Are The Pixies Still Important?

I saw the Pixies twice at the peak of their powers. Both times, they were opening for someone else.

The first was in September of 1989, at Dodger Stadium in LA. It was one of those unbelievable bills that sounds like a work of fiction: The Cure, Love & Rockets and The Pixies. There were a bunch of us sitting out in left field, far from the stage, all desperately newfound friends in our first year of college. We spent the afternoon baking in the sun and drinking peppermint schnapps out of a plastic bottle, which is what you do when you’re 18. If Cameron Crowe made a movie about it (starring, I dunno, Elle Fanning and the kid who plays Bran Stark), you’d say the whole thing was over the top.

The Pixies came on in the late afternoon; they played five songs, among them ‘Gigantic’, which I can remember like it was last week. They looked very small, dare I say pixie-like, against the huge shadows cast across the baseball diamond by the low California sun. I have a vague memory of Black Francis’s already-balding head and plaid flannel, seen from a great distance. But the sound was gigantic indeed, and forever altered me, though I could hardly explain it at the time.

This live video, recorded at a festival in the Netherlands the same year, is a close enough approximation to what I witnessed:

(In case you’re wondering, yes, the headliners were amazing too.)

A year later, I saw Francis and co. open for Jane’s Addiction at the Hollywood Palladium – another bill from a crazy dream, but I swear I’m not making it up. I paid $60 for a scalped ticket to the beyond-sold-out show. When I got inside, The Pixies had the place in a frenzy. The Palladium is a big room, but it felt like a sweatbox, with the violence of the slam pit broken into shards and scattered to all corners by the band’s majestic noise. Usually you have to wait years before you realise you were part of something special, but that night I knew as it was happening.

I’m not telling you all this to brag, or out of nostalgia. OK, maybe I’m bragging a little — but I hate nostalgia, and I wouldn’t blame you for wanting to throw something at an oldie who’s banging on about shows he saw back in the day. The point is that there’s something about the Pixies’ music that still matters, and improbably has much the same transformative effect it had the first time you listed to Surfer Rosa and it made your jaw drop. This despite their bald domes, their bigger waistlines and the loss of Kim Deal.

On the eve of their Sydney shows, it’s disingenuous to suggest a Pixies concert will be just the same as it was back then – but as an experience, it’s a surprisingly consistent one. It has certain properties, like helium, or peppermint schnapps. Just read some of the emotive live reviews.

Who Even Are The Pixies, And Why?

You know the bullet points; the Pixies basically invented indie rock as we know it. Most famously they influenced Nirvana. They’re constantly described as Kurt Cobain’s favourite band, and there’s no doubt the gorgeous melodies, bruised and battered by brutal guitar riffs, the primal screaming and feral wailing and barking, the whole loud/quiet/loud thing, had an impact on Aberdeen’s finest like they did Radiohead and P.J. Harvey and everyone else.

But it’s not just about their legacy. There’s something else about their music, a quality that has much more in common with the cult horror and sci-fi movies and surrealist art and Old Testament scriptures that were such holy/unholy inspiration for Black Francis’s lyrics. It never really seems to age; it seems more relevant, in fact, the more time passes. “Classic” isn’t quite the word; it’s timeless, but in a darker way than is usually meant by that. When I listen to Smashing Pumpkins (which in fact I did the other night, but don’t tell anyone), it might feel good, but it’s always as though I’m doing something embarrassingly nostalgic, like watching The Breakfast Club and eating a Cap ’N Crunch sandwich by myself. To varying degrees the same is true of other paradigm-changing ’90s bands, even – I hate to admit it – Jane’s Addiction and Nirvana.

The Pixies, on the other hand, somehow still feel contemporary, just a part of our musical landscape — but a permanently disruptive part, in a way that’s reserved only for weirdo greats like David Bowie, the Velvet Underground, and few others. (Nick Drake? Nina Simone? Wu-Tang Clan?) So much so that they’re too easy to take for granted; you almost forget about them for long stretches of time, in a way no one forgets about Nirvana – until you expose yourself to ‘Debaser’ or ‘River Euphrates’, and your blood runs cold again.

It helps that the Pixies mostly flew under the radar, avoiding the kind of massive mainstream success in the moment that many of their peers achieved. Instead of exploding, their popularity was more like a dangerous chemical fire in an abandoned mine that has continued smouldering for decades. (Surfer Rosa didn’t reach gold status in the US until 2005, after their first reunion tour.)

