonstration’ of what we were playing, but I would not have even called it a demo.”

The first iteration of The Breeders would be Kim on rhythm guitar, Donelly on lead guitar, Britt Walford on drums and Josephine Wiggs on bass, and they would record Pod with Steve Albini in January 1990. Boasting a melting pot of geographical home bases—Kim being from Ohio, Donelly from Rhode Island, Walford from Kentucky and Wiggs from England—the assemblage of The Breeders was nothing short of a lightning-in-a-bottle touch of miraculousness. I ask Kim how she met Wiggs, especially, given that the bassist remains an integral figure in the band in 2023. “We were doing a Pixies show in London and [Wiggs’ band] Perfect Disaster opened and I said hello to her,” Kim notes. “And then, at some point, we were playing a show in Germany and she was at the show with her girlfriend. After the show, I hung out with them—and I was very buzzed on beer all night long. The sun was coming up and Josephine was like, ‘You need to find your bus.’ So, I probably just had her contact and said, ‘I’m doing something, do you want to do something?’” As for Walford’s entry into the group, it’s a little less concrete—as Kim swears that him joining the band was Albini’s idea, that she doesn’t even remember meeting him until the foursome was in Biggleswade rehearsing Pod at Wiggs’ family’s house.

The legacy of Pod is almost mythical in a way, thanks to the British magazine Melody Maker labeling The Breeders a supergroup (mainly because of the then-shared universe of Pixies, Throwing Muses, Perfect Disaster and Slint) upon its release and Kurt Cobain calling it one of his favorite records of all time. But Kim didn’t pay much attention to any of that. “I didn’t think, ‘Let’s make an indie supergroup, Tanya,’” she says, snickering in a mischievous tone. “This was just a girl that I knew who was in a band.” What made that distinction and title even more odd to Kim was the fact that Pod was an import-only record, much like Surfer Rosa had been two years prior. “You had to go to the ‘import’ section with plastic sleeves and buy that record from Newbury Comics, because the records were not manufactured in the United States,” she says. “So, you know, I’m sitting in my place in Boston and then I go overseas and it says ‘indie supergroup.’ It’s like, ‘We don’t even sell these records in America.’”

The Breeders would sell records in the States eventually, after catapulting fully into the limelight in 1992—when Jim Macpherson replaced Walford and, after Donelly was planning to form her own band Belly, Kelley was asked to join the group and play guitar (even though Kelley did not know how to play guitar). Nirvana would have The Breeders open for them on the European leg of their Nevermind tour that year, too. In retrospect, it was a huge, huge deal for the biggest rock band in the world to have a woman-led group (or, as Kim puts it, “chick bands”) open for them. Yes, of course, they would have bands like Teenage Fanclub and The Melvins foot the front of the bill often—but ushering in The Breeders was a seismic shift that Dave Grohl continues to practice even today, by having Wet Leg and Courtney Barnett open Foo Fighters gigs. When it was happening back then, though, Kim wasn’t all that tuned in to what it meant for the social conscious of rock ‘n’ roll. “I didn’t think of it as a movement or a revolution, [Cobain] did really like Pod,” she says. Perhaps it wasn’t a movement as much as it was a door being cracked.

Nirvana would have The Breeders open for them again a year later and they’d share a Live and Loud concert for MTV, along with Cypress Hill, at Pier 48 in Seattle, Washington (where that infamous Christmastime cover of Melody Maker featuring Kim and Cobain was photographed around the same time). Watching that concert is where I would go on to discover The Breeders for the first time, at the height of my Nirvana obsession—when smiley face T-shirts were a crucial piece of my everyday wardrobe. I could have talked to Kim all day about her time spent with Cobain, Grohl and Krist Novoselic, but I kept it brief—and she unveiled her favorite story to tell, about when Macpherson was puzzled by these “big back boxes” (monitors) next to Grohl’s drum kit, to which the Nirvana percussionist said “Jim, you put the band in them.”

Earlier this month, The Breeders sophomore album—Last Splash—turned 30. For a year as loaded with alt-rock classics as 1993 was, including In Utero, Siamese Dream, Rid of Me and Exile in Guyville, it’s a massive testament that Last Splash outperforms all of them. Many years ago, Kim told SPIN that she never thought anything she made would sell. But, when Last Splash came out, it charted high on the Billboard 200 and went platinum. The record was taking off, yet The Breeders had no idea about it until they returned home from a tour and saw that their Spike Jonze and Kim Gordon-directed video for “Cannonball” plastered all over MTV. “They played that video a lot,” Kim says. “Jim came back from tour and his dad said, ‘What’s the name of that band you’re in? I think I see it.’ Nobody knew us, we were from Ohio. But [Jim’s] dad knew. I noticed that, gosh, they were playing that song a lot. It’s a good video, though. They had a loop like radio stations and it goes over and over and over again. We were on that.”