Frank Black, a Star Is Shorn

For Frank Black, these are the times that try men’s backs.

No sunshine patriot in the rock ‘n’ roll wars, this much-praised, quirky alterna-rock auteur says he’s in it for the long haul, which nowadays means he has to do some of the hauling himself every night he and his band, the Catholics, play.

For the first time since 1987-88, when his old band, the Pixies, helped lead the last spasm of pre-Nirvana, truly underground “alternative”-ness, Black doesn’t have a major-label record deal. In fact, the author of “Wave of Mutilation” and other college-radio cult hits met with a wave of indifference as he shopped his most recent album, “Frank Black and the Catholics,” from label to label. It sat in the can for about a year before he finally found a home for it on spinART, a small New York City company.

Age 33 might be a tad young to be downsized, but Black, who plays Thursday at the Coach House, accepts his straitened circumstances with a certain equanimity and a willingness to adjust.

“It means my record is going to be sitting in a lot less record stores,” he said, speaking recently from his home in Los Angeles. “It’s out there; you can find it, but there’s less copies out there floating around. If I’m in the mood to buy a record, and I can’t find what I’m looking for, I’ll buy something else.”

Taste-making modern-rock stations such as KROQ-FM (106.7) won’t return spinART’s calls, much less play his record, he said, so Black has been touring most of this year to fly the flag for the faithful.

For now, Black’s days of touring in comfortable, bunk-lined buses hired with record company bucks are behind him; this year he’s been running down the road trying to loosen his financial load by doing without such perks as roadies and a sound engineer.

“We’ve had to rein it in a bit, and recently we reined it in in the ultimate way. We did a three-week tour, just me and three musicians in a van with a trailer. It went great. I was a little more tired at the end of the evening, but it felt good to put on your gloves and load a little gear, and we make a lot more money, which is nice. We’re at the mercy of the local crew in the [sound] mix, but we’ve had few disappointments. The house sound people have been pretty eager to please us.”

Black’s creative stature is such that Pearl Jam gave him a lift over the summer, having him open a series of about eight dates in the Midwest and Canada. “They paid us very well and treated us very nice,” Black said.

Nirvana, which broke the alterna-rock thing big in 1991, cited the influence of the Pixies for the now-commonplace structural trademark of playing it quiet on the verses, then pouring it on for the choruses. The Pixies’ 1989 album, “Doolittle,” ranked 86th in a recent Times readers’ poll of the top 100 pop albums ever.

“It’s nice to get mentioned in those kinds of lists, but it’s kind of silly to me,” Black said. “There are lots of great records, so in a way it’s almost a shame to declare certain records as the best.”

Black, whose real name is Charles Thompson, disbanded the Pixies in 1992. He flip-flopped his stage name, which had been Black Francis, and kept on with a musical tack similar to the increasingly elaborate, grand-sounding concept of the latter Pixies albums.

Things are different on “Frank Black and the Catholics,” a name hit upon when bassist Dave McCaffrey, drummer Scott Boutier and guitarist Lyle Workman were trading stories about their Catholic upbringing.

Raw, Basic Recording

Instead of piling on layers of instruments and voices, the musicians recorded the album live to a two-track recorder, meaning no overdubs. At the time, they thought they were making a cheap, rough demo for Black’s then-label, American Recordings. But before the weekend of bashing-’em-out was through, Black said, they knew they had a finished album.

“It was pure, almost a religious experience,” said Black, who has been following the same do-it-in-real-time approach in recent sessions for his next album. “I can’t see going back to multitrack recording. I guess that sounds like a snobby attitude, but [multitrack] sounds lame to us. Now that I’ve seen the light, I want to make records [produced] more like Bill Haley and the Comets and less like every record I’ve ever made.”

The album sounds more like ‘60s-influenced garage rock than ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll; imagine a midpoint between Iggy Pop and Tom Petty, with some Rolling Stones, Smithereens and early Alice Cooper in the mix.

Black’s singing is more stripped-down and less theatrical than in the past; he’s excised the high-range yelps and screams that embellished his singing. He also has shied away from the space travel and UFO themes that had become his trademark; biblical imagery, conspicuous on the Pixies’ 1987 debut, “Come On Pilgrim,” is back.

