The Pixies aren’t the Rolling Stones, they don’t bring some gigantic machinery with them and the stuff installed on the stage of the El Rey on Monday night wasn’t that impressive, it just looked like anything set up for any regular band I see all the time. They aren’t the Rolling Stones as there isn’t much sex appeal or look involved. Still, they could effortlessly sell out the El Rey theater plus the Maya, four nights in a row in Los Angeles, and this is without mentioning their surprise secret warm-up show at the Echo on Friday night,… The Echo, the Echoplex, these are the places where legendary bands go for their warm-ups, it seems. The Pixies aren’t the Stones, but they are totally legends.
I saw Frank Black, Black Francis, or whatever his fans call him these days, doing a solo show at the Mint a few years ago, and he totally looked like a regular guy without an ounce of rock star attitude, still, I don’t know what to think anymore after Monday night. I will explain later.
The El Rey theater was completely packed, and I rarely see such a long line outside, hours before the main act, it was even packed for the lovely and impressive opener, Meg Myers, a rare thing in LA. When they came on stage, the band didn’t waste any time, starting with a song accelerating like a manic declaration, a song I didn’t recognize for a good reason: it was a cover, ‘Big New Prinz’ by the Fall. They soon enchained with another cover ‘Head on’ by Jesus and Mary Chain, and we had to wait till the third song to hear a Pixies tune! Their songs sounded quite muddy from where I was (right front of the stage), and especially short, actually, I had never noticed that the Pixies songs were so short, or were they playing them in an expeditious way? Actually, what happened at the end of the show led me to believe the band wanted to get out of there as soon as possible, or am I wrong?
Beside frontman Black Francis, the main attraction was the new bassist Kim Shattuck, also bassist of the Muffs. I have my doubts whether it was a general consensus, but around me, it was a love fest, with lots of ‘We/I love you Kim’ thrown at her every 10 minutes. If she has ever felt some uneasy feeling when replacing the famous Kim Deal, she was probably reassured. With her short black dress, high black socks, and bicolor hair, she looked like someone escaped from Courtney Love’s band, and seemed to be totally in her element on stage. However, I didn’t hear much of her voice, a weird thing when we know the importance of Deal’s voice in some of the Pixies’ most beloved songs… sadly, there was definitively no ‘Gigantic’, ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’ or ‘Into the White’ on Monday night.
But the Pixies have new songs, ‘What goes boom’, ‘Blue eyed hexe’, ‘Bagboy’, ‘Another toe in the ocean’, we heard them, mostly around the second part of the show, and unfortunately, I became a little bored at this precise moment. Too bad, because I really wanted to be blown away at that show, I like the Pixies, I even love some of their songs, and it was my first time seeing them live,… but it didn’t really happen. I don’t want to sound this negative because the show had its excellent moments, especially when I was recognizing the old big-hit songs, ‘Wave of mutilation’, ‘Broken face’, ‘Hey’, ‘Debaser’, ‘Tame’, ‘Gouge Away’. Like many people, I have had an eye on the setlist before they had even started and the guy next to me had literally jumped from excitement at the idea they will be playing ‘Debaser’. Come on, the Pixies are ‘the’ influential band, I love their unexpected distortions, their unclassifiable nature, their innovative tempos and furious screams (and Black Francis can still do this very well), their ability to transcend music genres, their faculty to make you believe you can do anything in art, their scratching-my-confused-head lyrics, and their royal pedigree – they have been praised by everyone, Bowie and Cobain included. However, on Monday night they were running through their set as if the theater was on fire… and the fire wasn’t always coming from their guitars.
Still, the really exciting moments came when the crowd went in total communion with the band, screaming the lyrics of ‘Debaser’, or ‘Hey’, their fists in the air in front of Francis Black’s face melting over the mic. The crowd was nevertheless very calm, I am used to a little bit more of mad energy, but even the punchier songs of the Pixies didn’t trigger anything close to some good old crowd surfing. May be the crowd was too middle age?
Then something odd happened, after ‘Planet of Sound’ (and three songs left on the setlist) they disappeared without saying a word, actually they hadn’t been very talkative the whole night! Everyone was waiting for an encore of course, the lights of the theater weren’t on yet, the theater crew seemed to be retuning the guitars on stage, but it was getting long, very long. And they never came back, despite the crowd booing, some guy saying he would refuse to leave the place till the band would come back on stage. An announcement was made, security guards were forcing us to leave, everyone was disappointed. When exiting, I heard two guys saying the Echo show was better since they played the whole setlist and in particular the Fight Club song, ‘Were is my Mind’… how could they have left out this one? ‘No Monkey Gone to Heaven’ either! And no explanation either! It was brutal, ‘totally unnecessary!’ as a guy put it. May be the band got pissed off for some reasons? Not enough enthusiasm from the crowd? Not enough cheering for the new songs? I said that everyone was rather calm, but I could only see happy people in the front. Who knows, may be Black Francis got old and wanted to go to bed before midnight, may be he wanted to leave us hungry for the other shows – and in this case I should have bought a ticket for their last one – and may be it was their most rockstar move of the night.
Setlist minus the 3 last ones (but this site gives a totally different order):
