BLACK MAGIC : Former Pixies Leader Is Going It Alone, but He Isn’t Leaving the Cosmos Behind

Frank Black’s first solo album is full of homages to contemporary pop-music heroes, from Iggy Pop to John Denver, the Ramones to the Beach Boys. But the musician he identified with the most when he abruptly ended the prosperous career of his band the Pixies a few months ago was from a different era altogether.

“ A la Glenn Miller, on New Year’s Eve I broke up the band,” he said.

Black relishes the connection as he tells the story over a martini in the bar of an old Burbank restaurant.

Black and his girlfriend were driving to one of their favorite destinations, a remote copper mining area in Arizona, a couple of days after he had notified the three other Pixies that the band was no more.

“We bought some swing tapes, because she’s really into the big-band stuff,” Black recalls. “And so we picked up some Glenn Miller tapes at the record store, and then we’re reading the liner notes as we’re driving. Oh yeah--on New Year’s Eve he broke up his band. This is exactly what I had just done 24 hours before or whatever. It was kind of funny.

“Fortunately,” he adds, alluding to the bandleader’s death in World War II while flying to France to entertain the troops, “I’m not much into the military, ‘cause I’d be really freakin’ out.”

Black’s jocularity doesn’t allow much sentiment for the past or sympathy for his former band-mates, whom he dumped by fax. But after six-plus years, the personal and musical dynamics had simply gone stale, he said.

“Five albums and as many tours. I mean it’s sort of like, ‘Aw, let’s finally do this.’ Everyone’s wondering if I was gonna do it anyway, so let’s just do it.”

Black, whose real name is Charles Thompson and who was known as Black Francis during the Pixies era, is off to a promising if unspectacular start in his solo career. His album, “Frank Black,” came out in April and has sold more than 100,000 copies. While it hasn’t made him a mainstream force, he has connected with his natural constituency--the record has been near the top of the college radio airplay charts since its release, and the reviews have been enthusiastic.

Black’s maiden solo tour brings him to the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano on Sunday, preceding shows at the Palace in Hollywood on Wednesday and the Ventura Theatre in Ventura on Thursday. His band is a sort of avant-alternative super-group, combining former Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago with Pere Ubu members Tony Maimone (bass) and Eric Drew Feldman (synthesizers). Feldman, whose credits include work with Captain Beefheart, the titan of rock visionaries, co-produced the album with Black and was a key shaper of its sound.

For Black, the biggest difference is freedom .

“It isn’t so much I’m out of the Pixies. That’s part of it, but the other thing is, you know, you learn how to play the guitar better, and you learn how to make a record, and you meet other musicians, and you hear more records, and you just want to do more kinds of stuff.

“You don’t want to only do your one trick that you started out with. You want to go beyond that. Or else do something out of music. It’s one or the other. It’s move ahead and learn from other people or go back to school and learn to do something else.”

*

Black orders another drink from the waitress. He looks more like a guy who’d be hunched over a beer at a blue-collar bar, but he seems to be enjoying his martinis in this slightly incongruous setting of dark wood and Naugahyde.

“I don’t know how to make ‘em really,” the roly-poly singer volunteers. “I know sort of what goes in ‘em. I should know. My dad owns a bar in Massachusetts, and I’ve worked there. But you never get someone comin’ in there askin’ for a martini. The most complicated it gets is a Cape Codder, which is like cranberry juice and vodka.”

As a child, Black moved back and forth between the Los Angeles area and Boston, spending most of his adolescence in Torrance. He formed the Pixies in Boston after briefly attending the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Puerto Rico. The quartet immediately secured an underground following with its distinctive music--visceral as punk, but oddly haunting and disturbing in an arty, David Lynch sort of way.

Though born too soon to partake of alternative rock’s current commercial boom, the Pixies anticipated it, building their audience until they could headline large theaters. They dented the national pop album charts with 1989’s “Doolittle” and got further exposure when U2 invited them to open a leg of last year’s arena tour.

Even with that boost, the Pixies’ future looked doubtful. In an interview after the U2 tour, Black considered the prospects and said “it may be a long road ahead for me playing in bands and stuff, but I don’t see the Pixies making records for 12 years or something. . . . To be honest, I’m hoping for other things.”

Now he’s got them, but Black, 28, remains a garrulous, ingratiating fellow who would probably rank Perry Como and Perry Mason right up there with Parry Farrell. He’s a fan of old television and big old cars, ethnic restaurants and old-fashioned music (he’s been tuned in lately to KJOI, where Vic Damone and Tony Bennett reign).

Black, who lives in a house he bought recently in the San Fernando Valley, savors the myths and ephemera of rock, but he also displays an innocent and generous responsiveness to all kinds of music and chafes under the restrictions of genre-based battle lines.

“It’s too bad with this whole indie rock thing that people are so into holding onto their indie rock credibility that they can’t appreciate a lot of things,” he says. “They’re so uptight about fighting the fight that they don’t relax and they can’t appreciate the new Tom Petty single or something. You know, I don’t own any Tom Petty albums, but I like him when I hear him.

