Seven years have passed since the night the Pixies gave Minnesota fans a little piece of rock history by playing their first reunion show at the Fine Line. Now Boston's masters of loud-quiet-loud are back on the road playing one of their classic records in its entirety.
Sunday's show at Roy Wilkins Auditorium will center around 1989's "Doolittle," the disc that turned the Pixies from a cultish college-radio band into an MTV and FM rock staple, thanks in large part to the crossover singles "Here Comes Your Man" and "Monkey Gone to Heaven." More than a few critics have pontificated that "Doolittle" may have opened the mainstream's doors to Nirvana and the alt-rock explosion of the early '90s. At the very least, it's a disc that still stands up from start to finish two decades later.
Pixies drummer David Lovering helped us pick out some of the more interesting factoids and tidbits about "Doolittle."
- The hit single went missing in action. Even though the song dated back to the early, punkier days of the band, the Pixies did not include the surf-pop sing-along "Here Comes Your Man" in set lists after "Doolittle" came out. Said Lovering, "We played it for years but had never recorded it. And then when we put it out, we never played it on tour [laughs]. And the only reason why is because it really is a pop song, so we thought it was cooler not to do it than to do it. It wasn't until our reunion in 2004 that we started playing it again."
- It's not the band's favorite disc. Lovering and guitarist Joey Santiago both say they would have picked a different album to play on tour, with the guitarist naming 1990's sci-fi-ified "Bossanova," while the drummer prefers 1988's scrappy "Surfer Rosa." Lovering said, "They're very different: 'Surfer Rosa' is just so much more raw, and 'Doolittle' is more polished. 'Surfer Rosa' is better to me because it's the album of songs we learned together in our infant years, so it's more near and dear that way."
- The rest of the band doesn't know why "man is 5" and "the devil is 6," either. With songwriter Frank Black aka Black Francis aka Charles Thompson holding off on interviews this time around, Lovering and Santiago are finally admitting the songs on "Doolittle" are as lost on them as everyone else, with all the obtuse references to horror movies and Old Testament passages and underwater gods. "No idea," Santiago told one interviewer. Lovering agreed: "I'm often the last one to know anything about the lyrics, but that's true of these songs especially. I know Charles had some kind of concept in mind, but I don't know what it was."
- There's little truth to the "Doolittle" rumors. Lovering denied the long-held story line that the making of "Doolittle" was marred by personality clashes, the first big fracture in the band's eventual breakup. "At that point, we'd been together a little over three years, and any band that's been together a while stuck in close quarters will get on each other's nerves," he said. "It really wasn't that bad, nothing more crazy than in any other band."
It's not so ironic, then, that he said the foursome has been getting along swimmingly playing "Doolittle" on tour. "We're having a lot of fun with it," Lovering said. "We're trying to play the album to a 'T' every night, and the challenge of nailing it from night to night in and of itself has been quite rewarding."
