Author: Jason

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #14: PISTOLERO

Frank Black and The Catholics
Pistolero
1999, SpinART Records

Every seasoned songwriter lifer has that thing that they can’t get away from. Maybe it doesn’t show up in everything that they do, but it will always call to them and they will return to it eventually.

For Jagger and Richards, it’s black American blues. For McCartney, it’s old escapist happy stuff that comforted people through past Depressions and wars. For Dylan, it’s the mystical side of traditional folk story-songs.

For Frank Black, it’s punk rock. No, he’s never been in a punk band, but that’s not important. Keith Richards didn’t hone his craft anywhere near the Mississippi Delta, either. What matters is that Black is clearly a punk product. Born in 1965, he’s the perfect age for the early wave to have made a life-altering impression on him. When he started his own band, he borrowed as much as he could. The Pixies were never a punk band, but there was a little taste of it in everything about them, from the surface details of their music to their aversion to all rock cliches of the time.

Punks move forward and Black continued his maverick ways on computer-assisted solo albums that still confound some people today.

When he left the big labels for humbler independents in his Catholics period, he approached things like he was on SST in 1984. Like The Minutemen before them, The Catholics threw themselves into the idea that rock is a blue collar job. A band doesn’t tour to promote a record; rather, they make a record to promote a tour. You don’t take a year off. You stay busy. You go out and play. Big cities, small towns, any place that will have you. You travel in a van that you load and unload yourself. You have no expectations of “hitting it big”. You get your kicks from just doing the work.

Black not only adapted well to this, but was inspired by it. See how prolific he got with the Catholics. This all seemed to appeal to his inner punk.

That’s why I say the Catholics era is Frank Black’s punkest period.

And Pistolero might be their punkest album because it just fucking rocks.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #80: BEARD OF LIGHTNING

Phantom Tollbooth
Beard of Lightning
2003, Off Records

The Off Records label run by Chris Slusarenko out of Portland, Oregon worked with Robert Pollard on two releases that were on a mission to pair him with unlikely collaborators.

As Pollard fired out multiple LPs a year made mostly with people he knew, Off sought to show us how his singular energy works with other minds and other sounds that you didn’t see coming. They’re left turns. Rock ‘n’ roll non sequiturs. Robert Pollard is perfect for this not only for his work ethic, but also because his tastes include noise and fucked-up shit. He has one of those free and freaky minds that can go left or right at any time.

The first mutant from this experiment is The Tropic of Nipples, in which Pollard and writer Richard Meltzer trade the spotlight in a noise-rock poetry slam. It’s not for everybody.

The second one is a lot closer to a “regular” rock LP, but it manages to be an even stranger idea. In fact, I don’t know if anyone before or since has made an album with anything like the process of Beard of Lightning. 

Its story begins in New York City in the late 1980s.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #13: PIXIES AT THE BBC

Pixies
At the BBC
1998, 4AD/Elektra

Our walk through the story of Frank Black’s body of work will take side trips into these Pixies archival releases. That’s just how it goes in rock ‘n’ roll sometimes. If you saw a Frank Black live show at this time, you would have likely heard an old Pixies song here and there in the middle of a stretch of his new stuff. This release timeline will have to behave the same way. Old and new will mix. The past haunts the present and future.

The Death to The Pixies compilation moved some units, it seems, so 4AD gave us more flashbacks for our CD collections.

I bought ’em all. In 1998, I remember I even had Pixies at the BBC on the flipside of my dubbed cassette (for the car) of Frank Black and The Catholics. The past and present came together on a homemade Maxell C-90 in one poor boy’s 1987 Chevy Nova.

People argue about CDs vs. vinyl vs. digital when it comes to the best musical experience, but I think my preferred format is the shitty tape that you kept in your car back in the day and played until your stereo eventually ate it for breakfast. Rewind, fast forward, or just let it play straight through. That’s devotion. That’s how you need to hear the Pixies cover The Beatles.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #79: MIST KING URTH

Lifeguards
Mist King Urth
2003, The Fading Captain Series

Many of us who came of age with 90s American indie rock were told that pretty much the whole genre of progressive rock was complete garbage. If music journalists at the time mentioned the old prog dinosaurs at all, it was to run them down as the reason why punk needed to happen. Sid Vicious and Johnny Thunders died so that you don’t have to listen to incomprehensible concept albums and sidelong suites. Some outsider scenes in Germany and Canterbury in England were okay. King Crimson got respect as an influence on the “math-rock” bands. In general though, 1970s excesses were as cool to most 90s indie kids as a misspelling on a neck tattoo.

I know because I was there and I was one of those pipsqueaks. Young people need guidance when navigating decades of music history. Critics are always around for that, though cool family members or friends are even better. When your favorite songwriters and musicians have interesting tastes, that’s a great resource, too.

What I’m trying to say is that it was about 1998 when I finally stopped automatically flipping past old prog-rock LPs in the bins and I started to give them a chance and I did that PURELY because of Robert Pollard. He was my guru. When he talked in interviews about bands he liked or made the occasional list of favorites (The Beatles, Wire, Genesis, The Who, and Devo were always at the top), I paid close attention.

In the little indie rock island that I lived on at the time, he was the only one who talked about this rejected old shit. He was the only one mentioning The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. He got me curious.

So I dug in and I dug what I heard. And prog’s influence on Pollard’s music was plain as day. It was like a secret passage opening up.

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The Constant Bleeder Doesn’t Know Anime From Aunt May #7: BUBBLEGUM CRISIS episode 7, “Double Vision”

Since I started this series years ago, the world has changed, but you know what hasn’t changed?

