Reunion tours are just less idealistic versions of the real thing: de-glamorized rock ’n’ roll stars haul out their amps and stuff their spare tires into stage-friendly clothing in the hopes of reviving their legacy and making a few (million) bucks, while well-off fans cough up the dough for expensive tickets, then head to the (insert name of big corporation here) Outdoor Amphitheater for a few $9 glasses of chardonnay while trying to remember the lyrics to songs they loved decades ago. For the most part, both parties are honest about their motivations. We all need money, and we all want to feel cool.
But what about when that band isn’t Jefferson Starship or the Eagles? What about when that tour plays college campuses instead of lawny yuppie hideouts? What if the music is the snarling, harmony-laden attack of alternative rock icons the Pixies? Wait … what the hell are the Pixies doing on a reunion tour anyway? Though the “real” answer to this question may be in the paragraph above, another technically correct answer is, kicking ass. In a summer where it seemed like only Prince and Madonna could win the miserly masses away from the TV and into the stadium for a pop/rock show, the Pixies’ reunion concert tour has been — and, as it hits Rimac Arena Sept. 21, continues to be — wildly successful, especially for a band whose most successful album topped out at number 98 on the American charts and whose videos never got more than a sigh from MTV.
Their performance at this year’s Coachella Festival earned rave reviews, and kept their ship afloat through the high-ticket-price storm that sunk Lollapalloza (tickets for their UCSD show are a
not-too-bad $36).
But for Frank Black (or Black Francis, as he was known first to
Pixies’ fans more than a decade ago), Kim Deal, Joey Santiago and David Lovering, reuniting the Pixies has not only meant the usual trappings of defrosted stardom (DVDs, magazine covers, a new album?), it has confronted them with the reputation they’ve earned — now as more than just masterminds of their own brand of gritty pop.
Looking back from here, it’s easy to see how the Pixies music was both the impetus and inspiration for much of the alternative rock explosion of the early 1990s: the band’s signature dynamic, which featured abrupt loud/quiet and start/stop shifts, became the MO for practically every band from Nirvana, who brought Francis’ songwriting style its first platinum success, to Linkin Park, who sell millions of records today with arguably the same technique.
The Pixies began as an idea in a San Juan bar: While Black was
studying Spanish in Puerto Rico in 1986, as an exchange student from the University of Massachusetts, he made the sudden decision not to go back to school and instead move to Boston to form a band.
He talked his old friend from California, Joey Santiago, into playing guitar for him. The two of them found “Pixie” defined in the
dictionary as a “mischievous little elf,” and named themselves after it.
After placing an ad for a someone who liked both Husker Du and Peter, Paul and Mary, as specified by Black, the two met bassist Kim Deal, who joined the pair and advised them to recruit Lovering on drums.
The band started playing shows around Boston, but their break came after a tour with Throwing Muses, when the legendary British indie label 4AD heard a Pixies demo and offered to sign the band.
Listening to the Pixies’ first full-length, 1988’s raunchy Surfer
Rosa, it’s hard to believe that this turbulence — the sound of the manic Black shrieking over his stop-start guitar chords with the band right behind him, the whole clamor wailing demonically (or gleaming with heartbreaking charm and full pop harmony) — would appeal to enough people to headline a mid-week show at the Ché Café, let alone become a college radio hit.
But in the dueling guitars, in Black’s ability to transition from
wispy ramble to salacious howl in the course of a line, and in the simple, on/off punches of Lovering’s drumming were the lessons of all the rock music previous to them distilled into a tense, inane, gleefully sarcastic lecture by professors of the modern teenage mental life.
And, shockingly, a lot of people were there to notice it.
The follow up to Surfer Rosa, 1989’s decidedly less-hellish Doolittle, debuted at an astonishing number 8 on the UK charts. Their most accessible, essential and successful album, Doolittle took the hints of pop sensibility already in the Pixies’ music and presented them, with the help of producer Gill Norton, somewhat nearer to the front of the music, albeit still with plenty of raucous guitar energy and bestial growl by Black.
The surf-rock-inspired “Wave of Mutilation,” about driving a car into the ocean, became a top-ten rock hit, and the gorgeous lament “Here Comes Your Man” took the Pixies sound to its poppiest extreme.
But the album’s finest track is the radio hit “Monkey Gone to Heaven” — its abrasive guitars clearing to reveal a longing harmony held up by Black and Deal, which is renewed with guitar crunch then fades away into Black’s whisper: “…and if the man is five/ And if the devil is six ….” Then he blasts, “Then GOD is seven!” at his primitive best while the guitar and drums come pounding back into the chorus: “This monkey’s gone to heaven.”
The Pixies would explore their sound further into the nineties, but after two more albums, they’d had enough. Their last studio album, Trompe Le Monde, was written entirely by Black (Deal had contributed notable tracks to earlier albums), perhaps signifying the fragmenting relationship between the two bandmates. One day, before he had told any of the other members, Black announced on the radio that the band was breaking up. And, aside from a few CDs of unreleased material, that was the end of the Pixies.
Their legacy was carried on, however, by a decade of rock ’n’ roll: the early-’90s alternative rock explosion, powered by songs of bestial sarcasm and dirty, ironic pop, owed much of its sound to the then-dying Pixies. Grunge icons Nirvana sought out the raw production of Albini, who worked on Surfer Rosa, for their masterpiece In Utero. Radiohead claim them to this day as a major influence, as do countless other bands in the post-punk/alternative world.
When the Pixies hit the stage Sept. 21, they’ll be faced with an
audience well aware of their importance. In the years since they were last together, they have only increased in notoriety, with a huge international fan base that consists largely of listeners too young to have seen the Pixies before, and many who wouldn’t know of them were it not for their high-profile followers. It will be a legendary night for those fans when the Pixies, discarnate forefathers of modern rock, appear onstage. It will be very different from a typical reunion tour — even if, on the surface, it’s the same.
