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Carl
- A 'Fifth' Catholic -

Ireland
11546 Posts

Posted - 05/23/2006 : 21:19:50

http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/view.php?id=12241

HEAR NO EVIL

Death to the
Pixies, Part One

In light of renewed interest in the
Pixies (a book! a documentary!),
here's the first of two installments
reminiscing on brushes with alt-rock
aristocracy.

by Jonathan Valania

A word of warning: This is gonna be one of
those columns where I go on and on
about my little monkey shines with
famous alt-rock personalities. Some
people love it when I do that, but others seem to get very, very angry about it, stomp
their feet and write mean letters that hurt my feelings. If that sounds like you, stop
reading right now. I'm serious. I don't want to even see you in the second paragraph.

Set the Wayback Machine to 1988. I'm a college DJ stranded in the middle of
Pennsyltucky. Entranced by the naked boob on the cover of Surfer Rosa, I slap it on the
turntable and-they had me by the first 20 seconds of "Where Is My Mind?" and never
really let go.

Shortly thereafter I got a gig working for a Pennsyltucky daily. They asked me one day
if I wanted to interview some guy named Black Francis from the Pixies. Would I? Man,
this was a dream come true. I could finally learn the WTF of lyrics like, "He bought me
a soda, he bought me a soda/ And he tried to molest me in the parking lot."

When I got him on the phone, he was no doubt bone-tired from endless touring and
weary of answering stupid fanboy questions. He insisted I call him Charles and pretty
much refused to give me a straight answer to any question. "Who cares?" he'd say.
"We just try to make cool rock music." I remember thinking: what a dick.

The next Pixie I met was Kim Deal, around 1994. The Breeders had just broken huge,
and somebody had given Kim's sister Kelley a copy of my band the Psyclone Rangers'
debut album. Kelley listed one of the songs as one of her 10 favorites that year in
Rolling Stone's end-of-the-year wrap-up.

So I get her on the phone and we hit it off, and she invites me and the band to come
hang out backstage at the Philly stop of Lollapalooza. I don't remember much except
it was hot and muddy and famous back there. The Psyclone Rangers were about to
record our next album down in Memphis. We had a song we wanted that patented
Deal-sister vocal on, and Kelley quickly agreed to sing on it.

The night before she was supposed to fly down she called to say she was too sick to
leave town. She sounded pretty out of it. Boy, were we bummed. Was it something we
said or did? A few days later, when she got busted for receiving a FedEx envelope full
of heroin, we put two and two together.

Fast-forward a year. The Psyclone Rangers are in L.A. playing a special pre-album-
release club show for all the music-biz poohbahs. The kid who ran our label always
bragged he was friends with Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago and drummer Dave
Lovering. Yeah, right! Prove it, we'd always say. That night he did.

Apres-gig we're sitting backstage, and who walks in but the guitar player and the
drummer from the Pixies, all smiles and compliments. The Pixies had long since split
by then, and Santiago had formed a then-trendy cocktail act called the Martinis. To be
honest, it was kind of a letdown: The guys from the Pixies don't have anything better
to do than hang out with chumps like us?

To be continued ...

Illustration by Alex Fine

Edited by - Carl on 06/06/2006 19:37:19

thermoplastics
- FB Fan -

33 Posts

Posted - 05/23/2006 : 22:24:40

The pop-psyc word, 'projection', comes to mind. Guy plays music, likes music, meets music makers, find out they like music, continue with music, go to music shows and one has a substance abuse problem and the guy is pissed off that people he never met and didn't know, lived lives that didn't support his ignorance and delusions.

The New Bolero
= Cult of Ray =

394 Posts

Posted - 05/24/2006 : 05:13:48

So who gives a crap? I neither loved it nor got very, very angry about it. The best part is the picture. By a mile.

Carl
- A 'Fifth' Catholic -

Ireland
11546 Posts

Posted - 06/06/2006 : 19:33:25

http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/view.php?id=12337

HEAR NO EVIL

All Good Monkeys
Go to Heaven

Death to the Pixies, part two.

by Jonathan Valania

Following Nirvana's sincere flattery and
inspired theft, an entire generation of
commercial alt-rock hits built on the
Pixies' patented songwriting template of
lulling verses and volcanic choruses are
already in the where-are-they-now? file.

Black Francis has become Frank Black,
releasing a steady string of increasingly irrelevant solo albums. The Breeders' career
went up the nose and in the arm of the Deal sisters. The Pixies guitarist went MIA into
domesticity, and the drummer gave up music to become a magician.

All of which is painstakingly detailed in Fool the World, the just-out he-said/she-said
Pixies bio. It reads like a 300-page Spin article and will answer every stupid fanboy
question Black Francis stopped answering in 1988.

Even more compelling is a soon-to-be-released documentary called LoudQuietLoud,
which sort of turns the reunion tour into a reality show. The camera follows them
everywhere. Old dramas such as the Kim Deal/Black Francis rivalry seem like ancient
history, replaced by more current and pressing concerns, like Deal's struggle with
sobriety and the drummer's midtour meltdown in the wake of his father's sudden
death from cancer.

A couple of years ago my roommate from college called me up to say the Pixies were
getting back together. "Just when I stopped caring," I said.

That wasn't entirely true. I giddily went to the reunion show at the Tweeter, and
contrary to what people who weren't there the first time around said, they were as good
as ever. The classic songs seemed immune to the ravages of age, and besides, the
Pixies' strange allure was never based on the hormones and hair of youth-unlike, say,
a band like the Strokes, who already seem a bit past it.

These days they're all fatter and balder, but having settled or set aside the
irreconcilable differences of the past and worked through the addiction/rehab/divorce
craziness of middle age, they're also wiser.

Something else happened while they were away. This cult band with its weird, noisy
songs about UFOs, incest and bone machines became more famous in death than
they ever were in life. They've become part of the great collective alt-rock unconscious-
like the Cure or the first Violent Femmes record. Surfer Rosa is on every punky bar
jukebox. Jocks crank "Wave of Mutilation" as they race by in Daddy's car, flipping off
the nerds. And every chick bass player worth her salt has played "Gigantic" until her
tits practically fell off.

When I saw the Pixies last year, 20,000 people sang along with every word of "Where
Is My Mind?" Judging by the median age of the crowd, most were still in short pants
when the song first came out. It would seem the Pixies have become-dare I say it-folk
music.

I suppose we all learned something along the way: Kim can't be around alcohol, Black
Francis needs to lay off the buffets, the guitarist looks a lot cooler with no hair, and
the drummer needs to finalize his divorce from Vicodin. For me, it's that Black Francis
was right all along. All that soap opera jive? What does it really matter in the end?
Especially when the only thing worth remembering is this: The Pixies were just four
kids from Boston trying to make cool rock music whose monkey died and went to
heaven.