‘It’s educational!’

Although Charles Thompson (aka Black Francis/Frank Black) only attended UMass briefly in the 1980s, his influence still resonates today. As frontman of the legendary alt-rock band the Pixies, he penned the song (and “accidental anthem”) “U-Mass,” along with many other classic tunes. These days, he’s still performing and touring—and he still has a fondness for western Mass and the Valley. The Boston Globe caught up with him to talk about his UMass roots, that infamous eponymous song, and the professor who helped inspire another Pixies standard. Here’s an excerpt.

Thompson met Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago when they were freshmen in the ’80s at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A prospective anthropology major, Thompson was pretty down on dorm life living in the sleepy west of the woody east, and eventually dropped out of school. The song “U-Mass,” off the 1991 album “Trompe le Monde,” captures a certain bratty apathy of the era with its simple, screamy chorus, “It’s educational!”

…

Despite Thompson’s reservations, his wife loves the song. “It’s got a catchy hook, and I feel very happy to have it affiliated with my alma mater,” says [Rachel] Phillips, who graduated in 1995. They didn’t cross paths until years later, during the pandemic, but at UMass they were eight years apart: close enough to have had the same professor, Don Levine, who taught a class on avant-garde film. “And that is where [Charles] saw ‘Un Chien Andalou,’” she says, referring to Luis Buñuel’s 1929 surrealist fantasy, which features a shocking image that later made its way into a lyric in the Pixies song “Debaser,” off 1989’s “Doolittle”:

Got me a movie, ah-ha-ha-ho

Slicing up eyeballs, ah-ha-ha-ho

In the years that followed, students started taking the course because of the Pixies song, says Levine, now a professor emeritus at UMass. “And to bring you totally up to date, sitting on my kitchen counter is a small bottle I couldn’t resist getting of men’s perfume called Debaser. In typical American cultural fashion, things have come around full circle, and I now occasionally spray myself with Debaser.” He laughs. “Oddly, it’s not bad.”

Read the full article at The Boston Globe, and check out our roundup of some of the greatest UMass campus concerts of all time.