Frank Black-O-Rama! #1: Introduction and COME ON PILGRIM

I still call him Frank Black.

Maybe you call him Black Francis, the stage name under which he made his most famous music. It was the name he began his career with, then changed, and then later assumed again.

Maybe you’re one of those weirdos who call him by his real name, Charles. I’ve seen people do this. It’s fine if you know him personally, but kinda creepy if you don’t. Just sayin’.

Whatever name you use, you know who I’m talking about. The Pixies guy. Aloof. Likes to cultivate an air of mystery. Never looks like he’s happy to see you, not that you can tell since he often hides his eyes behind a swanky pair of shades. Sings about surrealism and UFOs, space girls and the apocalypse, Ray Bradbury and Pong, Los Angeles and lost love.

Blessed with a loud and versatile voice, he can scream a door off its hinges, but he almost never speaks to the audience when he performs. Over time, the ol’ waistline expanded and he went bald, but he wore it well and it only enhanced his status as an unconventional rock icon. If your songs are good, you don’t need to be a pin-up. If your songs are really, really fuckin’ good, whatever you look like becomes cool.

Cool is not a thing to which you conform; it’s a thing that you create.

 

And Frank Black IS an icon. In the business of rock ‘n’ roll, which rips out hearts and crushes souls daily, he’s one of a handful of musicians who’ve kept going over three decades. He never went away. Never took ten years off. Never decided to step away from the mic to become a producer or something. Frank Black is always there. The Pixies put out their first record in 1987 and we’ve never stopped hearing from this nut ever since. The old band breaking up didn’t slow him down. Moving from majors to indie labels didn’t slow him down. Playing to smaller audiences only made him more prolific as he began to treat rock music as a blue collar job. You write songs and you tour and you don’t stop. That’s your life and it’s a good life.

Whatever his situation, Frank Black has always made the most of it.

The result as I write this in January 2020 is a big pile of albums. Some of them are beloved. Most are overlooked or perpetually controversial like all true cult items. His body of work is sprawling and maybe even confusing, which is exactly the kind of thing that I love to talk about.

On this site, I have a running series called Things I Will Keep. Summary: A former record collector (me) who’s totally over it these days and never wants to flip through another used bin again writes about the favorite albums and singles that he (me) found back in the day. It’s about the records that I still want to keep close even after I’ve sold off most of the collection. Some of them are classics, some are only classics in my living room. It’s a whole personal goddamn stupid thing.

I’ve been wanting to include a Frank Black album in that series since I started it, but I could never figure out which one. Do I go for a big favorite like Teenager of the Year? Do I turn left and go for a brilliant album from his under-heard Frank Black & The Catholics period, such as Dog in the Sand? Do I get really nutty and choose the Frank Black & The Catholics complete box set? Do I go total strait-jacket lunatic and write about Fast Man Raider Man or Bluefinger? Meanwhile, that rocking Peel Session EP that he made with Teenage Fanclub as his backing band is also jumping up my leg.

I love all of those records.

So, I would start to write a draft about one of the above, but I would always start yammering on about the other albums around it. Even by my lax standards, the results could get unwieldy.

Finally, I had to admit it. Frank Black needs his own series, I want to cover it all. He’s too important to me. I like the story too much and the story is a long one.

My own history with him begins in 1995. I caught him after the Pixies broke up and about ten years before their blockbuster revival. I caught him during the curious stage in which he was a true cult figure. Sorta equally loved and hated and ignored.

When the Pixies were around and making waves in their original run from 1987 to 1991, I was between the ages of 10 and 15. Comic books were my thing in those years. My music interests back then went from The Monkees to being a faithful listener of The Dr. Demento Show and somehow this lead into a fixation on old jazz and old rock that ruled my teen years.

Here’s the kind of teenager I was: I was in high school when Nirvana were on top of the world, but I didn’t even know who the hell they were until Kurt Cobain’s relationship with a shotgun made the news. My thing back then was old movies and old music. Groucho Marx was my hero. Musically, I was into Duke Ellington and Django Reinhardt and Art Tatum and The Beatles. I liked very little about my time and my world. Media for me was all about escape, preferably into the past.

