Frank Black-O-Rama! #10: THE CULT OF RAY

Frank Black
The Cult of Ray
1996, American Recordings

I don’t know why Frank Black parted ways with his longtime label, 4AD. If he’s ever commented on it, I haven’t seen it. All I can say is that his first album for Rick Rubin’s American Recordings–home at the time to the likes of The Black Crowes, Johnny Cash, and Slayer–feels like (and was) his last-ditch effort at a solo hit in the dying days of “Alternative Rock”. The mood is punchy and aggressive and Black leans hard into his sci-fi guy persona.

As weird as they are, his previous two solo albums are all about pop. They come in candy-colored packages and boast bright production with several tracks ready for radio. They never caught on in a big way, but they have their cult (count me among them) and they’ve aged well.

They also come off like their own little era that burned itself out quick.

Or, to put it another way, how do you follow up Teenager of the Year, a double-length oddball epic that starts with Pong and ends with apocalypse?

The best way is to not even try. Answer that album’s layered, synthetic production with more simple, raw production. Answer its twenty-two tracks with a tight thirteen. Answer its complex maze of topics with a batch of songs that roughly break it all down to kids and UFOs and one mother of a lead guitar.

That’s The Cult of Ray.

Two big influences that leap out at me here are:

1) Rock clubs and the kids who go to them and jump around in them. This album is made for the stage. Neon sign out front. Spilled beer and cigarette smoke. Hot lights. Two tracks here reference the live music experience explicitly. “Mosh, Don’t Pass the Guy” is a surf instrumental with a title that comments on the trend of crowd-surfing that annoyed so many of us back in the 90s. (Do kids still do that these days? Probably not. You can lose your phone that way). Then “Dance War” is a fast anthem for the slam dancer who almost ritualistically throws his body around with every G chord, scaring away the lightweights to the back and declaring the front of the room for psychos only (“Though I’m going nowhere/ Slammin’ in this pit/ My brain was going to melt/ Listening to your shit”).

2) 1950s rock ‘n’ roll. A couple of guitars, bass, drums and nothin’ else, except for the song. Maybe a little Sun Records echo on the vocal sometimes just because it sounds cool. Black likes to explore the roots of things and he hinted for awhile in his cover songs and in the odd original (“Sir Rockaby”) that he was beginning to identify with the old jukebox heroes and now here he is.

That said, this is not a strict imitation of the past. The Cult of Ray is not a time machine. Rather, Black just wants to make a record in the old way. “Live” in the studio, a little rough. No computers. There are some 1950s throwbacks here, but Black comes to that stuff through 70s and 80s punk. And when I say that this album’s standout ballad, “I Don’t Want to Hurt You (Every Single Time)” sounds like Elvis, I mean Costello, not Presley.

 

Meanwhile I doubt that Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly ever imagined a lead guitar as fearsome as Lyle Workman’s here. He spends this whole album freaking out, but ALWAYS in support of the song. Workman’s sound embodies a UFO. He’s a death ray from the planet Mongo. He’s a dazzling special effect in this album’s drive-in movie. Ever since he had Joey Santiago at his side in the Pixies, Frank has favored an agile lead guitarist who’s full of personality and who can be flashy without succumbing to wankery. Workman is a perfect fit and is such a powerful presence that he gets the left stereo channel to himself for the whole album while Frank’s own quirky rhythm parts get the right side. David McCaffrey’s bass and Scott Boutier’s drums are crystal clear in the middle and it all gives the album a glowing 3-D sound. 

It’s very different from Black’s previous solo work. Eric Drew Feldman is out of the picture (he’d come back later) and Black assumes the producer credit himself for the first time. His approach is to just give you the band, stripped down, sounding like they’d sound on stage if you could hear everything perfectly. 

The first five tracks are all rockers.

“The Marsist” is a love song, but it’s not about any girl on Earth. It shouts and drops to its knees for the infamous “face on Mars” and it’s got the coolest lead guitar on any Frank Black song ever. I love Joey Santiago and I love Rich Gilbert, but when Lyle Workman tortures electricity here, I see God.

Or at least I see a theremin, which Workman somehow impersonates with his strings and fretboard. His sound evokes flying saucers and mysteries in the cosmos and it lends extra craziness to the narrator and his Mars fixation.

Frank Black has several songs about people who are obsessed with outer space. It’s their reason for living or sometimes the source of heartbreak. They come off as lonely and a little offbeat, but probably harmless. That’s “The Happening” by the Pixies and then solo songs such as “Czar” and “The Vanishing Spies” and, here, “The Marsist”.

