Frank Black-O-Rama! #5: TROMPE LE MONDE

Pixies
Trompe le Monde
1991, 4AD/Elektra

The Pixies’ break-up is not an interesting story.

There are MUCH more juicy rock music scandals out there. There are bands who ended because of murder. Or suicide. Or murder-suicides. Some bands ended because someone in it was certifiably insane. There are bands who ended with shotgun blasts, overdoses, plane crashes and prison sentences. Some performers died on stage. Other bands went down in a flurry of lawsuits. Sex, violence, money, drugs and mental illness have all collided in some combination or another throughout music history to result in some real harrowing soap operas.

How did the Pixies end?

With a fax.

For those under 40, back in the days before e-mail, the most immediate way to remotely deliver a message, other than a phone call, was through fax. It wasn’t a social thing; it was mostly a business thing. You had a message or a document. The fax machine would scan it and then send it.  Next thing you know, a sheet of paper got printed out through bulky 1992 technology five miles or five thousand miles away to the recipient. People sent vital documents and contracts this way. In the late 90s, before PayPal and trusted online credit card processing, you even sometimes bought things on the internet this way.

You could also break up your band this way.

It was how Black Francis did it, at least. He was finished with the Pixies. It wasn’t working out. He was through and there would be no debate about it. It was simple and cold.

In many tellings of the Pixies’ old story, Francis becomes the villain by the end. His ego grew and grew until it smothered a great band to death. Some say that he resented the increased attention that Kim Deal received (“We were rich once/ Until your head exploded“, she wrote in the 1993 Breeders song, “I Just Wanna Get Along”, a comment on the break-up so blatant that Deal wasn’t comfortable singing it and so she had her sister do it). Francis was more or less cool with the other two, from what I understand. Joey Santiago continued to show up here and there on the Frank Black solo albums, at least. The big rift was between Francis and Deal. Whatever camaraderie that they may have enjoyed in 1988 went sour by 1991 and ’92.

Now, I don’t want to do the gossip thing. I don’t know the full story of what happened. I wasn’t there.

My gut feeling is that they were all just YOUNG. Francis would have been about 26 or 27 at the time and most everyone that age is an asshole. Throw in a successful music career and fawning press for years on top of that and it’s not unbelievable that Francis might’ve been full of himself.

Everyone that I knew when I was in my mid-20s was an asshole. I was an asshole. Asshole behavior is just in the air around you at that age and it’s contagious. You and most everyone you know cares only about themselves. You have no deep roots, no truly long friendships, yet. The world revolves around you. Some people still hang out with their old roommates and college buddies as they slide into their 30s and 40s, but just as many don’t. There are a million reasons for why people drift apart. A few of ’em are sensational, but most are pretty dull.

Come to think of it, the Pixies ended perfectly.

Part of the appeal of the Pixies is that while they made killer rock music they were also plain and normal on the surface. Jeans and T-shirts. Nobody looked like a movie star. Nobody dressed like a rock star. Their leader got more hefty and bald with each album.

OF COURSE the Pixies didn’t end with someone floating dead in a swimming pool or with an exciting burst of bloodshed.

The Pixes ended in an awkward whimper. They ended with personalities that once clicked well together no longer working out. They ended with some real shitty communication.

The Pixies ended just like how many of our relationships in our 20s ended.

---

Just before these jerks said “fuck you” to each other though, they made one more great album.

On Bossanova, aliens landed. Also, nuclear war might have happened.

On Trompe le Monde (English translation from French is Fool the World), we’re in a curious post-apocalypse and some of our best friends are Martians. There’s always something happening in the sky.

Some people call this the first Frank Black album–and that’s either a compliment or a criticism depending on the source–and I almost agree.

First thing, it brings Eric Drew Feldman into the fold. At the time, he was also in Pere Ubu and had worked with the likes of Captain Beefheart and Snakefinger. Feldman adds spacey keyboards to the Pixies sound. He would later be crucial to Frank Black’s early solo records and would continue to work with him here and there for decades.

Second thing, it’s geeky as hell, like those first few Frank Black albums. If the topic isn’t aliens, it’s colonization of Mars (somewhere around the Olympus Mons). Or it’s ancient world mysticism. Or it’s a quick tribute to the architect of the Eiffel Tower. There are songs about love and loss, but they’re delivered via all of this nerd stuff.

In the album’s most open-hearted love song, “Letter to Memphis”, Francis refers to the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis, not the one in Tennessee, and its scenario involves reincarnation. The “letter” to Memphis is a message to your lover’s past life thousands of years ago. Or something like that. It’s a rock song. Don’t think too hard about it.

Then there’s hard-strutting “Subbacultcha”, a hook-up story as told in a speak-sing beat poetry style (“She shakes and she moves me or something/ She’s like jellyroll like sculpture”). In it, our narrator sees the sexy goth girl of his not-so-sweet dreams (“I was hoping to have her in the sack”, goes the second line of the song). They get together and next thing you know, they’re both living on a boat, which they use for drug-smuggling. HEARTWARMING. (Let’s also mention that it’s one of the band’s earliest songs. They were performing it live back in 1986, but never found a place for it on their albums until this one, on which it’s tweaked here and there, but still embodies the original idea.)

Francis couldn’t–or didn’t want to–write a regular old “Baby, I love you” song at this time. He hints at it, but everything comes filtered through this prism of weirdness.

