Concert review: The Pixies, Auckland, March 12

So last night was alt-rock legends The Pixies' very first tour in New Zealand, like, ever, on the road on their never-ending reunion tour, this time playing their 1989 classic album "Doolittle" straight through, beginning to end. They pretty much sold out the massive 12,000-seat Vector Arena, filled to the brim with former hipsters-now parents like myself (fun game -- count the balding 30-something blokes with shaved heads! Pretend they're all clones!). NZ has been waiting a LONG time for Pixie love -- I know several people that were practically buzzing out of their seats all week in anticipation. And it was awesome good fun, with Frank Black, Kim Deal and co. slashing out the riffs, yelps and screams like it was 1990 all over again.

It was a bit of deja vu for Avril and I as we were (probably) one of the few there who'd actually seen the Pixies live since they reformed in 2004 -- we caught them on one of their very first gigs almost exactly six years ago back in Oregon. So we didn't have the shock of novelty going for us, but it was quite interesting to contrast seeing them at a 1,200-seat club vs at a cavernous 12,000 capacity arena. We definitely had better views at Eugene, where the band was a bit looser (Joey Santiago doing an impressively fun series of impromptu guitar solos), but Auckland's show was a prime spectacle -- there was something quite awesome about seeing so many thousands of people so totally into the definitive "cult" band, singing along to grotesque and weird anthems like "Debaser," "Gouge Away" and "Hey." They were smoothly professional with just enough of a gritty edge to not seem like a total cash-in reunion tour, and the two encores were awesome, with fantastic versions of "Into The White" and "U-Mass." I'm just too darned old for the front row, but I actually like sitting a bit back from the stage and seeing the sweep of hundreds of heads bobbing, hands waving. Kim Deal was the definition of rock-chick cool, Frank Black screamed so much I thought his throat would explode, and we all thrashed away.

We also had the fun of people watching -- as usual there were a fair percentage of goofs who seemed to just show up to spend $100 on tickets, get as drunk as humanly possible on $8 beers, then get thrown out (the guy who got tossed out during the second song was tied for 'Winner of the Night' with the other guy who tried to vault a fence into the pit and did an amazingly epic face-plant on the concrete floor instead).

Anyway, it was totally cool to see the Pixies once again -- the last time Peter was just a 10-week-old shrimp, today he's a bouncy 6-year-old! -- and to see them earning the cash and the acclaim that they deserved back in the day. "Doolittle," at 21 years old, still sounds strange and spacey and surreally menacing, as fresh as anything from 2010. Gouge away, my friends, gouge away...

MUSIC: The Pixies and Beastie Boys get the 33 1/3 treatment

MUSIC: The Pixies and Beastie Boys
get the 33 1/3 treatment

I admit, my music tastes weren't real cool in 1989. It was the start of senior year in high school, and "edgy" for me was Depeche Mode. One of my big thrills my senior year was going to a Billy Joel concert. I bought a T-shirt. Heck, I still have a soft spot for "We Didn't Start The Fire" today, but these days my music radar is a bit broader than it used to be. In 1989, I had no clue that I missed out on two of the seminal albums of my time – The Pixies' roaring manifesto Doolittle, and the Beastie Boys' psychedelic mix tape Paul's Boutique.

I actually got The Pixies' Doolittle by mistake in 1990 as part of a record club I was in … didn't know quite what to make of this clattering, screeching CD, and it took me a few years to get into it. Paul's Boutique I didn't discover until the mid-1990s, when the Beastie Boys finally lost the frat-boy image after hip-hop blasts like Check Your Head and Ill Communication. Now, both of these two very different albums are high up in my list of Desert Island CDs.

So hats off to Continuum Books' fab 33 1/3 music-criticism series, which examines the Pixies' and the Beasties' 1989 slabs of sound in two new books. Each slim 100-page-or-so book in the series dissects a particular CD, like liner notes on steroids. The Pixies book by Ben Sisario and the Beastie Boys book by Dan LeRoy are both swingin' samples of the series' rock-geek eye for minutiae and big-picture grasp of the trends and visions that go into the albums we love.