In other words, I was a total nerd-and-a-half.

No wonder I liked Frank Black so much when I found him. I think his early solo albums, in particular, appeal to that kind of personality. It’s misfit music.

He was an early icon for me of the maverick rock ‘n’ roller. A guy doing his own thing and you can fuck off if you don’t like it. When I discovered him, he wasn’t yet playing old Pixies songs live. In fact, he was DONE with that band. He treated ’em like a bad memory. Instead, he was on this oddball science geek and history buff trip. He went from being the leader in a cool band to pursuing an aggressively uncool image. Frank Black was a chubby guy with a thinning crew cut shouting about space travel and the history of Southern California’s water supply. And it was GREAT.

So, that’s where I come from.

The old Pixies records were vital to me once upon a time, but I don’t put them on a pedestal. Meanwhile, I’m nuts about the Frank Black & The Catholics era and his Nashville singer/songwriter period and the anything-goes “back to Black Francis” years that started in 2007. The 2014 Pixies reunion album that caused tantrums on the internet was just a new Frank Black record to me and I enjoyed it.

His solo work is my favorite.

We’re a weird little cult, but we’re out there. We’re walking among you.

And nobody is telling our story.

So, I guess I’ll give it a shot.

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One of my other running projects on this site is my Robert Pollard series.

This series will be similar, but different–because its subjects are similar, but different.

Both are prolific artists who became elder legends over time. Both haven’t always pleased critics or fans who cling to their past milestones, but they’ve played well to their cults. Both draw liberally from classic influences. Both have had periods in which they rejected their famous band/brand name, but eventually made peace with it and embraced it.

As for their differences, the obvious one is that Frank Black became popular early. His very first band and his very first record got noticed. According to mainstream opinion, he did his best work before he was 25. Meanwhile, Pollard was famously a late bloomer.

Hey, we all take our own paths. That’s what makes us interesting.

Another big difference:

Robert Pollard is a meticulous record craftsman who creates his own sleeve art and sees the album (preferably on vinyl) as the ultimate widescreen perfect statement of his vision. It’s about songs and how they’re sequenced and the artwork that surrounds it.

Frank Black, by contrast, doesn’t really care about that. He’s not a record collector. He’s a road warrior. I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t even own copies of his own records. Album statements are something that he can take or leave. Yes, he lives in the present and understands that albums are how a lot of people listen to music and he does his best on that front (he’s even made at least one concept album), but his vision goes really old school, into pre-rock ‘n’ roll worlds.

He posted something on the frankblack.net fan forum about fifty-eight years ago, on September 17, 2003, that always stuck with me.

Someone asked him, “Which Catholics record are you the most proud of?”

Frank’s reply: “Hmmm…more proud of songs than records….records are…an artificial format.”

I can hang with that. Robert Johnson never made an album. Hank Williams never made an album. They just wrote songs and played ’em.

The whole fetishization of discs and formats is a recent development. Like high fructose corn syrup and Twitter and my low carb diet.

So, fuck it.

If Frank Black doesn’t care about that, I don’t care, either.

So, this series will NOT be quite the same deep dive into the discography as my Pollard articles. I will take on the occasional single when I feel like it, but I won’t pick apart every last little one. Oh, this series will still be long and crazy (at least thirty entries coming up, according to my rough count, circa January 2020). We’re gonna hit ALL of the albums, but it won’t be a completist collector’s compendium. We’re gonna be nerds, but we’re not gonna be fuckin’ dorks. I love live albums, but I’m not going to cover each of the dozens of live Pixies CDs from back when they pressed up official discs for every date of the first reunion tour. I love B-sides, but I’ll get to most of them when we get to the compliations.

What I’m trying to say is that The Constant Bleeder respects the artist.

