The Pixies might offer as close to a happy ending as you can imagine for the story of a rock band - four folks decide to start a band, and they're great. With insane ease they move from playing clubs to becoming an international sensation. They break up at the height of their potential, only to reunite a decade or so later for a sold-out reunion tour that makes them millions. They survive to finally become famous and hugely influential, nobody dies of an overdose (although some feelings get hurt), and they're left with a legacy of thrashing pop-rock tunes that helped change the music landscape.

It's a history worth talking about, and in the new book Fool The World: The Oral History of A Band Called Pixies, authors Josh Frank and Caryn Ganz piece together a sweeping oral history of the band by friends, family, and fellow musicians. It's a skillfully crafted read, and a rocket ride through the band's quick rise, fall, and lasting musical redemption.

The authors spoke to all four band members - frontman Charles "Frank Black" Thompson, bassist/cult idol Kim Deal, drummer David Loverling, and excellent guitarman David Santiago, and the band's inner workings and psychodramas are told here as never before. In addition, pretty much everyone who ever worked with the Pixies in their extraordinarily short heyday from roughly 1986 to 1992 is interviewed: recording engineers, record label wonks, album artists, and musical mates like members of Throwing Muses and Dinosaur Jr. In addition, we get testimony to the Pixies by everyone from Bono to Perry Farrell (Bono: "The Pixies are an original species. They invented something"). Frank and Ganz manage to weave an amazing tapestry of voices and views about the Pixies.

Oral histories are a tricky breed of storytelling, though. Even the best of them can be a bit shapeless, and Fool The World sometimes errs on the side of giving too much nonessential detail and too much focus on side players to the Pixies' story. The book could've been edited down just a little tighter, I felt, although diehard Pixies fans won't mind the scope. Also, while Fool The World excels at giving you an idea at the band personalities and particularly the volatile relationship between Thompson and Deal, it falls a bit short in places in telling us how the Pixies' unique style came to be. (I should note, a really excellent companion to this book is Ben Sisario's The Pixies' Doolittle, a novella-length examination of the band's finest album and Thompson's songwriting style).

But no book can cover every angle of a band as sprawling as the Pixies, whose loud-soft dynamic of clattering, surrealist songs still sound as fresh today as when they were recorded which is going on 20 years ago. Thompson notes that the Pixies, at the time, "didn't have the grind that some people go through. There was no real struggle." The Pixies and their sex and death dynamic clearly touched something primal, and while American success was slower in coming, in Europe they became mega-stars.

Frank and Ganz give us a real feel for the massive footprint the Pixies left behind, and start to answer the question of why they mattered as much as they did. Bonus points for the excellent appendix that not only gives a Pixies discography, but also includes trivia such as how many cover versions of Pixies songs there've been, and by whom. For Pixies fans, Fool The World makes for pretty essential reading.