quote:

---

Originally posted by dayanara

---

i hate anyone who doesn't like me.

---

quote:

---

DEBASER
At home with Frank Black

By Brian Heater


“Annabelle, gently. Don’T push her too hard. When you push it, she goes higher and higher. And she’s too tiny for that.” Charles Thompson (aka Frank Black, aka Black Francis) clearly has other things on his mind when I call his Oregon home at 9 a.m. on a Friday morning to speak about rock’n’roll. The mascaraed Black Francis, who made his name singing about sliced-up eyeballs and broken faces, isn’t around at the moment to indulge some New York City music writer about the romanticism of it all. Two of his kids are pushing one another a bit too hard on the swing set, and his son is getting ready to go off to camp. “He’s about ready to be a star,” Thompson laughs, interrupted momentarily. “He knows the press is on the phone, and wants to get in on this.”

His next of kin may be gearing up for their moment in the spotlight, but 13 years after the breakup of the Pixies, and two years after the beginning of their ongoing reunion, Thompson, it seems, doesn’t spend too many hours wallowing in the romanticism of his long and celebrated career. “It came about in the most dull, mechanical way,” he says, when asked about Fast Man, Raider Man, his new double disc and younger sister to last year’s star-studded Honeycomb. “I know a guy, his name is John [Tiven]. He’s a record producer. He’s got a lot of connections among older players—blasts from the past. I told him I wanted to make Blonde on Blonde, go to the studio, lay it down with some cats, and he was the kind of guy who could provide those people. That’s it. I wrote some songs, I showed up, here I am.”

The topic of the newly reborn Pixies elicits a similar response. “To tour with The Pixies can mean a lot of money over the summer, but this whole reunion thing isn’t going to last forever,” he says, simply. “We’re enjoying the big easy. We just walk on, like Tom Jones, and when the show’s over, walk out. We deserve it. We’ve earned it.” His finite response has echoes of recent, well-publicized statements that the band has no plans to record any new material, beyond 2004’s first—and thus far only—new post-reunion song, “Bam Thwok.” The tune is a bubbly number, penned by the band’s resident ex-cheerleader, Kim Deal, which sounds much closer to the material on The Breeder’s Last Splash, than anything the band put to record in their first incarnation.

“They called up and said, ‘Hey, we want you to write a song for Shrek 2, and if you do, you can all buy your own submarine,’” Thompson says of the iTunes single, with another one of those laughless, it’s-funny-because-it’s-true jokes he fires off with reckless abandon. “You can’t turn down an offer like that. ‘Oh hey, you got beat out by the Counting Crows, which were the producer’s favorite band, and he was planning on putting them in the movie all along, anyway.’”

These days, with four kids, a wife, an album a year, and the touring schedules that come with supporting two main projects, it seems that the magic is best left up to those who have the time to wave their wands. “People ask us: ‘You got that song in the Fight Club movie. Tell us how that all came about.’ How did it come about?” Thompson proposes the question I learned not to ask. “Some music supervisor calls up your manager and says, ‘Hey, can we use one of your songs?’ Great. Bye. There’s no romance. The romance is sitting in a movie theater, watching a great movie, and your song comes up in the pivotal final scene.”




August 19. Southpaw, 125 5th Ave. (betw. Sterling & St. John’s Pls.), Brooklyn, 718-230-0236; 8 p.m., $20.

---