Pixies, Soundgarden to play festival at Bloomfield Stadium

Cornell has performed in Israel twice as a solo artist, in 2009 and 2012; Soundgarden, which broke up in 1997, reunited in 2010.

By DAVID BRINN
Chris Cornell (photo credit: Deena Cavalto)
Chris Cornell
(photo credit: Deena Cavalto)
Two of the world’s biggest alternative rock bands from the 1990 – the Pixies and Soundgarden – have been booked to headline a two-day festival on June 17 and 18 at Bloomfield Stadium.
The highly influential American post-punk Pixies, led by Frank Black, will perform on June 17, and the hard-rocking grunge pioneers Soundgarden, with Chris Cornell at the helm, will take center stage the next day.
Cornell has performed in Israel twice as a solo artist, in 2009 and 2012. Soundgarden, which broke up in 1997, reunited in 2010.
“I enjoyed performing in Israel so much in recent years, and I’m really excited to be returning finally with Soundgarden,” said Cornell in a statement.
For the Pixies and promoter Shuki Weiss, the show will be the culmination of a long story that began in 2010. The Pixies, who had broken up in the mid-1990s and reformed bigger than ever in 2003, were slated to headline a Weiss-promoted festival in Tel Aviv.
However, in the aftermath of the Mavi Marmara incident in which nine Turkish activists aboard the Gaza-bound aid ship were killed, the group ended up being one of the high profile cancellations to Israel that year, amid rumored pressure on them to back out of the show.
At the time, the Pixies issued a statement saying that the decision was not taken lightly and stated that “we’d like to extend our deepest apologies to the fans, but events beyond all our control have conspired against us. We can only hope for better days, in which we will finally present the long awaited visit of the Pixies in Israel.”
Evidently, those better days are here, and Weiss on Sunday called the booking the “realization of a dream.
He added that additional performers for both days of the festival would be announced during the first few weeks of 2014.