Tag: 4AD

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #17: (PIXIES) COMPLETE ‘B’ SIDES

Pixies
Complete ‘B’ Sides
2001, 4AD

I have a special respect for bands who put out good B-sides.

In fact, some days (every other Tuesday and the odd Sunday) I’d even say that the mark of a great band is the coolness of their throwaway tracks. The stuff that didn’t make the album. The stuff that they have laying around. The stuff that they cough up when the record company needs them to simply fill up some space.

B-sides are one of those fascinating aberrations of the old music industry. Ever since records started being pressed and sold, they’ve had two sides and even if one side was a surefire hit, you had to put something, anything, on the other side or you looked like an asshole. B-sides were space-fillers, but they were also sometimes a way to “share the wealth”.

For example, let’s say it’s 1961 and a group records a great song that the radio is sure to love. What about the B-side? Well, in many cases, the producer would hack out a goofy instrumental that nobody would ever care about (sometimes not even involving the A-side’s performers). The result was that if the A-side became a hit and sold a bajillion copies, the credited writer of the B-side benefited from that, too. in terms of royalties. They got a free ride into some big money. (See the likes of Phil Spector and Kazenetz-Katz, who were particularly brazen about it.)

That’s the seedy side of it all, but there are other sides. Like any good record, there’s always another side.

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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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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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Frank Black-O-Rama! #7: TEENAGER OF THE YEAR

Frank Black
Teenager of the Year
1994, Elektra/4AD

I have a weakness for “overstuffed suitcase” albums. I love long, unwieldy track-lists. Lots of songs, lots of moods, lots of mixed reviews from the critics.

Albums that have thirty-seven tracks on ’em for no special reason other than that’s what happened. Somebody tipped over the toybox, made a big mess, and decided that the room looked better that way.

My favorites sound almost like accidents. They aren’t conceptual rock operas. There’s no grand, four-sided double album vision (many of them aren’t even double albums). No, they overflow because that’s how the wind was blowing and the artist is okay with looking crazy. It’s okay to look crazy in rock ‘n’ roll. In fact, I’d recommend it.

Frank Black has looked crazy before. He continues to look crazy here, starting with the cover photo.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #6: FRANK BLACK

Frank Black
Frank Black
1993, 4AD/Elektra

In the Pixies, Black Francis wrote fun, memorable songs about surrealism and aliens, but he didn’t get really weird until he flipped his stage name and became rock music’s top science nerd.

Why the change? The break-up of the old band was just that bitter, I guess. He had to wash it off. Treat it like something best forgotten. He wouldn’t even play Pixies songs live for five years.

There was also something punk rock about it in an old school way. It gave off street cred. In their early 80s heyday, the likes of Black Flag and Husker Du played live shows typically dominated by their new stuff even when it wasn’t yet out on a record. Leaning on your past is what tired old rock stars do. Real motherfuckers move forward.

So, on that note, meet Frank Black, 4AD’s newest pop sensation! Hear his hopelessly strange “debut” of brilliant songs that surf on waves of crisp, synthetic sounds. It was also his best and most eccentric work yet at the time.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #5: TROMPE LE MONDE

Pixies
Trompe le Monde
1991, 4AD/Elektra

The Pixies’ break-up is not an interesting story.

There are MUCH more juicy rock music scandals out there. There are bands who ended because of murder. Or suicide. Or murder-suicides. Some bands ended because someone in it was certifiably insane. There are bands who ended with shotgun blasts, overdoses, plane crashes and prison sentences. Some performers died on stage. Other bands went down in a flurry of lawsuits. Sex, violence, money, drugs and mental illness have all collided in some combination or another throughout music history to result in some real harrowing soap operas.

How did the Pixies end?

With a fax.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #4: BOSSANOVA

Pixies
Bossanova
1990, 4AD/Elektra

Mainstream opinion puts the first two Pixies albums on a pedestal and then treats the next two as lesser lights. There’s always somebody around who insists that Doolittle is their best. It was definitive, they might say. It’s the perfect snapshot of the band’s personality. The peak of their screaming surrealism and pulverizing pop. Doolittle was the album on which the band sharpened their blade as good as it was ever gonna get.

