Whether he’s touring with the Pixies or solo as Frank Black, Charles Thompson travels around the world as part of his lifestyle, “and I quite enjoy that,” he says. But he always finds his way back to his home state of Massachusetts, where he was born (Boston), went to high school for one year (Westport), bought his first guitar (Hyannis), formed his first band (Amherst), and now lives when he’s not on the road.
This month Thompson has been on tour for the 30th anniversary of “Teenager of the Year,” named for the honorific he received while a senior at Westport High School. He’ll play the House of Blues Jan. 31 before returning to Western Mass., where last month he wed Rachel Phillips at Amherst Town Hall.
“I’m fond of the whole Pioneer Valley,” he says. “I’m always driving around, going up random roads to kind of remember where the edges of the Valley are, like, which towns: ‘Oh, this is where the so-called Pioneer Valley begins, and this is where it ends.’”
To this day, Boston and Western Mass. both lay claim to the Pixies, so which one is right? “Probably neither,” he says. “Well, they can both play equal parts.”
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!”
Still, it’s become something of an accidental anthem for the flagship university, if not exactly a contender for the official state rock song — like Modern Lovers’ 1972 ditty “Roadrunner.” With the line “I’m in love with Massachusetts,” Jonathan Richman’s song has been proposed repeatedly in bills on Beacon Hill. (The Modern Lovers frontman grew up in Natick.)
“Yeah, I’m gonna give it up to Jonathan Richman, of course,” says Thompson. “That’s a much better song — his song — and it certainly rallies something. I don’t know if the Pixies’ ‘U-Mass’ rallies anything other than a kind of a beat or whatever, but I don’t know what all the shouting is about. It’s not a rallying cry. It’s just a little more unhinged than that, psychologically speaking.”
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 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.”
Levine also heard from the singer himself. Soon after he moved back to the Valley in 2012, Thompson invited his old film professor out to dinner, later visiting his class. “He came maybe three or four times throughout the semester, and just quietly sat in the class,” Levine recalls. “He’s a real sweetie pie.”
Thompson says that the song “U-Mass” has created some confusion over the years: “I mean, I love Amherst. I love UMass. People have misunderstood the song locally, thinking either it’s a supportive pro-UMass song, or that it’s a diss — a putdown song. It’s neither one.”
If anything, it’s just a stream-of-consciousness accounting of what it felt like to be at the big state school during the so-called Me Decade, filtered through “a lot of naive, kind of intellectual snobbery that you would expect from young college kids,” he says.
“Now I’m, like, ready to go sign up. Every time one of my kids goes off to school, I [think], ‘Maybe I should go take classes — I could finish my degree.’ Now I would love college.”
Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.