Site does not load when configuring Wordpress with nginx/PHP

I have a Wordpress site running on Apache that is heavily overloaded, so I want to try replacing it with nginx/fastcgi to see if it would help.

I compiled spawn-fcgi and nginx configured a server that would run on port 81 as a test. When I try accessing the site, it says "Waiting for site" and never loads (and the access logs does not show anything)

I started spawn-cgi like so:

/usr/local/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 53217 -P /var/run/fastcgi-php.pid -- /usr/bin/php-cgi

and here's my nginx config:

http {
    include   /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    #keepalive_timeout  0;
    keepalive_timeout  65;


    server {
      listen     xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:81;               
      server_name  domain.com www.domain.com;               
      access_log  /home/domain.com/nginx.access.log;
      root        /home/domain/public_html/;  # absolute path to WordPress installation

      try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php;

      location ~ \.php$ {
        include        fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:53217;

        fastcgi_index   index.php;
        fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME /home/domain/public_html$fastcgi_script_name;

      }

   }


}


events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

and finally, here is my fastcgi_params file:

fastcgi_param  QUERY_STRING   $query_string;
fastcgi_param  REQUEST_METHOD     $request_method;
fastcgi_param  CONTENT_TYPE   $content_type;
fastcgi_param  CONTENT_LENGTH     $content_length;

fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_NAME        $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param  REQUEST_URI        $request_uri;
fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_URI   $document_uri;
fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_ROOT      $document_root;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_PROTOCOL    $server_protocol;

fastcgi_param  GATEWAY_INTERFACE  CGI/1.1;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_SOFTWARE    nginx/$nginx_version;

fastcgi_param  REMOTE_ADDR        $remote_addr;
fastcgi_param  REMOTE_PORT        $remote_port;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_ADDR        $server_addr;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_PORT        $server_port;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_NAME        $server_name;

Is there anything in my config that would stop me from serving a basic WP site? I'm running this on CentOS on a dedicated box.