I saw them on Saturday night. As Obie mentioned elsewhere, the dirty secret is that they were never a very great live band (I saw them once around 1990). However, on Saturday, they were fantastic. It was very simple--no between-songs banter, no elaborate costumes or anything (Black Francis wore a button-up shirt with a sweater vest, fer Chrissakes!). They played for about 1 hour and 45 minutes, and they played all but three songs on Doolittle, plus roughly half of Surfer Rosa and Come on Pilgrim. I would have liked to have heard more off the last two albums, and I really wanted to hear "River Euphrates," but oh well. We weren't expecting much, but it was damn good.
I thought it was a very good performance. I didn't have huge expectations when I recently listened to a copy of their first show they did since they reunited which was at the Fine Line Cafe in MPLS last March, they sounded really sloppy. So I was really impressed with how crisp and tight they performed last Wednsday. It was very good, and I have much the same observations with just about everything you said, simple/scaled-down show, not too much banter, same set pretty much, although I counted all but 2 from Doolittle. All in all, a pretty good show. Black Francis has some really good wind pipes on him. The Datsuns really blew, imo.
The only ones they skipped at my show were "There Goes My Gun," "La La Love You," and "Silver." Glad we skipped the Datsuns. Even though I saw them once back in the day, I still had that feeling midway through the show of "Jesus Christ, I'm watching the fucking PIXIES!!!!" It was quite a rush.
And for the life of me i cant figure out why. I mean...to be fair (and i've mentioned this on other threads) i dont have a problem with the song itself as much as it's position in the tracklist of Doolittle. I dont think i'll ever figure out why "hey" isnt the last track on that album.