Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Close to Home — What it’s like on the street where you live
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Gonzo Report: Prime Spoon and Pixies Lite at Gallagher Square
But Black Francis & Co. had the cross-generational crowd enthralled
Spoon sounded like Spoon, which is good.
I don’t know if the Pixies and Spoon have ever toured together before their recent month-long jaunt across the US, but the pairing seems as natural a fit as jeans and a T-shirt. San Diego was selected for the opening night of this indie-rock combo deal, and the festivities went down at Gallagher Square inside Petco Park.
After a quite toasty, late-August afternoon, the temperature had dropped considerably by the time Spoon hit the outdoor stage at 7 pm. You weren’t going to be sweating your arse off in a hoodie, and you weren’t freezing in short sleeves either. Perfect. The Square has a stated capacity of 6000+, and I would guess there were at least a couple of thousand people standing and watching Spoon’s set from the front of the stage. The entire venue is general admission, but there is a cool grass (well, turf) hillside plus are plenty of concrete ledges for those who need a break from remaining upright. Combine that with the residents of an adjacent, high-rise apartment complex watching the show from their balconies (the ultimate cheap seats, except for, you know, downtown rents), a truly stellar sunset sky, and the vintage, architectural attributes of Petco Park, and you had a local outdoor music venue with some serious vibes.
Every so often you catch a gig where the openers top the headliners and (for me at least) that was Spoon on this night. They have the age advantage in the live setting, primarily because Britt Daniel, their lead singer, has a voice that still sounds like you remember it sounding. On the other hand, a longtime Pixies trademark — the paint-peeling shrieks and screams of Black Francis — seemed almost nonexistent during their set. Those wild vocal embellishments are often the sharpest hooks in performances of Pixies classics such as “Monkey Gone to Heaven” and “Debaser” — the latter of which somehow wasn’t even performed on a night which, oddly enough, featured two different versions of “Wave of Mutilation."
I guess my main takeaway was that Spoon is still clearly in their prime, while the Pixies are starting to show their age a bit. In their defense, all the original Pixies members are at least 60 at this point, so delivering a live set that would match their energy circa 1989 is basically impossible. But even if we are in the “Pixies Lite” era of live Pixies gigs, it’s still a concert well worth attending — because it’s, you know, the Pixies, for God’s sake! And whatever my take, my impression was that less than ten of us in attendance were more impressed by Spoon than the Pixies on this night. The core mass of audience members standing in front of the stage had at least doubled by the time their performance began.
I was in the general admission soup (stage right) for most of the Pixies' set, and was amazed by how many attendees were mesmerized youth in their teens and 20s. There was even a young couple slow dancing in front of us during “Caribou.” If someone had told me in 1991 that I would be experiencing this exact scenario in 2025, I would have assumed they had consumed a large bowl of PCP for breakfast. But somehow, the Pixies — a moderately popular band back in the pre-Nirvana days of MTV — is now a full-on legendary rock band, with multiple generations of youthful listeners latching onto their teat.
Even less believable to my 1991 self: the crowd seemed...sober. In fact, I’m pretty certain that the last show I attended that featured an extremely wasted crowd was by the Fleetwood Mac cover band Fleetwood Max, at Navajo Live in San Carlos. The median age of attendees was around 60. The rumors of young adults not drinking down the booze in the same binge-worthy fashion as their parents may in fact be true. Then again, maybe the cost of alcoholic beverages at these events is a factor as well. A cocktail with Four Roses whiskey, ginger-ale and a lime is yummy, but is it actually worth shelling out $17? Perhaps these are the questions that the 20 and 30-somethings who grew up during the festival era have been asking themselves. And perhaps in the end, they collectively said no.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Gonzo Report: Prime Spoon and Pixies Lite at Gallagher Square
But Black Francis & Co. had the cross-generational crowd enthralled
Gonzo Report: Prime Spoon and Pixies Lite at Gallagher Square
But Black Francis & Co. had the cross-generational crowd enthralled
Spoon sounded like Spoon, which is good.
I don’t know if the Pixies and Spoon have ever toured together before their recent month-long jaunt across the US, but the pairing seems as natural a fit as jeans and a T-shirt. San Diego was selected for the opening night of this indie-rock combo deal, and the festivities went down at Gallagher Square inside Petco Park.
After a quite toasty, late-August afternoon, the temperature had dropped considerably by the time Spoon hit the outdoor stage at 7 pm. You weren’t going to be sweating your arse off in a hoodie, and you weren’t freezing in short sleeves either. Perfect. The Square has a stated capacity of 6000+, and I would guess there were at least a couple of thousand people standing and watching Spoon’s set from the front of the stage. The entire venue is general admission, but there is a cool grass (well, turf) hillside plus are plenty of concrete ledges for those who need a break from remaining upright. Combine that with the residents of an adjacent, high-rise apartment complex watching the show from their balconies (the ultimate cheap seats, except for, you know, downtown rents), a truly stellar sunset sky, and the vintage, architectural attributes of Petco Park, and you had a local outdoor music venue with some serious vibes.
Every so often you catch a gig where the openers top the headliners and (for me at least) that was Spoon on this night. They have the age advantage in the live setting, primarily because Britt Daniel, their lead singer, has a voice that still sounds like you remember it sounding. On the other hand, a longtime Pixies trademark — the paint-peeling shrieks and screams of Black Francis — seemed almost nonexistent during their set. Those wild vocal embellishments are often the sharpest hooks in performances of Pixies classics such as “Monkey Gone to Heaven” and “Debaser” — the latter of which somehow wasn’t even performed on a night which, oddly enough, featured two different versions of “Wave of Mutilation."
I guess my main takeaway was that Spoon is still clearly in their prime, while the Pixies are starting to show their age a bit. In their defense, all the original Pixies members are at least 60 at this point, so delivering a live set that would match their energy circa 1989 is basically impossible. But even if we are in the “Pixies Lite” era of live Pixies gigs, it’s still a concert well worth attending — because it’s, you know, the Pixies, for God’s sake! And whatever my take, my impression was that less than ten of us in attendance were more impressed by Spoon than the Pixies on this night. The core mass of audience members standing in front of the stage had at least doubled by the time their performance began.
I was in the general admission soup (stage right) for most of the Pixies' set, and was amazed by how many attendees were mesmerized youth in their teens and 20s. There was even a young couple slow dancing in front of us during “Caribou.” If someone had told me in 1991 that I would be experiencing this exact scenario in 2025, I would have assumed they had consumed a large bowl of PCP for breakfast. But somehow, the Pixies — a moderately popular band back in the pre-Nirvana days of MTV — is now a full-on legendary rock band, with multiple generations of youthful listeners latching onto their teat.
Even less believable to my 1991 self: the crowd seemed...sober. In fact, I’m pretty certain that the last show I attended that featured an extremely wasted crowd was by the Fleetwood Mac cover band Fleetwood Max, at Navajo Live in San Carlos. The median age of attendees was around 60. The rumors of young adults not drinking down the booze in the same binge-worthy fashion as their parents may in fact be true. Then again, maybe the cost of alcoholic beverages at these events is a factor as well. A cocktail with Four Roses whiskey, ginger-ale and a lime is yummy, but is it actually worth shelling out $17? Perhaps these are the questions that the 20 and 30-somethings who grew up during the festival era have been asking themselves. And perhaps in the end, they collectively said no.
Comments