Matching Tracksuits

I’ve never been a fan of Trent Reznor’s band Nine Inch Nails. Industrial just doesn’t really get it for me, and their seeming sense of self-importance was always a turn-off. Their song “Hurt” seems to me a perfect example of this. A whinny voice that belies the lyrics: any pain this guy’s felt is first-world pain, that strange phenomenon that often manifests itself in teens as cutting. Of course, a close listening shows that it’s about heroin addiction.

Still — first world issues with that voice.

Then I heard that Johnny Cash had done a version.

Nothing new or all that surprising: Cash has covered bands as non-country as Danzig and Soundgarden. He’s musically adventurous. But it was more than the novelty of it that excited me as I began listening: it was his voice, that deep bass-baritone that, unlike Reznor’s nasally voice, didn’t belie the text.

“He’s a man who’s felt pain, and whose voice won’t sound like a whinny kid.”

The real musical test of a song, though, is to remove the vocals, to strip it down to the the music alone. If it stands that way, it’s a good song. Enter: 2cellos.

There is only one band about which I can say, “I remember the first time I heard them — when, where, with whom — as well as the song and my immediate reaction.” The Pixies. I was visiting a friend, sitting in her living room with about four or five other friends, during my senior year when she said, “You’ve got to hear this.”

I was simultaneously appalled and fascinated. I bought the album shortly after that, though, so clearly the fascination won out. The song, called “Rock Music,” grew on me and eventually became one of my favorites on the whole album.

The Pixies have always been a group difficult to describe, and I’m not the only one who contends this. Allmusic.com begins its biography thusly:

Combining jagged, roaring guitars and stop-start dynamics with melodic pop hooks, intertwining male-female harmonies, and evocative, cryptic lyrics, the Pixies were one of the most influential American alternative rock bands of the late ’80s. the Pixies weren’t accomplished musicians — Black Francis wailed and bashed out chords while Joey Santiago’s lead guitar squealed out spirals of noise. But the bandmembers were inventive, rabid rock fans who turned conventions inside out, melding punk and indie guitar rock, classic pop, surf rock, and stadium-sized riffs with singer/guitarist Black Francis’ bizarre, fragmented lyrics about space, religion, sex, mutilation, and pop culture; while the meaning of his lyrics may have been impenetrable, the music was direct and forceful.

A few months after that first encounter, a friend sold me Doolittle, by far their best album, because he’d heard “Here Comes Your Man” and assumed the whole album was like this.

In the pre-internet days, it was all but impossible to preview a whole album, so he had no idea that the song following the pop-sweet “Here Comes Your Man” is a song about David and Bathsheba called “Dead,” one of my all-time favorite songs by the group.

Or “Crackity Jones,” in which Black Francis, the lead singer, tells the story of a crazy roommate he had while studying in Puerto Rico and in doing so expands his repertoire beyond crooning, screaming, and shrieking to include barking.

They’re not musically gifted; their lyrics are bizarre; the songs are often short blobs of confusion — all the things I say I dislike about music. Yet they’re so dang addictive.

I saw them first in 1991 or 1992 — right at the end of their existence. That first show was in Knoxville, stadium seating, and a few friends of mine and I arrived when the doors opened and sat just in front of the stage for almost two hours, securing first row “seats” and a very memorable experience. A few months after that, I saw them again in Atlanta, opening for, of all groups, U2. Then they broke up. The end. Never again.

No one could have foreseen the trend of old bands coming back together for the nostalgia of their fans and the filling of their own bank accounts. And even when bands that one would have thought had long gone by the wayside were reforming in the early years of the 2000s, I never would have guessed the Pixies would reunite. But they did. And they’re touring. And as this is published, I’ll be about twelve rows back with an old high school friend, hoping beyond all hope that they play “Rock Music.”