John Mendelssohn - Gigantic: The Story of Frank Black and The Pixies

Copyright Omnibus Press
This edition Omnibus Press
(A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)

ISBN: 978-0-85712-116-5

The Author hereby asserts his / her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with Sections 77 to 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages.

Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of the photographs in this book, but one or two were unreachable. We would be grateful if the photographers concerned would contact us.

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Visit Omnibus Press on the web at www.omnibuspress.com

For all your musical needs including instruments, sheet music and accessories, visit www.musicroom.com

For on-demand sheet music straight to your home printer, visit www.sheetmusicdirect.com

For Claire and Brigitte

Boundless love also to my friends Big Screen Rumsey,
nancy hoagland rumsey, Toni Emerson, Peter Pacey,
Mark Pringle, Kathleen Guneratne,
Stiofan Lanigan-OKeeffe, Anna Chen, and Lil P,
and to my sister Lori.

From the word go, from the very first gig we played, people clapped. We played a couple of gigs and were on our way to Amsterdam. We were very fortunate.

Charles Thompson

A PORT city on the southern California coast about a third of the way between Los Angeles (known for its tawdry glamour) and San Diego (known for its perfect climate), Long Beach has for much of its history been known as a Navy town. As such, it has traditionally had a disproportionate number of adult bookstores, tattoo parlours (this well before the Stray Cats Brian Setzer single-handedly made tattoos safe for rocknroll) and military surplus stores. No rocker of note has ever grown up there, but the horrid harbour city of San Pedro, around seven miles west and a little bit south, would in the late Seventies cough up The Minutemen, whose songs made those of The Ramones seem like Yes in comparison. Hawthorne, around 15 minutes north if there was no traffic, had in the previous decade given us The Beach Boys. It was in Long Beach that Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV, on the spelling of whose second middle name no two people agree, was born early in the spring of 1965, the year that Bob Dylan and The Byrds were widely accused of having invented folk rock.

While still an infant, he would later tell interviewers though its difficult to imagine him actually remembering the incident his parents took him via a suspiciously circuitous route to San Francisco, stopping one afternoon at some cousins house in the small north central Nebraska town of Alliance. A large, reddish-orange, saucer-shaped ship with portholes suddenly appeared in the late-afternoon pre-dusk sky, and floated there for some 15 minutes. Alarmed, the family notified the police, who came out for a look themselves, and then tried unsuccessfully to follow the spaceship when it got bored and buggered off.

Not all of Charles childhood memories would be so happy. Indeed, one of the first Christmas Eves he can remember, his grandmother pointed up at a red light in the sky (probably a little aeroplanes brake lights) and told him it was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, guiding Santas sleigh down to Charles. He scurried in terror to his bed and hid trembling under the covers, only for Grandma, unaware of his terror, to tiptoe out onto the balcony outside his window and shake sleighbells.

For a long while thereafter, the mere mention of the jolly fat gift-giver was enough to paralyse him with dread. He spent the subsequent Christmas Eve lying awake in bed in his own cold sweat, dreading the awful sound of hooves on the roof. Understandably, there are no known photographs of him as a small child sitting contentedly on the lap of some disgruntled underemployed borderline alcoholic actor paid peanuts to impersonate jolly St. Nick at Del Amo Fashion Center, and not only because Americas second largest mall didnt actually open, just a very few miles from Charles birthplace, until 1975.

His early boyhood memories also include glimpsing things in the sky that he felt sure werent ordinary aeroplanes, and might very well have been UFOs! On one memorable occasion, he and his younger brother Errol both observed what he would later describe as a rocket-shaped craft passing silently overhead while they were outside playing. Both boys stopped to watch, and then, being little fellows, got back to the important business of playing. Neither talked about the incident to anyone, not even to each other, until it came up quite by chance some 25 years later in conversation. Each thought it was his own weird personal memory, and was flabbergasted to discover that his brother remembered the same event. When extraterrestrials came to be Charles fallback topic, that which he wrote about when he had to come up with lyrics quickly, he would concede that his familys having lived near the Goodyear blimps launch site in Carson might have had much to do with his multiple sightings.

In any event, he wasnt yet out of kindergarten when he first heard rocknrolls siren song. There was a guy who played drums down the street in his basement, he recalled. I didnt even know what a drum set was I didnt even know what it was when I looked at it! I just heard it and it was like, Whats that? I want to be around that!

Little Charles never had a chance to get too comfortable or otherwise in the city of his birth. Four times before he graduated from high school, he moved back and forth between Americas coasts with his younger brother Errol, mother and stepfather, attending 10 different schools ranging, according to how much real estate his realtor stepdad was managing to sell at the time, from private schools to gritty inner city ones. It was enough to make a little fellows head spin. He found some small solace in the New York naf Melanies Brand New Key, which some believe, albeit without documentation, to be a greater crime against humanity than even Peter, Paul & Marys Puff The Magic Dragon.

Moving back to California without extensive premeditation around the time of his eighth birthday, Charles parents gave away his entire Beatles collection. He was appropriately devastated, but sufficiently recovered within a year to make his first known musical performance of Woody Guthries Why Oh Why in a Unitarian church in Boston, as half of a duet with a chum whose affluent hippie parents belonged to the quaintly named Boston Folk Song Society.

Having been encouraged by his mum to play records rather than sit staring moronically at television like most American children, hed earlier (as a 4th grader) discovered Bob Dylan, and thought, Whats this all about? Hed enjoyed detecting a subtle, appealing note of foreboding a good sadness, a beautiful sadness, he would sigh reminiscently decades later in Peter, Paul & Marys version of 500 Miles.

At one point, his family moved into a flat whose previous occupant had left behind a copy of The Beatles Let It Be, which Charles, preferring the zany, anarchic You Know My Name, is thought to have mistaken as the records B-side. It is unknown if Charles is one of those who believes it would be a far, far better world if, at the end of every benefit concert ever held in Britain, the massed celebrities on stage sang You Know My Name rather than Paul McCartneys much better-known vague ode to hopefulness. Later songs of his own composition such as the Pixies There Goes My Gun would suggest that, when he investigated The Beatles further, he was much taken with the insistent simplicity of the lyrics of such of their songs as Why Dont We Do It In The Road?