Frank Black-O-Rama! #9: BLACK SESSIONS – LIVE IN PARIS

Frank Black
The Black Sessions – Live in Paris plus The Kitchen Tapes
1995, Anoise Annoys

If you were in the US and you wanted to keep up with Frank Black in the 90s, you had to buy a bunch of import CDs from Europe. In addition to the singles (most American labels didn’t bother with those at the time unless the band was a major cash cow), there was The John Peel Session EP from the UK in 1995. The next year, there was the Euro edition of The Cult of Ray, which included a second CD with four bonus tracks. Later still in 1998, was the first Frank Black and the Catholics album, which came out on the Belgian label Play It Again Sam several months before it came out anywhere else.

Eh, I didn’t mind. I thought that was cool, even if it cost me a few extra bucks.

Plus, it helped that most of this stuff was easy to get at the time. Not only were record stores more plentiful, but even some of the mega-chains were on a mission to stock every CD that they possibly could to fill their miles of rack space devoted to loss leaders and that’s how I was able to go to the blindingly corporate Best Buy in the shitty suburb of Mesquite, TX in 1996 and scoop up this UK live album.

Sometimes I miss the mid-90s. Then I remember how bad my hair was and am glad that we all moved on.

It took a few months back in ’96, but Frank Black’s first two solo albums eventually started to keep me up nights. Their slick computer tones became less jarring. I began to find my way in the confusing maze of songs. I stopped wondering why Frank Black and Teenager of the Year weren’t the fifth and sixth Pixies albums and began to get into their own oddball vision.

And I really wanted to know how those songs sounded live.

Before I slid this disc into my bedroom CD player, I expected it to recreate the ambitious textures of those first two albums. I figured there’d be at least one synthesizer in the mix.

But no. Frank surprised me and went the other way.

He toured for Teenager of the Year with a basic four-piece rock band. Two guitars, bass, and drums. No samples, no tapes, no anything like that. On record, Black was an artsy dude going for a grand studio vision; on stage, he made like it was 1959. Black and his band attack these often strange arrangements with simple tools and they make it work.

The date was June 10, 1994 and according to the gig list at frankblack.net, it was the conclusion to a weeklong residency at L’Arapaho in Paris and this set was broadcast live on French radio for a show called Les Black Sessions. By this point the band were warmed up good and hot for the coming tour.

Boldly, they open with “Two Spaces”, one of the MOST synth-heavy songs on Frank Black, neatly interpreted here without a keyboard in the room. From there they rip into eleven Teenager of the Year songs that pretty much reflect my own picks of that album’s highlights. They take us to California with an airtight “Calistan”, take us to whatever strange place “Superabound” is going, and thrash us about wondering “Whatever Happened to Pong?”.

Four Frank Black songs make it to this nineteen-song performance, as well as two B-sides (“Oddball” and “Men in Black”), retro dance anthem “The Jacques Tati”, and “Handy Man”, the old school cover song blasted out like a bullet through a chamber to end the whole shebang..

This show is powered by two things:

1) Black’s own ability to adapt. Starting from way back in the Pixies days, Black would perform short solo tours. He’d go on vacation in Europe and pay for it by playing sets of Pixies songs in which he screamed his head off and bashed at his guitar all by himself. Later, Frank Black and The Catholics would take his songs from all previous eras and add pedal steel or organ and play around with different tempos and beats.

These songs evolve for the stage and they can go forward into more busy arrangements or backward to simple one-man performances. Black knows what makes up the backbone of his songs and if there’s an acoustic guitar handy, he’ll show you exactly what it is.

So you don’t miss the keyboards here. You don’t even think about it.

A big part of this is…

2) Guitarist Lyle Workman. From the very beginning, with Joey Santiago, Black has had a badass lead guitar wizard at his side. A player who can do anything, whether it’s charging through a punk thrasher or keening like a strange signal from the cosmos. Black likes a guitarist who can scream as loud as he does, just from a fretboard.

Workman does all of that. He zooms around like a spaceship while still supporting the melody. He makes left turns like it’s nothing and gives these songs power and shine. Workman would be vital to three Frank Black studio albums, starting with Teenager of the Year, and he’s vital here, too.

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Now, for reasons that I’m not clear on there are TWO different CD releases of this show. 4AD’s version is simply called Black Session and it comes in a solid black case and only contains the original show.

At around the same time, another UK label Anoise Annoys put out a totally different-looking edition in a blue case and that’s the one you should get because it has three bonus tracks. It’s formally called Black Sessions – Live in Paris plus The Kitchen Tapes.

The first two of the extras are Frank Black and Joey Santiago demoing two new songs in Frank’s kitchen in 1930s blues musician audio fidelity. Lo-fi. “Modern Age” is a light-hearted time travel tale. It’s a simple, silent movie vision of going to a different time and looking around and having polite conversations. Frank Black and the Catholics would record it about seven years later.

Up next is “Jumping Beans”, another one from the kitchen and an even sillier song about… jumping beans and nothing more. It’s got that Tijuana street song flavor that reminds you of old Black Francis. It’s fast. I like it. It would resurface later in a more polished version in 2000 on the Oddballs collection of Frank’s non-album odds and ends.

Lastly, hidden at the end, unlisted on the case, is a stark, solo acoustic “(I Want to Live on an) Abstract Plain”. Is it a demo? Is it something that Frank banged out just for this CD? I could believe either.

For me, it’s a curious epilogue to Black’s 4AD years. Frank was about to switch labels and change the sound of his records, but he would remain a maverick. He would be one of those weird guys who the music industry just doesn’t know what to do with anymore, but who also won’t go away.

People like me were still buying his records and going to see him play. We liked this guy with a guitar who kept talking, in one song or another, about how he always wants to be somewhere other than where he is.