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Tag: Pixies

  • Houston Concert Watch 9/3: Chris Brown, Parker McCollum and More

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    From the beginning – and here I mean the beginning of the show, not time, as “Saturday Night Live” hasn’t been on the air that long – SNL has earned a reputation for being a real pressure cooker. Long hours. Sleepless nights. Unreasonable demands. Backstage fights.*

    Add to that a tradition of management treating the careers of performers and writers in a rather cavalier fashion, with loyal team members being dismissed on a whim, often times in a cruel (or at the very least, insensitive) fashion.

    Over the past several days, as SNL ramps up to the debut of its 51st season, a number of personnel have received their walking papers. Cast members Michael Longfellow, Devon Walker and Emil Wakim, along with writer Celeste Yim, are all out. Heidi Gardner announced that she will not return next season, but speculation is that she moved on of her own accord. Walker has stated publicly that the atmosphere at SNL could be “toxic as hell.” Wakim called his firing “a gut punch.”

    According to numerous books and articles (Live from New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live), much of SNL’s dysfunction can be laid at the feet of the show’s producer, Lorne Michaels.

    A man who has long cultivated an image of inscrutability, Michaels is someone who, it would seem, likes to play with his employee’s heads in a variety of ways, so as to keep them off-balance. Making people wait in his reception room for hours. Sometimes not telling future cast members that they had been hired. Playing favorites. Putting tremendous pressure on his staff and mandating unreasonable deadlines “because that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

    Michaels is an old dog, so it is highly unlikely that he is going to learn any new tricks. Maybe it’s time for a new dog, er, producer?

    *When Chevy Chase returned to SNL to host an episode after leaving the show at the end of its first season, he managed to get into a fist fight with Bill Murray prior to the broadcast. Chase had been taunting Murray for several days, but it was Murray who got the last word, hollering “Medium talent! Medium talent!” as he and Chase were pulled apart.

    Ticket Alert
    If you like your rock and roll lewd and lascivious, you just might dig a double bill featuring Buckcherry and Nashville Pussy on Sunday, September 28, at Warehouse Live Midtown. Tickets are on sale now for a show that will have something to offend just about everyone.

    Austin’s Uncle Lucius returned to the Heights Theater on Friday, October 10, with its signature blend of rock and roll, country and blues. Tickets are currently on sale, and they are going fast.

    Lorrie Morgan is the real deal, first appearing onstage at the Grand Ole Opry to sing “Paper Roses” when she was only 13. During the ‘90s, she racked up an armload of platinum and gold albums by bringing a touch of pop into a more traditional country sound. Morgan will perform at the Dosey Doe on Saturday, February 21, as part of the venue’s popular “dinner and a show” format.

    Born in Serbia, guitarist Ana Popovic knew her way around a guitar by the time she was a teenager, steeped in American rock and blues. She’s known for her guitar chops, but Popovic is an equally expert vocalist. You can catch her act on Friday, February 22, at the Dosey Doe Big Barn. Again, it’s a dinner / show thing, so go there hungry and ready for some chicken-fried steak.

    Concerts This Week
     The Fixx was among the best of the early MTV bands, with a sleek rock sound and a commanding visual style. But what really distinguished the band was a run of well-crafted songs like “One Thing Leads to Another,” “Red Skies at Night,” “Stand or Fall” and “Saved by Zero.” Significantly, most of the musicians from the Fixx’s golden era are still around, including Cy Curnin (vocals), Jamie West-Oram (guitar), Rupert Greenall (keyboards) and Adam Woods. Return to those thrilling days of yesteryear tonight at the House of Blues.
    Nelly is at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion on Thursday, on a bill that also includes Chingy and Ja Rule. Early in his career, Nelly set himself apart from the pack by emphasizing his Midwest roots in St. Louis during an era that was dominated by rap from the east coast, the west coast and the south. In addition to his activities as a recording artist, Nelly has appeared in films (The Longest Yard) and television (“CSI: NY”). And if that weren’t enough, Nelly can also boast a third-place finish on “Dancing with the Stars” in 2020.
    The Pixies have long been considered one of the most influential alt-rock bands, inspiring acts like Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins. Almost 40 years on, the band is still touring with a lineup that includes three of the band’s original members (Black Francis, vocals and guitar; Joey Santiago, guitar; and David Lovering, drums). Catch the Pixies on Saturday at the White Oak Music Hall and learn more by consulting this week’s interview with Santiago in the Houston Press.
    Conroe-born Parker McCollum will be at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion on Saturday as part of his “What Kind of Man” tour, on a bill that includes Kameron Marlowe and Vincent Mason. The country juggernaut has been on a roll this year, headlining a Rodeo Houston performance at NRG Stadium in March and releasing the album Parker McCollum in June. Traditionalists will be cheered to hear that the new record has a lean production style, harkening back to his debut, The Limestone Kid.
    Several significant rap shows are coming up this week, including performances from Nelly (see above) and Chris Brown (see below), along with NBA YoungBoy at Toyota Center on Saturday. To clarify, “NBA” has nothing to do with the National Basketball Association. It stands for “never broke again.”

