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Posted - 11/15/2004 : 12:10:54
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/entertainment/music/10185896.htm?1c
Posted on Mon, Nov. 15, 2004
The Pixies defy the odds with their reunion tour
BY GREG KOT
Chicago Tribune
In what has been a sluggish year for the concert industry, a band consisting of four graying indie-rock veterans who broke up acrimoniously 14 years ago is defying all expectations on a comeback tour.
Singer-guitarist Black Francis, bassist Kim Deal, drummer David Lovering and guitarist Joey Santiageo - collectively known as the Pixies - made four influential but modest-selling albums in 1987-1992 that bridged the gap between melodic pop and noisy underground rock. Yet to many tastemakers, including Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder and Radiohead's Thom Yorke, the Pixies wrote the defining chapter, if not the book, on '90s guitar-rock. Now they're rewriting the book on reunion tours.
Before the Pixies tour ends on Dec. 18, the band is expected to play to 415,000 fans and pull in more than $14 million in revenue.
In Chicago alone, the band will rake in nearly $750,000 and play to 23,000 fans during an unprecedented five-night run at the Aragon Ballroom that began Saturday. In its first incarnation, the band's peak audience in Chicago as a headliner was 2,500 at the Riviera, so the band has essentially increased its following tenfold.
Usually when bands reconvene, they can expect to play to audiences no bigger than the one they originally had, says Marc Geiger, a vice president with the William Morris Agency who booked the Pixies' current tour. "Sometimes a band like the Eagles or Simon and Garfunkel will play to crowds 10 percent to 30 percent bigger than before, but this is a band playing to crowds five to 10 times its original peak," he says. "I've never seen anything like this."
Andy Cirzan, vice president of Jam Productions, calls the success of the Pixies tour "the year's biggest surprise, no doubt."
"We knew it would be strong, that it would be a big deal for music geeks, but this is something else," Cirzan says. "I don't remember booking any band in Chicago that has sold 10 times as many tickets when they came back. And you don't sell 23,000 tickets just to music aficionados. This is a tour that has made its way to more passive music consumers who are seeing this as a cultural phenomenon that they need to see."
The phenomenon has not been fueled by traditional record-industry marketing tools such as radio airplay, compact-disc sales or videos. A Pixies retrospective, "Wave of Mutilation: Best of the Pixies" (4AD), has sold only 70,000 copies since its release last spring. The Pixies' initial batch of tour dates last spring were modestly announced in newspaper and magazine ads that carried little more than the band's logo. There were no media interviews and no new album of songs to promote. The band was, in effect, treading on its reputation and word-of-mouth. It worked.
Though concert ticket sales declined overall in the first half of 2004 and the outdoor concert season was deemed a failure by many industry observers with overpriced shows playing to half-full amphitheaters across North America, the Pixies were another story. The band blitzed through tickets for its initial run of low-key club shows, played to 50,000 fans at the Coachella festival in the California desert May 1, and in subsequent months sold out multiple-night stands at theaters ranging from 3,400 to 8,500 capacity in major cities from London to Los Angeles. In the process the band tapped into a growing community of fans who saw the Pixies as symbolic of a culture that didn't abide by the music industry's formulas.
"There was a strong alternative culture in the late '80s and early '90s that quickly got co-opted by the music industry," Geiger says. "Music is cyclical and now we're at the end of the corporate cycle. Alternative culture is on the rise again. People are yearning for things that are credible."
Though compact-disc sales of the band's back catalog have been slack, fans have been downloading the band's music on the Internet at a furious pace. In October alone, the band's 1988 debut album, "Surfer Rosa," registered 8,600 paid downloads on Soundscan, compared with 2,300 CD sales. Thousands more copies of the album have been downloaded through rogue peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. The band also skirted the music industry by producing limited-edition CDs documenting its first run of club shows, which quickly sold out and now are being offered for hundreds of dollars on eBay.
"We didn't sell millions of records when we were around the first time, and we still don't," says Pixies singer-guitarist and primary songwriter Charles Thompson, who records under the stage names of Black Francis or Frank Black. "But we like the designation of being the coolest band. We're cooler than everybody else (laughs). We've always had that, we broke up and now we're back and a little older, but we still kind of have that."
The Pixies' first two albums, "Surfer Rosa" and "Doolittle" (1989), bridged the gap between the underground indie-rock of the '80s and the more mainstream alternative rock of the '90s. The band was headlining arenas in Europe, where it signed its first recording contract, and was on the cusp of larger success in North America when Francis broke up the quartet in 1992, declaring that he was having "less and less fun at an increasingly faster rate" and needed to do something else. "Doolittle" eventually went gold (selling more than 500,000 copies) and the band maintained an aura of hipster cool long after its premature demise.
Cobain talked about the band constantly, even going so far as to say Nirvana ripped off the Pixies, whose softly strummed verses and shrieking choruses provided the blueprint for the Seattle band's 1991 multimillion-selling alternative-rock touchstone, "Nevermind."
"I've felt a real musical bond with them," Cobain once said of the Pixies. "I was blown away by them. That's very close to what we were doing and are doing more so now."
Veteran rockers embraced the band: U2 had the Pixies open the Irish band's 1992 amphitheater tour, and David Bowie covered one of their songs, "Cactus." A new generation of fans grew up venerating the violently surreal but strangely alluring songs. Conor Oberst, the 24-year-old singer in indie-rock mainstays Bright Eyes, was one of them. He wasn't old enough to see the Pixies in their prime but grew up under their spell, thanks to his older brother's record collection.
"Their songs have a timeless quality, and yet they still seem intensely modern," Oberst says. "They were experimental and aggressive in the way they approached pop music, but they still kept the memorable hooks, the stuff that won't leave your head."
Though the individual band members enjoyed varying degrees of success as solo artists, particularly Deal as the leader of the Breeders, they had been shrinking from public view in recent years. After saying for years that the Pixies would never re-form, Thompson changed his mind last year. He had been re-recording some of the older Pixies songs with the British experimental pop group the Pale Boys to package with some acoustic demos he had preserved from the Pixies' early days (released on the double-CD "Frank Black Francis" on Spin-Art), and during an interview in London allowed for the first time that he might consider a reunion.
The band doesn't deny that the possibility of a decent payday was a factor. Time had helped ease old frictions, particularly between Thompson and Deal. But nobody knew for sure if it would work until the first rehearsal, where the quartet's old chemistry came gurgling back to life: The contrast between Thompson's Sybil-like array of vocal tics and Deal's edge-of-innocence harmonies, Santiago's acid-surf guitar, Lovering's unflappable drumming.
At Coachella, the Pixies' performance was the must-see event on a bill that also included Radiohead, the Cure and Kraftwerk. When the quartet began performing at dusk, they reeled off 19 songs that played like long-last classics to two generations of fans who sang along with nearly every word.
After their set, Radiohead's Yorke took the stage and confessed his awe. "I don't belong here," he said. "When I was a kid, R.E.M. and the Pixies changed my life."
Those words applied to many fans in the audience that night. Many of them never got to see Nirvana, the band that is in many ways the guiding spirit of alternative music in the last 15 years, and they never will, because Cobain killed himself in 1994. That leaves the Pixies as torchbearers for an era of music that came and went almost before anyone noticed.
For Thompson, the success is gratifying if a bit mystifying at a time when so much emphasis is placed on image, packaging and marketing campaigns. "With us there's absolutely no theater at all," he says. "We have never been theatrical, and if we do it, it's very self-mocking. I hate to say it, but it's all about the music."
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© 2004, Chicago Tribune.
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