Rock ’n’ roll fun fact No. 35 — the secret to Black Francis’s success lies in the delicious secretions of his right thumb
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Rock ’n’ roll — a young person’s rebellion and coming-of-age ritual, or an obese cash cow to be fucked and milked until it dies, utterly and udderly used up?
A few years back, Bobby Bare Jr. captured the coming-of-age possibilities in the stunning song “Dig Down,” where he cursed the likes of Pete Townshend, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Page and Black Francis for exhausting all the great riffs, forcing those who came behind them to be “derivative and mundane.”
It must’ve been a proud moment for Charles Thompson IV (who switches between stage names Frank Black and Black Francis) to be included in the highest echelons of rockdom. In a recent phone interview from his bathtub at home in Oregon, Thompson showed that he can also keep up with his rock-god peers in the cash cow department.
Rockers go to great lengths to explain their extended tours. Mick Jagger recently justified yet another Stones tour by stating that “I'm not saying I'm poor, but I do spend an awful lot of money just on keeping everything up, all the people and the children and all the ex-wives and the house that you don't live in that you still have to keep going.” Then there was Mr. Pete Townshend, who said of the last Who tour, “I had been shamed by Roger [Daltrey] into doing quite a few tours to [financially] help John [Entwistle], who then promptly fucking dies on us.”
Thompson’s justification for the 2004 reunion of his old band, The Pixies, is even simpler. “It wasn’t too hard to make the switch [from his solo career], considering I was making the jump from struggling to make money to making lots of money,” he says. “That made it easy to do whatever was required of me. Of course that was a big part.… We were being paid significantly more money than we were ever paid in the old days.
“When you are an artist, at various times in your career you’ll be worth ‘X,’” he continues. “At other times, you’ll be worth ‘Y.’ What people don’t realize is that you work hard for ‘X,’ you work hard for ‘Y,’ so if someone comes around who wants you to do that particular dance and will pay you oodles of money, you deserve it. Your patrons have said, ‘We want to see the old shtick.’”
In this case, “X” is the legendary Pixies, who recorded five studio albums between their 1985 formation and demise in 1993, and ‘Y’ the dozen albums the man has released as a solo artist under his two pseudonyms and with The Catholics. Despite having spent more time away from the band than in it, Thompson has no qualms about re-visiting the old grounds in his current solo tour.
“I don’t think that most people that go to my shows are really concerned about it,” he explains. “I might do this, I might do that. People are pretty accepting of whatever I choose to play; they are not really expecting that I would do particular songs.”
Fans may not be picky about set lists, but that doesn’t mean his listeners aren’t devoted. A quick scan of Wikipedia shows the obsessiveness of some of Thompson’s listeners, as they tie the bands he’s inspired into a tangle of hyperlinks. “It’s nice,” he says of the online attention, “but I’m more focused on cheques. How are ticket sales? Did I sell many T-shirts?”
This marketing instinct is one of Thompson’s major motivators. If people show up for his gigs, he is happy. If they don’t, he has to stop and wonder why.
“Is it me?” he asks himself. “Am I competing against something? Does the promoter stink? Is my career over?” While he says he doesn’t get caught up in opinion, he does check out www.frankblack.com to see his set list and reviews from previous shows. “It’s not about money, [but] the money or lack of it determines a lot of stuff,” he explains. “It determines how I should proceed. Should I pursue the artistic path or should I try to be a dancing bear?”
