Pixies
At the BBC
1998, 4AD/Elektra
Our walk through the story of Frank Black’s body of work will take side trips into these Pixies archival releases. That’s just how it goes in rock ‘n’ roll sometimes. If you saw a Frank Black live show at this time, you would have likely heard an old Pixies song here and there in the middle of a stretch of his new stuff. This release timeline will have to behave the same way. Old and new will mix. The past haunts the present and future.
The Death to The Pixies compilation moved some units, it seems, so 4AD gave us more flashbacks for our CD collections.
I bought ’em all. In 1998, I remember I even had Pixies at the BBC on the flipside of my dubbed cassette (for the car) of Frank Black and The Catholics. The past and present came together on a homemade Maxell C-90 in one poor boy’s 1987 Chevy Nova.
People argue about CDs vs. vinyl vs. digital when it comes to the best musical experience, but I think my preferred format is the shitty tape that you kept in your car back in the day and played until your stereo eventually ate it for breakfast. Rewind, fast forward, or just let it play straight through. That’s devotion. That’s how you need to hear the Pixies cover The Beatles.
So, I spent my whole article on Doolittle blabbing about how I can’t listen to old Pixies albums anymore. I played them too much, I got burned out. That’s also sometimes how it goes in rock ‘n’ roll.
But I can hang with Pixies at the BBC. No, the performances aren’t drastically different from what you hear on the albums, but sometimes a little fresh air is all you need.
Like most interesting bands, the Pixies didn’t tend to play their latest single in the BBC studio. Instead, they often dove into B-sides, covers, new songs that weren’t out on a record yet, and album deep cuts. If part of a rock band’s currency is their coolness, a session for John Peel was a place to be extra cool with under-the-radar selections.
It begins perfectly with “Wild Honey Pie”, the second strangest song for a band to cover from The Beatles’ White Album (the first is “Revolution 9”, obviously). In this performance from May of 1988, when Surfer Rosa was still new in the racks, the Pixies rip like demons through McCartney’s old throwaway. The original was a goof-off that made it to the Beatles’ album because it was short and added texture to their brilliant double LP epic. Those people who think that the White Album should’ve been cut down (buncha weirdos) invariably cite “Wild Honey Pie” as expendable.
I disagree and it’s nice to hear the Pixies concur with a version that brings all of the screaming violence of their early days.
From there, the rest of the disc bounces back and forth in time, hitting choice moments from six different stops at the BBC from 1988 to 1991. It’s sequenced for effect rather than chronology. It’s also not a complete document. Maybe they were holding back tracks for later use. Maybe they didn’t want to merely be a better-sounding, official version of one of the most popular Pixies bootlegs at the time, Rough Diamonds, which offered all of the BBC performances.
Or maybe, just maybe, 4AD knew that a complete collection wouldn’t fit on one side of a 90-minute tape. Yeah, I’ll go with that.
When it comes highlights, yeesh, they’re ALL highlights.
I love the breakneck takes here on “There Goes My Gun” and “Dead” (tracks 2 and 3; this CD pummels you hard at the beginning). Both are from an October 1988 session six months before those songs came out on Doolittle. Both are shorter than the album versions, with “Dead” being nearly a full minute shorter, but not missing any essential ingredients. It’s just played faster. Works for me.
Being burned out an album doesn’t mean that you’re burned out on the songs, after all.
I also dig the 1989 version of “Down to the Well” when it had a more prominent, if repetitive, backing vocal from Kim Deal that you can only faintly hear buried deep in the mix on Bossanova a year later.
Speaking of Bossanova, this album also offers up one track from a 1990 solo Black Francis session. It was just him, his guitar, a click track, and a few songs from the Pixies’ new album (along with a cover of The Beach Boys’ “Hang on to Your Ego” that sadly isn’t here, but that he’d later record as Frank Black). Francis’s one-man “Is She Weird?” is noticeably more stark than the rest of this disc, but he performs it like the band may as well be there. He unleashes the scream and attacks his strings and fretboard.
As for the rest, while the Pixies always had the tightness of an ambitious band, nailing their songs perfectly and delivering the goods it’s interesting to hear them become even more professional with time. The 1988 performances here of “Caribou” and “Levitate Me” hit every note, but there’s enough air between those notes that the songs feel like they could potentially fly off the tracks, and gloriously so. Compare to them to later songs such as “Ana” and “Letter to Memphis”, which are next to indistinguishable in this set from the album versions.
The disc closes with a banger–and another cover. We end where we began, in 1988, and the Pixies set fire to the room with a roaring “In Heaven” from Eraserhead. On the later reunion tour, Kim Deal took the lead vocal, but in the early days, Peter Ivers and Dayid Lynch’s ultra-simple midnight movie lullaby was yet another vehicle for Francis’s scream. In heaven, everything is fine and if you don’t believe that the first time you hear it, the Pixies will pound you harder and harder with it until you do.
When these fifteen tracks finish up, I feel weird. It doesn’t feel like I took a nostalgic stroll. It feels like I just woke from an old dream, one that I hadn’t had in awhile. And it still gets under my skin.
The Pixies were a great fucking band.
If I never said that in my early pieces in which I wrestle with the question of the Pixies’ relevance to me over time, I’ll say it here.
I’ll even say it again.
The Pixies were a great, great fucking band.