Frank Black and the Catholics
Show Me Your Tears
2003, SpinART Records
There’s not much writing about the end of Frank Black and the Catholics. They weren’t the kind of group that anyone gossiped about.
When the Pixies got back together in 2004 some thought that the Catholics might merely go on hiatus. I remember seeing speculation that once this reunion played itself out, the Catholics would return.
Oh, how innocent we were!
That made some kind of sense at the time, though. Also, speculation was all that we had. Black talked to a million writers in 2004 who wanted to know how well he and Kim Deal were getting along and what he thought about Kurt Cobain. No one asked Catholics questions, so it took years for Black to confirm in the press that the Catholics fell apart all by themselves. It was over.
A 2021 interview with Independent.co.uk quotes him:
“[They] were totally burned out on me and burned out on my methodology,” following, he’s previously asserted, “10 years of hard touring and loading our own gear and not making a lotta money out of it”.
I don’t think I need more explanation than that.
From their strict live-in-the-studio recording method to their endless tours, the Catholics did everything the hard way. That was the point of the band. It’s a wonder that they lasted as long as they did.
To their vast credit, they never flinched. Rich Gilbert, Dave Phillips, David McCaffrey, and Scott Boutier were pros. If they were burning out, they never gave it away on record. Each album is a new show of confidence and Show Me Your Tears stands for me as their most beautiful Valentine’s candy box of sad songs.
Let’s cover them one by one. I love this album and I’ve got my coins ready for the jukebox.
“Nadine”
The opener is ALL sexed up (“Will she let me in/ Underneath her clothes?/ That girl got skin like a ghost!”). Nadine sounds like a hottie and the song’s narrator sounds like a crazy man as he shouts and growls her name over and over while the band pound out swinging, demonic blues.
Every now and then Black writes a song like this, a celebratory rave-up that sounds like it’s from a mental patient. He’s an insane person who REALLY wants us to know about the greatness of Un Chien Andalou or Pong.
Here, he wants us to know about Nadine. NADINE, NADINE, NA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NADINE!! He’s so worked up that I’m a little worried about what he’s going to do to Nadine when he gets hold of her.
“Everything is New”
Grief. The person you love is gone and now everything is different. Black grounds his song in the story of Billie Jean Jones, widow of Hank Williams. He was found dead from his short life of drink, drugs, and trouble on New Year’s Day of 1953. Shortly after, she married another country singer, Johnny Horton, and he died in a car accident seven years later. One sudden death is hard enough. How do you deal with two? That’s what this song reckons with in a few haunting verses. This song is also about the magical combo of piano and pedal steel and how it can roll by like storm clouds.
“My Favorite Kiss”
A man who travels for work kisses his woman goodbye every time before he leaves and all he can think about afterward is that the passion is gone and the relationship is done. This track clocks in at a mere 2:05 and my only thought about it for twenty years was that it was an example of the Catholics’ expert brevity. They were good at playing only what a song needed and not one note more. Also, this was merely another portrait of love gone sour from a man who’d become hooked on writing them. It was a fictional situation.
Then that 2021 Independent interview that I linked above revealed this:
When his first wife heard 2003’s troubled Show Me Your Tears, with its songs of emptiness, desolation and “imminent divorce”, she suggested they needed to talk. “I had no idea,” he says. “I was like, ‘Huh? I’m just trying to write songs, man, I’m just trying to be universal, you’re misreading everything.’ But now I listen to that record, I’m like, ‘Holy f***ing s***, the whole thing’s a f***ing goddamn letter, practically.’ At the time I didn’t know it because I was too caught up in it, I was too stoned, whatever. I was just like, ‘Wooo! Making music!’ You don’t really think about maybe that you are commenting on your own paradigm… I use this word very lightly, but you end up being prophetic about your own life.”
Now, I couldn’t tell you what exactly his ex-wife heard on Show Me Your Tears. There are details that only she would notice, I’m sure. Even Black himself didn’t notice them, as we just read. I won’t dwell on interpreting the album through this lens (particularly since Black’s next album of original songs, Honeycomb, directly addresses the divorce).
But the spare lines of “My Favorite Kiss” are the ones that most obviously apply to Frank Black’s life at the time as a touring musician. It’s a simple song. told from one point of view, which is that of the guy who hits the road with a hole in his heart.
And I wonder if maybe the ex-wife identified too much with the other side to ignore.
“Jaina Blues”
This is the album’s one song that has nothing on the surface to do with love, lust, loss, or tragedy. I can’t help but think though that some devastating heartbreak led its narrator to throw himself into the Indian religion of Jainism. Black screams through the struggle to live up to its tenets. Will he make it? I don’t know, but an infectious organ riff does its best to help.
“New House of the Pope”
The title is an English translation of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, a French red wine. Love has gone bad and that’s what we’re drinking. The smoky cabaret vibe is a perfect comedown from the previous rocker.
“Horrible Day”
It plays like a rowdy country-rock singalong delivered with a smirk. until you listen to the words and it becomes one of the darkest songs on the album. “Horrible Day” is a suicide note. Our narrator has so many troubles that one day he tells the world to fuck off and he hits the road on a trip straight toward death. Maybe he intends to drive off a bridge (“I’ll take off with my worries/ And I’ll even let death drive”). Deciding to kill himself is the only thing in his life that has any control over and he’s upbeat about it.
“Massif Centrale”
Another song from a runaway, but this guy leaves the USA and hides out in rural France where no one he knows can find him. I hear a man who’s been married for awhile and was happy with that, but it ended and now he’s rudderless. He admires a woman from afar, but he’s out of practice at making the approach. He watches her body language in a neurotic way for some indication that she’s receptive (“that’s the sign of her love behavior”). He’s fragile and afraid of being hurt again. That’s the song and it’s a top-shelf anthem with a great structure that knows exactly when to lay us out with a musical suckerpunch. It’s my favorite rocker on the album.
