Frank Black-O-Rama! #6: FRANK BLACK

Frank Black
Frank Black
1993, 4AD/Elektra

In the Pixies, Black Francis wrote fun, memorable songs about surrealism and aliens, but he didn’t get really weird until he flipped his stage name and became rock music’s top science nerd.

Why the change? The break-up of the old band was just that bitter, I guess. He had to wash it off. Treat it like something best forgotten. He wouldn’t even play Pixies songs live for five years.

There was also something punk rock about it in an old school way. It gave off street cred. In their early 80s heyday, the likes of Black Flag and Husker Du played live shows typically dominated by their new stuff even when it wasn’t yet out on a record. Leaning on your past is what tired old rock stars do. Real motherfuckers move forward.

So, on that note, meet Frank Black, 4AD’s newest pop sensation! Hear his hopelessly strange “debut” of brilliant songs that surf on waves of crisp, synthetic sounds. It was also his best and most eccentric work yet at the time.

 

Frank Black, the album, is such a retreat from anything cool that it ends up being cool in its own strange way. Listen to it next to any other “alternative rock” album of its year and it stands out. It doesn’t belong. It’s one of the weird kids in class.

Most bands freshly signed to the majors in this period (in the US, at least) were rocking out and stomping on distortion pedals. They were reaching for loud, punch-you-in-the-face choruses. They were talking to Steve Albini about making their next record. Everyone dressed like they worked at a gas station. “Grunge” was the buzzword of the day. All things raw and unpolished–or a major label’s approximation of that, at least–were in. Expansive studio masterpieces were out.

There were no Brian Wilsons in “alternative” at the time. Popular rock music in 1993 had, in a way, gone back to 1963, in approach, if not in style. The hot sound was just guitar, bass and drums and not much else. (Yes, Guns N’ Roses got into orchestras and choirs at the time, but they didn’t count among the new breed. Also, they were imploding anyway and, thus, became a handy example of the fine line that separates ambition from mere bloat and how falling on the wrong side of that can destroy a band.)

The vision for Frank Black’s solo debut flew against that. It’s an album of computer tones, slick guitars, sparkly keyboards, occasional horns and plenty of ventures into midtempo pop songwriting. The backbone is still rock music–it’s not techno or even a new wave throwback–but its sonics are a hundred miles away from Surfer Rosa.

Black explains it in a 1993 interview with Mondo 2000: 

“The music wasn’t rehearsed in a rehearsal space with musicians, but in cyberspace, on a Macintosh computer… I would show the arrangements to my colleague, Eric Feldman, and he would rehearse the music on the computer, using artificial sounds. That’s how we laid out the map for the whole record. We then added a lot of real instruments to it–like real drums, real guitars. And we kept some other things… I mean, it’s nice to get four musicians together in a room and jam and rock out, but there’s something about using computers that gives you a chance to ponder a bit. Not necessarily over-fiddling or crawling up your own ass and taking forever … It was just good to be less emotional, be more cold. [laughs] It was just nice working with computers. I loved it.”

Sounds like the perfect approach for a guy whose songwriting had become drawn into the subjects of science and technology. The Pixies dealt with aliens and UFOs and ancient world mystery, but mostly on a Weekly World News level. It was more weird stuff from a band who were all about weird stuff.

In his solo new beginning (working with collaborators with pasts in Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band and Pere Ubu, along with John Linnell from They Might Be Giants and old buddy Joey Santiago), Black comes off like he’s doing a lot of reading and is genuinely interested in black holes (“Places Named After Numbers”) and the Biosphere 2 project (the cynical “Old Black Dawning”).

He’s also concerned about modern artificial light and  how people ponder the stars and sky less because of it (see “Don’t Ya Rile ‘Em”). The sky used to be a puzzle that people devoted thousands of years to solving. The stars were the world’s first navigation system. In B.C. times, Greek scholar Eratosthenes came up with a credible measurement of the circumference of the Earth by observing changes in angles of sunlight. Humans are naturally inventive and will always come up with amazing things, but as I write this in 2021, it’s still out of fashion to ponder the stars. We don’t think about them at all. Our concerns are earthbound.

