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Originally posted by Jettison

Black is back
The Pixies leader talks about the break-up, the reunion, and the band’s return to Boston
BY MATT ASHARE
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There are good ways to begin an interview and bad ways. Forgetting the name of the lead singer of the Verve (’member them?) when you’re talking to the lead singer of the Verve and they’ve got the hottest single in England falls into the latter category. Waking up the occasionally grumpy Charles Thompson, who you might know under his Pixies nom-de-rock Black Francis or his post-Pixies stage name Frank Black, from a pre-gig nap in his Minneapolis hotel room could also have been a minor disaster. Then again, Thompson has a lot to be happy about these days thanks to a prolonged Pixies reunion tour that, along with netting him and his cohorts the kind of money they never saw the first time around, has been one of the bigger stories of the year. (They’ll finally hit the Boston area this week with two shows at the Tsongas Arena, in Lowell, on Wednesday and Thursday, December 1 and 2.) And, while it’s a groggy Thompson who greets me on the other end of the line, it turns out he was counting on me to wake him up.

"You’re my wake-up call," he says without a hint of sarcasm. And, without even pausing to throw some water on his face, he pulls himself together to answer the one question he must be absolutely sick of hearing. What finally brought the Pixies back together after a 12-year hiatus and a break-up that was reportedly messy? "Hmmm ..." he pauses to collect his thoughts, "Well, here we go ... it was my idea. I made a joke on a radio show. The joke was taken seriously instead of sarcastically. The joke was reported in magazines and newspapers over the following days. So everyone just assumed there was a reunion in the works. And rather than fight this wave of silliness, I just called Joey and said, ‘What the hell.’ There you go: that’s the whole story."

Simple enough. But after a decade that had seen the rise and fall of the kind of alternative rock the Pixies represented, accompanied by decreasing record sales for Black’s numerous solo albums and the seeming inability of Pixies bassist Kim Deal to get her once-very-successful post-Pixies outfit, the Breeders, back on track, it wasn’t as if the world were screaming for a Pixies reunion. Indeed, as Thompson himself points out, there were a number of indications that nobody really cared anymore, beginning with the relative lack of interest the public had shown in the Pixies retrospective and rarities discs Elektra threw together after the label finally got word that the band had been one of Kurt Cobain’s favorites. "None of those things ever sold very well," Thompson concedes. "They always sold less than expected. But people were continuing to buy the whole back catalogue. You have to remember, Doolittle came out in 1989, and we all received gold discs for that five years later. So it was slow going. We’re an acquired taste."

Nevertheless, by the time I caught my first Pixies reunion show, last spring at the giant Coachella festival in the middle of the desert somewhere near Palm Springs, there was little doubt that demand for the Pixies had expanded exponentially in the band’s absence. Around 40,000 people crammed their way into the space before the festival’s main stage for the Pixies, and proceeded to sing, shout, and pump their fists along to such obscure nuggets as "Bone Machine," "Where Is My Mind," and "U-Mass." Coachella made it clear that the Pixies had picked a great time for a comeback, and that the band were going to spend the next several months playing arenas, not clubs. Says Thompson, "After Coachella, our manager called up the promoters and asked for more money. They didn’t even blink. They gave us more money."

Now that’s not the kind of thing that happens every day in the greedy concert business. And yet Thompson, who at 39 has been around the old rock-and-roll block a time or two, remains circumspect about the events of the past year. I wouldn’t characterize his tone as blasé or aloof. But he approaches the Pixies’ newfound popularity with a bemused reserve. "I’m very accepting of these events," he says. "But I’m never going to be amazed. We’re just not the kind of band who do jigs backstage. It’s all little winks and nudges, but it’s never high-fives. We just don’t take ourselves too seriously. That’s not to say there’s some big façade or that there’s nothing driving us. It’s just, you know, we have a gig Thursday night, we hope some people are going to come, and we’re going to try really hard. I’m not talking literally about a gig next Thursday night. I’m talking about our gig in 1986 at some club. That’s where we’re at. And that’s where we’ve always been."

Thompson won’t even concede he heard echoes of the Pixies in Nirvana. But he doesn’t suffer from low artistic self-esteem. "I wasn’t surprised by what Kurt said. My fans are many, including other rock musicians. You could say we’re kind of a musician’s band. Or an active listener’s band. Our only hit song was ‘Here Comes Your Man,’ and that was simply the luck of a simple chord progression and a catchy melody. It had nothing to do with the lyric because it’s not a romance song. The lyrics are totally abstract. In fact, it’s not a typical pop song in that regard at all."

