By: Jim Froehlich
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
-George Bernard Shaw-
(Apologies to the steadfast & patient editors of this website for the tardiness of this review. In a world where "The Wayne Brady Show" can be cancelled, you'll excuse me my priorities.)
The little guy was from Toronto. He’d driven 10 hours from Winnipeg without a ticket to see the first show of the reunion tour and was driving back that night to see them in Manitoba the next day, in Kamloops maybe or Brandon. Bolstered by drink and the blind faith of the true fan, he lingered outside the Fine Line until some shameless profiteer sold him a ticket for $120US and he made his way inside...
I am tall and he was small. Generally, I’m sensitive to sight-line issues in smaller clubs and tend to drift towards the back lest I importune the more vertically-challenged. This was history, however, so I finagled a choice spot along the mezzanine rail and settled in with my companion for the show.
Newsflash! Personal space outlawed in Canada!
He was all over me from the start - hands on my shoulders, beady eyes peering through my legs, trying vainly to crawl into my shirt pocket while jockeying for a better view. After an hour or so of being molested Lambada-style by the tyke, we both smoked a cigarette and he took me home to meet his parents. Actually, he sheepishly tapped me on the back and asked if he might stand in front of me for the encore so he could take some pictures, eh? I'm a nice guy. I stepped aside.
Note to The Pixies: 6 songs is not an encore, it’s a second set. Thanks, though.
He took a couple of snaps right away but then climbed up on the rail and began screaming out to Kim Deal & Frank Black (or Black Francis or Chuck E. Cheese or whatever he's calling himself these days). Several times people standing nearby had to grab him by his coattails while he leaned over the brink - one slip and he would have plummeted down into a crowd so densely packed you could have slipped coal into a sweaty armpit and had a diamond by the end of the show. Heat, pressure, time...Heat, pressure, time...
Now he was scaring me. He kept screaming and reaching out, vainly trying to make contact with the band until he suddenly climbed down, claiming Kim Deal had smiled and winked at him. And then he was gone.
Airfare from Toronto to Winnipeg. 20 hours to Minneapolis and back. $120 for a ticket. T-shirt, live CD, incidentals. And a wink & a nod was all he needed.
The Pixies were the Bob Seger of late 80’s college rock. I never owned any of their albums but somehow I knew at least a dozen of their songs by heart, if not by name. They were ubiquitous standard bearers of all things “alternative”, when that designation still had meaning. They were stalwarts of college radio, MTV’s 120 Minutes and any other media that deviated from the mainstream, before the mainstream assimilated them into the Borg of popular youth culture and mass consumption.
A vade mecum of musical influences up to that point, they incorporated punk, surf, latin, country & sci-fi into a musical cross-pollination that's standard today but remarkable in it's time. Following a classic career arc of fame, personality conflicts, solo/side projects and inevitable reunion, they found themselves back on a small stage at the Fine Line prepping for a worldwide tour that would bring them to some of the largest summer festivals in the US and Europe.
Openers The Capitol Years had the thankless task of goosing a crowd that was already primed to explode. The animated, Rickenbacker-based quartet played a well-received short set of energetic pop songs located somewhere in the mists of the 4 decades between The Who, The Jam, the Lyres & The Hives. I heard a few around me mention they sounded like Jet. Or the Vines. Or Stellastar. This would be logical, I suppose, if music had just been invented in 1998. Regardless, they seemed like nice boys and worthy of a return visit.
BTW, The Strokes suck.
A Draconian guest-list policy coupled with the Ticketmaster lottery had thinned the potential scenester crowd considerably, leaving small circles of lumpen-hipsters at the back of the club like water buffalo on the veldt protecting their young from hordes of black “Doolittle ‘89” tour shirts only recently retrieved from the bottom of sock drawers across the Upper Midwest. MTV, Newsweek, NME and other international media were present upstairs in a special tabled area where they could receive an unabated view and sip delicious cocktails brewed, I imagine, from the blood of small boys.
The band took the stage quickly & casually, with grins that could only be described as “shit-eating”. None the worse for wear, they all seemed older, wiser and maybe a little glad to be back. An already glistening Frank Black was first, looking less like Uncle Fester these days and more like a bemused George “The Animal” Steele after electrolysis and a long shvitz. A chatty Kim Deal was next, beer in one hand and a smoke in the other, wearing a black bowling shirt that transported me instantly to my mom’s ladie's afternoon church league c. 1973. Less mercurial members Joey Santiago & drummer David Lovering took to their marks with a wave to the crowd and they were off...
This was their first public show together in 13 years so I can forgive them a very mannered, cautious performance through 25 songs that relied heavily on their early independent albums. "Only one song from 'Trompe Le Monde", an exasperated Brian Oake was heard to exclaim, "and then only 'U-Mass'?" Madness! The band was loose but tentative, missing several cues but laughing them off good-naturedly. All the hits (that I knew of) were well-represented. Check the set list for your favorites. The fanatical crowd seemed a bit subdued after the first few songs but this was probably because they were wedged in a human version of "Don't Break the Ice" that rendered them incapable of moving without taking a half-dozen of their neighbors along for the ride.
Taken as a whole, a pretty good show, especially with a blistering "Here Comes Your Man" and the slowed down 'surf' version of "Wave of Mutilation" they offered in the encore. I'll be curious to see them in November when they visit Roy Wilkins after 9 months of touring. Hopefully, confidence issues will be moot and the band will jettison their elementary school "citizenship convocation" vibe and feel free to crank it up a notch and maybe move about the stage.
Agit-industrialists Laibach teach us that popular music is political, pop artists are politicians and pop concerts are essentially political rallies. We collect autographs & memorabilia, throw things at the stage or shout out from the crowd in an attempt to connect with people to whom we've ascribed positive virtue & values. I left the show and loitered outside for a while and the opinions were always the same: if you were a Pixies neophyte, it was an OK show. Not great, good stuff, glad I was there but let's move on. If you were a fan, however, you had just witnessed the greatest miracle since the Feeding Of The 5000. People were actually crying, for God's sake, like they'd had an epiphany on the highway and were now going to spend the remainder of their lives tending to lepers. "Dude, it was better than the Main Room in '90!" It's this cult of personality, this inabilty to judge artists/politicians objectively that leaves me clammy. Of course, if we actually judged these people on their personal lives and the content of their characters, we'd all be listening to Jars Of Clay and Wayne Brady would be president.
As it should be.
Location Info:
Fine Line Music Café
Artist Info: Pixies
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