Pixies

For more than ten years, since the Pixies ended their run with a meltdown that left pretty much everyone pissed off, the chances of this group ever getting back together were basically nil. All four members scattered: Frank Black embarked on a solo career that has produced ten albums, many of which were critical triumphs and all of them anticipated eagerly by long-time and new fans. Joey Santiago did session work and got into scoring television and film projects in L.A., and received critical kudos for the two albums he did with wife Linda Mallari as The Martinis. Kim Deal put together the Breeders who opened for Nirvana, headlined at Lollapalooza, and recorded a platinum album. After finding little satisfaction in studio work, Dave Lovering gave up music entirely and began a career as a professional magician. But like star systems in an expanding universe, each of the Pixies would feel the pull, sooner or later, back toward the center, where once they had exploded and showered the musical vacuum with pointed, ironic, blackly humorous, and unforgettable songs. It took a few years – twelve, to be exact. But in late 2003, against all expectations, they did get there. And once again, everything changed. The Pixies’ 2004 tour was a total surprise and at the same time no surprise at all. Of course, it was a miracle that they were all up there onstage, pummeling through the songs that had inspired bands from Nirvana to Radiohead and guitar-thrashing teenagers in garages throughout the Western world. On the other hand, once they were there, how could they not sound glorious? If anything … if possible … they were stronger than ever, despite their tempestuous legacy. The band's return was documented on digital film. Those who disbelieve, or who consider a Pixies resurrection too good to have actually happened, are proven wrong with Pixies Sell Out, a DVD extravaganza that captures the greatest shows from their 2004 reunion tour. Footage includes hair-raising performances from around the world: the Move Festival in England, Voodoo Festival in New Orleans, T in the Park in Scotland, Fuji Rock Festival in Japan, Coachella in California’s desert valley, Austin City Limits festival, and the heart of the DVD, the Eurockeennes Festival in France. Typically, though, the Pixies comeback began with a burst of confusion and contradiction. Reactions within the band, for example, were hardly consistent when word spread that Frank Black wanted to put the act back together: “I was elated,” enthuses drummer Dave Lovering. “I dreaded it,” admits bassist Kim Deal. “I just hoped it would go away.” Just as typically, given the patterns of communication that had helped drag the Pixies to their demise in the early nineties, it began with Frank Black and his habit of expressing wishes indirectly. Rumors persist that he had originally broken up the band by letting his colleagues know it was over via fax. (“He remembers it that way,” Kim insists, “but it never happened. It could never have happened because he isn’t a confrontational guy. He couldn’t fire anybody, so he just stopped talking to us.”) This time out, he apparently let everybody know what was on his mind by talking to the media. In an interview with London’s XFM Radio in the summer of 2003, he mused about his dreams of getting the Pixies together again. He even sweetened the bait by revealing that they still hooked up now and then to jam, though “not for public consumption.” “Well,” Black says, coming clean at last, “we never actually jammed or anything. I was sort of stealing a quote from George Harrison, who said, when asked about his band’s much anticipated reunion, ‘Hey, if we all got together and jammed in the living room, you guys in the press wouldn’t even know about it.’ So I was being completely sarcastic, and the next day it was in The New York Post. It was like the cat that was never actually in the bag was out of the bag anyway.” That’s all it took for the rest of the band to catch on. “I actually heard about it from my dad,” Lovering laughs. “One day he says to me, ‘I hear the Pixies are getting back together.’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ See, I knew that would be impossible. I would never, ever have conceived of a reunion actually happening. So I discounted it until one day Joey called to say, ‘Guess what? Charles [Thompson, a.k.a. Frank Black] wants to get the band back together.’ And that just made my whole world much better.” Black had asked guitarist Joey Santiago to convey his wishes to Lovering and Deal – just in time, it turned out, for him to disappear into a series of solo projects that made him unavailable when the rest of the band decided to see how it felt to play together again. With Black tied up on a European tour, the three met in November ’03 at the Breeders’ studio in Vernon, south of downtown L.A. “Joe and I had agreed that if we sounded like shit, of course we wouldn’t do it,” Kim remembers. “So I packed my stuff into a Volvo station wagon in Ohio and checked into corporate housing near Joe’s house. He had burned ten of our songs onto a CD, which I picked up at his house – David already had all the Pixies stuff on iPod. We listened to those songs, and then we drove down to the Breeders’ space and got to work. “It began quietly,” she continues, “like, ‘Okay, how does this one start?’ But toward the end of the day Joe and I were amazed at how, for better or worse, we sounded exactly the same as we used to. We even joked about whether this was good or bad, but we all agreed it was remarkable.” In four days they worked up a list of forty songs, which they polished on and off through the winter, until Black was free to join them. “I was worried because he’d been doing solo stuff for a decade,” Kim says. “I thought that might give him a different sensibility of performance. When you’re in a rock band, it’s part, part, part, like with the Who, it always goes like this: ‘We won’t get fooled again … AAAGGHH!! Yeah!!’ But then you get this Mac Davis thing, where you decide that maybe you won’t go to the verse just yet, you’re going to ride the opening notes until you feel like singing the verse. If you have to cough, you can just cough. You can stop the song to take a drink of something and start the song back up. “But Charles sounded great,” she smiles. “He sang like a beauty. It was gorgeous. I was so impressed.” “On my first day back with the Pixies, we took a break to get some tacos,” Black recalls. “It reminded me of our early days of rehearsing in some industrial place, with little amps, a minuscule P.A., and a couple of mikes. I was feeling so up that I said, ‘Hey maybe we should do an unannounced gig in a few days, at some local club.’ The rest of the band looked at me like I had two heads because, to be honest, I’d forgotten a lot of the words to the songs. I was all over the place on that first day. But I knew there was a lot of muscle memory involved, and after I reviewed a little bit that night it all came right back by the next day. And by a couple of days after that we were sounding exactly the same as we had years before.” With everyone onboard now, plans were laid for their reunion tour. Opening in Minneapolis, the Pixies tour rolled first into Canada. From the start they drew packed houses and won rapturous reviews: At one of their early shows, in Saskatoon, Pop Matters described the performance as “ninety minutes of bedlam.” And even as part of an all-star bill at Coachella, The New York Times reported, “the day belonged to the Pixies.” More important to the band was the feedback they were getting from their audiences, which was unlike anything they’d experienced. “In every city, people were so happy we were there,” Kim marvels. “People were crying. It didn’t really hit me until later in the summer, when Charles, Joe, and I went to a Stooges reunion in Berlin. And I realized, ‘Oh, my gosh, maybe people were reacting to us the way I was to the Stooges.’”