LeRoy's Paul's Boutique volume will hit the spot for Beasties fans, many of whom still consider the Beastie Boys' madcap second CD their best. LeRoy establishes the revolutionary sophomore record Boutique was. The Beasties made their name with loud, thrashing proto rap-rock like "Fight For Your Right To Party," but the leering goons in the early videos weren't really who they wanted to be. Paul's Boutique was the response to those who thought they'd pegged the Beasties as one-hit wonders – a still-remarkable collage of samples, slick multi-referential rhymes and an ever-shifting soundscape. A tune like "Sound of Science," built almost entirely of riffs by none other than the Beatles, still kicks it today.

LeRoy painstakingly reconstructs how Boutique came to be. He builds a pretty strong case that Boutique can be considered a strong collaboration between the Beasties, the Dust Brothers and reclusive producer Matt Dike, who had assembled the sample-filled bones of some of the songs on his own even before the Beasties came along. That helps explain why Paul's Boutique doesn't sound quite like anything else the Beasties ever did. It also pretty much bombed in 1989, coming nowhere near the success of the Beasties' License To Ill and only gaining its current shining reputation over time. LeRoy provides a guide to some of the arcane samples peppered throughout the album, noting it's "impossible … to comprehend in its sprawling totality." Paul's Boutique is a gorgeously dense piece of work, and LeRoy explains how post-1989 changes in sampling laws mean nothing like it will ever quite happen again. Given the confines of a 128-page book, LeRoy can't be utterly encyclopedic about the disc — and sometimes a broader picture of the Beasties' influences and inspirations is lacking – but he is pretty darned solid at showing the voices and ideas that went into it.


The Pixies, unlike the Beasties, didn't become truly famous until they'd broken up. Their "prickly kind of pop," Sisario notes, wasn't ever Top 10 material, but influenced many (notably Kurt Cobain, who idolized the band). Their second album proper, Doolittle, is a jagged, glistening knife of a listen, strangely sunny despite the loud-to-soft howls of frontman Charles Thompson (aka Black Francis) and titles like "Debaser," "Gouge Away," "There Goes My Gun" and "Mr. Grieves." Seventeen years on, Doolittle – originally titled Whore – still sounds fresh and fiery. Sisario shows how the Pixies' unique alchemy rocketed them to "next big thing" status, and how they soon imploded in the usual ego and fame struggles.

Sisario really manages to capture some of Thompson's elusive personality as he road-trips with him around his Eugene, Ore., home. He illuminates some of the thinking that went into the songs that became alt-rock anthems, and he goes after Doolittle's twisted lyrics with a scholar's eye. It might spoil the mystery of the songs a bit for some, but I found it fascinating to learn that, say, "Crackity Jones" is about Thompson's demented former roommate. Few secrets of Doolittle remain untold under Sisario's probing. Sisario heavily examines the influence of Surrealism on the Pixies' voice – Thompson ate up filmmakers like Buñuel and David Lynch, and his frenzied lyrics captured a kind of senseless joy and pain. Or, as Thompson himself puts it, the appeal of the Pixies lay in their "sex and death vibrations." Sisario's sharp analysis and exploration of Doolittle makes this 33 1/3 tome a must for Pixie-heads.

Both books suffer a tiny bit by not having the full bands' cooperation – the Pixies' Kim Deal refused to talk to Sisario, and only Mike D of the three Beasties spoke on the record to LeRoy. Yet that doesn't really matter too much. These 33 1/3 books aren't meant to be an all-inclusive band biography. Both authors bring to their task an easygoing yet authoritative voice. Reading these books, it's like it's 1989 all over again for me, and I can pretend I'm finally kinda sorta hip.

The Pixies Reunion Tour, April 28, Eugene, Oregon, McDonald Theatre
What a show. So I'd managed to score tickets to the second Eugene show on the Pixies 'warmup' reunion tour, their visits to smaller venues before a larger tour this summer. The show sold out in about an hour and it was only through luck I was able to get onto the website to get tickets. We knew it'd be tricky to even go with a 10-week-old baby to deal with, but fortunately my folks decided to make a visit up here this week and were the perfect babysitters. So, anxiety about leaving the boy for the first time aside, we were ready to head to Eugene.

