Though they’d spent nearly seven years living and breathing almost every moment together, between 1992 and 2004 Thompson, Deal, Santiago, and Lovering traveled down very different roads. Half of the band members’ work during that period is better known (Thompson as Frank Black and later Frank Black and the Catholics, Deal with the Breeders and the Amps). Lovering’s and Santiago’s careers grew in different directions. Though fans cried out for more Pixies, there wasn’t much hope for ever getting the foursome back in the same room at the same time, let alone ready to play together again. In the meantime, alternative rock burned itself out in the late 1990s, giving way to another round of extraordinarily successful pop.
LOVERING: I had done a number of drumming gigs, and nothing was panning out. I did a bunch of tours with other bands, also studio work. I auditioned for a bunch of bands and different things. And then I was in a local band, I was with Joe and the Martinis. And then it just kept trickling and trickling until I just gave up drums. I actually just put my drums away. Then when I moved into a house that I was renting, they knew I was a musician so right on my lease it says, “No drum playing,” handwritten across it. So I couldn’t play drums anymore. And the Pixies sustained me for a number of years, it was nice. And I have a friend, Grant Lee Phillips, from Grant Lee Buffalo, we’re both magicians. We went to an international magicians conference that was happening in Los Angeles, and there we saw some magic that just blew me away. So I rediscovered magic and I went full into it. It’s been about six, seven years now that I constantly have a deck of cards in my hand if I’m not either in the shower or sleeping.
I love magic. I think what lured me to it was just that disbelief, seeing something that’s just impossible. And the performance is the same—I think magic and music offer two of the same things. It’s almost an emotional kind of thing that you get from it, seeing something that moves you in some way. But magic offers one other thing which I don’t think music does, which is a sense of wonder. You may get it in a band, but with magic it may make you feel that the impossible is possible. And it’s entertaining, people really like it, and people walk away with something from it. It saved my life, it really did. I can honestly say that magic saved my life the last six years, ‘cause I don’t know where I’d be, honestly. I was kind of going in death’s fan, and this got me out of it.
I belong to a place called Magic Castle in Hollywood, and I’ve been a member there four or five years now, and I perform there every Friday night. I do a show there. I’m in with the guys now at Magic Castle, and we all critique each other. I’m not gonna leave Los Angeles because of the Magic Castle. I’m gonna stay there, just because I love that place.
I do things that are more nontraditional. I don’t do cups and balls, rope tricks, bunnies, things that you see all the time. I like things that are more mental, using mental powers, or sleight of hand. It’s not only cards, I can use rubber bands, I use other objects, I make things move and stuff like that.
I’ve done four tours for Charles. I call myself a scientific phenomenalist. And basically, I come out in a lab coat and do science and physics experiments. It’s all kind of upbeat, really weird physics experiments that you never see. Then I bring out a meteorite that gives me special powers. And that’s where the physics gets a little weird, and that’s where the magic starts. But that line’s kinda fuzzy. I’d rather have them leave going, “Is it or isn’t it?” rather than “It’s all science,” or “It’s all magic.” So I do kinda weird things that most magicians don’t do. Very nontraditional. If you were to see me, you wouldn’t think it was even a magic show, you’d think it’s more entertainment in a way, which I like better. I can just say I’m an entertainer. It’s actually a stage show that I’ve done all over in L.A. in clubs and I’ve taken on the road, toured all over with different rock bands, as well as taken it overseas. For a rock band, I think it’s a nice alternative form for a support act. The crowd’s seeing something that’s completely different, your ears aren’t blown.
I remember when Foo Fighters were forming, I think it was Mark Kates over at Geffen, he had once asked me if I wanted to play with Foo Fighters. I didn’t know who they were, I really wasn’t up on it. It’s just something that, you know, passed by. And then I ran into Dave [Grohl] for the first time in over eleven, twelve years, at the Troubadour about a year ago and we were talking about how the Pixies meant so much to him and he asked if I’d want to come down and just jam with them and play drums. And I was like, “Oh yeah, that’d be great.” But it’s been tough. I’ve been really busy. There was talk about it, but it didn’t come to fruition.
HERSH: Billy [O’Connell, her husband and manager] just took a couple of the kids to this great club here, Largo, and saw David, he was doing magic tricks for the kids. It was so adorable. The last time I saw Joey was at the Muses show here, last year (our reunion was before theirs). I don’t think [he had any clue about the Pixies reunion] because I think he was looking for a job. Joey was e-mailing me all the time about getting the kids together for a play date, and I’m thinking, you’ve got too much time on your hands, dude! I liked the Martinis, I thought they were great, but didn’t keep him busy enough, I guess.
