Frank Black-O-Rama! #12: FRANK BLACK AND THE CATHOLICS

Frank Black and The Catholics
Frank Black and The Catholics
1998, Play It Again Sam

I think it was autumn of 1997 when I read the news and got annoyed.

I even wrote to Frank Black’s record label at the time, American Recordings, which isn’t normally my style, but it was easy to heat me up back then. My message, sent from my old college e-mail account, is long lost, but I recall that it went something like this:

Dear American Recordings dickheads,

Hey, quit being jerks and put out Frank Black’s new album. I read the news on Addicted to Noise. They said you won’t release it. Why, you creeps? It sounds cool. So what if it’s a little rough around the edges? Did you know that he was in the Pixies? You ever heard of that band, dummies? 

Get fucked,
Jason

American somehow resisted my persuasive powers and did not offer us Frank Black and The Catholics, but we eventually got it about a year later via independent labels.

The story that I read in ’97 was that Frank Black formed a mysterious band called The Catholics and his new release with them was finished and ready to go. The twist was that the recordings were all live in the studio and intended to be a demo, but Black liked the results enough to decide that it was the album. It was done.

According to the rumor, American Recordings disagreed, but our hero wasn’t budging.

Now, there might be more to it than that. It was common in the 90s for labels to ditch artists after one album that didn’t fly off the mall racks, so it’s possible that American were dropping him anyway (I still remember when Elektra dropped Spoon just a few months after putting out their major label howdy in 1998). Alternately, maybe Black merely wanted out of his contract. I don’t know. Either is believable.

What I do know is that, as a young pipsqueak, this news got me to imagine a truly CRAZY piece of rock music. Too noisy for the big stupid label. In my early 20s, I craved extremes.

When I finally heard the Catholics album, that’s not what it was, but it still held me and grew on me. I wasn’t smart about many things back then, but I did know that you don’t dismiss Frank Black records after one listen.

So, who were The Catholics? They weren’t a new band at all, turns out. They were the same band who played on The Cult of Ray, the same band that Black got to know well over the long 1996 world tour. Lyle Workman, David McCaffrey and Scott Boutier.

And was their record too wild for the major label wimps? NO. Nothing here would offend the ears of the average Tom Petty fan. The band are tight and professional and these twelve songs are sturdy pieces of craft heavy with classic influences. You have to listen close to even tell that it’s live. It’s an unsweetened sound, but also vivid and loud, as recorded by Billy Joe Bowers. No one disappears in the mix. Black clearly thought that he had a shit-hot crew backing him up.

The band threw themselves into live recording (to old-fashioned two-track tape) for the next five years. It became the Catholics’ identity and they got better at it with each release. That’s partly because they toured like a hungry new punk band. Frank Black and The Catholics played everywhere. They played the big cities, but they also played out-of-the-way places that most bands on the club circuit skip. They played Maine. They played El Paso. The stage was the Catholics’ home and their records were snapshots of what they could do.

It had nothing in common with any modern trends and it had everything to do with the old way of doing things. Duke Ellington and Hank Williams didn’t have umpteenth tracks of overdubs to work with and there’s nothing wrong with their records. Those old guys were touring acts. They had little conception of records as displaying anything beyond the sound that their band could make in a room. Frank Black is a history buff and he probably thinks about things like that.

It also might have been a kiss-off to the mainstream music industry. Black played that game for three releases as a solo act and nurtured a healthy cult following along the way, but never broke through big. He made the kind of albums that one magazine on the rack raves about while the magazine next to that one hates it.

Major labels didn’t have time for complicated artists like that in the late 90s as “alternative rock” was dying out.

So the smartest move for a guy like him was to go independent. Play to the cult. Go with your gut. Cut out all of the bullshit. Walk away from any competition with new young bands for fleeting relevance. Instead soak up inspiration from the venerable old titans whose music has survived a few generations.

It wasn’t about imitation. No, it was seasoned rocker taking on a challenge.

The Catholics years are my favorite era for Frank Black’s music. I listen to these songs endlessly. I have a lot to say about why this period was great and what it brought out of Frank Black.

And I have five more albums, two B-side collections, a live record and a box set to squeeze it all into. I think that might be enough room.

Let’s get into this first one.

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When I listen to Frank Black and The Catholics for the thousandth time, two observations leap forth.

