Last week the Pixies kicked off their latest tour with a four-show, two-night stand in Portland, playing sets loaded with B sides, rarities, and deep album cuts they hadn’t performed live in more than a decade. It was a bootlegger’s dream, and Jake Walker and Eric Welsh were there to record every minute. In December the two men teamed up with Chicago multimedia firm Coudal Partners to form a concert-CD company called the Show, and the first client they landed was the Pixies. Clear Channel and eMusicLive, among others, are already selling discs burned on the spot to concertgoers, but the Show aims to reshape the business by forgoing instant customer gratification in favor of better-sounding recordings.
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Walker and Welsh had already worked together at DiscLive, which Walker helped found in Boston in 2003. Despite some legal saber rattling from Clear Channel, which had introduced its Instant Live program at several Boston clubs that year and claimed to own a patent on “instant burning” technology, DiscLive grew rapidly. The company brought in music-industry veterans Rich Isaacson and Sami Valkonen as executives, solicited capital from investors, and moved to New York. Though Walker stayed on as an employee until late 2004, he sold his stake in DiscLive in April, about the same time the company contracted with the Pixies to document their reunion tour–recordings that Walker supervised and Welsh helped engineer.
As soon as Walker got home that night he called Jim Coudal, owner of Coudal Partners, whom he’d worked with on an aborted project while at DiscLive. Formed in 1993, Coudal’s creative firm has done everything from marketing the White Sox (“Good guys wear black”) to developing specialized CD packaging like the Super Jewel Case. Walker and Welsh had agreed to form the Show with Coudal Partners within days. “I get a call from Jake on a Thursday night,” says Coudal, “and by Monday morning–after a long weekend of no sleep–we had it all put together.” Walker and Welsh hit the road with the Pixies on December 6 and recorded the last 12 shows of the 2004 east-coast tour.
The Show maintains a Web site, theshowlive.com, but to sell the CDs it’s used pixiesdiscs.com and dcddiscs.com. “It’s not about our brand,” says Coudal. “It’s about trying to bring the band and the customers together.”