SANTIAGO: The Martinis are very sugary. Give you cavities. It is what it is: light pop. A lot of songs about Linda’s dad. It’s just Linda and I. We got the record out, finally, but the first couple years I pretty much went into this little depression. Maybe not little—my wife would say huge. You know, I stayed in my room. But then I woke up from it, took some antidepressants, and started going, “Hey, look at this! There are trees!” I started learning these computer programs and was like, “You can record in a computer? How the fuck do you do that?” I did it, and I did a film, I co-scored a film, and I did a TV show. It was easy to do that.
I’m a rookie. I’ve been composing for film and TV. I did a season of Undeclared, it’s by the people who made Freaks and Geeks. It was actually pretty good, which is part of the reason why it got can-celled. It’s tough meeting with those people. I got an agent and she’s trying to get me to this meeting vibe.
JUDD APATOW (executive producer of the television series Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared; director of The 40 Year-Old Virgin): I was looking for a composer, and you always get a stack of CDs of different people who compose music for movies and television, and one of the CDs was from Joey Santiago. It was some scores he did for some independent films, I believe. And it just sounded great, it was perfect for what we were doing because we needed it to sound like the feeling of going to college, and at least for me, as an old 37-year-old, college sounds like the Pixies. And so Joey came on and did an amazing job, he was so easy to work with and so funny. He’s just an incredibly creative, easygoing guy. Sometimes when you work with a composer you give them notes and they look like they want to kill you, and Joey was so easy to collaborate with. But he was supremely overqualified for the job. We would laugh about how much better Joey was at what he does than we are at what we do.
He probably mentioned his association with the Pixies, which immediately sparked my interest. It was really fun, and every once in a while he would be scoring an episode and he would say, “Yeah, Frank came over last night and I was finishing up the score so he helped me out on a couple of cues.” And we would laugh and say we’ve got the Pixies reunion backing up our crappy Undeclared. There was actually one cue Joey brought in and it was him and Frank playing guitars and you could very faintly hear Frank Black sing, like “la la la la la” and we got so excited. Everybody on the show was a big fan of the Pixies.
I didn’t find Joey quiet, I thought he was really nice and warm and seemed happier than most people I know. He did seem like one of the most well-adjusted rock stars I’ve ever come across. There’s nothing more awkward than having a rock legend be your composer and having to give him notes. You’re so happy when it’s actually as good as you hoped it would be because it saves you from that weird moment when you have to tell a guitar god how to fix something.
He had a room in his home and he played all the instruments, for the most part. You would give him a rough cut of the show and tell him where you thought the music should go, and then he would start roughing out ideas, and then he would start sending in cues. It’s a difficult job because you have to score the entire show in a week or two. You always have a few people in a production that I call nobrainers, who just nail everything and surprise you and make everything better than you ever thought it could be. I always used to think that about Ben Stiller when I was working on The Ben Stiller Show in the early ’90s. Every time Ben directed, everything was so much better than we thought it could be, and that’s the way I always felt about Joey’s music.
Then Frank Black came to the premiere party for Undeclared. It was at a pool hall called Yankee Doodle on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. It certainly made our party a much more interesting event than it would have been with only us there. Teenager of the Year is one of my favorite records. I can’t tell you how many scripts I’ve written to Teenager of the Year. It’s a great album to write to. When I was rewriting The Cable Guy, I was listening to that all the time. I’m really drawn to artists who don’t care whether or not anybody likes them. The Pixies certainly go their own way and are more concerned with originality than pandering to their audience, and so that’s why when I’m writing I tend to listen to the Pixies or Warren Zevon, people I think write from the heart and do what they feel and let the chips fall where they may commercially.
WATTS-RUSSELL: I don’t know what other people thought of Charles’s solo albums at 4AD. It wasn’t a surprise that regardless of what they sounded like, they didn’t sell like the Pixies. You become a solo artist after having led a band and I don’t know what the equation is, but I think the industry has an expectation of something like a third of the sales. He had Eric Drew Feldman there, he was just shedding the other members perhaps, but they don’t sound like Pixies records. I think his writing had changed. I like the two records we put out, but I didn’t want to work with Charles. It just seemed like by the time of the second record, Teenager of the Year, it really wasn’t a very good relationship. Charles can get in your face and I’ve seen him do it to other people, and that’s when he started doing it to me. I just really felt that he and Ken wanted to get off 4AD and Rick Rubin was in the wings at the time. They put something out on American [Cult of Ray in 1996].
