Dave Noisy
Minister of Chaos
Canada
4496 Posts |
Posted - 08/28/2003 : 13:56:00
|
Here's the article:
Black on track (Filed: 28/08/2003)
One of the most influential bands of the '80s, Pixies split in acrimony. Now Frank Black, the group's leading light, has re-emerged to deliver a fresh masterpiece. Andrew Perry meets him
Frank Black is a very popular man. A recent TV documentary about his first band, Pixies, started with plaudits from no lesser rock personages than David Bowie, Bono and Thom Yorke. Each effectively proclaimed him the greatest songwriter of the late '80s and a huge influence on their own work. Kurt Cobain also famously confessed that Nirvana was his effort to rip off Pixies.
At the other end of the talent spectrum, my friends are no less enamoured. From the fortysomethings to the relative babes-in-arms, they each expressed awe when I announced that I was off to meet Frank. In the next breath, however, they all wondered what he's up to these days. For an entertainer still so beloved, the obscurity of his current operations defies belief.
Born Charles Michael Kitteridge Thompson IV, he formed Pixies while at Boston's University of Massachusetts. He soon dropped out, renamed himself Black Francis, and, during a six-year career of rapid-fire creativity, created three classic albums of the pre-grunge years - Surfer Rosa, Doolittle and Bossanova. Rock hadn't sounded so alive since the Sex Pistols.
Since he split the band in 1992, his solo records - especially his annual albums with current group, the Catholics - have been greeted with blanket derision, as if to repay him for terminating everyone's favourite band. The criticism hasn't always been without foundation, but his latest one really deserves a warmer reception.
It reminds me of Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks. Like Dylan in the early '70s, here is a man cut adrift from his former all-eclipsing credibility, suddenly spurred on by traumatic events in his personal life to reinvent himself via a bruised, country-tinged masterpiece. He has recently separated from his wife, Jean, and the album's title, Show Me Your Tears, is what his therapist said when he arrived for his first session thereafter. The lyrics aren't explicitly about his own plight, but their pain, sadness and anger are real.
Despite the fact that his music has touched so many so deeply, Black, like Dylan, has rarely seemed to give away much of himself. (Perhaps this was what his therapist was driving at.) As I touch down in his new hometown of Portland, Oregon, I have no idea what to expect.
He is an hour late for our appointment because, having just moved up from Los Angeles four days before, he was having his phone connected. Then he locked himself out. The weight of such minor problems, at least, is visibly lifted for him by the presence of his new flame, Violet. Every time they converse, they sink into each other's eyes for a few gooey moments.
It transpires that it's impossible not to have fun in their company, as we cruise around in Black's huge '50s car, a Cadillac Fleetwood the colour of banana flesh. We soak up some of Portland's upwardly-mobile funkiness, some sunshine, some latte and, once the locksmith has been and gone, eventually wind up at the new pad, a top-floor conversion where the two of them are set to engage in what they gigglingly call the "loft lifestyle" together.
Black leads the way down to the courtyard outside for our interview, and I'm surprised how upbeat and animated he remains, frequently touching on the once-sticky topic of Pixies.
"It was all real spontaneous," he recalls fondly. "It came from being exposed to surrealist art films from the '30s and '40s and recognising that there was this whole movement that just went, 'Yeah! This is from my mind! Wooo, here it comes, whatever it is! It makes no sense!' So I was like, 'Here I am, I'm a surrealist!' "
In Black's exuberant, often goofy way of expressing himself, you might readily recognise the author of such Pixies' tunes as Debaser ("Got me a movie, I want you to know/ Slicing up eyeballs, oh-oh-oh-oh!"), a homage to Bunuel's film Un Chien Andalou.
Perhaps his songs were just too surreal, his occasional screams too scary, because, no matter how catchy Debaser or Monkey Gone to Heaven or Velouria were, Pixies never managed to translate their arty coolness into mass sales. It took Kurt Cobain's more direct explosions of angst, not to mention his poster-boy good looks, to achieve that. Towards the end, they became frustrated. Black called time, and started making solo records which, in his own words, "embrace cliche".
He says: "I'd hear Roy Orbison singing, 'Pretty woman walking down the street' and think, 'Wait a minute! That guy's cool and he's just singing some simple little song. I want to be able to do that.' You begin to appreciate things that are more universal and closely related to folk music."
He switched his name around to the more normal Frank Black and began recording his albums live in the studio. To the ears of many, though, this whole process snuffed out the fire in Black's work, leaving just the rather sketchy ashes of what he once was. "We're not trying to be off-the-cuff," he says. "People think that we play one take and 'Aw, that's it!' But it's not like that. It's really intense."
The intensity has reached critical mass with Show Me Your Tears, which lurches between boozy nights and caustic goodbyes with a whole new sense of purpose.
"My wife," Black says, pausing to correct himself, "soon to be ex-wife, I guess - she's always been encouraging me to be more direct and emotional. I've been dabbling with that for a few years, but, of course, there's something about actually breaking up, and going to therapy - it totally makes you [airy-fairy voice] 'Yeah! I need to tell everyone about my life!' And there's also some [forlorn voice] 'Oh, I thought I knew what heartbreak was, but now I really know what everyone's been talking about.' "
Black has spoken very openly about his career for an hour or so, but still I'm struggling to pin him down about the tough stuff: how Pixies split allegedly because he and bassist Kim Deal, now singer in the Breeders, were at each other's throats, and how their failure to reconcile is the main obstacle preventing a Pixies reunion.
Suddenly, Violet appears and sits on Black's knee. He says the arguments weren't as bad as people made out. "You get older," he shrugs, "and things that seemed dramatic and intense 12 years ago seem more laughable now. We keep in contact, but everyone has their own lives."
His past is hard to escape, though, and in these transitional times for him, he was forced to confront his old self sifting through behind-the-scenes footage for a Pixies DVD. "I almost didn't recognise myself," he says. "What an arrogant prick!"
More grist to the therapist's mill, no doubt, but until that audio-visual bonanza arrives, Show Me Your Tears should see the man back on track.
'Show Me Your Tears' is released by Cooking Vinyl on Sept 8. |
|
|