POP MUSIC : The Pixie Perspective : Off stage, the band’s Black Francis is a regular Joe who bears the cult-rocker’s burden of mythology with a shrug and a smile

Charles Thompson guides his Detroit gas guzzler along the colorfully seedy eastern end of Hollywood Boulevard and considers his options.

“What do you feel like eatin’? There’s a Thai restaurant, Chuan Chim, it’s the best Thai that I’ve found. . . . And there’s Bodhi Garden, this vegetarian restaurant run by some Vietnamese people.

“Or there’s a pretty good taco place I always go to. They use whole beans, it’s not greasy or anything like that. . . . Me and my girlfriend usually go there three or four times a week.”

Rolling onto the Hollywood Freeway for the short hop to the North Hollywood taco stand, Thompson gives the impression of a friendly, roly-poly puppy dog. It’s hard to reconcile this regular Joe with his alter ego: the fearsomely enigmatic, fiercely shrieking Black Francis, leader of the rock band the Pixies.

Thompson formed the group--which also includes bassist Kim Deal, guitarist Joey Santiago and drummer David Lovering--six years ago while in college in Boston, and it quickly secured an underground following with two albums for England’s 4AD label: 1987’s “Come on Pilgrim” and 1988’s “Surfer Rosa.”

Adding an anarchic mean streak to the edgy artiness of Talking Heads, alternating a gut-spilling, psychodramatic attack with passages of harsh, haunting beauty, Thompson--under the nom de rock Black Francis--forged a distinctive music that was as visceral as punk, but disturbing in a subversive David Lynch sort of way.

Immediately admired and influential, the Pixies built up their audience and actually dented the national album chart with “Doolittle” in 1989. A few months ago, they had finished an eight-month headlining tour in support of their latest album, “Trompe le Monde,” and were ready for a break. But when U2 called and invited them to open its North American shows, the Pixies hit the road again.

A career move?

“Absolutely,” says Thompson. “Everyone was all excited about it and I admit I was too, but the record company was acting like we were gonna sell a million records, and, of course, it didn’t happen. . . . You know, a week after going through Philly our sales would do one of those”--he draws a straight line in the air with his finger and makes a little bump--”but it didn’t change anything.

“It was good, you know. I would never want to say anything that would reflect badly on U2, like it was boring, but it was boring. It had nothing to do with them or the way we were treated. . . . You know, all those places where they play basketball or hockey are similarly designed, and after a while it’s cement building after cement building.

“But it’s always a good challenge to play for people that don’t know who you are and try to entertain them and try to get them to cheer instead of boo. . . . “

“Decompressing and goofing off” after the U2 swing, Thompson is easygoing and amiable on a muggy afternoon. He’s greeted warmly by the employees at the Mexican restaurant, and chats with them in Spanish while he waits for his tray of soft tacos. As he sits at an outdoor table and ponders the introduction of black beans to the menu, it appears that he enjoys his restaurants.

“Yeah,” he says, laughing heartily and patting his stomach. “It’s one of the great pleasures of life, I suppose.”

Thompson, who lives in Hollywood with his girlfriend of six years, likes to keep his pleasures and his perspective simple. That’s not always easy for a cult figure around whom mythology constantly circulates, but he bears the burden with a shrug and a toothy smile. He’s a fan, so he understands why it happens.

“I suppose that’s what rock writing is all about,” he says. “It’s sort of over-complicating the whole thing--which even I do as a rock fan. When you go to someone’s house and they’ve got a nice record collection, a nice stereo and you sit there and you spin records and you smoke pot and you gab about it and talk about it and you kind of get into it all, analyzing it, that’s fun to do.”

Thompson, 27, moved back and forth between Boston and Los Angeles several times as he was growing up. He spent most of his adolescence in Torrance, where he engaged in “pretty typical teen-age stuff”--riding his skateboard, hanging out at the mall and the beach. He managed to avoid the punk-rock that was blanketing the South Bay, and didn’t travel to Hollywood for the ‘80s rock experience. Instead, he communed with the ultimate inspiration for the Pixies’ free-form imagery.

“The first rock records that I listened to were Beatles records, and most of that material is pretty non-linear. I may have read the lyrics in my little Beatles songbook and maybe even looked up the definitions of some of the words that I didn’t understand, but for the most part--you know, goo goo ga joo joo, I am the walrus.