    It’s been quite a year so far for YoungBoy. In April, he completed over three years of house arrest stemming from convictions for the distribution and manufacture of drugs, possession of stolen firearms and a federal firearm charge. Well, I supposed it gave him plenty of time to write new material and prep for his current tour. And by the way, don’t despair if you couldn’t get tickets for YoungBoy’s concert this week. He will return to Toyota Center for another show on Tuesday, October 28.
    R&B singer, songwriter, rapper, dancer and actor Chris Brown has been a lightning rod for controversy over the years, but things seem to have calmed down somewhat in his sphere as of late. Brown will bring his “Breezy Bowl XX” event to Daikin Park on Monday, with a lineup that also includes Summer Walker and Bryson Tiller. Brown is pulling out all the stops for this tour, promising a show that features multiple LED screens, pyro, lasers, inflatables and AI-generated video material.

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    Tom Richards

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  • After Almost 40 Years, the Pixies Can Still Conjure Up Some Fairy Dust

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    Musician / producer / conceptualist Brian Eno once said, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”

    The Pixies have sold a few more albums than the Velvet Underground, but, in a similar fashion, the band’s influence is perhaps larger than its fame. The Pixies have been credited with giving rise to alternative rock and grunge in the early ‘90s, and Kurt Cobain famously tipped his hat by acknowledging that he was guilty of “ripping off” the band’s use of dramatic dynamics along with the soft verse / loud chorus formula.

    Many of the acts who were inspired by the Pixies have fallen by the wayside, but the genuine article is still active, with a new album, The Night the Zombies Came, released late last year and a current tour that will stop at the White Oak Music Hall on Saturday, September 6.

    click to enlarge

    The Pixies (l-r Joey Santiago, David Lovering, Black Francis and Emma Richardson) have been called “The Fathers of Alternative Rock.”

    Photo by Travis Shinn

    Guitarist Joey Santiago, an original Pixie along with vocalist / guitarist Black Francis (aka Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV) and drummer David Lovering, hasn’t had his morning coffee yet, but he is nevertheless enthusiastic about discussing the band that he cofounded in 1986. Like most trailblazers, the Pixies have never sounded quite like anyone else. There is certainly a punk rock vibe present, but surf music influences also show up, along with periodic hints of a pop-ish sensibility.

    Speaking via Zoom, Santiago reflects on The Night the Zombies Came and how it differs from previous Pixies efforts. “It is different,” Santiago allows. “To me, it seems moodier. It still has the DNA of the Pixies in there, which is very important, but we can’t help that.” So what exactly is in the Pixies’ DNA? “Charles’ voice, obviously. We can’t run away from that. Just speaking for myself, I try to retain the guitar style, sound, stuff like that.”

    Santiago and Black Francis met while attending the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Many bands who formed during the members’ formative years and continue playing together into middle age find that the initial kinship can fade over time. Almost 40 years later, how has the relationship between the two musicians changed?

    “We’re still friends. We’re friends, colleagues. We switch hats. We still joke around.”

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    “We’re still friends,” Santiago says. “We’re friends, colleagues. We switch hats. We still joke around. You know, we live 3000 miles away. I live on the other side. I live on the west coast, he lives on the east coast. We’ve got family and all that stuff.

