Gigantic: The Story of Frank Black & the Pixies

by John Mendelssohn

The Pixies were a shock to the system. Emerging from their first rehearsals, conducted in a squalid Boston basement, they were soon the toast of the U.K. and Europe—the new saviors of rock 'n' roll. Forerunners of grunge, they made a virtue out of eccentricity with their seriously weird songs. then when megastardom threatened, Pixies' songwriter and singer Charles Thompson, a.k.a. Black Francis, ditched the band, rechristened himself Frank Black, and insisted he hated the group..until deciding to reform it for a sell-out tour in 2004! John Mendelssohn's definitive biography of the legendary group also examines how Charles Thomson's music forever changed the lives of Pixies' fans.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Biography

199 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2005

Reviews

[Tamelyn Feinstein · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was rather hoping this would be a book about The Pixies. Turns out, however, that this is a book about John Mendelssohn -- about how very clever clever he thinks he is, how much he dislikes and disapproves of Frank Black's entire solo career, how he seems to think it's the epitome of wittiness to make Frank Black Is Fat jokes, and how he has wasted a lot of Pixies fans' time and interest by writing such a misleading excuse of a book. All this, plus randomly interspersed chapters of fan fiction about a girl named Vicky, which, as far as I can tell, are apropos of nothing.

[Jordan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Absolute garbage. The author should be ashamed of himself. When I worked in a bookstore I often stopped customers from buying the book.

[Debra Cleaver · Rating 1 out of 5]

this is - by far - the worst book i have ever read. i figured i'd finally learn why the pixies had broken up. guaranteed good reading, right? wrong. i expected an indepth biography. what i got was a half-assed amalgamation of actual biographies that preceeded this book, interspersed with a FICTIONAL NOVEL about a girl who grows obsessed with frank black. did you catch that? it was an every other chapter situation. one chapter would pretend to tell you something about the pixies, and the next would tell you more than you could ever want to know about some weird ass chick who lives in massachusetts and spends all of her time thinking about frank black. i think the "author" (use that term loosely) intended to provide details of the pixies in a non-traditional biographical format, but all he really did was annoy me.

if you'd like to learn more about the pixies, find another book. this book was godawful.

[Bustagroovy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to read this book after seeing the hilarious reviews for it. And they are right, it is absolutely awful. It doesn't even sound like the writer is a Pixies fan. And what's with that interspersed fictional story about the girl wanting to be in a band and using LIKE every LIKE second LIKE word, then stalking Frank Black 20 years later. What is going on here!! Bonus star for how comically bad it really is.

[D · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is such a weird book.

It takes a certain kind of conceit to write the bio of a band that you obviously don't like. And then there's this weird fictionalized side story that didn't even happen.

I don't think any of the band members even spoke to this guy. It's just so freaking weird.

The best book on the pixies is the 33-1/3 one about the making of doolittle.

[Joe Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

This author fucking hates Kim Deal for some reasons. Like, he is so snippy whenever he mentions her.

[Peter O'Connor · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a mess.
The back cover of ‘Gigantic: The Story of Frank Black and the Pixies’ features a quote, unattributed, saying that this is ‘ the most in-depth account of The Pixies ever published’. That may be so only for the fact that in 2004 when it was written, there hadn’t been another. The inside cover also features a little bio of the author John Mendelsson. In it we are told that he has won some prizes for short stories and that he is a sometime music journalist and critic and sometime musician. That is it. No more credentials.
Mendelsson is clearly more at home with writing short fiction than he is with actual research and he manages to insert one of his frankly mediocre short stories into the biography of the Pixies – a band surely more deserving of a detailed account than most.
Despite the Pixies enormous footprint on Indie Rock, Gigantic is a miserly one hundred and ninety three pages long and, unbelievably, Mendelsson’s short story chews up more than twenty five percent of them. Yes, really.
The remaining hundred and fifty pages would have to be pretty tight then right? If only. While sometimes summing up a whole album in a page or two (the Pixie’s only had five at the time of writing, FFS), the author will spend another couple on some rambling speculation or with trying to be cutting or disdainful. It takes a certain economy and a certain cleverness to be nasty in print and there are neither on display here. What we get instead are so many rambling, over-long sentences that, by the time they get to the point, have lost any punch or incisiveness they may have once held in the author’s head.
More time spent researching the band’s history (two websites are listed in the acknowledgements – that is all) or, heaven forbid, actually gaining some comment or insight from any of the players in the story may have given the book at least some credibility but alas, it was not to be and there is none to be had.
Gigantic?
Only if you are trying to describe the size of this travesty.

[Vanyo666 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh yeah. So we all love Kim Deal and hate Frank Black and that's the unquestioanble truth... Never mind that one of them is indeed lovely and talented but sinks routinely into junkie oblivion and the other went on to forge a (routinely dismissed as a matter of unquestioanble fact, except for "pre-sold Charles junkies") string of (dismal and abysmal) genius albums. The writer is a snide smarty-pants asshole riding on phony unquestioanble consensus from "Gigantic" ( which I didn't know about and couldn't care less about ) to bash and dash against everythang aftah Dooliltlah.

So why read it at all? Because along the way there is something I didn't know about the band and the solo artist.

Is it all some kind of meta-joke and operating in some supreme level about my pedestrian appreciation and understanding? I would love to think so.

[Pete daPixie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well I give this two stars and I'm feeling generous. I had to read this book, not because I'm a solid Pixies fan, but because Charles Thompson IV, alias Black Francis, alias Frank Black....attended my wedding back in 1990.
So now I've read this biog of the band, I've caught up on what musical water has passed over the previous twenty years.
I saw them play in Manchester in the late eighties, and spent time with Kim Deal, Joe Santiago and Dave Lovering...a close friend of mine was their tour promoter.
John Mendelssohn's biog fills the gaps in time for me, but with each chapter alternately filled with 'Vicky's story', I found the book extremely tedious.

[Northern K Sunderland · Rating 1 out of 5]

All and all informative enough, but the Author is a terrible writer, and seemed it would be hilarious to insult every member of the band any chance he got.
Also, every other chapter is a terribly written fictional story. Your guess is as good as mine as to why they included it.
Bottom line, if you're a fan of the band, you can find a better read on Wikipedia. And you won't have to skip through a seemingly teenage-written novella about some dumb girl who starts a band.

[Krzysztof · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've never felt this comfortable ditching a book only having read 4 pages, but this author is insufferable. A total wretch and not even a funny one. Fine, so he didn't care for Charles when he met him or whatever. Does that make publishing a book of insults (and not just geared toward the Pixies, but other musicians and humanity itself) honorable? And what were the publishers thinking? Zero stars.

[Mark Farley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A partly fictionalised, fantastical account of one of the greatest groups of modern music and the core influence of much popular music today. Ex-Rolling Stone journalist John Mendelssohn weaves anecdotes with with, pith and candour and salacious happenings.

[Scott Zumberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boring, bloated and obnoxiously opinionated. Not to mention wtf was even going on with the random fan fiction story in every other chapter. This was a mess. I almost always power through to the end even in books I don’t care for but I just couldn’t do it here.

[DR22 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Goodreads I worked out it was best to simply skip all the "Vicky's story" chapters. That done, and despite the somewhat sardonic style, I found the book informative and enjoyable.

[Nick Mehalick · Rating 1 out of 5]

Worst biography I've read. Ever.