E-Mail This Article to a Friend Stunned in the sun The Pixies get their just deserts BY MATT ASHARE

Indio, California, is a piece of desert about two hours (barring any traffic foul-ups) northeast of Los Angeles. If there’s an actual town there, I’ve never seen it. Every May for the past four years, a little swath of otherwise uninhabited Indio dustland has been transformed into a multi-stage fairgrounds for the closest thing the US has to a Reading Festival — Coachella, a two-day, stunned-in-the-sun music event that attracts the tattered remnants of our alternative nation, as well as a slate of some of the most popular left-of-center bands currently active. Three years ago, Weezer reintroduced themselves to the world at Coachella before going on to make their big "Green Album" comeback, and Perry Farrell reconvened Jane’s Addiction for what turned out to be a less productive reunion.

This year, however, with 50,000 $80 tickets sold for each of the event’s two days, Coachella was "bigger than ever," as everyone I ran into half-complained, in large part because of the reunion of a band most of us thought would never reconcile their differences — the Pixies. No, they weren’t the headliners on Saturday. That honor would go to Radiohead, who did command the attention of just about everyone who’d survived the day’s 100-plus temperatures. But the Pixies stole Radiohead’s thunder, as well as whatever storm clouds the Cure were able to conjure as the main-stage headliners on Sunday, when the temperature soared to over 110. Every other person I ran into at Coachella was there "to see the Pixies." And having road-tested their set with a swing through Canada and a couple of secret shows here and there, they were ready for prime time. They weren’t just the highlight of Coachella: at times, it seemed they were the reason for Coachella. I spoke to a number of people who weren’t even planning to come back on Sunday.

Now, Indio is only about 20 minutes as the crow flies from a place you’re more likely to have heard of, Palm Springs. But again, when 50,000 people are driving down one-lane rural roads to reach a temporary man-made musical refuge in the middle of the desert, 20 minutes can easily become 200 minutes. And that’s just the driving part. We almost made the tragic mistake of parking three miles from the fairgrounds on Saturday afternoon and were saved only by some kindly advice from among the hordes of resolute folks returning to their parked cars to drive onward into the traffic jam. Needless to say, there were no officials on hand to explain how any of this worked. So here we were, the youth and not-so-youth of today, baking under the hot California sun, inhaling dust and exhaust fumes as we tried to make rational decisions in an environment that didn’t lend itself to such things. In a way, it made perfect sense that this is where the Pixies chose to introduce themselves to the world at large: "If they really want us back, let ’em come to the desert and swelter."

It wasn’t always that way, at least not in the US. Although pound for pound they may have had the largest frontman in Charles Thompson (a/k/a Black Francis/Frank Black), the Pixies weren’t necessarily the biggest band to come out of the Boston underground in the ’80s (remember ’Til Tuesday? the Lemonheads? Blake Babies?). And when you consider how fertile the local-music scene was back then, they almost certainly weren’t the best. But as the twists and shouts of fate would have it, the Pixies did become the most influential band to emerge from a fragmented underground that, in the best post-punk, indie-rock tradition boasted no particular Boston sound but instead nurtured artists as diverse as the roots-rocking Del Fuegos and Scruffy the Cat, grungy hardcore-metal fusionists Bullet LaVolta and the Bags, and plenty of groups — O-Positive, Heretix, Tribe — who in retrospect were perhaps too ready for what alterna-rock radio would become a decade later.

Like most of us, the Pixies had little or no knowledge of their true calling in life. Otherwise, I’m guessing, their albums would have become progressively more, well, Pixie-ish — more like 1988’s Surfer Rosa (4AD), the Steve Albini–produced album debut that in its American version also included everything from their very similar 1987 EP Come On Pilgrim (4AD). Instead, their artistry peaked on that first album, with the sensual thump, the little-girl vocals, and the ecstatic static of white-noise guitars that propelled the Kim Deal–sung "Gigantic" and the mathematically precise backbeat turn-arounds and psychotic but not psychobilly speaking-in-tongues (English? Spanish? Spanglish? Esperanto?) rants of truly twisted Thompson-sung ditties like "Bone Machine" and "Where Is My Mind?" With the older, maybe even wiser Gil Norton producing, the band perfected parts of that strange formula that seemed to draw equally from strains of British and American punk and post-punk on the next album, Doolittle (4AD/1989). It may seem obvious now, but merging the beer-gut blue-collar 1-4-5 buzzsaw guitars of the Ramones with the aloof art-school 1-4-5 drone of Jesus and Mary Chain–saw guitars was a brilliant idea. Yet the Pixies couldn’t have asked for anything worse than scoring a radio/video hit with "Here Comes Your Man," a harmless pop nugget that ironed all the quirks out of their passion and presented them to the rest of the world — the mainstream — as a band unlike themselves. Unlike anything they had recorded up to that point, "Here Comes Your Man" really did, and still does, sound like a step backward to the early ’80s of R.E.M.-inspired bands discovering the Velvet Underground, only to wait on some desolate metaphorical corner for their muse to show up.