BANKS: What Charles didn’t do, what he refused to do was play the game. And the game would have been that he would have played Pixies songs, then introduced his new stuff, and the audience would have gone with him. But the Pixies audience went to see him and it was all new songs and no Pixies songs. They were kind of disappointed. That’s why they were successful in the first place. That’s what great artists do. They are relentless. They don’t do what the public want, they do what they want and the public either loves them or hates them, but they don’t care.
GEIGER: The first solo album that had “Los Angeles” on it [1993’s Frank Black] came up pretty strong. I think that the decrease in popularity was expected given every great band that broke up, when I worked with the solo members, the drop-off was the same. I think that’s just standard when a band breaks up and one of the members goes solo. Very few actually equal or surpass the success of his or her band.
FELDMAN: I had a big hand in how Frank Black was made and how it was going to sound. I was producing it. I wrote the drum parts, played the bass, keyboards, and left space for guitars. Joe came in and played, Charles did his part and sang. It was pretty thought out and structured in a certain way. Charles wrote them, I laid ‘em out with MIDI templates and it was just sort of like, now you just have to sing and play. And that’s in a way completely different than how the Pixies did it. Charles seemed pretty at ease with it at the time. I heard later on from Gil or someone else that people perceived it as Charles being lazy, but maybe I just bamboozled him by doing it this way. I think he was okay with it, but for whatever reason a year later when we started working on Teenager of the Year, he sort of said, “Let’s not do it like before, let’s just play it.” That was fine with me.
FLANSBURGH: I directed the first couple of Frank Black videos off the Frank Black album, notably the “Los Angeles” video which was in [MTV’s] Buzz Bin and on Beavis and Butt-head. A lot of people noticed it. Charles enjoyed They Might Be Giants videos in that they weren’t so self-serious, and while I certainly was not inside his head, there is a tedium to being a contrarian and I think the Pixies had made enough anti-videos that Charles was ready to do things that were just more visually hopped-up. The “Los Angeles” video that we did, the last minute and a half of the song is this open field of gray over which hovercrafts are floating. It’s about as tripped out as any video I’ve ever been involved in, and it was also realizing a dream of Charles’s, getting him in a hovercraft.
FELDMAN: On Teenager of the Year, I didn’t lay them all out in advance. We just kind of did it like a bunch of musicians. He showed me the songs and we played. It was the three of us and [guitarist] Lyle Workman was around. He just sort of showed up at the last minute, and we stuck him in a room and he played along. It was a lot more spontaneous, and Charles was just writing a shitload of songs. That was really him sort of coming out, becoming who he was. It’s a little closer to things to come. The first Frank Black record is this kind of thing that connects Trompe Le Monde, and at the same time it is an island, like nothing else he did.
We would spend hours together driving in a car to a gig, so you just talk about stuff. We were driving around once and talked about our love of the Three Stooges and that became a song called “Two Reelers” on Teenager of the Year.
BLAKE: Charles was in London to do a John Peel session. The band had broken up and he got in touch with us and asked if we would like to back him up on it and we were thrilled because we were such big fans. So we went to London and booked a rehearsal studio for a couple of days. Getting to see how Charles writes was really interesting. At one point I had been telling him a story about how I’d gone to see Jonathan Richman and that halfway through the show he turned down his amplifier and, you know, you normally see people turning their amplifiers up, and Charles thought that was an amusing story. So we get into the studio a few days later and Charles had written a song about it, “The Man Who Was Too Loud.” So it was interesting to see that little story spark off a set of lyrics. It was really fun recording the session because Charles likes to record things live and most people don’t like to do that. But Charles sees it as being liberating—you go for the take, capture it, it’s done, you go home. We did all the songs live with a few vocal overdubs. Charles likes to use quite complex time signatures and have several in one song, too. We also covered “Sister Isabel,” the Del Shannon song. We did four songs with him. We worked through the arrangements the day before. We did “The Man Who Was Too Loud,” “The Jacques Tati,” “Sister Isabel,” and “Handyman.”
GILBERT: Charles put out the first Catholics album, Frank Black and the Catholics, so that one has Lyle Workman on it, but Lyle was doing so well with studio work and was maybe a little burned out from touring that he just didn’t want to keep going on the road. So I got the call and played on the next Catholics record, Pistolero. Charles is incredibly prolific. He’s a very hard-working gentleman. Charles and I will lock horns, historically, in fact, it’s tradition, we will lock horns once during every recording session for an album. We’re both really determined and passionate and a little strong-minded. We’ll have one huge fight during the recording session. It has no residual effect, whatsoever, like a half hour after it everything is fine, the air is cleared, we just get back to work.