“When Will Happiness Find Me Again?”
“I believed in the Fates/ I thought they were great” is the classic line in this tale of a country boy who moves to the big city and has his heart broken by a woman. This performance sounds like it’s the band’s 80th take and they’re a little tired of it, but that weariness adds to the song.
“Goodbye Lorraine”
Another one with lots of pedal steel and country vibes. Love has gone sour yet again, but the twist this time is that our narrator is the one who left. Lorraine wants to reconnect, but Frank just can’t and he’s having trouble explaining why. Maybe Lorraine’s a little too freaky for him. I’ve always been struck by this lyric: “She said if we’ll be witches/ Then there must be nakedness/ I said you have no heart until/ That aching fills your chest”.
“This Old Heartache”
My favorite song here. I want to make a movie only so I can score a scene with its smoky lounge arrangement and weird guitar solo. For Black, it’s also a Leonard Cohen moment. It’s in his cool vocal delivery and his dreamy words. It’s a strange love letter. The narrator wants a woman to know that he appreciates her, but she’ll never cure “this old heartache”. He’s damaged beyond repair.
“The Snake”
A rocker with a screaming sax solo! Frank learned that he was born in the year of The Snake, according to the Chinese zodiac. A trait of a Snake is that they go by spontaneous intuition. They follow their gut and aren’t ones to make big plans. Black related to this and it became his go-to explanation when asked about his approach to music and where he wants to go with it in the future. Here, it becomes another broken heart song and our narrator is a Snake when it comes to love. He can’t commit. He causes nothing but pain. No one is better for having met him. It all catches up to him when he realizes how lonely he is.
“Coastline”
A gentle one to ease us toward the end. A harmonica joins a lovely bed of acoustic guitar and pedal steel and another song about bad love. The lyrics continue the theme of people who are too screwed up to be happy. There are many cheating songs out there. Some pour soul’s heart gets broken due to the treachery of another. Black’s written a stack of those himself, so much maybe that by this point he’s more interested in how the broken-hearted person brings their unhappiness upon themselves. Sometimes unhappiness is all that someone knows and they will always steer in that direction. It’s insane, but people often have patterns that they can’t escape. Or as Black writes in this song’s opening lines, “There’s a perfect explanation for the shit that I’ve been in/ As soon as I find out, I’ll let you know”.
“Manitoba”
The final Catholics song. We have two B-sides collections coming up, but “Manitoba” is still the last song. It’s the closing gesture. It ends how the Catholics should end, with sadness and winter. Its arrangement is a gorgeous mist. Pedal steel and restrained horns join in to play what amounts to funeral music while Black tells a curious story. Someone up in snowy Manitoba sees strange lights in the sky and heads out to see what’s happening. Why? Maybe because there’s nothing else to do (“The people were a few/ And the nights were never colder”). Because this is a Frank Black song, the lights could be a UFO, but because this is a Frank Black & The Catholics song, it could be merely an ambulance or a fire truck. Or maybe it’s “the face of God”, as this song calls it. Along the way, the lights fade and our searcher gets lost and weakened by the weather. They pass out. They’re discovered disoriented and frost-bitten. Next thing you know, they’re committed to a sanitarium. The holes in story are filled in by the beautiful music. It’s one of the greatest Catholics tracks.
Show Me Your Tears has some startling guest appearance credits in the booklet.
Van Dyke Parks shows up (piano, accordion). So does Stan Ridgway (harmonica, melodica, banjo, percussion, vocals). Ohio oddball Jack Kidney plays here (saxophone, harmonica), as do Keith Moline and Andy Diagram (credited here as Andy J. Perkins), who some may know as The 2 Pale Boys in their collaborations with David Thomas.
They’re a cast of players who come everywhere from 1960s classic record production (Parks) to modern artsy stuff (Moline and Diagram).
Their presence illustrates what I consider to be the coolest thing about Frank Black and the Catholics, which is that the group was partly about gathering musicians with maverick sensibilities and asking them to play classic rock with a straight face. Get some musical weirdos together to make juke joint ravers, Stones-y rockers, and sad country songs. See what they do with it. See what happens.
I’ll tell you what happened. One of my favorite bands happened. Some of my favorite albums happened. Some of my favorite live shows I’ve ever seen happened. A bunch of songs that will be in my life forever happened.
In between the lines of this music is a powerful statement about how to get older. Rock musicians can hit the wall hard. The young hellion’s accomplishments get held against the middle-aged bald man who’s still out there doing it.
Black powered through these years of “irrelevance” by making like a young band on SST in the early 80s. Tour anywhere and everywhere and do it in a van that you load and unload yourself. Always have a new album on the way. Put your new songs in the live set NOW, even it’s going to be awhile before they come out on a record. Be intense and fearsome and dedicated to the road and always moving on to the next thing until the band flames out and falls apart.
I don’t see anything wrong with that. Twenty years later, the Catholics years hold up as my favorite period for Black’s music.
Back in 2004, I was one of those fans who hoped that this Pixies reunion thing would blow over soon and we’d get our Catholics back. That never happened, but there’s nothing to mourn here.
Frank Black and the Catholics gave us six great albums in five years, which is a hell of a run. And that doesn’t even count TWO B-sides collections, a live album, and a box set, all of which are coming later and that I intend to cover here in time.
I still have lots of room to pay tribute to the band. Later, I will likely get deeper into what the Catholics continue to mean to me, but for now I raise my glass to a band who gave us more than anyone should have expected from them and who ended exactly when it was time to end.