“If there was a conscious decision about the songwriting, it was [to downplay the astral themes],” Black said. “Even though I really enjoyed it, it was not satisfying all my constituents. I figured I’d back off that. I didn’t have anything new to say on the subject, anyway.”

With the biblical element, Black is taking a different route to the same destination he’s always had: using rock music as a vehicle to escape the ordinary and enter a more magical, strange and enticing realm.

“The circumstance was a different kind of world,” he sings on “Steak ‘n’ Sabre,” a new-album song in which he imagines hoisting a few friendly drinks with a brotherly Cain and Abel.

Hero worship is another Black trademark. He covers “Six-Sixty-Six,” a twanging number by Larry Norman, one of the first Christian rockers. During his early teens in Torrance, Black says, he attended evangelical Christian churches and saw Norman play at Calvary Chapel in Santa Ana and on Christian night at Disneyland.

“Many a Saturday night I went out there and saw some rock music,” he said of his trips to Calvary Chapel, one of the first churches to embrace rockin’ the Gospel. “It was a great experience. I got to hear rock music without a lot of drunks around.”

Norman has responded enthusiastically, Black said. Still, Black has been leery of seeking feedback from the new album’s other object of hero worship, Jonathan Richman. “The Man Who Was Too Loud,” a noisy valentine to the quiet-rocking Richman’s unique renunciation of high-volume bashing, follows in a long line of skewed but affectionate Black tributes that include odes to the Ramones, Iggy Pop and John Denver (“Czar” remains in his set as a memorial).

Black doesn’t think Richman--a lifelong cult artist enjoying a higher profile than ever thanks to his singing role in the hit film “There’s Something About Mary”--would approve of a song paying him tribute.

“I changed the lyrics just slightly so you could say, technically, that it’s not about Jonathan Richman,” Black said. “It was for fear Jonathan Richman would get mad at me for writing a song about him. I haven’t dared contact him. I can imagine him just yelling at me.”

Other changes include the first completely straightforward and transparently intelligible lyrics of Black’s career, on the relationship-trauma numbers “I Need Peace,” “Do You Feel Bad About It?” and “Suffering.”

“I am more comfortable nowadays trying to do a more straight-ahead type of number, a love-gone-wrong song. There are people who work in that format, like Freddy Fender, that I respect. I’m more comfortable in trying to be formulaic and universal.”

Looking Back

Black also has gotten more comfortable about his Pixies past; in their live sets, Black and his band (veteran Boston guitarist Rich Gilbert, who happens not to be Catholic, has taken the talented Workman’s place in the touring lineup) are dipping into the Pixies catalog for a couple of songs, something Black pointedly had not done before.

“I guess I’m just a little less uptight about it all,” said Black, who remains close with Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago, his University of Massachusetts college buddy from the days before the band. He said he has no contact with bassist Kim Deal, now of the Breeders, or drummer David Lovering.

“I’ve put out enough solo albums and proven I’m capable of making records without the Pixies. I have enough fans and good reviews. For a while there, I didn’t want to rely on it like a crutch. Now I don’t think it will be perceived that way.”

Black perceives himself as a long-haul rock ‘n’ roll trouper.

“If I got to the point where I couldn’t put out records and get some critical acclaim for those records, I might be tempted to do something else,” he said. “But I do see myself as an older person touring around.

“The band and I, we call them ‘lifers,’ people who like to play rock music, and they’ll always do it. We all see ourselves fitting that personality type. It’s very pleasurable. There is an aspect of rock music that is about youth, and sometimes it’s very exciting. But I went to the Coach House earlier in the year and saw Leon Russell and Freddy Fender. With somebody like that who’s 60 years old, it’s definitely not about youth. We strive to be as good as those people are one day. It’s about wanting to be a really good entertainer.”

* Frank Black and the Catholics, the Ziggens and Pinwheel play Thursday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $16.50-$18.50. (949) 496-8930.

Frank Black and the Catholics and Mark Mulcahy play Nov. 22 at the Foothill, 1922 Cherry Ave., Signal Hill. 9 p.m. $12. (562) 494-5196 or (562) 984-8349.