By the time Pixies made their fourth and final album, they had more than a few famous admirers. Two of the most prominent were Bono and the Edge, U2’s singer and guitarist, who pressed for Pixies to come along for their Zoo TV tour in 1991. But what seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime became a quick disappointment for a band who needed something to get excited about.
In 1992, the same year that compact discs outsold cassette tapes for the first time, Pixies played their last show. While the band’s fate hung in the balance, fuzzy guitar rock with ringing choruses and subtle verses became the standard sound for a truckload of bands that were getting airtime on alternative radio stations and playing to thousands of stringy-haired, moshing teenagers. In a moment laden with symbolism, Nirvana’s Nevermind booted Michael Jackson’s Dangerous from the top of the charts.
LUBIN: Trompe Le Monde comes out and U2 decides they’re going to go on tour, and I guess that was a fairly big bit of news because I think they hadn’t been on tour for quite a long time. The opening slot on that tour was the object of desire of every up-and-coming band and every label and every band’s manager . . . Everyone wanted the slot as opener on the U2 tour, and then it turned out U2 wanted the Pixies. So that was a fantastic bit of news.
MARTS: It didn’t seem to be a secret that U2 had asked Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana to open up for them, and I guess those bands passed and Pixies said yes.*
BANKS: When we played in Dublin, I remember U2 coming to the gig and they sent a note back, I’ve still got it, actually, framed: “To the Pixies, keep digging for fire.” U2 and Bono, the Edge, they were massively impressed with the Pixies.
BONO (U2 singer): I just saw the Pixies again recently. They have a fanatical following here in Ireland. It’s really beyond comprehension. They had to do an hour-long encore. But they always bring me to tears. When Kim Deal sings that one song about “heaven,” I just want to scream. It goes right through me. The Pixies are really an original species. They invented something. You have to put groups in certain categories, and they are in the category of having actually invented something that didn’t exist before they came along. And it’s not just the hard cut—you know, the cut from savagery to sobbing in a split second—but also their subject matter. As a lyricist, Charles can find playfulness on the way to big questions. He’s like [artist] Damien Hirst: there’s surreality, but there’s also something oddly touching. It’s subject matter, it’s structure, and it’s the craft of those chord progressions. They are off the map.
LOVERING: It was great, that was probably the biggest tour we opened up for. It was funny, it was also the only tour that no one knew who we were. Many U2 fans, I don’t think they were aware of the Pixies in some way.
BANKS: I personally thought it was a mistake, tour supporting U2. It’s very rare that doing support does you any good as a band—it’s good for the main band but not so good for you.
WATTS-RUSSELL: Oh, God. Why does it always happen? I remember before that Throwing Muses were opening for R.E.M. and being in the audience with the Throwing Muses coming onstage, so excited that they were touring with R.E.M.—they both like each other, audience is gonna gobble it—the place was a third full. I felt so strongly that this never works, you always get so excited, the idea that this is going to do them so much good, that this is gonna expose them to a much bigger audience and it just never fucking works. No one had learnt their lesson.
HURLEY: It was on paper a great opportunity to play in front of that sort of crowd. The reality of it is you’re playing in a basketball arena that’s three quarters empty because most of the fans are still buying their U2 T-shirts. The acoustics in those venues are poor and you get a small proportion of the crowd who’d come to see the Pixies or at least appreciate them. It wasn’t the right arena or environment for that band.
KOLDERIE: They were the critics’ darlings, sure, but you’re playing pretty much to an empty hall, people who don’t really care about you. Even if you’re cool and you’re the Pixies, it’s really sort of soul-destroying. It’s like, you’re out there and you think it’s the biggest gig of your life, but you’re playing at a half-empty arena where no one cares.
LUBIN: Now, the bad part about it was even though U2 claimed that they thought the Pixies were the greatest thing in rock’n’roll to come down the pike in ten years, and they wanted to help the Pixies, when it came to paying them to go on tour they were about as ungracious and ungenerous and unsupportive as an act could have been. Which is to say, I think they agreed to cough up 750 bucks per date. Now, they’re selling out arenas and they want the Pixies and it’s thirty-three dates and they’re willing to pay $750 per show. To this day I still think that’s just disgusting. And certainly we asked nicely if that number could be, oh, say, twice that. The answer was no, and therefore when all the calculations were made and all the totals were totaled, it came down to Elektra had to spend, I think the number was, $95,000 to underwrite the cost of this tour. And that is just part of doing business, it’s not like it was unheard of that labels paid tour support, it’s just that this was the biggest tour in the country with the biggest grosses and probably the highest ticket prices at the time, and for them to treat the Pixies like they were some local pickup band, to me and, I think, everyone else involved, was fairly insulting and disgraceful. I went to maybe five or six of those U2 shows, and it was the same every night. Which was the houselights were on full blast, there was maybe one twelfth had people in the seats at the time, you get to play for thirty-five minutes under these circumstances to people who are not paying any attention whatsoever, sometimes they didn’t announce who you are and what you’re doing there, and then you’re done. And that’s exactly what it was like for the Pixies, and it was horrible on many levels, not the least of which was they weren’t having so much fun being a band to begin with, and that just was brutal in that context as well.
