How I learned to love Frank

The Pixies were one of the best bands of the last twenty years. Nirvana may have broke things wide open, but the Pixies pretty much invented that loud chorus/quiet versus thing.

Between 1987 and 1991, they released four amazing albums and an ep. One a year. They became a soundtrack for my late high school and early college years. When I decided to switch over to cds and could only afford one, I bought Doolittle. Everything was so perfect about it that I didn't really care about buying anything else for quiet a while.

Drunken dorm room sing alongs to Allison were just the beginning. Trompe La Monde came out my sophomore year of college, and my roommate and I dissected that thing as if it would lead to the path we should lead our lives down.

We saw them live on that tour. You could tell there were tensions within the band. Every time Black Francis said something, Kim Deal would roll her eyes. Of course the rest of the time I though she was looking right at me with a big grin on her face.

I was in love with the Pixies. Sure, I liked Kim. I followed her Breeders side project, and I loved her background vocals. Joey Santiago and David Lovering were pretty amazing too. But Black Francis was what it was all about for me. What an amazing character. Songs about slicing up eyeballs, incest, being alone on thanksgiving "here I am with my ham", wanting to be a singer like lou reed because he likes lou reed, and of course the girl with the tattooed tit that said number 13.

The tour tshirts said "Death to the Pixies". But nobody believed it or wanted them to end. In early 1993 when they called it quits I was sad. I went to a party that night and felt like I lost a friend.

"Just look at it this way", a friend of mine said, "now we'll have the Breeders AND Black Francis solo albums." He was only partially right.

Black Francis was killed off. Frank Black absorbed him into his ever-widening torso in early 1993.

The first couple Frank Black albums were okay. "Los Angeles" and "Headache" were great singles, but the albums lacked that something special that the Pixies had. Namely Kim Deal and Black Francis. The newly christened Frank Black was a totally different animal. Much tamer and more professional.

By the time The Cult of Ray came out, I'd lost interest. Frank Black annoyed me. On occasion I'd read positive reviews and pick up an album of his. I even saw him live on the first Frank Black and the Catholics tour. He played 2-3 early Pixies songs and shocked everyone that he still had those chops, then he bullied us with every Frank Black rarity and b-side he could dig up. And he has a lot of them. The boy is productive.

Flash forward to 2004 and the Pixies reunite. If ever there was a band that it seemed would never get back together, it was the Pixies. They had more bad blood than Pink Floyd. Their reunion, as well as the brief reformation of Pink Floyd, proves that bands never really break up anymore. They just go on hiatus.

The Pixies reunion was thrilling. At least when viewed from afar. The warm up show was here, but it would have been more accessible had it been in Africa. Tickets were impossible to get. The tapes sounded great though. It could have been 1989 again. Frank Black as Black Francis was back.

By the time I saw them on their regular tour stop here in Minneapolis, a lot of the excitement had died out. It was cool, but it sort of seemed like they were just going through the motions. Just one new song too.

About a year after I saw them live a peculiar thing happened. Instead of being annoyed that Frank Black put out a solo album while he continued to tour as a Pixie and deny us new band material, I started to like what I heard. Sure, I held out. At least six months. But eventually I checked out Honeycomb and was pretty impressed.

I'd like to say that I was blown away by Frank's latest. But Honeycomb isn't the type of record that blows you away. It's as familiar as a back porch on a rainy day, and it take a while for its sound to slowly envelop you. I didn't really notice the songs so much when I played the album straight through, as I did when I had my itunes on shuffle. Wait...what's this.

Apparently Frank had been in therapy. His marriage had ended, and he was searching for meaning. Not only did this result in the Pixies reunion, but it also provided the background for a much more serious singer-songwriter album.

Honeycomb was initially going to be called Black on Blonde, as a tribute to Dylan's Blonde and Blonde and the Nashville musicians who accompanied both Dylan and Black. The songs are loose, but not careless. And they're a million miles from the Pixies. Maybe it took this amount of distance for me to respect Frank Black and not curse him for abandoning Black Francis. Or maybe it was seeing the Pixies reunion and realizing it verged on becoming an oldies act.

Either way, I'm now a Frank Black fan. From 2004 on, anyway. He's set to pull a bit of a Red Hot Chili Peppers or Smashing Pumpkins by releasing a double cd in June called Faster Man/Raider Man. It may be a wealth of material, but I know that even if I can't digest it in one sitting, it'll always sound good when it comes up in a shuffle.

And I've stopped caring so much about the current Pixies too. If I want to listen to a little Black Francis, I'll pull out Surfer Rosa. But if I want to hear Frank Black I'll put on Honeycomb. I've even started filling my Frank Black section away from my Pixies section in my cd case. He deserves to stand on his own, and anyway, Frank Black was never in the original Pixies.