A Pixies bootleg album.
"Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm just being nostalgic, but it seems that all the stupid pop songs
from yesterday are better than the stupid pop songs of today."
-- Black Francis
Late February, a rainy Sunday afternoon in Camden Town. Milling round the market stalls,
trying to fulfill the seemingly opposing objectives of: 1) sheltering from the rain and 2) finding open space away
from the crowds. My mind none too sharp, the previous days' experimentation with sleep deprivation
having left me almost unable to cope with the massive sleep deficit accumulated over the past
two weeks.
Trying to keep our snide comments about all the clean-cut nu-metal kiddies at a
volume level audible only to us. A phone call from a loved one; an apparently half-missing
/msg from the morning. A record stall.
Amongst the random treasures, such as a reading of a treatise on the benefits of LSD by Dr. Timothy Leary,
I found this one.
Recorded at two different performances from the band's Doolittle tour, the album's mostly made up of songs
from Doolittle, though there's a few from Surfer Rosa and Come on Pilgrim: mostly from a performance at
the Cabaret Metro, Chicago IL on 10/08/1989 (this could be a European or American date format though...);
the remainder from the European leg of the tour, specifically the Koncerthall in Vienna (Austria) on 11/06/1989.
The sound quality is about what you'd expect from a good quality live bootleg, and the performances themselves
are classic Pixies, capturing the real live concert atmosphere that's been so lacking in the available
recorded Pixies material.
The CD and inlay are cleanly done and pretty: high quality print and pressed CD. The illustrations seem professionally done,
culled from details from the original Doolittle illustrations: the front cover a composition of a random
rock shot and 'Pixies' and 'Transatlantic' text in white. Inside covers are sections from the illustration to
Wave of Mutilation, the rear cover from the illutration to Hey.
The 'sleeve notes' are of course entirely devoid of traceable elements: no recording credits,
etc. other than the band, and a rather pathetic looking duplication of the standard
'All rights reserved' message. Included, however, are a band photo and a couple of nifty
Black Francis quotes; that at the beginning of this writeup, and also:
"You get these bands claiming that if they hadn't found rock 'n roll they'd have
turned into mass murderers. I'm not so sure about this theory. People who manage
to organize themselves to get a band together, hire a studio, pay their studio bill,
they've got their shit together. They don't strike me as the kind of people who would
otherwise be chopping up bodies and burying them in the Utah desert."
-- Black Francis
Track Listing
- Bone Machine
- Cactus
- Caribou
- Crackity Jones
- Dead
- Debaser
- Gigantic
- Gouge away
- Hey
- Holiday Song
- I Bleed
- Isla de Encanta
- Levitate Me
- Mr. Grieves
- Monkey Gone to Heaven
- Tame
- There Goes My Gun
- Wave of Mutilation (slow, Uk-Surf style version)
- Where is My Mind?
- Into the White
- Nimrod's Son
- No. 13 Baby
- River Euphrates
- Vamos
- Wave of Mutilation
Tracks 1-21 are from the Chicago gig, tracks 22-25 from Vienna.