MARTS: That was disappointing. When there’s a row of eight kids, six sections back in the hockey rink going berserk surrounded by either empty seats or noncaring fans, it’s hard to do it. But the Pixies played just as hard in those circumstances as they did when they headlined. The biggest disappointment was playing Boston Garden in their hometown on St. Patrick’s Day and yet nobody cared that we were on the bill.
LOVERING: What’s kind of sad for me is that we played our hometown in Boston, the Boston Garden, which is where I saw my first show, all my sporting events, everything, so it was the most amazing thing to be playing in Boston Garden, not only opening for U2, but on St. Patrick’s Day in Boston. So, oh man, I thought it was gonna be a huge show. First of all, I didn’t get a dressing room. My dressing room was the regular men’s room, I swear to God. We did the show, and no one acknowledged or knew who we were. It was amazing. Of all the shows we did with U2, all over North America, that one was the worst, where no one had a clue who we were. I mean, I can understand, you know, that Irish Catholic, Bostonian U2 crowd had no idea, but still, we got to play Boston Garden. It was nice. The tour was very easy, you were back out of the venue by eight o’clock, ‘cause we did an early show, we were the opening act. It was so wonderful, by eight o’clock you’re done, back to the hotel, whatever.
MARTS: It was also somewhat depressing that there was no interaction between U2, the band members, and the Pixies. We played Nassau Coliseum and Larry Mullen came in that day to talk to the band and it’s ironic because it was the day before Boston and they were all doing interviews for the Boston show and he said, “Oh, I’m interrupting you. I’ll come back later.” And I went to grab him and say, “Please come talk to us ‘cause we’ve been dying to meet the band.” And he said, “No, no, I’m gonna leave you guys alone,” and took off. And I was just depressed. We want him to hang out for a minute and say hi.
ST. THOMAS: They were opening for U2, even though the gig was not the best Pixies gig I ever saw, it was still like, “Holy crap! The Pixies are opening for U2 at the Garden!” We were like, whoa, fuck yeah! There were people there to see the Pixies and fucking loving it. You’re talking thirty thousand people and one thousand people know who the Pixies are, even in Boston. Everybody wants to fucking go to U2.
First of all, U2 in Boston is a whole thing in and of itself. It was on St. Patrick’s Day, and every Irish Catholic kid in fifty miles was there. There was this little section in the front that were, like, ten rows deep, who were probably hardcore FNX listeners who v/ere freaking out that the Pixies were on, and everybody else in the stadium was getting hot dogs and beer and they didn’t give a shit about the Pixies. The fact of the matter is that U2 is one of those bands where people don’t really care about the opening act. There was no backdrop, nothing. Their equipment was just in front of U2’s equipment. It was really stripped down.
DEAL: We opened up for U2. Yeah, but when we opened up for U2, we opened up to an empty hall, people finding their seats. People came to see U2, we were just the dumb opening band. Which was fine, I was fine with that. It was just like the Velvet Underground, being popular never corresponded with whether you were a good band or not. It absolutely had nothing to do with anything.
IHA: I saw them open for U2 in Chicago, they were playing a big arena, obviously. I went backstage and I met Charles for a second, he was with his girlfriend and he was leaving and he had one of these slim, I think it was a classical guitar that he brought along so he could write songs in hotel rooms, or something, and he was showing me it. It was really small and he was playing it, and he goes, “There’s a song, right there.”
THOMPSON: I remember my first opportunity to meet Larry Norman came through U2 of all people. A lot of people in the U2 organization are Christians, basically. Back in England in the early ’70s there was this so-called Jesus movement, you know, hippies, and Larry Norman had a bit of a career in the early ’70s. He wasn’t on Bible Thumper records, he was on Verve, MGM/Verve. Somehow I heard that he was going to be at a U2 show I was opening up at, their lighting guy or something said, “Hey, I heard you like Larry Norman. He’s going to be here tonight.” This was in Sacramento.