Part of the reason may have been that, unlike their contemporaries, their personalities were never really part of the show. Sure, Black Francis was a bit odd, but only in the same way one of your mates might have been. They were never really MTV stars; they only had one T-shirt and it said DEATH TO THE PIXIES. You never got a chance to get sick of them. They were seemingly just four regular people from Boston blessed with the ability to tap into a really wild, unearthly sound, and they didn’t seem to have a lot of control over it. They weren’t trying to change the world; they were just trying to mix punk and ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, the experiment went all wrong, Steve Albini was there to record it, and bang. OK, that’s oversimplifying, but still.

You listen to the Pixies and, sure, it sounds like the ’90s if you were there and lived it; but more than that, it sounds like driving your car into the ocean, like slicing up eyeballs, like watching an entire cityscape explode and collapse and you’re not sure if you’re dreaming it or not.

(With that one-minute sequence, David Fincher found the perfect cinematic illustration of the Pixies’ music. Remember before 9/11, when Hollywood movies took chances?)

The Pixies Still Matter

Check out the 2006 documentary loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies, which covers the band’s 2004 reunion tour. (It’s hard to accept that twice as much time has passed since that tour than the Pixies spent together the first time around; but hey, that’s life.) In its loud/quiet way, it’s one of the better music docos of the past decade, mainly because of its uncomfortable intimacy. It reveals a group of pudgy middle-aged Americans who don’t necessarily have anything in common, people with families and sweater vests and drug problems and corny magic tricks, people who would otherwise never hang out — who in fact don’t get on at all — coming together in the service of… this crazy sound.

There’s a moment in the doco (it takes place in the middle of this clip) when an awkward, overweight teenaged girl from the Midwest, who was probably born after Surfer Rosa came out, breathlessly tries to explain what the band means to her. She absurdly describes Kim Deal as her god, then grows frustrated when she can’t find words for her devotion. Later she’s almost overcome when the awkward, overweight Deal passes her a signed guitar pick through a chainlink fence. It’s beautiful and a bit scary all at once, like the band’s music. It speaks volumes about the lives of young people, especially young women – she reminds me of so many girls I knew growing up ­– but also about the band’s enduring appeal. Teenagers will probably always get into them the way they’ll always get into J.D. Salinger and cheap cordials. There’s something about that feral growling that speaks for the young mind and the nightmares it confronts daily. Can you imagine Pearl Jam having this effect?

For these reasons, you can pretty much forgive the whole legacy-act thing. With music this bulletproof, why not make some money and let a new generation revel in it? Despite looking like a bunch of middle-aged schlubs, Black Francis, Joey Santiago and David Lovering still know how to bring it live. And while they’ll never be virtuosos, they’ve honed what they do to a kind of craft, though it still has its sharp edges.

More importantly, the songs will never not have that haunting otherworldly quality – after this many years it’s apparent that it’s kind of impossible to ruin it. True, it’s yet to be seen whether the loss of Kim Deal is, well, a dealbreaker. Her disturbingly angelic voice and exquisitely simple and melodic bass were crucial to the  sound, no matter how troubled the personality it sprung from. But replacement bassist Paz Lenchantin seems to be doing all right – watch this recent live performance of “Bone Machine” and tell me it doesn’t make your hair stand up a little:

As for the new album – ah, don’t bother. You might not even find it horrible. But it hardly pertains to what we’re discussing, to the Pixies’ music as we know it. Pure and simple, they waited too long (we’re talking 23 years) between albums. I’m not saying bands shouldn’t write and record new songs; I’m not saying it’s not really the Pixies; I’m not even saying these songs won’t sound great live. I’m just saying don’t bother.

The Pixies ARE indie rock, the way James Brown is funk, and probably always will be. Aging doesn’t need to diminish what they do, any more than it does for Bob Dylan or Nile Rodgers. The wave of mutilation goes on.

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The Pixies In Concert

Sydney: Friday May 23, Saturday May 24 (sold out), Sunday May 25, Monday May 26 @ The Sydney Opera House — tickets here

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Jim Poe works for the Sydney Film Festival and writes for inthemix and The Guardian. He tweets from @fivegrand1.