Track 2, “Men in Black”, is THE HIT. Or it was supposed to be, at least. The big rock station here in Dallas had it in regular rotation for about fifteen minutes in ’96. The song is Frank’s most X-Files moment. It’s three minutes of government UFO conspiracy paranoia with a radio-friendly kick. It’s a feverish call to Art Bell’s talk show in rock music form. Black and the band hit the chorus like it’s a TV theme song and it’s so wired that I can’t help but like it.

“Men in Black” originally came out two years earlier in 1994 as one of the B-sides for “Headache”. It was also performed live for that year’s tour and somewhere along the path, I guess Frank realized that he maybe shouldn’t have thrown this one away. This new version has the same arrangement, but tightened up and with some extra roar. The early take brings no special revelations, but it’s out there if you’re curious.

Black has often cited Iggy Pop as an influence and you can hear that in track 3, “Punk Rock City”. It’s got that familiar swagger, but the song itself is something that only Frank would write. It’s about genetically engineered people–all young, clueless punks who live only to work in mines, have babies and never go above their station. In a way, that was the punk rock dream back then. Do your work underground. Never rise above. Ambition is the sign of a scumbag sellout. That was the way. It’s kinda silly and Black knows that, but he doesn’t preach in the song. He sketches out a dystopian portrait and treats it like a campy comic strip. I can dig it.

As for the fourth track, “You Ain’t Me”, I have to say that there are weirdos out there who think that Frank Black is constantly writing songs about Kim Deal. They think that he’s as obsessed with the Pixies break-up as they are. “Whatever Happened to Pong?” is about Kim Deal. “Los Angeles” is about Kim Deal. The weatherman says that there’s a 60% chance of rain next week because of Kim Deal. They want the Pixies break-up to be as full of drama as the Beatles break-up. (I give my own thoughts on the matter in my piece on Trompe le Monde.)

Me, I say that Frank Black didn’t really address the break-up at all in his early solo songs, BUT… I could… if the wind is right… MAYBE… with reservations… be swayed into hearing “You Ain’t Me” as a poison dart dealt in Deal’s direction.

While the melody flirts with becoming a country song, the narrator is a confident achiever who takes shots at his coattail riders. He acknowledges their success (“The money has been spent/ I’m not saying it hasn’t been earned/ The customers have paid/ I’m just feeling kind of burned”), but he also asserts that he’s above them no matter what (“I’m the guy from wonderland/ And you could never understand/ That you ain’t me”).

It’s a song from an artist who believes in his longevity and who believes that his imitators and orbiters won’t last, even if they’re in the brighter spotlight at the moment.

Black could be talking about Deal, whose band The Breeders had a huge hit in the early 90s with “Cannonball”. It was a song so popular that it only made him look more like the villain in the Pixies break-up, like he was holding her back all that time. That’s gotta be annoying.

Another interpretation: Black might have simply turned on the radio in the mid-90s and heard a steady stream of useless bands (Bush, Seven Mary Three, twenty other bands whose names I forget) who clumsily ran with the old Pixies sound and temporarily became more famous for it–and that’s maybe who this song targets.

Whatever it’s about, “You Ain’t Me” is bitter and I’m okay with that.

Also, Black was right. He would outpace the “competition” over the years and stay busy and inspired in humble times.

Speaking of being right, “Jesus Was Right” is, some days, my favorite thing here. It’s super-cool and super-uncool at the same time. It’s a breakneck rockabilly song with a spacey Workman twist. The lyrics tell us about a skater kid who finds his place in the universe on his board alone, listening to music, playing guitar, and relating to Jesus. The hippies from a long time ago had drugs and free love to mellow them out. Maybe 90s skate-punks could do the same with a little Christ in their life. Is Black preaching to us? NO. It’s just a story. If “You Ain’t Me” is about selfish thoughts, “Jesus is Right” provides the more healthy contrast. Also, it rocks.

(Note: I love this June 1996 live performance of the song on Youtube.)

Now I’m out breath and could use a ballad to cool off.

I didn’t like “I Don’t Want to Hurt You (Every Single Time)” for awhile. It was too conventional. It was all smooth and Hollywood. I didn’t understand yet that Frank Black was forming a vision of making “normal” songs from an oddball’s perspective (this would be the driving force of his Catholics period coming up soon). Let’s talk about love and loss and all of the things that soul singers and country singers deal with. After ten years of making music about mostly absurd and silly shit, I say that a guy earns the right to sing “I don’t want to hurt you/ Not every single time, no/ I just seem to hurt you/ Every single time”. It’s probably still going to be a little melodically weird anyway because a guy like Frank Black instinctively takes the left turn.

Now, I think that “I Don’t Want to Hurt You (Every Single Time)” is good stuff. I can hear Wilson Pickett singing it.

But would Wilson Pickett follow it up on the album with a surf instrumental?

NO, but Frank Black does with “Mosh, Don’t Pass the Guy” and now we’re rocking again.