“I thought that’s the way that rock music was. I always thought it was weird that people would act surprised--’Gee, you don’t write straightforward lyrics.’ And I was just like, ‘So what?’ It’s already been established by so many big, famous pop-rock people that you don’t have to. I assume it’s just one of the ways to do it.

“It’s easy to be surreal--just don’t be linear. But I’d certainly like to write songs that are more linear. Like on this last record I felt like most of the songs were in a way pretty linear. If you were to sit there with a lyric book and read along, you could get a basic concept about what the song was about, I thought. I’m not complaining, but no one that was writing reviews credited me with that. They just sort of went, ‘Well, wacky Black Francis is back.’ ”

Before Nirvana emerged from the mists of the Northwest underground last year to become the hottest rock band in America, before Sonic Youth lurched out of the avant-garde ghetto in ’90 and got played on MTV instead of SoHo lofts, the Pixies were the American art-rock band of the moment, the one making the transition from college radio to mainstream charts, from small clubs to big ballrooms.

“I just think we were contemporary, maybe interesting and different, maybe even exciting compared to whatever else was out that particular year,” says Thompson, skeptical in retrospect. “But when people start calling you the greatest rock band on the planet and all that baloney, how long does that last? They’re not doing that now.”

With its post-”Doolittle” albums “Bossa Nova” and “Trompe le Monde,” the Pixies have settled into a solid if unspectacular orbit in the cusp between conventional and experimental. The last two works have each sold in the 200,000 range, following “Doolittle’s” 290,000.

Thompson has no regrets that it didn’t get bigger.

“I still make a good living. You can’t make people buy your record--unless you’ve got a lot of money. So you get what you get. I try to make good songs and have a good band and put on good shows. I did my best, so to speak, and it came out sounding like this. . . .

“It’s just that I got lucky pretty fast. I could have busted my ass for four or five years like a lot of bands and then maybe this year right now would be the beginning, I’d have my first record out and all that. But it wasn’t like that. I started a band and all of a sudden I was driving around Europe playing to all these screaming punk rockers.”

What about the future?

“It may be a long road ahead for playing in bands and stuff, but I don’t see the Pixies making records for 12 years or something. Maybe, but who knows? . . . To be honest, I’m just hoping for other things. This is the only band I’ve ever played in. I feel like I’m just learning how to play the guitar. It’s like I’m just understanding how to make records and stuff.”

Back behind the wheel, Thompson reaches into a plastic bag on the seat beside him.

“I went to Tower Records the other day. . . . What did I buy? The Buzzcocks. My girlfriend picked out jazz records. The Manic Street Preachers, that’s a new hot band. Roxy Music. . . .

“I’m a fan, but I certainly don’t keep up with modern music or anything. I don’t know what any of these new bands sound like. I almost don’t care. There’s too many records to listen to.

“That’s the one nice thing about records. Like I didn’t grow up listening to punk rock or anything. And so now to go buy Clash records or something, it’s like, ‘Yeah, this is great!’ That’s what’s great about records. It’s too bad that in some people’s minds a record becomes passe and therefore you can’t listen to it anymore.”

Thompson pops in the Roxy Music greatest-hits cassette and bobs to the beat as he considers the question of keeping the music fresh.

“You might worry about that when you’re not playing your guitar and you’re talking about it in the abstract. But all you got to do is go get your guitar out, and if that’s not satisfying, you go get a drummer and go in a room and you play real loud and get some little chord progressions going and it’s like, ‘Ooh yeah, this is good.’

“It takes care of itself. I think it does. I hope it does, or I’ll have to do something else. Yeah, there’s always songs out there. There’s that famous Keith Richards quote about pop music being in the air, all you got to do is find it, it’s already written. I think maybe in a way that’s true.

“It’s just chord progressions that evolve into like songs and the songs evolve into recordings. You know, I write songs, I make records, I go on tour. I don’t have any perception of where are things going, where have things been. It’s all too abstract. I just write songs, you know.” He nods toward the tape player and rocks his body harder to the Roxy Music beat. “This is it right here. I guess you could almost call it lowbrow entertainment.”

Not high art?

“No. It’s got all the pretentiousness of high art, which is fine. A little pretentiousness can be nice. It depends on how it’s done, I suppose.”