The result is pessimism. People used to be excited about the future. The future was going to be amazing.

Now, nobody feels good about the future. The iPhone in ten years will be even more bitchin’ than it is now, no doubt, but it’s still a piece of product and not exactly a Trylon and Perisphere.

We’ve lost our connection to outer space–we’ve stopped caring about things that are bigger than ourselves–but Frank Black still wants to sing about it and if he looks like a big geek for doing that, he’s fine with it. At least his songs are quick blasts of melody that always approach their subjects from a unique, never didactic, angle.

One of the best space songs here is about not going into space. “Czar” is a stark rocker, not even three minutes long, about gentle folkie John Denver, who had his own fascination for the cosmos. Denver never stopped looking at the stars. From the country roads that he liked to sing about, you can probably see Ursa Major pretty well. Denver wanted to be the first civilian in space. In the late 80s, he went through through all of the NASA training to do so. He eventually approached the Russian space program and offered millions of his “Rocky Mountain High” money for a seat on their next shuttle up into the great void, but it didn’t work out.

In “Czar”, Frank Black sidles up to Denver at the bar, buys him a drink and sincerely says “Sorry, man”.

Meanwhile, the otherworldly pop of “Two Spaces” covers, in three simple verses in less than two-and-a-half minutes, the twin mysteries of outer space and the ocean.

Frank Black’s narratives at this time were often about wanting to travel to places where you can’t go. Outer space. The furthest depths of the sea. The past (“Every Time I Go Around Here”, maybe). A different Los Angeles.

Another quote from the Mondo 2000 interview:

“I think the cosmos is important. I don’t know why … but it is.”

That sums up part of what Frank Black was on about for awhile post-Pixies. What’s above our heads is important, even if he doesn’t know why. But he’s got these songs about it and maybe we can figure it out.

There were other subjects, too, though. Lots of ’em. An essential part of this album’s personality–and that of its epic follow-up, Teenager of the Year–are its songs about silly things. Black Francis wrote lots of songs about silly things and so does Frank Black.

“Fu Manchu” is a dreamy one about mustaches. “Parry the Wind High, Low” is about the scene at a sci-fi convention (“I’m getting patterns from a Trekker/ And it sounds like soul records to me”) and is one of this album’s closest connections to the feel of Trompe le Monde. It even brings the ol’ Francis scream.

Then there’s “I Heard Ramona Sing”, a song about the joy of listening to the Ramones that sounds nothing like the Ramones. It’s track 2 and its aggressively glittery sonics–swirling keyboards, guitars slicker than fifty gallons of hair gel–lock you in to how strange this album is going to be. On one level, it’s a friendly song with lyrics that lay it all on the surface (“I had so many problems/ So I got me a Walkman/ I really liked it a lot and/ They walked right in and they solved them”), but Frank Black is naturally aloof. It’s in his voice.

Black can belt like a force of nature, but he’s not a soul singer who rips out his heart and gives it to the audience. Like most artists, he’s attracted to the highs and lows of human emotion, but he’ll never get too emotional himself. That’s just his personality, but he makes it work for him. In the Pixies, he considered himself a surrealist and he went for glorious nonsense. Solo, he started out on this science geek trip, but in a way it was the same thing. Both were unique ways to approach all of the universal subjects (love, loss, home, the edifying power of music itself). Both gave him an aura of mystery. Both were reasons to take left turns.

Over time, with age, he would open up more in his music, and “I Heard Ramona Sing” was a step toward that. Also, it’s a beautiful song. Like I said, humans are capable of amazing things, despite ourselves.

The album’s two singles are as odd anything else on it.

Opener “Los Angeles” is not only an earth-shaking rocker and an advanced take on the quiet/loud/quiet approach that should have owned the radio in ’93 (and it did get a little airplay), but it’s also the perfect first statement of this new phase in Black’s music. Over the next decade, he would fixate on Los Angeles in his songs. Black would analyze its history and retell its old stories. He would treat Los Angeles like a science experiment still developing.

