*wristband required

If their recent sold-out reunion tour has proven anything, it's that almost everyone has something to say about the Pixies. Since their appearance is one of the undeniable highlights of this year's Bumbershoot for many people, we figured that rather than let any one writer hold forth about his private love for this pivotal band, we'd let lots of people do it. We also let a couple of haters in, too, because what are the Pixies if not suffused with hatred? I could tell you about the first time I heard "I Bleed" in a Virginia dorm room and felt baptized into a new, scary world of weird, exciting music, or how the first minute of Surfer Rosa changed my life forever. But everybody knows that story, because everybody has one just like it, as you'll soon discover. Gouge away. --Sean Nelson

I love the Pixies because of the soul of Black Francis' vocals. As a kid, I was petrified by/fascinated with/ turned on by the singers on my dad's old folk-blues records. Those guys had such intense voices, and it was my idea of good singing. In the late '80s, punk voices were miserable, anonymous things, so I was mostly into rap, but I couldn't believe it when I heard Doolittle. It was clearly a white guy, but it was so free and athletic and colorful. It sounded like a scary, malfunctioning Wilson Pickett cyborg, which I'd kind of been waiting my whole life to hear. Imagine my surprise when I finally saw the dude. --Travis Morrison, solo musician

I've been lucky enough to kiss both Kim Deal and Frank Black. With Black, I was selling merch and I thanked him for changing the way I viewed things, and he responded by putting a $10 tip down the front of my shirt. Major respect goes to the Pixies for once playing an alphabetical setlist and having it be more cohesive than most other bands' regular sets. Unbeatable, essential, ultimate. The Pixies have the priceless power of being able to instantly change my mood once I hear their songs. I owe them my sanity. --Ben Blackwell, writer/musician (the Dirtbombs)

It's great that the Pixies have thawed out intact. --Robyn Hitchcock, solo musician

I bought Come on Pilgrim for Vaughn Oliver's cover shot--it made me smile, which was rare in the '80s--but on listening, I was instantly smitten. It sounded like nothing I had quite ever heard but everything I'd wanted to. They were one of the weird Boston-area bands, along with Throwing Muses, I only knew about from costly British music magazines. But if Kristin Hersh from the Muses was like your arty friend off her meds, the Pixies looked like people who could be your roommates or coworkers. It was pretty easy to imagine a mind-numbing work shift behind you and Kim Deal at your side shooting darts or playing pool. That was part of the appeal--these four average-looking people made a fantastic racket. I can't wait to see it live, now that I'm older and just as weird. --Nate Lippens, Stranger staffer

I'm too old for the Pixies, but the Breeders changed my life. --Steve Fisk, musician and record producer

In '93, the first one of us to have a car was Adam Seidel's older, pudgier, shorter brother, Brian. No fewer than six of us would tear around Katy, TX in Brian's olive-green Volvo, windows down, smoking KOOLs and screaming, "I am moonSHOT!! And I'll loose ya" at the tape deck, completely unaware that our lyrical interpretation of "Debaser" was light-years off. Then, as now, I asserted that it didn't matter what kind of precarious phrases we were putting in the mouth of St. Black Francis: What mattered was that I was falling in love with the Pixies like a good li'l teenager should. Eleven years later, "Debaser" still sounds like triumphant puberty to me when I'm in my own car, going fast, pretending to be Kim Deal in my head and pounding my fingers red on the steering wheel. --Joan Hiller, writer/Sub Pop Records employee

The Pixies were the first band I loved that screamed a lot. I'd heard Plastic Ono Band, where John Lennon screamed, but these were deeply personal screams, with a specified subject (mother) and a desired effect (therapeutic release). Black Francis' screams came from nowhere and everywhere, their causes and effects swept up in the howl, making these screams open to everyone, for all time. Plus, Pixies songs are exciting by design, the best of them inexhaustible, positioning Pixies as the chubby, grumpy, non-scat-loving Chuck Berry of alterna-rock. --David Schmader, Stranger staffer

The Pixies became my favorite band in 1989, when I was 14 years old, so there are probably a hundred or so forgotten reasons why I became obsessed, but the main one was Kim Deal. Following the still unfathomable success of "Cannonball," saying you loved the former Mrs. John Murphy became cliché, but it's safe to assume that I've probably loved her for much longer than most of you have. I once gave her a letter with my phone number in it and she called me, if that gives you any idea of how overlooked she was back in '91. Anyhow, Kim became the first of many, many, many rock crushes and more or less taught me how to appreciate being in love with someone who was usually a barricade and a couple of bouncers away. While my friends were putting up posters of Anna Nicole Smith and Erika Eleniak, I was building up a shrine on my bedroom wall to the Ohio-born bassist, and she looked like a goddamn angel. --Marc Hawthorne, editor DIW Magazine

I've always had a sick fantasy to mount a musical using the songs of the Pixies. The eleven-o'clock number would be "This Monkey's Gone to Heaven" with a chorus of multitudes dressed as monkeys singing, "If man is 5, if man is 5, if man is 5, then the devil is 6, then the devil is 6, then the devil is 6, then the devil is 6, and if the devil is 6, then god is 7, god is 7, god is 7, this monkey's gone to heaven." In my 17-year-old mind it was a brilliant combination of Luis Buñuel and Busby Berkeley. --Kenny Mellman, musician, "Herb" of Kiki & Herb

The Pixies last toured, to my memory, in 1991. I was a college senior in Chicago, and they played, I believe, at the Aragon Ballroom. I wasn't a rock guy in those naive days, unable to distinguish a Pixies song from a Cranberries song. However, I was involved in a short, doomed, emotionally abusive but somewhat lusty relationship with a freshwoman who had tickets to the show. I'd come down with a bad case of strep throat, and had planned to stay at home that night. But somewhere around 9:00 p.m., the thought of this girl having fun without me, perhaps even meeting another guy, filled me with a grab-bag of emotions familiar to those who have ever considered stalking someone. So I headed down to the Aragon on the El, bought a ticket at the door, and lurched toward the front of the crowd, where I knew she was. The look of loathing on her face when she saw me doesn't come to mind often, but it comes roaring back now. I spent the show trying to rock out and understand the fuss, but I was sick and my girlfriend was flinging hate, particularly when a series of racking coughs seized me and sent me to my knees. It wasn't a pleasant train ride home with her. And that is why I don't like the Pixies. --Neal Pollack, important American writer