I have an unhealthy attraction to music biographies, as I’ve stated before, and an even unhealthier fixation on those of epic proportions. I recently had to exhume David Cavanagh’s My Magpie Eyes are Hungry for the Prize: The Creation Records Story for research. Always a pleasure. What’s not so pleasurable is Everett True’s Nirvana, but I can’t put the f*cking train wreck down. Some book deals are miracles. When your relationship with a book is the tedious, boring type of love/hate, there is a problem. Especially when the only thing that keeps me turning the pages is an addictive curiosity about how True is going to piss me off next. True is typical Brit music writer/sycophant splooge expert with a really pathetic attempt to seem cool (namedrops a lot of obscure bands, then footnotes them), and as such, this too-old, moon-headed, smiling freak is garden variety irritant, but he gets points for few things: Persuading a publisher to green light this self-indulgent monster. Lots of footnotes (still not enough for my liking). Slicing and dicing the other Nirvana/Cobain biographies (claiming the Cobain was holding the phone away to laugh after fabricating ridiculous childhood stories for Azerrad). And…..700 pages……700 pages that follow a choppy, confusing, autobiographical format that fails not for those reasons, but because True is so unlikable.
If the Pixies reunion of 2000-and-whatever + subsequent “activity” is a disgustingly mundane exercise in showcasing just how stupid and gullible a fanbase can be, it’s a sure bet that the obligatory projects of documentation (on top of the 871 Pixies books that choke the shelves) will be entertaining on this level. loud Quiet loud: A Film About The Pixies is not a film about the Pixies. It’s a documentary about Phoning It In, thousands upon thousands of people digging their forks and knives into bowls of shit, formulated disputes in nice hotel rooms and super-quiet rental vehicles, and the art of the tight-fitting sports cap + turtleneck sweater. Look, it came on cable. And again, I couldn’t stop.
I’m now writing about things that happened several years ago, not the topical fare that folks might care to read, but I must relate something that the Pixies documentary popped onto the brain. As always, when I think about the Pixies reunion (and everything that’s happened since), I think about the exact opposite. But I’m not here to praise the Mission of Burma reunion or the unbelievably beautiful reissue packages that came earlier this year courtesy of Matador.
When the reunion was announced, it lit up the music-nerd mailing list I’m a member of. It’s basically lurkers, semi-famous underground (or so) musicians/do-ers, good people, and humorless music writers. When one writer took his mind off of a constricted sphincter to complain about Martin Swope being replaced by Bob Weston, I replied that this was akin to griping about Sanford and Son episodes that didn’t feature Grady. In front of the entire group, this response entered my inbox:
“Don’t push me.”