Tag: 2002

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #20: DEVIL’S WORKSHOP

Frank Black and the Catholics
Devil’s Workshop
2002. SpinART Records

There’s only one good reason for a band to put out two new albums on the same day.

They want to get diverse. They want to show off how they can play chess AND execute a backward somersault. They want the world to hear that they can do two different things well without much time to catch their breath in between tricks.

Maybe they’re bragging, but if you’re a fan, it’s a lot of fun.

I had a lot of fun on August 20, 2002, when Frank Black and the Catholics put out two albums that lived in my car, in my CD player, and in my brain for years. I dragged my old CDs around everywhere. They’re a mess now. You won’t want to touch them without gloves.

Black Letter Days is an 18-track sprawler that’s built like a classic rock double record set. It’s indulgent and unapologetic about it.

The other one, Devil’s Workshop, does exactly what it should do, which is be the opposite. It lets the air out of the balloon.

It was recorded a few months after Black Letter Days and I recommend that you listen in that order for the full effect. Take in the epic first and then put on this shorter, sharper self-response.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #19: BLACK LETTER DAYS

Frank Black and The Catholics
Black Letter Days
2002, SpinART Records

Frank Black’s music is always annoying somebody.

When an artist makes Surfer Rosa and Teenager of the Year and Black Letter Days in a fourteen-year span, they might leave a few fans figuratively stranded at a few train stations. Not everyone follows.

Today, the brief Frank Black and the Catholics period (1998-2003) is well-loved among the deep-diggers. A new vinyl box set of their six formal studio albums is out and the reappraisals are glowing.

Twenty years ago though, when, for all that anyone knew, Black might make Catholics records forever, some people were over it after three albums. They weren’t into this classic rock sound. Maybe they were tired of the broken-heart songs. Others resented that the guy who launched his solo career with expansive studio visions not long ago was now hooked on recording everything live in the studio to 2-track tape like it’s 1963.

On the flipside though, plenty of us enjoyed it. For me, Black was my mutant Bob Dylan. The songs were stunners, but I also got engrossed in how he was building a body of work that would someday look like a bottomless well, full of phases and stages that sometimes conflict and that people argue over.

In 2002, Black and the Catholics moved at the pace of a band signed to Elektra/Asylum in 1975. A new album (or two) each year nearly. Then a lot of long road trips. They sounded like a classic rock band ready to launch their own Rolling Thunder Revue, yet they also had the discipline of a great 80s punk band who take a blue collar approach to the work. They’re ambitious, but not in a way that has anything to do with breaking big in the mainstream. They’re not even thinking about that. It’s more about honing a vision.

After four years of getting better at it, the eighteen-track lost highway of Black Letter Days sounds like what naturally emerges.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #18: PIXIES

Pixies
2002, SpinART Records

Almost nobody ever refers to it as their debut, but the first Pixies record is technically a self-released, small-press cassette nicknamed The Purple Tape. Whether copies made it to the racks of any cool Boston record stores back in the day or were sold at shows, I can’t say for sure, but this ambitious young band did send out stacks of them to record labels. (As of this writing, original copies of the tape command over $1,000 on Discogs.)

Its seventeen tracks represent everything in their arsenal circa early 1987. It’s all of the songs that they had finished, polished, and were playing in clubs. Sixteen originals and one cover of “In Heaven” from Eraserhead.

The 22-year-old Black Francis didn’t call these recordings demos. He wasn’t married to this cassette as a finished album, but the tracks themselves were ready for prime time. The band made them in a real studio (financed with a loan from Francis’s father) and, though they bashed them out in three days, they worked hard on them.

That’s when the 4AD label out of England enters the story and they liked the cassette, but they thought that an EP would be the best way to introduce the Pixies to the wider world. So, 4AD co-founder Ivo Watts-Russell selected eight highlights and that became Come On Pilgrim, the group’s really real debut.

That left nine unreleased tracks that became well-bootlegged over the years until they finally saw official release in 2002 on this starkly presented disc.

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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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Robert Pollard-Mania! #76: THE PIPE DREAMS OF INSTANT PRINCE WHIPPET

Guided by Voices
The Pipe Dreams of Instant Prince Whippet
2002, The Fading Captain Series

Were the nineteen songs of Universal Truths and Cycles not enough for you? Do you want more universal truths? Might you be interested in further cycles?

If so, Merry Christmas because this ten-song set of B-sides and castaways shortly followed the album. The band recorded a pile of songs while trying to figure out what the hell Universal Truths and Cycles was supposed to be. Going by this collection, they ruthlessly left off some punchy pop that didn’t fit on the LP’s sprawling trip.

