The way we process the music, the melodies, the lyrics we remember is complex and involves the emotional part of the brain. When we hear them again, right away there is this intense neural activity and we are back to the same emotion we experienced the first time, it’s rewarding and truly enjoyable (if we like the song of course) even though it is played differently, with less instruments, or even sung by a different voice.
I was thinking about that yesterday when, I, unexpectedly, got the chance to see Black Francis/Frank Black at the Mint in Los Angeles (thanks to losanjealous.com which gave me a ticket!). I just knew he was part of famous post-punk band the Pixies who broke up in 1993 and reunited in 2004. Without being a huge fan, I have always liked the Pixies, although I have never exactly understood what was going on in their cryptic songs.
The Pixies have been a huge influence judging how many times other bands have cited them. Kurt Cobain said he was basically trying to rip off the Pixies when he wrote ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, Thom Yorke of Radiohead has cited them many times as a great influence, and Weezer (who have covered ‘Velouria’) have also said they have been an influence on their music.
After the Pixies break-up, Black Francis released several solo albums under the other moniker Frank Black, inverting his name for denoting a change, but since 2007, he has readopted his first nickname (his real name is in fact Charles Thompson!) and has continued to release numerous albums, almost one every year, which makes him an extremely prolific songwriter.
I have never been curious enough to get interested in Black Francis/Frank Black’s solo career, so I didn’t know any of his songs, although I realized yesterday I actually knew ‘Los Angeles’ with which he ended the show.
But I was ready to see this ‘legend’, who was even asked by David Bowie himself to perform at his 50th birthday party, back in 1997.
I suppose it will always be hard for someone to follow a successful number like the Pixies, and you can tell that his solo material, although well received by the public, did not trigger the same enthusiasm than the few Pixies’ songs he performed. The audience, largely male and mostly in its 30-40’s, was very attentive and supportive, apparently belonging to his strong fan base.
Black Francis was playing solo, with a sole electric guitar to support his voice, and according to what he said at one point of the show, he had chosen to play a song of each one of his releases, not a bad idea considering how much material he has! The show was advertised as ‘acoustic’ but he used the same electric guitar all night, performing probably around 20 songs with a loud and raw metallic sound.
And this is what I meant by songs and memories, I instantaneously vibrated when he sang the crazy worded ‘Caribou’, the haunting ‘Where is my mind’ or the lyrically weird but glorious ‘Velouria’ of the Pixies, even though the musical arrangements were limited by his only use of the guitar.
It was of course different for the songs I did not know, I would need to hear them again to really form an opinion, as some of them did not sound like any of the Pixies’ songs.
He appeared very relaxed on stage exchanging little stories about some of the songs. He said that ‘The water’ was written about his father who told him he should write a Christmas album because ‘everybody likes them’, so he named his album ‘Christmass’. ‘I Heard Ramona Sing’, a song about the Ramones with whom he toured for 6 weeks in 1994, did not remind the Ramones’ sound at all (and it will coincidentally figure on the soundtrack of the movie ‘Scott Pilgrim vs. the World’ I was just talking about). He also performed a song about his brother’s bar ‘Fitzgerald’, an upbeat country inspired tune ‘Goodbye Lorraine’, and a song about a painter, just after sharing an anecdote about a pricey art piece and little children with pens. He kept making jokes about the holes in his t-shirt (his favorite one) and ended up the show with ‘Los Angeles’.
There was no encore but what a better way to finish a show with ‘I want to live in Los Angeles’ when you are in the city of Angels, even though the ambiguous lyrics do not necessary evoke the one you are thinking about.