1.) Frank Black was clearly over being rock’s top UFO conspiracy weirdo. There’s not ONE WORD on this whole album about Mars or outer space or aliens. The subjects here are love gone wrong, death, religion, escape, traffic, mysticism, personal misery and Jonathan Richman.

2.) I think that Black got heavy into Bob Dylan at this time. He has too strong of a personality of his own to imitate Dylan outright, but the elder seems to have resonated with him as a writer who could be esoteric in one song and then earthy in the next one. Frank Black and The Catholics takes a cue from Dylan albums such as Street Legal from 1978. On that one, the mystifying epic “The Changing of the Guards” (tellingly, covered by Frank Black and The Catholics for a B-side during this time) sits pretty next to songs such as “Baby Stop Crying” that lay it all on the surface.

The tracklist of Frank Black and The Catholics is in alphabetical order, which is a quiet statement that it’s all about the songs. Let ’em stand or fall on their own. No meticulous album sequence necessary.

That said, the record still flows comfortably with an ear for variety. The first six songs even stand as a tidy summary of ideas that the band would expand on over time.

There’s a whisper of enigmatic Dylan in “All My Ghosts”, the album’s kick-off track and lead single. Over music that oddly starts off like punk rock before it settles into a nice midtempo groove, Black sings about immortality. It’s about living long enough to figure out the mysteries of the world and eventually see the action-packed end of it all. The first line starts up the fantasy (“If I could live to be several hundred…”) and the last verse takes us to Armageddon (“I had a date for the eleventh hour”). Along the way, we get a verse about the Nephilim and a curious bridge about a horrible car accident and a porno store that drops us down from the clouds and back to normal Earth.

“Back to Rome” is a break-up song (a Catholics staple) presented via a Fall of the Roman Empire metaphor that might coax a smirk out of you once you get it. “Rome” represents the good times of a relationship since gone sour. Our narrator thinks that it’s possible to go back, but NOPE. We know that ain’t happenin’, despite the upbeat music.

If the first two tracks had anyone baffled, the third one is as straightforward as any Buddy Holly song. There’s barely a hint of weird old Black Francis in “Do You Feel Bad About It?”, another break-up tune. The only thing even mildly eccentric about it is its briskness. It’s blue collar rock delivered with punk rock speed. Just over two minutes. No guitar solo. No anticipatory intro. This song gets right to it and then gets right out.

Up next in the alphabetical cavalcade is “Dog Gone”, which is an apocalypse song (another staple subject for Black). It looks like they went and dropped the bomb. Or maybe some cosmic event took us by surprise. All we know is that everything’s gone except for a few weary survivors scrambling in the strange new world to the tune of a pensive, yet pretty melody (this was the second single). I have fuzzy memories of an old interview in which Black says that the lyrics are from a dog’s point of view, but don’t quote me on that.

Track five, “I Gotta Move”, is a death song (yet another staple subject) and a Los Angeles song (ditto). It covers two real life deaths, Jack Nance and Peter Ivers. Both were involved in the film Eraserhead (Nance was the lead actor; Ivers composed the music for “In Heaven”, which the Pixies used to cover) and both died thirteen years apart as a result of sudden violence in the LA area. There are at least two ways to interpret the chorus (“I gotta move/ I had a taste/ I gotta move/ I gotta get me off the face”). It’s either about being disgusted by the city and wanting to leave or it’s from the dead man’s point of view. He’s saying see ya later. Time for me to go. Death is just the next trip. Nothing in the song’s punchy three-and-a-half minutes argues against either of those points.

By this time, we’ve been through a lot and I need peace. Good thing that the next song is “I Need Peace”. When the world is an awful place, turn up some good sounds. Maybe it’s your favorite records, but I get the sense that Black here is talking about making music (“I need peace/ I get so down/ I got these/ Turned up so loud”). Make a noise. Create something. That might shut up the demons. On an album dominated by quick-burners, “I Need Peace” stretches out for over five minutes. The powerful instrumental throwdown in the middle might be more important than the verses that Black sings. It’s part classic rock, but it also has the jagged edges of punk.

And that’s the album’s first half. Love is fading. People are dying. The world is ending. There is some respite to be had, but Frank Black and The Catholics are always telling us about the end of the road. That’s where every blues, country, and folk musician hangs out, too. That’s where you find the best songs.

