The bizarre reason Kim Shattuck was fired from Pixies
Being fired from a band is never nice. Yet Kim Shattuck’s sacking from the Pixies seemed particularly brutal. Shattuck had joined Pixies in 2013 for the autumn European tour but was suddenly given the boot at the tour’s conclusion.
Reflecting on the decision to remove her from the band, Shattuck said of her dismissal: “I was surprised. Everything had gone well, the reviews were all good, and the fans were super-nice about everything. They were like, ‘We love you, New Kim!’ We said goodbye at the airport, and the following morning the manager called me and said: ‘The band has made the decision to go with another bass player.’ I was shocked.”
She added: “I get the feeling they’re more introverted people than I am. Nobody really talked about deep issues, at least out loud. There was a show at the Mayan in Los Angeles where I got overly enthusiastic and jumped into the crowd, and I know they weren’t thrilled about that. When I got offstage, the manager told me not to do that again. I said, ‘Really, for my own safety?’ And he said, ‘No, because the Pixies don’t do that.'”
Shattuck had played in the 1990s punk rock band the Muffs, where she was the singer, guitarist and primary songwriter. She had also played in the Pandoras and in the Beards with Lisa Marr. Shattuck passed away at age 56 after suffering from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Joey Santiago said of Shattuck’s firing: “You know it’s complicated; the band dynamic is very complicated. Yes, it’s all of those things. It’s everything; that’s what being in a band is about. People could guess why [they] think it didn’t work out. Give me the reasons, and those are probably the reasons, and they are the reasons. Yeah, personality, yes. Musically, yes. It’s [nobody’s] fault. You are what you are and you play the way you play. That’s it; that’s the bottom line. It’s like, ‘does it fit in with you? Yes or no? Answer it.’ It sounds simple, but it’s more difficult than people think.“
He added: “The communication that we should have had with her that she wanted was impossible. We were on tour, and everybody, after the last show, went home. We were going to tell her, but she had already told everyone. We weren’t the first ones; it was like, ‘fuck’. Then after that, why should we even fucking bother calling her? I called her once, just saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Stop it.'”
Santiago then claims that Shattuck is now known as the “person the Pixies fired,” he said, before concluding: “That’s it, that’s her in a nutshell. That’s the grave she dug for herself; you can’t blame us on that. Once again, you can’t blame her; that’s the way she is. You can’t just blame anyone; she is what she is. That’s basically what she is in a nutshell, the way she reacted.”
