Sat. Oct. 22

He was born Charles Thompson IV, but mostly called Black Francis. For years, he, his wife Violet Clark and their children have happily resided in Eugene, Ore. The once-and-again Pixies frontman was born 46 years ago in Boston. His family moved around frequently, but after he founded the Pixies at U-Mass Amherst he returned to Boston in 1986. After years out west, they recently moved to Western Massachusetts. Home again! Sort of.
    Pixies – masters of slashing post-punk rock with loud/soft/loud dynamic shifts - had a brief, but successful recording life, from 1987-1992. Posthumously, they were hugely influential in the alt-rock world. They split up acrimoniously, but re-united in 2004. Later, this fall they’ll commence yet another leg of their (never truly ending?) “Doolittle” tour – dates that feature that 1989 classic album – including one at Hampton Beach Casino Oct. 30. In the post-Pixies years, Thompson also made solo records as Frank Black, sometimes as Frank Black and the Catholics. The singer-songwriter-guitarist also plays in a duo, Grand Duchy, with his wife. But for now … Thompson, or whatever you chose to call him (David Bowie had a time of it when the two met)  is doing the small-scale solo gig thing. He played the Beachcomber in Wellfleet this summer and is at Brighton Music Hall Saturday Oct. 22
 
   JSInk:  What has life been like in Eugene? Were you treated like a celebrity?
   Thompson: It’s been very mellow and people don’t bother you, so to speak. They put a little extra whipped cream in my espresso - wink wink - but people don’t show up on my doorstep with demo tapes. I don’t know what it’s going to be like out in Western Massachusetts.
     Fantasy time. Let’s say somehow someway you’re a new young singer and you got on “America’s Got Talent” or “The Voice” or “American Idol.” How do you think you’d fare?
    We all know how I would do. It would not go well. I don’t know how to analyze. I’m sure musicologists could give you a nutshell description of what it’s all about now, but it’s some weird combination of Broadway musical, modern R&B and “Glee.”
   Naively, I once thought we were too smart for that crap, that we liked our musicians to make records, build audiences in clubs.
   Yeah, but I guess it’s no different than any other time. There’s a huge group of people that are really passive music listeners and there are others that are not so passive. Also, I think this kind of shallow folk music has become kind of like a national junk food snack. But I think even people who are really into it are not slaves to it. I don’t think they’re totally buying it, but they just like it. 

   Last year at the on your sol tour, you had a drummer, Todd Demma, with you along with your longtime collaborator Eric Drew Feldman on bass and pump organ. What about this year?
   I have one guy with me, Eric.
   What material are you playing?
   I’d like to play at least one selection from each of my releases, going back to the first Pixies record. And that’ll take us up to 20-odd songs and then whatever else. I don’t want to call it a retrospective, but it’s a way to organize the material. And I’m going to try to break out of whatever I may have felt the last couple of years – where you favor songs and you play them a lot when you play solo shows. You say, “Oh, yeah, I know that one. I never practice that one; I know how to play it.” And you’ll avoid the ones you never really learned. My wife’s been giving me shit for that so I gotta figure some stuff. Eric and I have some intense rehearsals planned in the hotel room in Boise. By the time we get to Phoenix, as they say, we will be a well-oiled machine.
   Musically, what can we expect in terms of dynamics?
  When I played with Eric and Todd last September I think we got into a quieter, more subtle thing, where I was trying to pretend to be JJ Cale or something. It had the reserve of middle-aged gentleman, and had that mojo and nuance. I’d like to think I can tap into that again. I like loud, but loud is a little one-dimensional. There’s nothing subtle about loud. Having said that, part of the problem, too, is I don’t necessarily do well with acoustic either, because I’m not really an acoustic guitar player. I can strum it for a while, but it’s not like I’m a picker. There are people that do that really well, like Loudon Wainwright. There’s a guy that can change a guitar string on stage while he’s telling funny stories and singing songs, in the most seamless, entertaining way. And I’m not that. I’m not like a folkie guy – I don’t have that kind of prowess. I’m using the electric guitar, but bringing the volume down
   Also, you do have an outlet for loud. Tell me, though, with Pixies it seems like a cash cow, especially with this “Doolittle” tour, playing “This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven” and other hits.   

 Yeah, it’s very Groundhog Day as the phrase goes. But it guess we do enjoy trying to ring the bell every time, trying to get into the nuances of the original recordings to see how faithfully we can recreate a lot of it. I’m OK with it. We don’t really solicit the show. We wait for the phone to ring. It’s not ringing now in Europe, but it’s ringing here in America for some reason.
    Why, do you think?
    People like the whole “Doolittle” thing ‘cause they know what they’re getting. “Oh yeah, the Pixies doing this show. There’s the monkey on the T-shirt, that’s the one!” It’s comforting for a lot of people. It’s sold out almost every night. We’ve never done a lot of touring with production, so we have this big screen and lights and that’s kind of fun for us. We also have a lot of pauses between songs. We don’t want to rush through it. We want the tempos to be accurate and we don’t want it to be over in 43 minutes either. The Pixies are quite fond of shtick right now. Because we’ve been doing the “Doolittle” show for a while and it’s kind of like the same show every night. Maybe the encores are different, but the same things happen and we’ve kind of embraced it. Everyone loves it. Sometimes, it feels like, “Oh man, we never would have done this [in 1987] at the Rathskeller. We don’t exactly high-five the crowd and throw any beach balls around. There is a Boston New England anti [showbiz] thing, which is what we come from. I hope that if we record new music we don’t forget that.

(This is an alternate version of a story I wrote for the Cape Cod Times this summer.)

Tickets: $20. Doors at 8.
 
158 Brighton Avenue, Allston, 617-779-0140 www.brightonmusichall.com