 

There’s a coherent line between this and the first Frank Black album, but this is STILL the Pixies. The band are doing their thing and delivering the goods, particularly in the first half, which is a wired, violent blast of songs. The pace is fast and the screams are loud. Before it came out, the rumor in the British press was that the Pixies were going metal for this album. That wasn’t true, but still watch your ass in the mosh pit. Somebody somewhere in the world has probably been kicked in the head pretty hard during “The Sad Punk”, at least.

And if Kim Deal doesn’t get much backing vocal action, Joey Santiago’s slinky guitar sound is everywhere. He can sound like a space ship. He can also tear into basic chords like punk rock circa 1979. It’s no big thing to him. Santiago is one of those guitar wizards who always serves the song.

What holds this all together is that the band never take any of this seriously. Though Francis would fixate on space and aliens in his songs for awhile I’ve never sensed that he was genuinely far gone into Conspiracy City. You can tell by his references that he’s done some reading and he has a personal UFO sighting story–the Doolittle-era B-side “Manta Ray” is about that–but he amps up his interest in this stuff for rock ‘n’ roll purposes. He’s putting paper plates on strings and callin’ ’em flying saucers. Cool with me.

Rock music is about absurdity and Francis was always looking for weird stuff to write about.

The pummeling “Planet of Sound” is the tale of an alien looking for Earth because it’s the planet where rock ‘n’ roll exists.

In “Palace of the Brine”, Francis serenades the sea monkeys. Remember those? I think every comic book in the 1970s and 80s tried to sell us kids sea monkey eggs. I never bought any. In fact, I forgot about them. And I still don’t think about them. Unless I’m listening to this song.

Meanwhile, “Distance Equals Rate Times Time” is an apocalypse song, but it’s an environmental apocalypse (“We got to get some beer/ We got no atmosphere“).

The album’s climax is “Motorway to Roswell”, the sensitive (seriously) story of a vistor from another planet who lands on Earth just “looking for a place to stay”, but winds up captured and studied by the government.

And I’d be a total fool if I didn’t mention “Head On”, a furious cover of a recent Jesus & Mary Chain song that was boldly released as a single. Bands didn’t do that in 1991. Skid Row didn’t cover Bon Jovi back then and hope to have a hit with it. That was a retro 60s thing. It was a throwback to a time when the song and how the band interpreted it was all that mattered. Who cared who wrote it? The Rolling Stones scored an early hit with a song written by Lennon and McCartney (“I Wanna Be Your Man”); maybe the Pixies will have a hit thanks to Jim and William Reid.

Once again, Vaughn Oliver and Simon Larbalestier capture the music perfectly with their artwork. It’s even brighter than the last album’s sleeve. Larbalestier gets in some cool photos, but the dominant images here are crude, hand-drawn depictions of spaceships. They look like doodles or maybe even cave paintings and they’re perfect for an album in which all of this space stuff is cartoonish. Flying saucers on strings.

And this was IT for the Pixies.

Yes, they reunited for a blockbuster tour in 2004. And, yes, new music under the Pixies name started coming out in 2013, but this was the last stand of the original line-up (Kim Deal came back for the tour, but left the group when they started making new albums). It was the last time that a new Pixies album was the sound of young hellions. It was the end of an era, with a new era dawning.

Kim Deal was about to score a genuine radio hit with The Breeders. Meanwhile Francis was about to change his stage name to Frank Black and get more weird and geeky and kick off his solo career with two landmark albums. More on those next.

---

Though Frank Black made great music–his best music, I think–after the Pixies, nothing that he did later ever topped the Pixies in terms of popularity or critical favor. There was a time when he tried to escape their reputation–or at least move on. He went five years after the break-up in which he didn’t play any of the old songs live.

Still, the band was always there, always mentioned, always coming up in interviews. They were like a haunting ghost.

And the Pixies will continue to haunt this series as we go on. Our trip through Black Francis/Frank Black’s body of work will be in chronological order, going by release date. There are Pixies compilations and archive releases along the way and we will talk about them when they come up because they’re a part of the story, too. They’re the story of a band whom the world never forgot, despite their leader seeming to wish that they would. They’re also essential to the story of that leader rejecting his past and then making peace with it in time.

I’m fascinated by the early to mid-90s period in which Frank Black was still sore about the Pixies. He was glad that it was over, but I think he was also tired of constantly being portrayed as the bad guy.

He could be a cold fish in interviews during this time. Black treated every writer like they were just going to say in the article that his latest album wasn’t as good as Surfer Rosa or The Breeders. His defense was often to be aloof and unhelpful.

Every now and then though, he would open up a little and my favorite quote about Frank Black’s thoughts on the Pixies back then is from a February 1996 article by Robert Wilonsky for The Dallas Observer. Black’s album The Cult of Ray had just come out and he was on tour.

Asking him about playing Pixies songs on stage, Wilonsky gets a good little rant out of Black:

“It doesn’t seem like the thing to do,” he says. “It’s just my own…oh, how can I put it? Even though I wrote all those songs, to a lot of people it’s like, ‘Oh, he broke up the Pixies, and he’s not so cool anymore, blah blah blah,’ and so I sort of felt like some people don’t really want to give me the credit for writing those songs, which is fine. I’m just the figurehead, the dude that broke it all up.

“I sort of feel like when people want to give me the credit–‘Oh, yeah, that guy wrote all the songs and he was the singer and we want to hear those songs’–then maybe I’ll have mellowed psychologically about my whole horrible experience of being a person in my 20s in some rock band. I won’t have so many bad memories hanging around about the whole thing, and I’ll whip out a few of the better ones. It’ll be the right time, and people won’t give me a bunch of shit about playing a song I wrote.”