November 1991, Cameo Theatre, Miami Beach, Fla.
It was early summer, 1989, I was home from college for summer break. I was sitting somewhere with my friend Sarah — I want to say it was on a docked sailboat — and we were talking about music. I was telling her how great XTC’s Oranges & Lemons was, and how I heard about this band called The Stone Roses.
“Do you have Doolittle?” she said.
“No, whose album is that?”
“The Pixies. We’re going to listen to it right now.”
And that was it. I’m not into the whole “five albums to take on a deserted island” (where does the electricity go when the battery runs out?), but in the hypothetical land where that question lives, Doolittle is one of those five albums. I heard about the Pixies before Doolittle (Surfer Rosa was released in 1988), but had not listened to anything like this. Thirty-eight minutes to change your life.
The Pixies are one of the greatest bands ever, how Nirvana can be in the rock and roll hall of fame (yes, lowercase on purpose) and not the Pixies is a travesty (and Dave Grohl would agree with me). From 1988 to 1991 they released an album a year, all beautiful and weird and quiet/loud/quiet and everything an original, genre-creating band should do to be remembered and revered. And I was lucky enough to see them before they went away for a while (and I’ve seen them plenty when they came back).
Cameo Theatre was a run-down old movie house converted into a grimy rock palace in the 1980s. I saw some wonderful shows there (I’ll get to some of them), but in the fall of 1991 was witness to a band at war. Trompe le Monde recently came out (including the classic “U-Mass,” “Planet of Sound,” “Alec Eiffel” and the Jesus and Mary Chain cover “Head On”), but the band wasn’t in the greatest of places. Perhaps there was pressure to become bigger (the band would tour with U2 in 1992), or perhaps they were tired of the grind — four albums with four tours in four years can do that.
Pere Ubu opened, the legendary post-punk band from Cleveland, Ohio, and while I don’t remember much, I recall thinking lead singer (and Miami native) David Thomas was a leadman worth watching. His voice was something other-worldly — high and direct and attention grabbing.
The Pixies came on stage and took their respective corners, heading into “Where Is My Mind?” (a song they end shows with now), before cruising straight into “Wave of Mutilation” from Doolittle. They played a generous mixture of songs from the four albums, it wasn’t until the end of the show the band played songs from Trompe. There was little interaction among the band, though, no talking, just the cranking out of songs one after the other (a la Ramones).
But truths became evident in the live setting. Is there a better screamer than Black Francis? No. Is there anyone who can play a bad-ass bass and sing as angelic as Kim Deal? No. Is there a drummer as frenetic and yet as seemingly organized as David Lovering? No. Is there a guitarist who accentuates this screaming wonder around him as capably as Joey Santiago? No. I know it’s an easy moment to choose, but there are few things in life more enjoyable than watching Black Francis yell “THEN GOD IS 7, THEN GOD IS 7.”
Other highlights included “The Happening” and “U-Mass,” two of my favorite Pixies songs not on Doolittle (all of the songs on Doolittle are sacred). “Tame” was a top moment, the vocal play between Francis and Deal was as stunning as I thought it would be.
I would see the Pixies again in 2004, during the comeback tour, and they were looser and seemed to have more fun. A few years back I saw them again when they played Doolittle front to back (yes, that was some sort of awesome, like climbing mountains awesome). But seeing them back in the day was a moment I’ll always treasure, even if the band didn’t seem to.
