Back in 2001, there was still mystery left in the Pixies. Frank Black (not, as he seems to call himself now, Charles Thompson) had only just reached the point where he could say the name of his former band out loud; he still hadn’t spoken to his ex-bandmate Kim Deal in almost a decade. Whispers of a reunion were growing louder, sure, but certainly nobody I knew was ready to believe them. And when an article appeared in Mojo that March, it was still something of a surprise to see all four members in print, geographically separated but united on the page for the first time since their breakup.

Is it strange to feel nostalgic for those days? Don’t get me wrong – just like every other rock nerd too young to have caught the Pixies in their original run, the alternative rock legends’ reunion made my 2004. And while I’m not holding my breath, in moments of weakness the idea of a long-awaited fifth Pixies album still makes me salivate a little. But after a seemingly endless tour, a handful of stray studio tracks, a glut of cash-in compilations and DVDs, and more cover stories than you could shake a sliced-up eyeball at, isn’t the Pixies’ biography becoming as well-worn and overdone as…well, the Beatles?

If your answer to that question was a resounding “yes,” then you might want to approach Fool the World, a new “oral history” of the band in the tradition of their 2004 Spin cover story, with caution. Or rather, you should approach it with the right intentions. There are no big revelations about the Pixies to be found here; it’s still the same story Mojo ran way back in 2001. Thompson meets guitarist Joey Santiago at the University of Massachussets. Thompson and Santiago drop out of school and decide to form a band. They meet bass player Deal through a want ad citing Husker Du and Peter, Paul and Mary; drummer David Lovering is introduced by Deal’s husband. And the rest is all spaceships, debasers, kicked guitars, ladies in the radiator and Steve Albini. There are no juicy tidbits about Thompson’s alleged relationship with Deal – at least none more substantial than the usual teasing suggestions. And if you’re looking for some great, dramatic “Reason” for the infamous breakup, you might as well forget it: the “Reason” is that they got tired, and Thompson/Black is as honest and understated about that fact as ever.

Fortunately, however (for the book and for our patience), big revelations aren’t why we read oral histories. What makes Fool the World such a fascinating and worthwhile read, in fact, has to do with the exact opposite: namely, the minutiae it sees fit to chronicle, from the specifics of the Pixies’ ill-fated tour with U2 to the photo session which produced the “Gigantic” 7″ sleeve. Mastermind Josh Frank, who bills himself as a “pop culture dramatist” – yes, he’s the guy who’s working on the Frank Black/Pixies musical you might have heard about a few years back – approaches his project with the zeal of a playwright and a fanboy, peppering the narrative with interview excerpts from a 61-strong “cast of characters.” That includes major players like longtime producer Gil Norton, Deal’s ex-husband John Murphy, and of course the band themselves, but we also get to hear from such peripheral figures as the band’s agent, the founders of Fort Apache Studios (where the Purple Tape/Come On Pilgrim was recorded), and a whole bevy of music-world contemporaries and torch-carriers alike. The picture we get isn’t always pretty – Lovering’s decline into depression and near-suicide in the years leading up the reunion is actually downright bleak – but it just might be the most complete telling of the Pixies story yet.

But perhaps this book’s greatest success lies outside the depiction of its immediate subjects, and in its portrayal of the world from which the Pixies emerged, the world for which their contributions are almost immeasurable. This world is the alternative rock scene of the 1980s, before Nirvana, for better or worse, Changed Everything; and as a backdrop for the rise and fall of the Pixies, it’s as irresistable as it is ubiquitous. There’s something romantic about the passage where Kim Deal describes her experience as a frustrated music lover in Dayton, Ohio, learning about what little underground music she could from clandestinely exchanged mixtapes in an era before every unsigned band had a MySpace. And Fort Apache cofounder Joe Harvard can barely even speak a full sentence without bemoaning the death of what he considers to be alternative’s “golden age.”

Granted, that era was as cliquish and backwards as any other – remember, those were the days when something as simple as a guitar solo by J Mascis seemed positively radical to an audience of reactionary post-punkers, forcefully weaned off anything which smacked of “Rock.” And the prevalence of Internet radio, DIY promotion and yes, pop culture webzines in today’s world has far more positives to boast of than negatives. But just like the part of me that mourns the loss of the Mysterious Pixies, something makes me a little wistful for those days when loving music was about finding your own path, when word of mouth, not artificially generated P.R. buzz, was the currency of choice. Today, any fifteen-year-old can visit a Livejournal group and find out how to dress like a scenester; can you imagine nerdy, bookish Joey Santiago or chunky, androgynous Charles Thompson surviving in that kind of environment? There’s an endearing kind of innocence to the Pixies, who took Surrealist cinema, Pentecostal fire-and-brimstone, suburban ennui and a half-baked idea of “punk” to forge a music that was all their own, which just doesn’t seem to exist in this era of spoon-feeding from the Pitchfork Gods. It’s unlikely that such innocence will ever come back, and maybe that’s just as well. But if you want to read about it, experience it, prove to yourself that it ever existed, then I recommend giving Fool the World a try.

Reviewed by Zach Hoskins