THE SET LIST: GIGANTIC

Day 11. A Song From Your favorite Band.
Gigantic, The Pixies

It was the name and it was the way they seemed to come out of nowhere and it was the surreal amped-up catchiness of their rock and roll but mostly it was the name - - - because, after Kiss and maybe after Sugar and Guided By Voices, no band has/had a cooler name, and the name alone had enough steroid in it to feed and balloon the mystique even before I heard a single note.

The day I would at last hold in my hands, all the way from some boondock record store in New Zealand (don’t ask), a brand-new cassette (yes, a cassette) of Doolittle, was bound to be momentous. What I never factored in was how prickly with chemical displacement it would be. There was nothing about the Pixies I hadn’t heard before when I first heard them. They embodied their flippant sum-up: Husker Du meets Peter Paul & Mary . . . but also meets surf pop and oddball sci-fic and the Old Testament and Tex-Mex and flying saucers. Except there was something about them I sort of hadn’t: equal parts sui generis, cosmic accident and alchemy. That “loudquietloud” dynamic of theirs may have been housebroken by Nirvana, inadvertently brokering alternative rock from a code to live by into a marketing category, but the whiny humorless subcategory of guitar rock that was the house style of the movement had fuck-all to do with the Pixies’ looseness and flippancy and gift for catharsis.

Being the first track on the first album of theirs I heard, it makes sense that Debaser would be the number that embodied their aesthetic for me, but even without those biases, it sort of does: the gutful scream-singing, the up-all-night bass, the guitar jetstreams, the abstract lyrics. The name-checking of Un Chien Andalou would eventually titillate the Bunuel nut I became, but it was always the way this made the grafting of Mission of Burma on a chassis of cranked-up smelted Cure sound like something God intended. I've since exalted it here as one of my favorite songs forever.

But it's Gigantic - - -a minor hit single and a major fan favorite - - - that I find myself going back to more and more. The phrasing of Dig For Fire, from Bossanova,the album that came after Doolittle, had me flashing back to my old Talking Heads records, more than the words really, but they sort of had me flashing back ,too : “. . .there is this old man, who spent so much of his life sleeping that he’s able to keep awake for the rest of his years. . .” Of course, it turned out to be a hommage. But it's the way Kim Deal cuts through the coy weirdness like a blast of helium with which everything lifts on that lovely refrain (“ . . .no, my child, this is not my desire. . .”), the way Tina Weymouth used to do from time to time, that clinched matters. On Gigantic, Kim takes to mic again, but this time full-hogs it, more Joan Jett than anything and all the sultry voltage that implies. Provisionally known as Kim’s Song it effortlessly, gorgeously claims the spot held previously by Led Zep’s The Lemon Song - - - or would that be Donna Summer's Love To Love You Baby? - - - as rock’s touchstone of horny. Having the sexiest woman in rock and roll on vocals will have that effect. And until we rescue Here Comes Your Man from 500 Days of Summer, and maybe even after, I'm saving all my (big, big) love for this.