The Pixies were kind enough to play "Here Comes Your Man" — a song they left off many set lists in the years before the break-up — at Coachella. They even included "Gigantic," a song that features Deal on lead vocals and, perhaps for that reason, also remained conspicuously absent from those latter-day set lists. It was also apparent that Thompson, Deal, guitarist Joey Santiago, and drummer David Lovering had come to terms with whatever bitterness caused the break-up — a bitterness that has often been characterized as acrimony.

"I don’t know what people mean when they say that the break-up was acrimonious, because that seems like a very strong word," Thompson says. "I can’t say that at the time we were hanging out and playing backgammon together in our spare time."

So how would he describe the emotions at the time of the split?

"Not playing backgammon," he deadpans before offering a more-considered response. "There wasn’t a lot of talking going on. And we broke up. That’s pretty typical. We weren’t pulling guns on each other — that sounds acrimonious. There wasn’t even any fighting or arguing going on. That sounds acrimonious. People just weren’t saying anything. It was just sort of grouchy — grouchy, grumpy, I’m in a bad mood, why are we doing this ... that kind of thing. Plus, we weren’t selling as many records or playing bigger places, so, in terms of numbers, it had planed out. Even the reviews had started slipping. It just seemed like the right time to break up.

"So, yeah, we were in a bad mood at the end of our career. And, now we’re focused on what it is that we’re doing and not on all those other things that put us in a bad mood. We have our own reasons internally why we were in a bad mood. And you know what? It’s between us and only us, and nobody will ever know. Whatever negative experiences we had became blown out of proportion. All you know is that bad taste that gets left in your mouth. So you avoid it for a super-long time. Having said that, I think it worked in our favor in terms of this reunion tour. Because if we’d broken up for three years and come back, no one would have cared."

Though Thompson gets to it in only a roundabout way, it’s clear (as it was a dozen years ago) that there was friction between him and Deal. When I bring up the Breeders and the success they had post-Pixies, his response is, "People have success for all kinds of reasons. It’s showbiz. So the Breeders didn’t surprise me. I have come to realize more than I realized back then that Kim has a lot of charisma. I mean she just stands there smoking a cigarette and people go bananas. People just like her. I don’t know why. I’m not saying she’s not likable. But she doesn’t have to parade around going, ‘Look at me, look at me,’ and people still go nuts over her. I hate to sound like I’m getting down on women performers because there are just as many if not more shitty male performers, but there are a lot of women in rock who kind of play up the whole sexual thing even when they’re supposedly not playing up the sexual thing. There’s nothing wrong with that. But that is what it is. And Kim doesn’t do that. So when she doesn’t do all the stupid shit and say, ‘Look at my boobs, everybody,’ and she just stands there in her jeans and rumpled T-shirt, it just drives men insane. She’s totally being herself. I think people sense that. They appreciate that she’s not going for all the obvious moves because she’s a gal or dumbing the whole thing down. She just has this attitude that’s like, I’m going to rock and either you like me or you don’t, but I don’t give a shit. People love that. And before, I may have been put off by that, for whatever the reason."

One could get the sense that Thompson was also put off by the fact that the Pixies were embraced in England back when they were still playing club gigs in Boston, and by the fact that they’ve taken such a circuitous route on this tour to the city that gave them their start. In fact, he harbors no bitterness, and it was simply the logistics of setting up a tour for a band who’d been away for a dozen years that affected when and where they’d play. "In certain big markets we could book a big show and wait to see what would happen. And in others we had to wait around until we had proven ourselves."

At the same time, there have been murmurings (mostly by other musicians) that the Pixies are just in it now for the money. That’s something Thompson takes exception to. "If people are commenting like that because they’re assuming we’re going to go through the motions and deliver a subpar show, then, yeah, that’s bad. That’s making a lot of assumptions, and we’re not 90 years old. It’s the original line-up — the precious four, the magic line-up. We’re not doing medleys. We know how the songs go. And, as a matter of fact, I have more experience now. I can sing a lot better than I used to. I can scream louder, too. Maybe if I couldn’t scream and do the barking like I used to, then that would be cause for dismay. But that’s not really an issue. I’ve kept my rock muscle up."

The Pixies play Wednesday, December 1 and Thursday, December 2 at Tsongas Arena, 300 Arcand Avenue, in Lowell. The Wednesday show is sold out; tickets are still available for the Thursday show. Call (617) 931-2000.

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