LUBIN: I think backstage there was an extremely severe line of security between the two camps which was not to be crossed for any reason. They were not welcome, they had to watch where they went and which door they went in and where they stood in the corridor. Just horrible stuff. The whole thing was joyless, I have to say, which was too bad.
MARTS: It was depressing, sort of, for the first week. There was a point in Atlanta, like the fifth show, and U2 had so many dressing rooms, we were made to use our tour bus as our dressing room. And we were really depressed about that. It became a joke. There were all these signs backstage—this way for food, this way to stage, stuff like that. And, I put up a sign: “Pixies. Don’t even go in. We’re using our bus as the dressing room.” And, apparently, U2’s manager and band members saw it and were like, “What’s this sign all about?” and we said, “Well there is no room for the Pixies.” And after that we got a dressing room every night in the arena. And that made a difference in how everyone felt.
IHA: There was a Spin article . . . [Jim Greer’s U2 tour diary, “Animal Farm,” published in July 1992] I remember when that came out and it was like, the U2 camp is pissed about it because there were pictures that said “support band” that were plastered on the Pixies’ dressing room door. I don’t really blame U2, they brought them on tour, I’m sure they liked the band. If they didn’t do the U2 tour, they would have done their own club headlining tour, and they would have still broken up. I’m sure it was part of it, but whatever, it was nothing but circumstances all culminating together.
FELDMAN: There was this drama about how a boyfriend of Kim’s at the time [Greer] wrote an article about what it was like to open for U2 and it was not a nice article. It was funny, I thought, and largely accurate but painted a nasty picture of corporate rock, and Charles was fumed about that and embarrassed, it made them into being spies and it came out in the middle of the tour. So that didn’t help.
SPIN ARTICLE BY JIM GREER, JULY 1992: Here’s the real zoo: laminate-bearing henchmen and women, walkie-talkies strapped to their sides, power-walking with tight, urgent faces down endless corridors; phones constantly gurgling; tattooed strongmen barking comprehensible Irish orders; wheeled crates full of unidentifiable but doubtless phenomenally costly equipment hurtling down corridors; strange wispy men in capes . . . Resulting perhaps partly from the behind-the-scenes anarchy, certain weird hierarchical inconsistencies crop up backstage. Little things, mainly, most of which aren’t probably even under the purview of the band members themselves, but they look to me like clues. For instance: Even though the Pixies have been handpicked as opening band for the first leg of the North American tour (the Edge and Bono are reportedly big fans), U2, which has gone to the trouble of printing up signs for just about every conceivable subset of its own organization, can’t manage better than to slap “Support Act” signage on the Pixies’ dressing room.*
MARTS: But ultimately what happened was there was such mania where they would put the shows on sale, and Pixies never got advertised, our name was only on a ticket or poster in Vancouver, the last day of the sale. Everywhere else it didn’t really matter. Sure the Pixies could sell two thousand tickets, but they were opening up for U2 and the ticket prices were the absolute highest at the time.
LUBIN: The tour sold out everywhere instantaneously. So the general manger of Elektra, Brad Hunt, had this plan to do fly postering all over each of the cities that would say, for example, “Pixies at MSG” and have a big sold-out sign slapped across it. Ken and Charles heard about that and said absolutely not. No fucking way. And I think Charles even said, “If I have to roll into town and see ‘Pixies at the Omni: Sold Out,’ I won’t even be able to take the stage, okay?” So it fell to me to call Brad Hunt and tell him that there’s just no way he could do this poster campaign. And he was having trouble selling enough Pixies records and we had just spent a hundred grand to put them on tour, and that’s on top of, I guess, making a “Head On” video with twelve cameras. The Pixies, because they were beloved amongst the A&R side of the company, there was no luxury they weren’t afforded, and so it fell to Brad to sell enough records to justify the expenditures, so this is one of the things he came up with. So I had to call Brad and say, “Look, Charles called to say we can’t do this,” and Brad Hunt flew into a massive rage. It could have just been the pressure to make the Pixies thing work, but he flew into a huge rage over how the Pixies were so precious that he couldn’t do his job, and how was he supposed to sell a goddamn record under these circumstances with his hands tied. And that escalated into me saying, “Look, Brad, we don’t treat our artists this way, we don’t defy them and do exactly what they call up and beg us not to, that is not how we behave,” and I think he said, “Well, it bloody fucking well is,” and I remember it got into, “Yes, I’m going to,” and I said, “No, you won’t!” and we slammed down the phone and I picked up the chair in my office and I threw it against the door. Howard Thompson, another A&R guy, came running down the hall because he heard screaming and this chair, he ran into my office and said, “Pete! I thought you killed somebody!” Brad ended up not doing it.