    “David and I have gotten closer over the past year. But when we go into the studio, it’s just the same. We have the work ahead of us, which is ‘How can we make these songs good?’ And that’s how it’s always been, ever since we started. I would like to have more of a rapport — like we have had — before recording another album. Just to see where we’re at. We are kind of like being a bit of strangers at the moment.”

    Santiago recalls, “When [Charles and I] were rooming together, in the summertime, hot summertime in Amherst, we did listen to a lot of surf music. We thought it was fun. We thought the titles were even funnier. Do they really think of the title and write about it, or do they write it and go, ‘OK, this sounds like blah blah blah.’ You don’t know which came first. We listened to that, Iggy Pop, Stooges, Bowie. I remember we went to see the Fleshtones. We loved that band.”
    Like many alt-rockers, Santiago is a self-taught guitarist. Pros and cons? “The pro is definitely having the discovery of this instrument every time you pick it up. In creating things, you’re looking for a feeling rather than a scale. That discovery is good, just going by feel and emotion,” Santiago says.

    “Even though, at times, I would [use a scale] and think, ‘God, that feels so good!’ There’s this one song on the [latest] album called “Chicken,” and I like the solo a lot. And I’m looking at it and go, ‘Fuck! I’m on the pentatonic scale, goddammit!’ Because I try not to do that.  But it just sounds so good.”  (N.B. The pentatonic scales — both major and minor — are, by far, the most frequently used in rock music.)

    After working for decades as a professional musician, does Santiago still enjoy playing the guitar and making loud noises? “I do. I was actually enjoying it very much yesterday. I really just ham it up. I’ll go on YouTube and search ‘backing track for smooth jazz.’ And then I chum around the house, trying to make my wife sick with goofy, goopy, drippy stuff. And I’m surprised I can actually do that shit. I don’t want to do it, but the exercise there was ‘OK, I’m capable of this, but fuck this shit!’”

    The Pixies will perform at 5 p.m. on Saturday, September 6, at the White Oak Music Hall, 2915 N. Main. Spoon and Fazerdaze will open. For more information, call 713-237-0370 or visit whiteoakmusichall.com. $78 and up.

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    Tom Richards

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  • If UFOs are real, I know a few musicians who will be very interested – National | Globalnews.ca

    If UFOs are real, I know a few musicians who will be very interested – National | Globalnews.ca

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    I’ve always dreamed of seeing a genuine honest-to-God UFO. Like Fox Mulder of The X-Files, I really want to believe there’s something Out There in the maybe two trillion galaxies in the observable universe.

    My grandparents lived just a few miles from the location of the infamous Falcon Lake Incident in 1967. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by the prospect of some kind of close encounter. I’m hoping that Star Trek will once again be prescient, and a Zefram Cochrane-like pioneer will launch the first warp drive flight (scheduled for April 5, 2061, a Borg invasion notwithstanding), attracting the attention of a passing Vulcan ship and thereby initiate First Contact.

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    I want there to be a black monolith with perfect proportions buried under my hydrangeas in the backyard that warns me to leave Europa alone. I dream of picking up an Alan Freed broadcast from 1955 on my little transistor radio, reflected back to us by a civilization somewhere within a 35-light-year radius (I’d prefer that to the Hitler stuff they had to deal with in Contact.) And those fast radio bursts? They’d better be actual interstellar/intergalactic WOW signals — especially this one. That would be a lot more fun than looking for hydroxyl emissions.

    But alas, even though I keep watching the skies, I’ve never seen anymore more than shootings stars and passing satellites and space stations.

    Lately, though, I’ve become more optimistic. First came the New York Times reports on US Navy pilots dealing with UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, the new re-branding for UFOs). Additional reporting piled up so high that this past week, whistleblowers testified under oath in front of the House Oversight Congressional Committee regarding an alleged massive coverup, claiming that “non-human” bodies and extraterrestrial technologies have been recovered from crashed vehicles.

    Millions of us await the truth, including a number of high-profile musicians.

    At the front of the line is Tom DeLonge, now back playing guitar with Blink-182, has been on the scent of aliens for decades, long before the group got together. Back in the band’s early days, he was known to spend hours on the tour bus looking out the window for UFOs. The band’s 1999 multi-platinum pop-punk classic, Enema of the State featured the song Aliens Exist.

