Phish, Pavement, Pixies. All “P” bands, all extremely important to me through the last decade and this decade, and all are currently reunited in some capacity.
Phish’s reunion is clearly not a nostalgia act – rather, it seems as though the post-hiatus dreck from the early 2000’s will be the asterisk for an otherwise pretty consistent career. I say “consistent” because if you liked them before, you probably like them now. If you didn’t like them before, you probably still don’t like them.
The question of value with Phish comes into play with how most fans heard the band in the 1990s: we had a few precious soundboard recordings that gave us arbitrary snapshots of performances that we probably overvalued because it was simply harder to get your hands on good concert recordings before the Internet. The NYT did a great piece on the Grateful Dead’s legendary 1977 shows, and meekly suggested that it’s possible that so many people like those shows so much because there was an abundance of high quality recordings from that time period (not that the band wasn’t also playing at a really high level at this point – this has been pretty well established.)
Two things happened since many of us started collecting Phish shows on Maxell XL-II cassettes: one, the aforementioned Series of Tubes known as the Internet brought us bittorrent. The other is that the band opted to begin recording every new performance through LivePhish.com. Since I have a basket full of cassette tapes in the trunk of my car, this creates a strange situation where I almost certainly overvalue some cassettes (Eugene, 4/22/92, for example) simply because of the format. Curiously, though, the new shows tend to be good enough that they make older shows sound less…remarkable. Part of this is a function of the fact that the band is proving they are “back” by over-playing some of their big-show tunes (Harry Hood, Mike’s->Groove, etc.) On the one hand, the move is necessary to win back skeptical fans like me who hated most of the post-hiatus pablum from 2003 to 2004. On the other hand, how do I value a “Mound” from 2009 as compared to a mound from 1994? I have no idea.
Pavement’s reunion is promising: it’s a one-off, they say. There’s no plan to attend to the band’s catalog. It will be a straightforward, “hey, everyone’s still alive, we can still play our songs, these are good songs, why not do it?” sort of reunion. It’ll stand completely apart from the band’s previous body of work, I hope, though it will (I also hope) remain in the glorious shambolic tradition that characterized Pavement shows.
Now, the Pixies…a tough one. They are venturing ever closer to wedding band territory. They pretended they were going to record new material, but instead, the nostalgia act has been chugging along since 2004, like a loveless marriage that lives on out of habit. Now they are playing an all-Doolittle show – hey, that sounds great to me, considering that Doolittle may be the finest single recording from the 1990s – but it’s a little desperate. It’s a little too clearly backward-looking. And the end result is somewhat cheapening, to me, the original output. It was tons of fun to see the band in 2004 – the crowd was old, eclectic, free, everything I expected from a Pixies crowd (having been too young to see them the first time around). But now? Like I said, it seems desperate, in a “do you still like us?” kind of way.
In this manner they sort of resemble Liz Phair, whose insistence on putting out records after “WhiteCholateSpaceEgg” is just absurd. I am less likely to listen to “Exile in Guyville” as a result of this fact. I hate that, I really do, because “Mesmerizing” came up on my ipod today and I remembered how much I love that album.
Of course, the only person who defies analysis in this respect is Bob Dylan, whose body of work increases in relevance as a result of his complete lack of interest in it. It’s not mindful, on his part: you get the sense he has fully digested his past and is just happy not to look back. To use a baseball analogy, Liz Phair and the Pixies seem, in hindsight, like minor league call-ups who got really hot for a couple of months. Mackowiak, Chris Shelton…the list is long. Maybe they love baseball, maybe they don’t. They just happened to be pretty good at this one thing for a stretch of time, so naturally, they milked it. Dylan, on the other hand, had peaks and valleys. But there’s no doubt the man was born to swing a bat.
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