FELDMAN: We were just sitting around, I told him a story about Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) and his lack of sleeping at one point in his life. And that became a Frank Black song, “85 Weeks” [on Pistolero]. And it starts with him singing “Once Eric said / come gather round / I’ll tell a tale / That is sure to astound,” and he just sort of bent it to be poetic to his needs.
HARVARD: I think the Catholics got critically short shrifted. I think the stuff that Frank was writing, it didn’t ever have that immediate, whoa, Pixies impact, but there was some very thoughtful, well-constructed rock music on those records. I think Frank was competing with Pixies songs, but he wasn’t playing Pixies songs, he was playing Frank Black and the Catholics songs, and it seems impossible for people to look at something as itself. The sad thing is, I think Frank had, and may still probably have, a great Frank Black album waiting, but there was too much bullshit shoveled in the way that he had to get through before he could even start the tremendous job of making that record. Because people wouldn’t just judge it by itself, they had to always go back to, well, it’s not the Pixies. Well, no shit.
WALSH: I feel his songwriting has improved. I know he used to kind of refer to his songs in the early days as being automatic writing, as if he wasn’t really that conscious of what he was writing. I don’t think there’s that much automatic writing that goes on now. Because now he has whatever skills or chops it takes to do it more fully consciously. Just his little games that he likes to play in the lyrics, it just seems like that’s a whole new level that wasn’t present before. How long can this kind of “this is all just spewing out of my brain” go on? I think there’s a certain point where you get a lot of stuff out that needed to come out, and then you have to actually do some work.
FELDMAN: I think his musicianship has just gotten stronger and stronger and he has an ability to sing in more different ways. Definitely not a guy who has plateaued. I think his solo work has had varied results, but for a lot of musicians he is quite an inspiration. He doesn’t get stuck in certain concepts, he always seems to be moving forward.
WATTS-RUSSELL: What a difference MTV makes. The Breeders made a good video and so it didn’t surprise me at all about “Cannonball.” MTV was interested in that kind of stuff at the time. That was the only video we were ever involved in that did that, just through the roof.
DEAL: We were on the MTV video the whole time. It was really odd. To be on 4AD and to be used to going under the radar all the time. And the fact that then people think you’re mainstream, and I’m gonna fail miserably if you think I’m mainstream ‘cause I’m not, but the song got played a hell of a lot. It’s vocal feedback from a microphone plugged in through a Marshall amp. I mean, it’s not intentional. My mother’s sewing machine is on the record, on “S.O.S.” It’s so fucking strange. And you know what, I just was watching a piece of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, and “Firestarter” is on there, and Prodigy sampled the “S.O.S.” thing. It’s so weird. It’s everywhere. It’s so strange.
GEIGER: I think you had a couple of great songwriters in that band. Maybe some of these were types of songs that Kim wasn’t able to get done with the Pixies.
MASCIS: [After the break-up] I talked to Kim Deal the most, probably. I produced some Breeders stuff at one point. Some B-sides for Last Splash, some other stuff. She’s pretty intense. We had different schedules. I’d want to record from eleven in the morning to maybe seven, and she’d get up at four, so we didn’t see too much of each other. I didn’t really feel like staying up all night.
ST. THOMAS: I remember the Breeders sent us a ten-inch vinyl with “Do You Love Me Now?” on it, and on the B-side was “Do You Love Me Now Jr.” with J Mascis on it. But to get a ten-inch single? That was just cool. They would also do very elaborate postcards.
IHA: Lollapalooza with the Breeders was great, they were really nice. The Deal sisters knew how to party. I wasn’t really close to the partying, but Kim was either drinking or smoking or doing both, but she was really nice. I actually played onstage with them once. They invited me to play “Divine Hammer” with them. So I had to play that with them and I figured out a harmony to the main guitar line, we got offstage and they were like, “That was, like, the Allman Brothers or something!”
DONELLY: Kim and Kelley are distinctly different. I’ve never confused them. They’re very different people, they have a different way of carrying themselves. They have a great relationship, they do have that twin dependency which I like. It’s like that dream you have when you’re a kid: somebody just like me but different. [Kelley takes care of Kim], and Kim sort of takes care of her in different ways.
NORTON: Kim did want me to do Last Splash, actually. She sent me the demos for it and I really liked it, and I said great, and then I didn’t hear anything from her for six weeks or something, so I assumed she’d decided to do something else. And then I took on another band, and the day I said yes to do something else she rang up and wanted me to do it. And I couldn’t do anything about it, because once you say you’re going to do what you’re going to do you can’t say, oh, I can’t do you now because I’m doing this. And to be honest with you, I never really wanted to get involved in any of the solo projects years ago, just in case they got back together.