I am still a massive 80s wimp.

I’m an old ripped pair of parachute pants. I’m a worn-out Rick Springfield cassette. I’m Eddie Deezen guest-starring on Punky Brewster. I’m Pac-Man cereal. I’m the last hour of Night Flight. I’m a Frogger machine in a movie theater that’s showing Losin’ It. I’m a foam McDLT container owned by some weirdo who collects old fast food packaging.

It’s my cozy place. When I need escape, I head in the direction of vintage neon and synthesizers like the zombies toward the mall in Dawn of the Dead. This is just how it is. Don’t tell me to get a life. I tried that already.

Yes, I’ve been slow in covering Bubblegum Crisis, but I like to think that’s because I’ve been savoring it.

Because this shit is mega-80s. It’s deliciously 80s. It’s beautifully 80s. And I took a long time to get to it, so why rush now?

Either that or I’m lazy.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #78: MOTEL OF FOOLS

Robert Pollard
Motel of Fools
2003, The Fading Captain Series

By 2003, it was clear that Robert Pollard had no interest in listening to his critics.

Those who couldn’t keep up with his 4-5 albums a year were just going to have to catch up later maybe.

Those who didn’t know what to make of projects such as Circus Devils were just going to have to remain confused.

Those who wanted only pop from Pollard and had no ear for his weird, personal Midwestern psychedelia were just going to have to miss out.

In the meantime, he continued to move forward, like any real artist would do, and make strange and wonderful things like Motel of Fools.

As Guided by Voices settled into a sound–a muscled classic rock kick made for the stage–Pollard’s other projects became the place where he did his searching. Much like how early Guided by Voices albums were always different from each other, Pollard solo releases at this time always took a turn that the previous ones didn’t.

Motel of Fools went for home-brewed, shoestring prog-rock. It has only seven tracks, which is normal for prog records, but this one blazes through ’em in just over thirty minutes. It’s modest and ambitious at the same time. It’s also weird and funny and another melodic marvel.

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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.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #77: THE HAROLD PIG MEMORIAL

Circus Devils
The Harold Pig Memorial
2002, The Fading Captain Series

Night. Stars shine and shadows crawl over the fresh grave of Harold Pig. The other bikers who knew him gather and talk. Stories about dangerous days and deadly nights fill the air like exhaust fumes. Some of those stories might even be true.

Harold Pig is an abstract presence here, a collage of stitched-together skin and mismatched eyes and limbs belonging to Sonny Barger and Peter Fonda and the hairy Hell’s Angels goons at Altamont, as seen in the great Rolling Stones concert documentary Gimme Shelter. He’s the loser and outlaw that defines the classic vision of the freedom-loving icon on two wheels.

Some say that the world is better off without him, but Robert Pollard refuses to keep it that simple. He had an idea for a story about a dead biker. His wrote a batch of songs that circled around it and approached it from the weirdest angles. Like most good rock concept albums, The Harold Pig Memorial is flummoxing. It doesn’t have a plot, but it does have a mood.

Roll me a fat joint at 2 AM and give me a lighter and turn off everything except for the stereo and I might be able to connect some dots between tracks such as “Dirty World News” and “Exoskeleton Motorcade”, but I don’t have those things now.

I turned 45 last week (Pollard’s age when this album came out on Halloween, his birthday, in 2002) and all I have is this old body and some sparkling water and The Harold Pig Memorial sounds to me like an album about saying goodbye.

By your mid-40s, you’ve said goodbye to so many things.

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Things I Will Keep #23: FLEETWOOD MAC, Future Games

Fleetwood Mac
Future Games
1971, Reprise Records

I was born in October 1976, which makes me too young to have any firsthand nostalgia for the 1970s, but I do have some simple, dreamy images in my head that don’t really mean anything.

The dark hallway of the house where we lived at the time. Patterns on bedsheets. Green shag carpet.

I don’t remember people. I don’t remember words. I recall nothing that happened. All I have are these surface details, these scattered dinosaur bones buried in my memory.

I’m interested in that. Why do we remember what we remember? What story did I want to keep alive somehow by remembering bedding and carpets? Is the answer so complicated that I’ll never understand it? Or is it so simple that I’ll always overlook it?

I doubt that I’ll ever know, but the first time that I heard Future Games (about twenty years ago), it sounded like a witness in my investigation. It was sooooooo 1970s and sooooooo dreamy and sooooooo removed from the present world that it touched a nerve and I had an irrational love for it right away.

According to the price sticker on my ragged old vinyl copy, I paid fifty cents for it. Sometimes that’s all that it costs to blow your mind.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #11: DEATH TO THE PIXIES

Pixies
Death to the Pixies
1997, 4AD/Elektra

Just ahead of the start of my favorite era of Frank Black’s music (the hard-touring, prolific years of Frank Black and the Catholics) came this Pixies retrospective.

It’s worth talking about because it accompanied a change in the narrative. Time brings new thoughts and new angles on old events and the story of the Pixies was a little different after this.

That band had been done for five years at this point and 4AD deemed it a good time to give them a nice headstone in the form of a double CD that offered something for the newbies (a “best of” collection on disc 1) and something for the old fans (a vintage live set on disc 2).

To promote it, Frank Black hit the press circuit and, for the first time in years, talked about his old band as something beyond a bad memory. After all, a collection like this calls for writers to go on about a group’s legacy and their history and how their music holds up.

That meant that the Pixies’ break-up drama was no longer the main topic.

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