At the center of the Breeders’ biggest hit, 1993’s “Cannonball,” Kim Deal sings a line that suggests an inside joke, or possibly a musicological riddle or zen koan: “I’ll be your whatever you want / The bong in this reggae song.” But the line is a mystery, because the syncopated alt-rock smash has nothing to do with reggae. “When Kim started playing that riff on the guitar, it had a kind of island feel to it. In its earliest incarnations, the kind of rhythm emphasis reminded her of a reggae song,” says Josephine Wiggs, the band’s longtime bassist. “It isn’t like that now because it got smashed into something else. By the time it turned into ‘Cannonball,’ with everybody’s parts, it doesn’t bear much resemblance.”
When Deal formed the Breeders in the late ’80s, she was far better known as the unflappable bassist in the Pixies, the screaming, melodic, influential underground rock band. But she had far more to say than that, turned out to be a formidable frontwoman, and the Breeders released one of the key rock albums of the ’90s — “Last Splash,” full of sleek melodies, messy guitars tuned to full volume, country harmonies and “Cannonball.”
Wiggs, who joined the band early on, when the Throwing Muses’ Tanya Donelly was still Deal’s singing and songwriting foil, recalls the moment the “Last Splash” lineup came together. “It was pretty immediate,” she says in a phone interview outside the Cincinnati Art Museum, taking a break from Dutch still lifes. “As soon as I started playing with Jim (Macpherson, the drummer), I straight away felt he was somebody I could lock in with.”
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Wiggs’ other revelation was Deal’s twin sister, Kelley, who joined the band as a guitarist even though she had never really played the instrument. “It started out as mystification,” Wiggs recalls. “But she’s such a delightful instrumentalist, and her ideas for parts are so unusual and interesting and compelling. I am happy for it now, even though at the time I was a bit nonplussed by it.”
The Breeders whooshed to stardom during MTV’s grunge era, playing Lollapalooza’s influential main stage in 1994 before breaking up in a sea of drugs and infighting. Kim Deal went on to form another band, the underrated Amps, and the Breeders tinkered with various lineups, reuniting for 2002’s “Title TK,” although minus Wiggs and Macpherson. By 2005, Deal had revived the “Last Splash” lineup for the 25th anniversary of the band’s record label, 4AD, and after the band toured in 2013, it released “All Nerve” this year.
The new album doesn’t have an obvious smash like “Cannonball,” but it’s tough and catchy in all the classic Breeders ways. The Deals tensely jam their vocals together on “Nervous Mary” and the meowing “Wait In the Car.” “MetaGoth,” on which Kim Deal returns to bass, has a spacey sadness, perhaps because Wiggs drew the lyrics (“Can’t come closer / might fall and drown”) from a poem she found after her mother died in 2015.
“My sister had been going through some papers in her desk and had come across some poems that we had never seen before,” Wiggs says. “You could tell from the subject matter and the tone of it that they were really written about our father (who died in 2001), and, shall we say, psychological tensions between the two of them.”
Wiggs, a Brit whose mother was a schoolteacher and whose father “ran a series of sort of political-environmental pressure groups,” first went into music via piano lessons at age 6. After earning degrees from two colleges in the U.K., she switched to music, landing in bands such as the Perfect Disaster, which opened for the Pixies in 1988. Four years later, she found herself one summer in Dayton, Ohio, home of the Deals, rehearsing six or seven hours a day, watching “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and learning to juggle.
With the possible exception of Kelley Deal, Wiggs has had one of the best vantage points to absorb Kim Deal’s work and living habits. Wiggs writes on her personal blog, for example, that Deal smears her guitar strings with “a technical mixture of hand lotion, coffee grounds and butter.” She also recalls Deal taking a slice of ham from a deli tray to smooth down her hair before shows. “It’s self-explanatory, isn’t it!” she says by phone.
Wiggs compares Deal to an uncompromising visual artist she worked with last year, Sebastiaan Bremer, on a Brooklyn, N.Y., multimedia festival called Sanctuary. (She wrote and recorded instrumental music.) “He would basically come up with hundreds and hundreds of ideas and themes and versions of things — and I would be like, ‘I like that one,'” she says. “Funnily enough, that’s what it’s like to work with Kim. She’ll basically be throwing paint against the wall. And I’d be like, ‘I’m really keen on the first two chords but I don’t like the third one.'”
“I feel like I’m quite good at doing that end of it — discriminating and critiquing the things somebody else has generated,” she says. “Being the person that’s spontaneously generating things — that’s harder for me.”
Steve Knopper is a freelance writer.
Twitter @chitribent
When: 7 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Vic Theatre, 3145 N. Sheffield Ave.
Tickets: $35-45; 773-472-0449 or www.victheatre.com
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