There are some cuddly songs on Bossanova and Trompe le Monde, sure, but the shine was off the chrome–or maybe it was TOO shiny as the band got more comfortable in bed with producer Gil Norton, who had a real ear for how to make these strange songs sound like sugar.

Now, I disagree. I disagree so much that I declare Bossanova my favorite of the original Pixies albums. I think it’s great. If the previous records are played-out to the max in my world, this one is still breezy and fun to me. It’s a perfect pop album. It makes me bounce off the walls.

Still, I do understand the detractors to a degree. While Bossanova isn’t a total departure–it’s still no-nonsense screamy rock music–there ARE differences from what came before.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #3: DOOLITTLE

Pixies
Doolittle
1989, 4AD/Elektra

I can’t listen to Doolittle anymore. I don’t hate it, but I’m finished with it.

There was a time when I loved it. There was a time when it was everything to me. It was my first Pixies album and right away, I thought that it was as good as music got. After my very first listen, I had a new favorite band (“Sorry, Beatles, you’re now #2”). No music had ever punched me in the face like that before. No music had ever screamed at me like that before. It was raw blunt force trauma with catchy hooks. The songs were jagged and jittery. They were quick little things that sliced through space and time like razors. And they were all so good and instantly infectious, not to mention darkly funny. They were stuck in my head all day, a constant source of energy and inspiration.

And now I’m done with it. Have been for at least fifteen years. I think I used it all up.

I was 19 and a total dork in 1995 when I bought Doolittle at a used CD store and Black Francis was 23 when he made it. A whole lot of life was waiting to happen to both of us. Over time, I think both he and I would relate less and less to this album’s shrieking young smartass, however brilliant he was, and move on to other things.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #2: SURFER ROSA

Pixies
Surfer Rosa
1988, 4AD/Elektra

Surfer Rosa is one of those great albums that a band makes once and then never makes again.

That’s not an insult to the other Pixies LPs, all of which I like. The later albums may even have better songs overall, but this one is uniquely apocalyptic. Every crazed and ridiculous (and infectious) song on it feels like one piece of an atomic bomb. Once it’s all put together–BOOM!

They can never do what they did here again. You shouldn’t expect it from them. They will never be this age again. It will never be 1988 again. Their ideas will never seem this strange again. They will never again have the energy of a band who don’t know if they have a future so they’re using up everything they’ve got right now.

At the very least, an upstart band who are capable of could-be/should-be hits such as “Gigantic” and “Where is My Mind?” will almost always try, in time, to make records that are at least a liiiittle bit more slick and shiny than their first. They’re clearly ambitious. They’re not dedicated to being noisy scum-rockers. They’re going to evolve.

Hey, it’s only a sell-out if it sucks.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #1: Introduction and COME ON PILGRIM

I still call him Frank Black.

Maybe you call him Black Francis, the stage name under which he made his most famous music. It was the name he began his career with, then changed, and then later assumed again.

Maybe you’re one of those weirdos who call him by his real name, Charles. I’ve seen people do this. It’s fine if you know him personally, but kinda creepy if you don’t. Just sayin’.

Whatever name you use, you know who I’m talking about. The Pixies guy. Aloof. Likes to cultivate an air of mystery. Never looks like he’s happy to see you, not that you can tell since he often hides his eyes behind a swanky pair of shades. Sings about surrealism and UFOs, space girls and the apocalypse, Ray Bradbury and Pong, Los Angeles and lost love.

Blessed with a loud and versatile voice, he can scream a door off its hinges, but he almost never speaks to the audience when he performs. Over time, the ol’ waistline expanded and he went bald, but he wore it well and it only enhanced his status as an unconventional rock icon. If your songs are good, you don’t need to be a pin-up. If your songs are really, really fuckin’ good, whatever you look like becomes cool.

Cool is not a thing to which you conform; it’s a thing that you create.

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