Black Francis - The Triple Door, 8/2/09

Truth be told, you probably shouldn’t trust anything I say about Black Francis. If last week’s love post wasn’t a clear enough sigh for you, I’ll just say it outright and save us both a lot of time—Black Francis/Frank Black/Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV is my favorite musician of all time.

So it should come as no surprise that his show last night at Seattle’s Triple Door is going to get a pretty stellar review here on the old blog.

You’re left to wonder whether my enthusiasm is the simple byproduct of my aforementioned obsession or a sober assessment by a blogger whose downright professionalism allows him to step outside personal bias and coolly analyze the evening objectively.*

Looks like you’ll have to keep reading to figure it out…

In a word, last night’s show was incredifabutasticsome.**

I’ve seen Black Francis (as the royal we will refer to him for the remainder of this post as that was the name he was performing under at said show) more than a dozen times accompanied by Pixies, Catholics, Nashville session players, Eric Drew Feldman and a bunch of dudes I’ve never heard of. But last night it was just little-old*** Francis onstage with a couple of guitars, a rack of harmonicas and a bottle of Champagne.

For two straight hours he ripped through songs ranging from earliest Pixies to classic Catholics to the choicest**** numbers from Black’s Nashville sojourn to last year’s Svn Fngrs mini album.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First a little bit about the venue. I’d been to the Triple Door years ago for a lunchtime KEXP show by Interpol. I remember being impressed with the space, but definitely didn’t appreciate it fully. Last night I did. It’s pretty much a dinner theater with table seating for 300, gorgeous decoration and perfect views and sound from anywhere in the place. To quote Black Francis, “This place has class out the ass.”

You buy tickets in the form of an online reservation, show up an hour or so before the show starts and get seated at your table. At this point (if you’re anything like us), you proceed to order way, way, way too much food***** from Wild Ginger’s kitchen upstairs.

You then enjoy dinner while the opening act (in this case, Josh Wong) performs then settle in for the main act which goes on at 8:30.

And by 8:30, I don’t mean 8:31-9:00. I mean 8:30.

Like I said, it’s a dinner theater. And as old as this might make me sound, it’s great. You have a comfortable seat for the whole show. You have waitstaff bringing you food and drinks. And drinks. You have a show that starts before 11.

I could get used to this.

At 8:30, Black Francis (dressed in black) stepped onstage and went to work.

Of all the times I’ve seen him perform, this was his most relaxed and charming. He settled into the dinner theater vibe, cracked a few Ricky Ricardo jokes and seemed to thoroughly enjoy himself. ******

He wasn’t alone. The set list was expansive and covered his career in way that felt balanced, but not indulgent. In reviewing 2005 and 2006’s Honeycomb and Fast Man Raider Man (the aforementioned “Nashville” records), Pitchfork invoked Francis’s status as Legend by way of excusing what felt (to many) like overly earnest, genre-hopping. I remember reading (and agreeing) that the songwriting was good, but the man singing wasn’t a good match to the material.

I agree that Francis has earned the right to write, record and play whatever he wants, but I also admire his self-awareness. He seems at peace with the fact that a good percentage of any crowd he plays in front of is there for one thing and one thing only. And he rewards them with the Pixies tunes they crave.******* But he doesn’t use the material as a crutch. Nor does his use it as a carrot to get the crowd through “the new stuff.”

The man plays what he wants to play. Despite the fact that half of his tour dates are in support of his new project, Grand Duchy, Francis didn’t really play to any one album. He wandered from theme to theme and touched on nearly every album he’s done.

Like I said, he plays what he wants. And last night that consisted of…

Los Angeles
California Bound
Holiday Song
I Burn Today
I’ll Be Blue
Masif Centrale
Horrible Day
Velouria
Burnt Out Rock and Roll
Nimrod’s Son
Sing For Joy
Angels Come to Comfort You
Lolita
Calistan Way
Robert Onion
Wave of Mutilation
Come to Murder Me
Crackity Jones
The Water
Bullet
The Shrimp Song
Song that I know is about pianist, Freddie “Fingers” Lee, but can’t remember the title of for the life of me
Headache
Gouge Away
She Took All the Money
Tight Black Rubber
All Around the World
Where Is My Mind?

28 songs and a bunch of witty banter from a man who wrote the music that defined a lot of the crowd’s youth. Francis played it coy and cool when he mentioned his “other band” and their upcoming tour to celebrate “an album” they did 20 years ago.

That Doolittle Anniversary Tour will hit Seattle’s Paramount Theater for two nights in mid November and thrum with energy as a bunch of aging hipsters (like yours truly) sing every word and compete to cheer every opening chord with haughty recognition.

It will be truly awesome.

Then again, so was a single figure onstage, laughing as he took a few hundred lucky people on a two decade journey from loud, quiet, loud to barroom rock to easy listening******** and back again.



*It’s the latter.
**Or, it could be the former.
***Looking relatively svelte I might add.
****Which are almost enough to make me reassess those two albums. Almost.
*****Accompanied by an awful lot of beer for a school night.
******Something that wasn’t always the case. I remember when (then) Frank Black first started working Pixies tunes into his set lists. It was slightly tense and the crowds seemed to vacillate between utter glee at hearing their all-time favorite songs performed live and respect for the fact the material was more than a decade older than the music they were ostensibly there to hear. It seemed like Black slowly came to enjoy the appreciation and love, eventually sending the Catholics offstage and playing stripped-down acoustic versions of the songs to adoring crowds that filled in Kim Deal’s parts with eerie group backing vocals. Soon enough, Deal would handle her own vocals as the band decided to start enjoying the fruits of their much earlier labors.
*******Make no mistake, I think it’s just as electric to hear the songs as they do.
********Relatively speaking.