“Kicked in the Taco” is a goofy one for the album’s second half, now that we’re riding the groove. The song earns most of its points for me for rhyming nightmarish with Albondigas Parish.

Happy Halloween at track 9 with “The Creature Crawling”. The movie screen lights up and there’s a monster on the way. Frank and the band do this one slow and swampy, but under three minutes. This creature doesn’t move fast, but it’ll get ya.

“The Adventure and the Resolution” is another surf instrumental, but this time the waves are a little more tame. It’s night and we’re mostly gazing at the stars and wondering about what’s going on up there. Lyle Workman’s guitar-as-theremin sound is in effect. The title is a reference to 18th century British expeditions into the then-mysterious South Pacific. Two ships, Adventure and Resolution, set sail together in 1772 to see what was going on down there and they made it all the way to the Antarctic Circle.

This album is partly about searchers and myths, but this is rock ‘n’ roll for the kids so Black keeps it on a B-movie level. Loud, cool, sensational. Jump around now; think about it later if you like.

No seque emphasizes that more than when “The Adventure and the Resolution” gives way to the impatient “Dance War”. Fuck your aliens, your explorers and whatever else you have to say. In rock ‘n’ roll, sometimes the kids just want to go nuts. They’re ignoring your precious words. All they care about is the noise and they’re not wrong.

 

The title track is a variation on the theme of noise and meaning and what gets lost in life’s chaos. The Ray in the song “The Cult of Ray” is author Ray Bradbury. It sounds like Frank went out to hear him speak and it was mostly wonderful except for some assholes in the audience who wouldn’t shut up (“I heard his words so very fine, so high above this constant dripping chatter”). Why do people do this? Why are they even there? I had the same experience when I went to see John Waters, director of such heartwarming films as Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos, perform his one-man-show some years ago. A few douchebags behind me were chit-chattin’ away about stuff that had nothing to do with what was happening in the room. I don’t know why they showed up for this, except that shitheads need to ruin everything.

Some people sit quietly and seethe. Some people tell the creeps to shut up. Frank Black wrote a killer song about it, a nearly 4-minute mini-epic about the good things in life and the stupid disappointments that sometimes accompany them.

The album goes out with a memorial. Shazeb Andleeb, a  Pakistani student at Narbonne High in Los Angeles, was beaten to death by a group of kids right there in the hallway in the spring of 1995. It was Frank Black’s old school and the story moved him to write a song that drops us firmly down on present day planet Earth after we’ve zipped all over space and time.

There are other worlds out there, I’m pretty certain, but while we’re still down here, this is the one that matters most.

---

Frank Black is a prolific songwriter and this was a rich period . There are lots of standout tracks on the sidelines. Fun covers, rocking originals, all with the album’s “four guys in a room” sound. The “Men in Black” CD single has strong B-sides. Also, Frank supplied his European label, Dragnet, with four exclusive extra tracks for their Cult of Ray release. There’s even an X-Files “soundtrack album” from this time that has one of my favorite Frank Black songs ever on it.

We’ll get to those when we get to the Oddballs compilation of non-album tracks pretty soon. It’s a collection so heavy with songs from this period that it’s pretty much a Cult of Ray companion.

For now though, I did want to highlight one of the European CD singles for “I Don’t Want to Hurt You (Every Single Time”). It’s subtitled The Live EP and, yep, it’s all live, even the A-side. The date was February 7, 1996 and the place was Bristol, England and the four selections here give us a band who attack the stage with total confidence.

The headliner track’s tale of conflicted love and confronting your demons resonates all the more on stage. “Men in Black” is tight and exuberant and ready for the pop charts that never accepted. it. Non-album gem “Village of the Sun” sweeps us up with unexpected grandeur. Lastly, “The Last Stand of Shazeb Andleeb” just occupies the air a little better live.

I recommend it.

---

And we must mention the sleeve art.

When Frank Black left 4AD, he lost their famous art department and began working with budgets that didn’t allow for him to hire someone else, so his album art for some years afterward was created by him and his girlfriend on their home computer.

And that’s exactly what it looks like.

Some people complain about them, but me, I think they’re charming. Because they remind me of me. I have no graphic design aptitude, either. (See this very website’s logo.)

Still, Frank tries. He doesn’t often resort to an effortless photo of himself or the band (the Dog in the Sand album later did, but Frank Black and The Catholics had earned it by that point). He prefers a little mystery and will run with a concept and I give him credit for that. My guess is that the faces here are intended to be a bunch of young Ray Bradburys.

Cool with me.

Rock ‘n’ roll wears amateurism well. Amateur is a French word that means lover, ya know.

Let’s be beautiful amateurs as we think about outer space, share our small stories of daily life, and mourn the unnecessary tragedies.