The second half starts off happy! On “King & Queen of Siam”, Black ascends and descends and bellows and shouts like a soul man. He sings lines such as “It was a royal rule/ To make sweet love just all of the time” as the band lay down a cozy 1960s hip-shaker. Meanwhile, Lyle Workman’s sleek lead guitar keens like it thinks it’s a back-up singer.

Next up is a cover song, “Six Sixty-Six” from Christian rock luminary Larry Norman. It originally appeared in 1976 on Norman’s dreamy In Another Land LP, one of the great sleeper rock albums of its day. There, it’s a mellow acoustic moment, the voice of the meek standing firm against the Antichrist. Black’s version though takes a completely different direction. It’s a cowpunk blast so loose that he laughs his way through the outro. From the early Pixies days, Black has often referred to Biblical drama, but has never written a totally straightforward song about it. Norman’s song seems to free him to go there. Black would continue to mess around with it live. In a few years, the Catholics played “Six Sixty-Six” on stage as an apocalyptic dirge that bared little resemblance to their album arrangement.  In Black’s solo acoustic shows, he eventually took to performing it a cappella. There are many ways to say “With the face of an angel and the heart of a beast/ His intentions were six sixty-six”.

The alphabet then blesses with a perfect follow-up. Coming off of the God stuff is Frank Black’s most Black Sabbath-sounding song. To some heavy riffing, “Solid Gold” tells a tale of road rage. Traffic sucks. Everyone hates it. It brings out the bad side of people. Here’s a song about it, though it took me a few listens to figure that out from Black’s evasive words.

As we get toward the end, Dylan’s shadow returns in the perplexing “Steak ‘n’ Sabre”. Black plays the soul singer again. He’s testifying, but this time in lines such as “I was swimming in Bali when I got swallowed/ By something hollow/ We were going down to a different kind of world”. I think it’s a song about the enormity of the world. Civilized human beings are just a small part of it. “The world” also means the bottom of the ocean and the plants and the animals the past and the future and… Anyone got a joint?

Things get a little more simple on “Suffering”. A depressed person lashes out. He hates the people who are having a good time. He hates their bright plans for the future. He thinks that everyone should go to hell. The bridge reveals that he’s disabled from an accident and Black lets him rant unchecked in an explosive rocker. A lot of reviewers compare it to The Who, but it sounds to me more like Husker Du. It’s tense in that same way.

The album ends on an alphabetical cheat, but it’s a great song so who cares? Some of us mega-geeks first heard “The Man Who Was Too Loud” a few years before on The John Peel Session EP. There it’s a catchy gem arranged on the quick with Teenage Fanclub. The Catholics version tightens it up a bit so that the melody stands out all the more. Its classic chords flirt with power pop and the song’s Jonathan Richman tribute remains touching and sweet.  It’s a nice happy ending to an album mostly full of different shades of darkness.

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It’s a sharp change in direction from the computer-assisted synthetic sound of just a few albums ago, but it’s not a total left turn. Black’s songs have always been built on classic rock influences. Pixies lyrics often referenced the avant garde, but their music was anything but that. It was pop determined to get stuck in your head no matter how crazily Francis screamed.

Me, I was one of those kids who always liked old music. My first favorite band was The Monkees (and this hit me around 1986). From there, a boy works his way to the Beatles and Stones. Then a little later, maybe Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. In high school and college, I dipped my toe in old school punk while I also got into trad jazz and classic country, some of which I wasn’t ready for yet, but I was still curious. Getting to know the roots of things was always important to me.

Frank Black’s body of work has the same trajectory, the same obsessions.

As I get older, my ear for the roots of music only becomes more curious and broader. I even dig into old gospel music these days, something that I never even thought about when I was a kid. (Good gateway drug: “Give God a Chance” by The Gospel Stars from 1963.)

It’s not about living in the past. It’s not about being “retro”. It’s not that simple.

I think it’s a fascination for things that are always there.

The old songs that never go away. The old topics that people never stop singing about. The old records that still sound good. The old bands who keep going.

Maybe it’s so interesting because you know what’s NOT going to be always there?

Me. You. None of us.

But if we snuggle up to that heartbeat of great old music, we can at least be in the company of something immortal. Something bigger than us.

Frank Black and his newly christened band were, for awhile, one of those things that was always there. They kept busy. Endless tour schedules. A new album (or two) almost every year, recorded live even when the arrangements got more ambitious later.

They grasped for something divine through grueling work and meticulous ritual. They probably made things harder on themselves than necessary, but it was all in the service of a vision.

How Catholic.