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    It’s said that Tom’s relationship with the band — he was estranged from mates Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker for years before a 2022 reunion — was strained because of his passionate pursuit of theories and conspiracies involving aliens and UAPs.

    When he separated from Blink, Tom co-wrote a number of novels and non-fiction books about “sekret machines” (His term for UAPs; I’ve devoured them all) and was behind the History Channel series, Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation. Also during his hiatus, he founded To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, a company with both an entertainment division and one seriously devoted to aerospace, ufology, and technological research. It’s stocked with academics, engineers, NASA scientists, and ex-government types, including at least one ex-CIA dude. The Academy has been relentless in demands for government transparency.

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    These days, he’s pretty excited about the latest revelations. On Blink-182’s current tour, bandmate Mark Hoppus has told the crowd “Tom was right.” Over at To the Stars, everyone is pretty pumped at what might be coming next. Meanwhile, if you ever have a chance to talk to Tom, ask him about his theories on “zero-point energy.” Prepare to spend a few hours on the subject.

    But Tom isn’t the only musician who wants the truth exposed. Matt Bellamy of Muse is another longtime UFOlogist. Not only has be expressed a desire to go alien hunting with Tom (he has a standing invitation to check out a warehouse near Las Vegas that’s apparently loaded with “weird alien [stuff]”) but he thinks he might have been abducted (probably by those damn Greys) at one point. He saw a flashing light in the woods at about one in the morning and went to check it out. The next thing he remembers is waking up at home. He does, however, admit that some recreational substances may have had a role and that it may have just been an ordinary helicopter. No word on if any probing was done. Meanwhile, he’ll continue to write songs with conspiratorial, cosmological, and astronomical themes.

    Black Francis of The Pixies has some thoughts about aliens, too, having written songs on the subject as part of the band as a solo artist. This stems from a 1965 sighting by his mom and several of his cousins. “There was a flying saucer floating above the house for half an hour and everyone just stood there and watched it. … It was just hovering. Then the state police came and chased it but they couldn’t catch up with it. My mother’s weird but she’s not that weird. She’s got no reason to make this stuff up.” Later he commented about The Pixies’ mission: “We’ve tried to elevate the sci-fi thing, make it more opera-ish, more of a serious rock thing. We want UFOs to be an acceptable topic. They’re romantic.”

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    Shaun Ryder of The Happy Mondays claims to have multiple encounters with flying saucers, saying “I don’t go looking for aliens. They find me.” At age 15, he and a mate were walking to a bus stop when “we just saw these things, zig-zagging about.” (He says he was way too young to be ingesting anything hallucinogenic.) This spurred a lifelong obsession with all things extraterrestrial — an multiple observations of UAPs (including from his own backyard) over the years. He, too, has made a documentary series on the subject.

    If aliens are looking for a place to land, Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones says he has it on good authority his Redlands estate in West Sussex was a landing site for UFOs back in 1968. I quote: “I’ve seen a few, but nothing that any of the ministries would believe. I believe they exist — plenty of people have seen them. They are tied up with a lot of things, like the dawn of man, for example. It’s not just a matter of people spotting a flying saucer. … I’m not an expert. I’m still trying to understand what’s going on.”

    And then there’s Dave Grohl. Foo Fighters is derived from the nickname given to Allied airmen who scrambled to investigate mysterious balls of fire — feu — along the French-German front in World War II. He even named his label Roswell Records after the town in New Mexico where they want us to believe a weather balloon crashed in 1947. If you believe that, then you probably think there’s nothing strange happening at Area 51 and nothing weird stored in Hanger 18.

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    Sadly, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, and Lemmy of Motorhead — all believers and witnesses — are no longer with us. But wherever their spirits are now, I’d like to believe that the truth has been revealed to them.

    Today, sightings are up across the board. And if you do encounter some of those bloody shape-shifting Reptilians, don’t turn your back, especially if they’re wearing a KEEP CALM AND PROBE ON t-shirt.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a man in a black suit and sunglasses who wants to see me about a flashy thing.

    —
    Alan Cross is a broadcaster with Q107 and 102.1 the Edge and a commentator for Global News.

    Subscribe to Alan’s Ongoing History of New Music Podcast now on Apple Podcast or Google Play

    &copy 2023 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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    Alan Cross

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