Robert Pollard loves his contrasts and this record is less of a whirlwind than the album. It’s more blunt. It just rocks.

Even the title is a contrast.

Universal Truths and Cycles sounds big and important.

The Pipe Dreams of Instant Prince Whippet conjures up a guy who’s having too much fun with cans of whipped cream. He has big thoughts himself though, and they’ll get even bigger with his next hit of nitrous oxide.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #75: UNIVERSAL TRUTHS AND CYCLES (the album)

Guided by Voices
Universal Truths and Cycles
2002, Matador Records

This album came out in June of 2002 and it ruled my summer. I spent the whole sweaty season thinking about these nineteen songs again and again. In 2021, I still do.

The only good thing about my depressing new office job back then was that you could live in your headphones all day. It was a lifeless setting in which I craved lively music. Singer-songwriters and slow stuff never lasted long in my portable tape deck (before download codes and cheap digital players came later in the decade, dubbed cassettes were the least fussy way to listen to your vinyl away from home).

I needed music that rocked and made bold leaps between moods. I wanted albums that you could live with and ponder and have a different favorite song every time you played it. More than ever, I needed music that sounded like a world to explore, a place to go when you’re lost.

Man, it was as if Universal Truths and Cycles was made just for me.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #74: UNIVERSAL TRUTHS AND CYCLES (the single)

Guided by Voices
“Universal Truths and Cycles” b/w “Beg for a Wheelbarrow”
2002, The Fading Captain Series

This is the fourth and final* 7″ teaser single released before the Universal Truths and Cycles album would hit the racks of your local Camelot Music in the summer of 2002 and it’s got the best B-side of the batch.

(*There were some European CD singles with repeated A-sides and that offered even more non-album tracks, but those can wait for a compilation EP that’s coming up soon.)

The flip here is called “Beg for a Wheelbarrow” and it’s a sinister beast meant for a band who can summon real thunder. It builds tension in an insistent post-punk march and then releases it in a haunting acapella section. Pollard’s words are about being broke, in debt and under the boot heel.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #73: EVERYWHERE WITH HELICOPTER

Guided by Voices
“Everywhere With Helicopter” b/w “Action Speaks Volumes”
2002, The Fading Captain Series

Rock is the word and the word is rock for this third 7″ on the ramp up to GBV’s indie rock homecoming album, Universal Truths and Cycles.

“Everywhere With Helicopter” is as commercial a single as Guided by Voices ever put out. Your average radio call-in contestant for Foo Fighters tickets in 2002 could easily get into its Nirvana-like kick. Meanwhile, Pollard’s melody ascends, descends, spins and attacks like an expertly flown Air Force jet maneuver. Every verse is a rocket that takes out a target.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #72: CHEYENNE

Guided by Voices
“Cheyenne” b/w “Visit This Place”
2002, The Fading Captain Series

“Cheyenne” is a song that only Robert Pollard would write. In the world of 2002, at least. That’s why it’s my favorite of the four Universal Truths and Cycles 7″ singles.

That said, it’s not any kind of left turn.

It’s made up of familiar pieces. It works on classic pop song machinery perfected long before Guided by Voices existed. “Cheyenne” is a product of the 1960s and of wearing out needles spinning piles of records by The Beatles and The Bee Gees (60s-era albums such as Idea and Odessa) and The Who over years and years.

It’s not the parts of “Cheyenne” that are so unique; no, it’s the way that they’re handled.

It’s like an artist’s line. You see an illustration and you instantly know who drew it. Only one person makes curves and crosshatches like that.

“Cheyenne” is about the mix of total pop with a curious dash of Pollard’s art-rock influences.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #71: BACK TO THE LAKE

Guided by Voices
“Back to the Lake” b/w “Dig Through My Window”
2002, The Fading Captain Series

The least controversial music news of 2002 was that Guided by Voices were back on Matador Records.

Everyone who cared was happy about it. Everyone knew that it was better this way. The prospect of a more free and spontaneous approach from the band was a welcome thing. The world needed a Guided by Voices who were under no pressure to achieve heavy radio rotation next to Puddle of Mudd.

The hits didn’t happen, but they got through the TVT era without becoming sellout jerks, which counts as a victory to me. Dignity was intact. Inspiration was running at a high. The band seemed to hardly take a breath between labels as they got to work on what I consider one of the very best albums to carry the Guided by Voices name, Universal Truths and Cycles.

But we can’t talk about that yet.

First we have to get into the whopping FOUR 7″ singles of preview tracks, released on The Fading Captain Series, because, hey, maybe the best way to hype an album is to make a big show of confidence like that rather than… whatever the hell TVT did.

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