The song invites a lot of interpretations, but I wonder if it was inspired by the book City of Quartz by Mike Davis. It’s a partly academic work originally published in 1990–and still in print today–that dissects the city’s unique past and its possible future. One of its themes (and I’m simplifying it a lot) is that Los Angeles, California is a different city depending on who you ask. Davis writes about these different cities that are all happening in one city, respecting its complexity, showing its convoluted tangle of wires, and attempting to explain how it got that way and where it’s going.

Frank Black’s “Los Angeles” feels like a similar take, but in four minutes of hyper-dynamic rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not an anthem for the city. It’s not a “New York, New York”. It’s not even 100% about Los Angeles, California as Black manically shouts about other places in the world named Los Angeles before he returns to the famous one.

You can hear his surrealist side in this song’s contradictions (“I want to live in Los Angeles/ But not the one in Los Angeles”). It’s a song named after one of the most famous cities in the world, but as a portrait it’s intentionally blurry.

“Los Angeles” is about Los Angeles, but not the one that you’re thinking of, whatever it is. There are many, whether it’s in a different country, in a different time, or it reflects a different side of the history and mythology of Southern California.

This album’s other single is even stranger. “Hang on To Your Ego”. It’s a Beach Boys cover, one of the oddest ones ever recorded. It barely sounds like The Beach Boys for one thing. It’s a partly electronic soundscape with an aerobics beat.  It’s very precise. Very digital. It brings synthetic sea foam and its light comes from an early 90s computer screen rather than the sun. It’s flummoxing, but catchy as can be, too. It’s perfect pop.

Still, even the choice of song was eccentric. It’s an early draft of what later became “I Know There’s an Answer” on Pet Sounds. When Brian Wilson submitted “Hang on to Your Ego” to the band, Mike Love balked because it hit too many drug culture buzzwords for his taste.

Damn near every time that people talked about LSD in the 60s, they talked about their ego and how the drug made them see it as useless baggage best lost.

Never mind that the song didn’t exactly approve of the “drop out” lifestyle, it still rubbed Love the wrong way and was rewritten.

Frank Black though chose to record the early version. It was the lone holdover from his original intention to make a covers album. (Who did he plan to cover? Black says, again from the Mondo 2000 article, “Husker Du, Jimi Hendrix, The Kinks, My Dad Is Dead, Angst. A combination of mainstream bands and obscure little punk bands.”)

What hits me as I listen to Frank Black in 2021 for the thousandth time is that “Hang on to Your Ego” is a nod to that then-out of fashion studio visionary style of making records from a guy making his own offbeat record. The Beach Boys in 1966 and ’67 were a band with two identities. While the group were on the road playing “Fun, Fun, Fun” and “Surfin’ USA”, Brian Wilson stayed home and wrote and recorded, with some of the world’s best session musicians, new music that surprised the band when they heard it–because these Pet Sounds songs didn’t sound like what made the kids dance at the Sioux Falls Arena. They weren’t even sure how to play some of them.

Black hasn’t gotten too deep into why he recorded the song (from what I’ve read, at least), but I think it’s a tribute to that maverick spirit. While he’s talking about the Ramones and John Denver, why not raise a glass to Brian Wilson, too?

Frank Black is a musical omnivore with a particular ear for the roots of things.

On his debut album, Frank Black goes to places where his peers aren’t going. He’s reading articles in science magazines and then writing songs about it. He’s chasing uncool sounds on a 90s cult-rocker budget, making music with little regard for a band, trusting that he and Eric Drew Feldman (and the fellow oddballs that they worked with)  will figure it out in cyberspace.

It’s one of my favorite albums of all-time. And more great stuff was still to come. Between the Ramones and outer space are endless places to go.

PS: The same 4AD house design team who did the Pixies album sleeves handled the artwork here (Vaughn Oliver! Swoon… Simon Larbalestier! More swooning…) and it’s reliably brilliant. It treats Frank Black as a new star on the scene, but with a dry British humor. With the exception of Bossanova, Pixies sleeves never showed the band, but here we see six photos of Frank Black dressed up in different costumes. A suit and tie in one pic. Pajamas in another. Dressed like a farmer in another. A fake mustache. Novelty X-ray glasses. Meanwhile, the colors are unnaturally bright shades of yellow and orange. It’s splashy and colorful, but there’s something weird happening here, too. It’s a perfect complement to the music.