you know, it's an interesting question if he realized that geffen would have almost certainly never signed him if it weren't for bowie's extreme interest in the pixies (to the point of practically starting a pixies cover band in 1988). it's not a direct thing, but you have to understand that people took bowie pretty seriously at the time when he started talking about what he thought had commercial potential.
RebelThoughts82
The Pixies were never a commercial band. They were completely underground. It was only till Kurt Cobain started talking about them in interviews that they started getting recognition.
deathtokoalas
that's absolute nonsense. surfer rosa was the album of the year in several mainstream music publications the year it was released, and doolittle was released through warner brothers.
bowie has been clear that his tin machine project was modeled after them. if you know a bit about bowie, he tended to figure out what was on it's way up, get ahead of it a few years before it happened and then act as a gateway in opening up doors for the bands he ripped off.
bowie was doing covers of debaser in sold out stadiums, to a sum total of probably close to a million people, about the same time as smells like teen spirit was released, which would have been a few months before it broke out.
