Gone to Heaven
When Bob Dylan was asked recently why he re-imagines his most legendary songs in concert, forgoing the usual classic-rock recreations, he argued that as a cult artist, he didn’t have to traffic in nostalgia. “Daltrey, Townshend, McCartney, the Beach Boys, Elton, Billy Joel. They made perfect records, so they have to play them perfectly,” he said. “Exactly the way people remember them.” Dylan of course made his share of perfect records, but the man has a point: fans want to see and hear the music they know and love, and nowhere has that been more apparent this year than in the arenas, stadiums and concert halls around the country. In 2009, Bruce Springsteen wowed the Jersey faithful with full-on renditions of classic albums like Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town. Public Enemy played A Nation of Millions... Van Morrison offered up Astral Weeks.
The Pixies are a cult band that also happened to make a perfect record. Doolittle, which the Boston-based indie-rock legends playing start-to finish before frenzied fanatics around the country, was released twenty years ago and could well be called the peak of the alt-rock movement… before Nirvana appropriated the band’s dynamic and brought it into the mainstream. The NME named Doolittle the second best album in history, while Pitchfork called the Pixies “the most influential alternative rock band of all time.” At New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom on Monday night, the band proved why.
The crowd – a mixture of forty-somethings who remember the band during their ’86-’93 heyday, and younger fans who never got the chance to – was amped up from the start. But it was only after a series of B-sides that the show proper began, as frontman Black Francis launched into Debaser, Doolittle’s opening track. The song is a perfect distillation of what makes the Pixies so vital: inescapably hooky with chiming surf guitar, chugging rhythms, bassist Kim Deal's soaring backing vocals, Black Francis’ howeled choruses, and freakishly violent lyrics (in this case referencing the surrealist Bunuel-Dali film Un Chien Andalou, which was projected on a screen behind the stage. The Pixies are that kind of band). From there, the band went from strength to strength: the visceral Tame (which you’d swear was a cut off of Nevermind if you didn’t know it came out three years before), the hushed, melodic “Wave of Mutilation”, the jangle rock of “Waiting For Your Man” (Bassist Kim Deal noted introduced the latter as “the beginning of side 2”, recalling a time when albums came on vinyl and cassette. And when music fans actually bought albums). And while the band has notoriously less-than-incendiary stage presence, the quality of the music and the video projections and metric ass-load of dry ice made for a spectacle. By the time the band closed out the set with the 3-minute primal scream of “Gouge Away”, the bulk of the crowd seemed to think they’d gone to heaven.
Critics, of course, have carped at the fact that band – who acrimoniously broke up in 1993, and have only released one song since – are cashing in and selling out. But you wouldn’t know it by the way the audience sung along to every track. During the encore, the Pixies launched into a pair of seminal cuts off of 1988’s Surfer Rosa (another “perfect” album): “Where is My Mind?” and “Gigantic.” Both were vivid reminders – as if we needed any more – that without the Pixies there would have been no Nirvana, no Pavement, no Beck, no Weezer. So who cares if there was no new material? That’s not what the crowd wanted. They wanted a perfect album played perfectly, exactly how they remembered it. And the Pixies delivered.
Photos courtesy of Nicole Powers and Myles Mangino.
