Flak Magazine: The Pixies' Live in Davis and Live in Indio, 05.06.04

As a format, the live album is a bust. Like greatest-hits compilations, band- and record label-sanctioned live albums often are trotted out once a business relationship has soured and the band is looking to fill a contract requirement or the label is looking to cash in on a hostile artist's fame. They're generally hodgepodge setlists cobbled from several shows over what can be a vast period of time.

On the other hand, full live recordings of single concerts have limited appeal to anyone but the obsessive fan. Many of them are bootlegs made by a sneaky soundman or concertgoer and are of a quality dubious enough to repel the casual listener. Even professional-sounding single-set recordings generally only find homes with noncasual fans — someone buying Live at Jitter Joe's most likely owns a Neutral Milk Hotel record. What's more, most bands sound better in the studio. Sure, the Grateful Dead offered seemingly endless jammy permutations of each song and Yo La Tengo is famous for busting out obscure cover tunes during its encores. Such performances are the exception to the rule of the irrelevant concert recording, however.

But New York-based DiscLive challenged that rule on the first leg of alt-rock legend the Pixies' reunion tour. Accompanying the band to the Coachella Valley Music Festival and the 14-date warmup tour that preceded it, the company recorded for posterity (and profit) the reunification of a band that hadn't toured in more than 10 years. Five hundred two-disc sets of each show were sold on the company's website in the days before the tour, satisfying many of the obsessives. An additional 500 copies were available for sale at the concerts. (Due to the event's 50,000 capacity, more CDs were pressed for the Coachella show in Indio, Calif.)

This sold-at-the-venue approach works where nearly every other approach fails because the product winds up in the hands of those who most want it: hardcore fans and those at the show. Rather than function simply as an album to be played and enjoyed, the DiscLive sets serve for attendees as instantly available memory reinforcers.

The April 29 show in Davis, Calif., and the May 1 Coachella gig in Indio featured nearly identical lineups of songs. And both sets, as many Pixies fans already know, were terrific, as the band skillfully tore through 20-some tunes taken primarily from the band's first three albums. I'll save a lot of words that could be spent discussing the already-raved-about performances and say that, never having seen one of my favorite bands before Thursday, I had one of the most amazing times of my life, let alone my life as a music lover. The feeling I had as I left each of those shows was one I'll never forget. But time is sure to wipe out mine and many others' memories of individual moments that made the show so great.

Enter DiscLive.

A mere hour after the April 29 show in Davis, Calif., an owner of Live in Davis, CA - 04.29.04 could listen to the beginning of track 3, where Kim Deal flubs the bass line of "Wave of Mutilation." Rather than get annoyed the way someone who wasn't at the show might, attendees could remember wondering anxiously whether the band, having stopped playing, would start over at the beginning or just abandon the song altogether, Cat Power-style.

A few days after the show, the discs still bring out such rich moments. There's Joey Santiago whaling on his guitar with a drumstick during "Vamos," which happened during both shows but was projected onto video screens at Coachella so short people could see it. There's wondering during the Davis show whether the band was ever going to play a song sung by Deal. (They held out until the very last song of the encore, when they played "Gigantic.") There's realizing during the Davis set that the band had two songs about incest ("Broken Face" and "Nimrod's Son") and wondering if that meant anything. There's Frank Black (or is he Black Francis again?) telling the overheated Coachella crowd to chill out before the band opens its set with "Bone Machine," which reminded me of how some people in the crowd at the Davis show acted like blockheads. There's Deal asking during the Coachella set, "It was really hot today, huh?" right after I wiped the sweat from my forehead for about the 5,000th time that day. There are a dozens of similar moments, and I'll spare you the details of the rest of them. Suffice it to say that the recordings' immediate availability is helping me keep these memories around for longer than I otherwise would.

By contrast, an Arab Strap show I attended in September 1998 in London was made into a great live album, Mad for Sadness. I still remember being blown away that night, but the album didn't come out until the following May. When I listen to "Packs of Three" or "Girls of Summer," I have no recollection of what I was doing or thinking while the band played. In fact, the only memory I have of the show is periodically wondering whether the band was going to play either of its first two singles. There's nothing so specific as my reinforced Pixies memories.

Technically speaking, Indio is superior to Davis. The drums sound weak on the Davis discs, though this can be remedied somewhat by fiddling with stereo settings. Nonetheless, the Davis set is actually an improvement over the sound on the floor at the actual show. Freeborn Hall's rock-concert-unfriendly acoustics don't enter the picture the way they did when muddy sound waves bounced and reverberated off the venue's hardwood floors, far-apart walls and cathedral-high ceiling. Not to mention that no one's trying (unsuccessfully, it turned out) to start a mosh pit next to me when I listen to my CDs.

DiscLive still has some work to do, namely obtaining setlists from the band before the show so it can include tracklistings with its CDs. The company could also stand to nail down the whole quantity thing. Nearly all of the Pixies shows were sold out by the end of the tour, with copies of the band's first show in Minneapolis and last show in Indio fetching upward of $100 on eBay. Meanwhile, DiscLive's website is still hawking Jefferson Starship and Billy Idol discs from last year. Additionally, there was a great deal of milling around after the Davis show as DiscLive customers tried to figure out where exactly it was they were supposed to go. The station the company had manned inside the venue had been deserted by show's end.

What's more, the discs are expensive, selling for $22 a pop if you picked them up at the venue, $25 to have them mailed to you. In addition to the $75 cost of a one-day Coachella ticket, it seems a little steep. But I plunked down $110 for a scalped ticket to the Davis show and another $185 for a two-day Coachella-plus-camping ticket, and I've got no regrets. Surely, the price of great memories is worth more than $22.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)