Here Comes Your Man
Meeting The Pixies part 1 of 3/4
Long Island, July 1989. I am 17 and a virgin (for only five more months but I don’t know that). I have graduated high school. It’s my last summer at home before heading to college in central Florida to begin to become myself.
At this point, the only things that define me are:
Being bullied by my classmates, my erstwhile friends, and my stepfather.
A strange sense of fashion (my attempts at replicating looks from Vogue and Star Hits with what I can afford from Greenwich Village secondhand stores and LI department stores, and what I can find in my mother’s closet) that doesn't help with the above at all.
A best friend named Kristina, who does.
A steady diet of books and movies, which also does.
A radio station called WDRE, previously WLIR, which plays weird music, mostly but not entirely from the UK, and which kids all over Long Island wear buttons for on their long black wool coats, giving each other nods of recognition at multiplexes and malls.
The station hosts free concerts and 16-and-up club nights all over the island, which Kris and I and our other friends (when we had other friends) have been going to for all of high school, doctoring birth certificates and IDs so that we didn’t have to wait until we turned 16. One of those clubs, Malibu, happens to be in our hometown of Long Beach, so we go to as many of the club nights (Thursday nights, “The Loop”) and shows as we can. The concerts I remember now are Erasure, APB, and, the summer before I leave for college, a newish band from Boston called the Pixies**.
* If you are from Scotland or grew up listening to these radio stations, you know this band.
** They hosted The Primitives there when I came home for December break a few months later, but that is another story for another day.
The Pixies are on tour for Doolittle, and “Here Comes Your Man” and “Monkey Gone to Heaven” are both getting airplay on WDRE. (As had “Gigantic” when the previous record came out.) They announced this as a free show with an unannounced band, but Kris and I go, since we go to as many as we can. Since we had seceded from our larger friend group a year or so prior — over mean pranks and shitty nicknames — we haven’t had much else to do but watch movies together, and, once I get my license, drive my blue 1984 Chevette, Jezebel, around LI and Queens in search of parties to crash where we don’t know anyone.
So we go to this one, and it is packed and hot and loud. Aside from these free shows at Malibu, I have only been to concerts at Nassau Coliseum, Jones Beach, Radio City Music Hall, and Madison Square Garden, with the exception of seeing Duran Duran at Roseland Ballroom the year before on a club tour for their terrible album Big Thing***. That was a 3,000-person venue, and the crowd there was jammed in and sweaty and girls were getting passed over the crowd, not to surf it, but to be carried backstage for medical attention (though obviously some were working that angle to try and get onstage).
*** At that point I didn’t really care about Duran Duran, but I went out of curiosity, and it was the first show I ever went to by myself.
This Pixies show at Malibu — a venue that has a capacity of less than 200 — is wild. Whereas Kris and I had been able to get close enough to the stage during Erasure that Andy Bell could see us parroting his dance moves, this is claustrophobic and cacophonous. The show is also long****. At some point (probably after “Monkey’s Gone to Heaven”) I ditch the main room to sit in the smaller side room, where they play shitty pop music. I get a glass of water and sit down to wait for Kris and watch the crowd and what I can see of the stage through the doorway.
I quickly lose track of time — I don’t have a fake ID or regular access to drugs, so I’m sober as a judge, just high on music and the crowd and the thrill of the new. I am also probably daydreaming that some tall skinny Jesuit School boy with a pierced ear and his hair done up with egg whites will come over and ask me my name. That does not happen. It never does, probably due to the fact that I don’t wear all black, still have a giant poodle perm, weigh 95 pounds at 5’ 7” and am flat as a board which may be good enough for catalog modeling but not so good for dating on Long Island in 1989. I got a nose job the year before which makes me look less Jewish but doesn’t do much else, aside from Tracey McConnack seeing me with a bruised face at the Valentine's Dance and shoving me up against the wall anyway, because she thought it was funny.
Instead of the Paul Westerberg/Robyn Hitchock/Daniel Ash teen clone of my dreams, a doughy older guy sidles up to me and asks what I thought of the show.
“It was amazing,” I say, and mean it. “But I started to get a headache so I came in here.”
“I think Doolittle is our best album so far,” he responds.
Wheels turn in my soft little brain. Obviously this is before the internet. And they do show Pixies videos on MTV’s 120 Minutes, but if you’ve ever seen those videos, you’ll know why I don’t recognize Black Francis. It’s not like I got a good look at him onstage. He seems to just be some sweaty older dude, and by the time I have figured out that he is a sweaty older semi-famous musician, there is a small throng of savvier, cooler kids lined up to tell him how great he was (which, in hindsight, we all know that he already knew).
Kris finds me shortly thereafter, and I tell her what has happened.
“He was hitting on you,” she says, excitement rising in her sweet voice.
“He was not.” And that’s the end of that for the night.
We head out into the throng, I smoke a Parliament in the parking lot, then we get in Jezebel and drive home, electric with the stupid buzz of rock ‘n’ roll and youth and our giddy, smart friendship (that will, unbeknownst to us, continue to the present where I am writing this).
I leave for college about a month later. In Tampa, far from curfews and bullies, I learn how to be at those hot, sweaty, small club shows, learn to love the loud. I become a legit Pixies fan, soon getting my hands on a copy of their first album Surfer Rosa, with its cover photo of a topless brunette in a flamenco skirt; I listen to the lyrics, often in Spanish. I often get confused for someone of Hispanic heritage (see nose job above), which allows me to duck the attention of the skinheads on the scene most of the time.
It also seems to mean that Kris was right. Black Francis was probably hitting on me.
Probably best that I didn't notice.
✝ As you can see on the YouTube page for the live recording, they played 21 songs.