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Pixies
Come on Pilgrim
1987, 4AD/Elektra

And away we go…

Listening to the debut EP by the Pixies for the first time in maybe twenty years, I’m struck by how the folky, country leanings of some of Frank Black’s later work are all hinted at here. There’s a dusty border town vibe. Meanwhile, the band is from Boston, so their take on this world is extra cartoonish–and enjoyably so. It’s not just the occasional Spanish lyrics. It’s also the demented story-songs (such as “Nimrod’s Son”, the sensitive tale of a young man who learns that he’s “the son of incestuous union”) and the whole drama of the thing.

I want to dip a chip in some spicy salsa just listening to that refried guitar at the start of “Caribou”.

Why did the Pixies strike such a nerve? Beause they had both songs and swagger. Their first record conjures up images of a mysterious young gun who just rolled into Tijuana and kicked up some trouble. He was violent, impulsive. Somehow he survived. Later, he changed his name from Black Francis to Frank Black to fool the authorities. That was also when he got older and became a lonesome cowboy, full of tales of lost love and ruin.

I can’t think of another band from the time who sound like the Pixies. They’re sorta surf-rock, but not really. Sorta punk, but not really. Sorta spaghetti western soundtrack, but not really. Nick Cave’s great, screamy old band, The Birthday Party, is a good comparison… but not really. 

In interviews many years later, Frank Black said that back in the 80s, he considered himself to be a surrealist, which makes perfect sense and I think that’s part of what made the Pixies different.

Surrealism is about the irrational. It’s an affront to all things simple and linear. It’s often grotesque and scandalous. It favors unrest and wanton absurdity. Art should be dangerous, says the old surrealists. They see an audience that’s confused and offended as a good thing. It’s how you fight stagnation in the culture. Shock might be the initial reaction, but the work should stick with you and your feelings may change over time. Yesterday’s freaky sliced eyeball is tomorrow’s college film course staple.

The Pixies took that and reworked it for rock ‘n’ roll. Sure, they dumbed it down, but that’s rock music for you. The Pixies weren’t revolutionaries. They weren’t avant garde. If they have strong opinions about politics or culture, none of them ever say a word about it. They just wanted to rock. They played like hellhounds while Francis screamed his head off about anything and nothing.

Most rock ‘n’ roll screamers who go for the psycho, blood-curdling sound are angry. They’re telling someone (or everyone) to go fuck themselves. They’re exorcising personal demons, wallowing in pain.

Black Francis, by contrast, screamed holy hell often for no reason at all, except that it sounded great. I think it’s a product of his interest in surrealism. There’s an absurdity to it. What emotion is this banshee wail coming from? In Pixies songs, you can’t always tell.

Pixies songs are often silly. Or they’re about nothing. A little Biblical imagery here and there. Some sci-fi. Some taboo matters (the recurring incest theme in the early years, always thrown out like a dark joke). Meanwhile, the performances are INTENSE. They take ridiculous songs and rampage through them like they mean everything in the world.

There’s a weird humor to that approach.

A million bands have nibbled off the Pixies’ influence. The sound, the vocal style, Francis’s little songwriting tricks. However, almost none of them ever really nails their sense of humor. Or their curious balance of funny, sexy and scary.

That belongs to them. The pretenders never get it exactly right.

Because they’re Pixies fans and not surrealists.

The Pixies drew a real line in the sand right from their first record.  They’re young punks, but full of confidence. They’re still learning how to tango, but the rose is firmly in their teeth.

This eight-song EP was taken straight from a demo, recorded in three days in March of 1987, of seventeen songs that was informally titled “The Purple Tape” and was in the hands of 4AD Records, who flipped over it.

Or at least label co-founder Ivo Watts-Russell did. He picked his favorite songs from the batch and that became Come On Pilgrim.

Most of the remaining nine songs were redone for later albums and B-sides. The original 1987 versions though were well-bootlegged over the years and finally came out officially in 2002 as an EP on SpinART Records, who were also putting out the Frank Black & The Catholics albums at the time.

We’ll get to it when we get to it.

In the meantime, I say listen to Come On Pilgrm for what it is: the sound of weird stars being born.