“No, this is an honest-to-goodness pizza joint,” we said as we rolled up on Lefty’s in Salem Saturday night. We were there to see Frank Black, and were expecting more rock venue than retro pizzeria, but there we were—getting seated at a table with dinner menus and everything. The show was a low-key warmup gig before Black and his new band (who remained nameless, as far as I could tell) headed over to Europe for a big tour, but the “low-keyness” of it all quickly segued into a balls-out rock show that proved that living in Eugene hasn’t mellowed Black’s propensity for howling, crooning, and covering late-90s dance funk.

When he took the stage—sans guitar!—only two kids were on the dancefloor, as everybody else was seated with their pepperoni pizzas. But FB said fuck that noise, and as the band launched into a cover of Tom Waits’ “Black Rider,” Frank grabbed the mic and hopped offstage, pacing the empty dancefloor while pounding his chest and howling in the faces of the two Salem kids standing awkwardly alone in front of the stage. It was like a 1984 hardcore show, with FB forcing a change in the room’s vibe, which it quickly did, and Black was then able to remain onstage for the rest of the show. (The floor filled immediately, however.) Black did 75 minutes of songs from his solo catalog; no Pixies material on this tour, evidently. To conclude the show, he noted that his kids love the hiphop, and while he likes it, his kids really really like it. So he dedicated the final song to them, and the band launched into a trash version of Fatboy Slim’s “Funk Soul Brother.” The crowd went appropriately berzerkers, screaming along with every line while the girls in cutoff shorts showed us how they funk-thrash in Salem. All that remained was the hourlong drive home, with everybody in the car marvelling at Black’s ongoing capacity to kick out the jams.

UPDATE: We just got a press release saying that Frank Black is returning to his old moniker, Black Francis. “I privately went back to the old stage name, if that even makes any sense, almost as a joke,” he explains. “I couldn’t get The Pixies back into a studio, but I would transform into my alter ego of yesteryear.” Welcome back, Francis!