“I always feel the need to distance myself from other indie rockers because I don’t want to be held to be responsible for some sort of philosophy or something. I appreciate generally that indie music is there. But music is music is music, and I just don’t really care. I didn’t have those categories when I started listening to music.”

Black gazes across the room for a moment. A quizzical look crosses his face, and he shakes his head.

“Sorry. The martinis are really getting to me. I thought I just saw Raymond Burr over there. It wasn’t him.”

*

In a few hours Black will be on the highway to Oregon, where his tour begins the next night in Eugene. And he’ll be busy as he drives.

“We’ve got some new songs that we’ve got to work into the set. We timed the set the other day, and with the whole album plus our three covers, it’s 59 minutes long. And we’ll we need at least one more song plus the whole encore thing.

“So we’ve been working on six or seven new songs. On four of them, the arrangements are pretty much there, but there’s no lyrics. I’ve just been sort of mumbling into the microphone. So on this 900-mile drive I got to scribble out the couplets and get it goin’.”

It’s not that Black is cavalier about his music. He just doesn’t like to overcomplicate things. You play some riffs, find something that works, then make it sound grand --one of his favorite words. Sometimes he’ll craft a lyric with cosmic dimensions, sometimes he’ll just play with a sound. Sometimes he’s a true poet of the prosaic.

“A lot of times when I’m on the road driving I really don’t have any time to do a lot of the fun stuff--the tourist attractions and things. So I get a kick out of the dull stuff. The truck stops . . . a cafe or a restaurant, or a particular hotel. Things like that, which aren’t particularly exciting.”

On his debut album, Black serves a more expansive variation on the harsh, brawny sound he invented with the Pixies, framing a series of songs that range from the ridiculous to the sublime. “Los Angeles” is a frenzied study in pronunciation and dislocation. “I Heard Ramona Sing” salutes the therapeutic powers of the Ramones’ punk-rock. “Hang on to Your Ego” is the Beach Boys anthem from “Pet Sounds” driven hard by Feldman’s Who-like synthesizer riffs.

Black, who studied anthropology in college and remains fascinated by science, continues his preoccupation with the UFO culture in his songs, but he also employs cosmic phenomena such as black holes as metaphors for the human emotional experience.

“I got into the whole space thing, so to speak, in a little more sophisticated way,” he says. “As soon as there’s any connotation to the cosmos, people think: bingo--green men, UFOs. They think that’s all I write about. And it’s more; it’s bigger than that obviously. There are real astronomical things and events.”

Why is he attracted to those themes?

“It feels cool. It feels right. I don’t necessarily hear other people doing that. It seems appropriate. . . . This is probably obvious, but people in the modern world aren’t really so connected with the cosmos like they used to be before electricity.

“People were aware of the sky, and they used it to navigate. People were just so much more aware. Even with all their ignorant ideas, they knew they were on this rock in the middle of whatever it was. . . . But now I don’t know how familiar people are with it. They don’t look at it so much, I gather.”

At the other extreme, there are songs such as “Fu Manchu.”

“I was listening to this Desmond Dekker tape, and there was a song on there called ‘Fu Manchu.’ I can’t even remember the song. I liked it, but the thing I was really attracted to was the fact they had this song called ‘Fu Manchu.’ I thought, ‘Oh man, that’s so cool.’

“I needed lyrics really bad, and I needed an ooo word. Fu Manchu fits.”

Black quotes his own song, savoring the pure sound: “ ‘I’ll never loooose my fooo manchooo.’ It works. It’s really weird how you get ideas, especially when you’re desperate for lyrics.”

Two of Black’s obsessions--space and music--congeal in “Czar,” whose terse references-- He was a mountain man . . . I got my own gas tanks . . . the Russians just said no you can’t go-- finally fit together like pieces of a puzzle to reveal the face of . . . John Denver!

“Of course, more than a rock icon to me, you know, he’s this space nut,” says Black, whose lyric evokes the singer’s offers to pay NASA or the Soviets to let him fly into space. There were also those stories in the ‘70s that Denver planned to install large gasoline storage tanks on his property, for personal and business uses.

“I didn’t worry about the gas crisis,” Black says. “I couldn’t even drive at that time. But I remember the gas crisis, and I remember this John Denver thing. But I mostly just needed stuff for other verses. The main thing was that he tried to go to space and failed. He tried but he could not.”

Will the same be said about Charles Thompson/Black Francis/Frank Black when the final accounts are in? He’s not making any predictions, but he knows he had no choice.

“I could have cashed in a big check if I would have kept the Pixies going for another year or two. I had some options that were coming up, you know, with publishing companies and record companies and all that baloney. My manager’s going, ‘Come on, we can cash in the big check.’

“But with that comes the responsibility of coming up with another couple of good records and promoting them in the appropriate way. If you just whip out a couple of records and then don’t tour or anything, people get pissed off.

“I mean, it’s not like I’m so high and noble, but if you only do it because you can get a little more cash, it’s like, then why are you doin’ it? You should only do what you like to do. There’s so many things to do in this world.”