When Mr. Sheena Easton isn't busting my chops, he's abandoning the steaming wreck he calls his life for a precious night at a time, following the Pixies around to the exotic locales of North America. This week: Lowell. Perhaps he made it a late night and taped a segment a segment for "Wild On: Lowell", drinking butterscotch schnapps while sitting Indian-style on Kerouac's grave. He calls it his art, I call it his slow fade into dementia; all I know is that he gets a government grant every few months to keep it up. I don't think this is so much a testiment to his genius as his insane capability for grant-writing.

18hr Wicked Awesome Le Monde:
The Pixies in Lowell
by Mr. Sheena Easton

When putting my foot in mouth, happens often, I really like my little toes. Something about being 6'3", well over two-hundred pounds—I like small things, and I really get into my pinky toe for some reason.

Did I say the Pixies were cashing in? That Charles Thompson perhaps would not give soft brown things for the popularity of his own rock band? That they could do without a live act? Heh, me dumb—will that do?

They played the Tsongas Arena last night... and blew the roof off that shoddy little Market Basket-sponsored rickshaw. More than that, Black talked to the crowd, shook things up with Kim (lecturing her on David Lynch—Jesus!), and even Joey Santiago walked up to the mic and said good night to the audience (he showed some face—rocking crazy new solos left and right). They were frisky, putting weird stops in their songs (mostly so Black could mop the flood of sweat off his pate) and slowing "Nimrod's Son" down to a dirge. And funny enough—no Disc Live (which smacked of the depths of the blackest psych-ops capitalism)!

Compared to Montreal: their set was not as heavy, but it sounded a bit more like music. Whether or not that was a good thing, they showed a heck of a lot of emotion. And late last night, they added a show to the Avalon for next week, basically saying (subliminally): we love our fans, we love what we're doing, it's 1989 all over again.

Of note as well: the audience was awesome.

Ghost, I know you secretly hold the band at arm's length—suspicious that this tour could really turn on its supporters and make them look feeble-minded and semen-colored. But if you can make a show, you better.

To clarify: I do not hold the band at arm's length. This is what psychologists call "transferrence". And I have never described anything as semen-colored; I'd call it mother-of-pearl. Because I'm an artist.

Also, the bastard scooped me. Tickets for the Avalon show in Boston next Thursday go on sale tomorrow (that's some short notice) at noon, at, among other places, in logic that has always left me light-headed, the Orpheum box office (but not at Avalon).