BANKS: I think Charles let himself be talked into the tour. I don’t think Geiger thought it was a great idea. I just think that one was a bad call. I don’t think it brought the band to an end, but if you’re touring and you’re touring hard and you’re working hard, then that hour that you get onstage, if that isn’t a good experience, it can soon become very depressing. Because you’re going through all the shit that you go through and all the misery and the boredom, it’s not particularly romantic, if you’re not getting the hit from the show, there’s nothing more depressing, and I’ve been there. And the people who benefit are the main acts. So when these big acts like U2 or David Bowie see a band like the Pixies, David Bowie wanted to get in there so he could produce them, they’re like leeches. They want the association, they want to be seen as cool, they want to be associated with a cool band. They get what they want out of it. What’s the support band get? it works all in the favor of the big guys, I think they would have been better off not doing it, but what do I know about America?
GEIGER: The band worked their ass off. If there was a mistake, it was doing the U2 tour. You know what, you couldn’t know, they were fucking huge. Now I say no all the time because I’ve been through it twice. I’ve watched everybody fail on it.
CRAFT: I don’t book the band in America and let’s put it this way, there’s no way they would’ve ever done a U2 tour in any of the markets that I represent because I would’ve just told them not to do it. Basically, I think it helped speed up the process of breaking up the band because they obviously weren’t enjoying it at all. And they realized it was a pointless exercise.
MARTS: We were on different tours. We were on a bus. They had a private chartered jet and it’s a different thing. At one point, we took a break for a week between the legs of the tour, and Charles jumped on the U2 plane and flew to New Orleans and he got to hang out with them a little bit. But for the rest, it didn’t happen, I don’t think, until the last night of the tour in Vancouver. U2 had an end of tour party, but we did a headline show in Seattle or something and we didn’t get there in time because they did it on a chartered boat. And we didn’t make it in time to get on the boat, so we missed that party. But we hung out in the dressing room the last night. And Bon Jovi was there.
FELDMAN: They kept trying in this sort of official way to say [U2 and Pixies] should all get together and have a drink and the Pixies were more resistant to participate in it, just because Charles and Kim were not really speaking at that point. During that tour, when they had off days on the U2 bit, they did their own shows and the very last one, a show in Vancouver, was when Charles told the band he wanted a year off. It was a normal night, it was okay, but I pretty much knew he was going to say the stuff that he did and people just seemed a bit stunned. And the idea was that we were going to go afterward to try to record a solo record.
I was often on the whole U2 episode much more then. Half the time I drove around with Charles in his car, not on the tour bus. Kim was traveling in an RV with her family and there was a tour bus that just had Joe and Dave Lovering. But sometimes Charles was traveling with his girlfriend Jean, sometimes it was the three of us, but sometimes they would prefer to be on their own so I was on the bus. There were no outward animosities at the time, but it seemed like there was a lot of tension between Charles and Kim. They had gotten to a point where they could afford financially not to have to be sitting around each other all day. They could manage to play shows and not hang around together. There was really no communication between the musicians at that point. Seemed like everyone came to the gigs separately and were only together onstage. I started to get the vibe that this was coming to an end, I don’t think anyone else did, except for Charles.
CRAFT: They finished the U2 tour in Vancouver and then they played their own headlining show just to finish off the tour. I don’t recall thinking at the time that this was the last show that I was ever gonna see them do, to be honest. My main thing was that I was just disappointed that they wasted so much time supporting U2 when they could’ve been spending their time touring in one of my markets and making a bit more money and doing better. Because they’ve always enjoyed Europe far more than America anyway. They get different audience reaction in Europe. In America it’s more about curiosity, whereas here it’s like the Church of the Pixies. It’s total adulation and adoration. It’s a completely different type of thing, really.
DEAL: We had just done this series of shows opening up for U2. But the last show we did was our own show, in Vancouver. We played it, called the Commodore. That was in ‘92.
On April 25, 1992, Pixies played their final show at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver. With plans to record a solo album in mind, Thompson suggested the band take a one-year break.
*Marc Spitz, “Life to the Pixies,” Spin, September 2004.
*Jim Greer, “Animal Farm,” Spin, July 1992.