But let me back up, in case you're not aware of who The Pixies are. They are to '90s alternative rock as the Velvet Underground were in the 1960s -- hugely influential, yet somewhat unheralded in their time. A big influence on bands from Nirvana (Kurt Cobain was quoted as saying of his own work, "I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off The Pixies. I have to admit it.") to Radiohead, Pavement, Guided By Voices and many more, their fire-breathing eclectic combo of surf-guitar spacey punk-pop was one of the most distinctive sounds of modern rock. Of course, just as they started to get known, they broke up, with frontman Frank Black going on to a solo career and bassist/backup vocalist Kim Deal best known as leader of the Breeders.

So that's the Pixies. We got to the McDonald Theatre just as doors were opening about 7:30. Completely sold out the 1,200-capacity venue, an old converted movie theater that is a great place to see bands in an intimate setting (we've seen Elvis Costello and Lucinda Williams both do fine shows there in last two years). You can pretty much get yourself as close to the stage as you're willing with their open floor, and there's a balcony if you're feeling like sitting. Avril managed to persuade the burly door guy to let her bring snacks in with her poignant excuse of, "But I'm breast-feeding!" (Always a good way to defuse large authoritative men.) The crowd was good, a mix of college kids, Pixies fans from all over Oregon and even the rest of the U.S. and assorted freaks.

After a lackluster opening act, the main action started earlier than we thought it would at about 9:30 as The Pixies took the stage. For huge Pixies fans going way back like Avril and I, it was amazing to watch them come out and actually start playing "Planet of Sound." I had a big crush on smoky bass player Kim Deal and although she's the definition of a weathered rock chick it was still a charge to see her onstage, and although stocky, short and bald Frank Black looks like a gas station attendant, that man can wail and scream like a banshee. The real surprise for me was lead guitarist Joey Santiago, whose distinctive burbling strings really provide much of the distinctive Pixies sound. He was astoundingly good. The band in general sounded great for one that's been broken up for a decade, although they had played ten or so shows already on this tour to warm up before hitting Oregon.

The band wasn't much for banter but smiled a lot and just kept playing should've-been-hits from their five 1980s and 1990s albums, one after another -- "Here Comes Your Man," "Is She Weird," "Wave of Mutilation" and more. What a charge it was to see a crowd of hundreds of people all waving their hands in the air to a cultish song like "Gouge Away." Definitely a room full of Pixies fans, no poseurs here. Avril and I stationed ourselves against the wall at stage left, which was good as we didn't get jostled by the moshers up front (at 30-something we're too old to mosh). With the great gently sloping floor in the McDonald and being 6' 2" I could easily see the entire show without much problem. It was a ferociously passionate show as befits the Pixies, but the band were in great spirits and top form. I could lip-read Frank telling Santiago during the curtain call that it was a "great gig."

Highlights? It all rocked, but I thought the renditions of "Hey," "Tame" and "Debaser" were really fantastic -- these songs are where the distinctive "soft/loud" sound of bands like Nirvana had its genesis. I also geeked out at hearing "Monkey Gone To Heaven," one of my top five Pixies songs and one I didn't think they'd play. For the encore, it was grand to hear Kim take lead vocals on the plaintive "In Heaven" from the movie "Eraserhead," a Pixies live staple. Our ears rang afterward, and there was one hell of a logjam to leave the theater, but it was all worth it. Besides, knowing the Pixies, it may not be long before they break up again anyway.

Another fantastic thing is that we've ordered live discs of the concert from this new company DiscLive, which has been following the entire tour and producing limited 1,000-print editions of each night's show using some pretty amazing technology (they actually record and burn the discs during the show using a mobile studio and have them ready right after if you want to pick them up, although we didn't want to wait around because of the baby and it was after midnight, so they're being mailed to us). Great way of cutting off the illegal bootleg trade by offering "real" bootlegs at an affordable cost and what, according to accounts so far, is excellent sound. We can't wait to get the discs.

Best of all, baby Peter did fine with my parents and Avril and I realized that even though we're parents now it's still OK to "rock out" on occasion. It just takes a little more work is all.