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Dave Noisy
Minister of Chaos
Canada
4496 Posts |
 Posted - 10/31/2002 : 15:38:17
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Taadaaah!
The many colours of Black
Ex-Pixie Black Francis/Frank Black
has reinvented himself once more
with nods to a number of raucous traditions
By DEREK RAYMAKER
Special to The Globe and Mail
Thursday, October 31, 2002 – Page R8
TORONTO -- Frank Black may be bearing down on 40, but he's no precious rock star. He can still hump gear in and out of a venue like a 19-year-old Teamster, he demonstrated as he unloaded Tuesday afternoon for a five-night stand at Toronto's Horseshoe Tavern.
"Hi, I'm Frank," says Black, flashing his steely grey-blues from behind a massive amp case he's wrestling. "Wanna beer?" He is built like a diesel locomotive, topped with an impish apple-cheeked boy's face, his charismatic grin masking a 10,000-channel imagination.
Black is actually Charles Thompson, but the name never really suited a man prone to creating alternate universes of alien dominions and glowering sexual/religious angst on vinyl. As an anthropology major at Boston's University of Massachusetts, he formed the Pixies in 1986 with roommate Joey Santiago. He called himself Black Francis then and became something of the kind of demented lounge singer you might find headlining the Holiday Inn of the seventh circle of Hell.
The Pixies grew from a surreal experiment in mangled noise and melodies into a ferociously sharp quartet that trademarked an electrifying sonic wave of raunch trailed by an odd and often troubling cast of metaphors. They were the muscle that 1980s indie-rock needed to get the ears bleeding, fuelled by the intensity of Black's arrangements and howl, combined with the audacity of the band's loud, then soft, then deafening verse-chorus alterations.
Unfortunately, only university students of the late 1980s and early 1990s in North America would be won over by the Pixies, though in Europe they were much more successful.
Black disbanded the group in 1992, partially because easily agitated bassist Kim Deal thought she was getting short shrift for her songwriting contributions. Deal had already formed the Breeders, one of the seminal "alternative" rock acts of the 1990s, and had a huge hit with the album Last Splash and the single Cannonball in the summer of 1994.
Black was left to toil in relative obscurity. Living in Los Angeles since 1990, now with his wife of three years (they have no children), he remains a workaholic. He's pumped out eight studio albums since 1993, including a pair last month, Black Letter Days and Devil's Workshop (Sonic Unyon) with his band The Catholics. He has bounced around four record labels in that time, and no one is yet sure what to make of him from a marketing angle. In the meantime, the Pixies' charm is getting a second wind, with a smattering of new collections and covers by heavyweights like David Bowie and Papa Roach.
Black has a fiercely loyal group of fans, and critics universally point to him as being supremely creative without being self-indulgent or inaccessible, a guy from whom cardboard knockoffs like Nickelback and Treble Charger could learn a thing or two.
Cheerful and animated, he waves his beefy hands for emphasis more than drama. He's opinionated but not dismissive, always acknowledging that his views, as deeply felt as they are, might very well be wrong.
Going with a stripped-down crew is strictly a business call that allows the band to pocket more money and play smaller places, says Black, as he sips his ale. He's very business-savvy, never taking advances from record companies and maintaining full ownership of master tapes, which results in those companies not promoting Black's releases as much as those in which they have more intimate financial entanglements.
"They put it out, and they make money on it," says Black of his label relations. "Maybe they don't make millions of dollars on them. Even if they did put all their ducks in a row and do it just the way they wanted to do it, are they going to sell more records? But that's why major record companies are such hard asses. They lose money all the time." He's only had a gun pulled on him once in a business transaction, after a Pixies show in Baton Rouge, La., by a promoter who put a pistol on the table as a negotiating tool. "They're pretty old-school down there," he remembers with a chuckle.
Unlike many Pixies shows, Black is having a lot of fun with Scott Boutier on drums, former Pere Ubu member Eric Feldman on guitar and keyboards, David McCaffrey on bass and Dave Phillips on guitar.
Tuesday night, the Catholics rip through two sets of largely new songs, some Pixies nuggets and two lovingly seedy rave-up covers, Larry Norman's Six-Sixty-Six and Tom Waits's 12-bar blues carnival-barker Black Rider.
Pixies favourites like Wave of Mutilation, with its euphoric chorus and demonic drive, seem to bring out visceral memories in the crowd. But the Catholics' preferred toy has become the pedal steel guitar, and Black spent almost the entire second set in honky-tonk gunslinger mode, shedding his black outfit for a sleeveless sweatshirt and an acoustic guitar.
Here is where the potent songs of searching for an end to loneliness from Black Letter Days really come to life, especially the gravel-voiced chaos of Southbound Bevy and the slow-burning southern jam of End of Miles. The shift didn't mark a decline in volume or intensity, but showed Black is willing to tip his hat to the raucous traditions of southern boogie, honky-tonk and even classic rock.
"At 13, [Bob Seger's ambling hit] Hollywood Nights sounded okay to me," says Black, describing his current tastes. "When you're young, you're trying to get attention and you're breaking all the rules, supposedly. "Then you get a little better at what you do, and you become less concerned about breaking the rules and more concerned about being as good as some of your heroes."
His own peculiar talents for constant reinvention are often rooted in what others might not consider cool enough. Black's own preference for surf music, Brian Wilson falsetto and science-fiction whimsy predate a lot of current trends exploited by others, so he doesn't have much time for pondering what's cool now.
"People have to accept the overlap, the passing of the baton. It can't be, 'I've never heard anything, I'm totally in an original vacuum, I'm from Venus.' It's nice when you have a Venetian thought that's not connected to anything but your own creative thing. But you make rock music because you like other rock music and you listen to rock music."
Frank Black and the Catholics play the Horseshoe in Toronto through Saturday. |
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