Tag: Frank Black

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #21: SHOW ME YOUR TEARS

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.

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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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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! #16: DOG IN THE SAND

Frank Black and the Catholics
Dog in the Sand
2001, What Are Records?

As I crumble and stumble through old age, I’ve learned that the musicians who mean the most to me have two things in common.

1) They never go away. They’re always there. Even after their band breaks up, their album bombs, their label drops them, or they fall out of fashion, they keep going. They have a new record out next year. They don’t hide away for a decade. Bad reviews bounce off of them. I find this life-affirming.

2) They’re ambitious. However, I’m NOT talking about the sort of ambition that drives a person to do anything for success. Stab their collaborators in the back. Bow to the big entertainment shit machine. Con their way to the top of mountain. No, I’m talking about an ambition that means challenging yourself and putting out work that reflects a vision and a variety of interests. People change. They go through phases. I like when musicians do the same. If a band or solo act has ten albums out, I’m most impressed when album #10 is on a different trip from album #1.

Now, there are great bands who don’t fit into one or either of the above descriptions.

The reckless types who burned bright and flamed out early, like Robert Johnson or Syd Barrett, are perpetually fascinating.

There’s also something to be said for bands like Motorhead or the Ramones, who found their one sound and then worked it until they dropped.

That’s all fine, but I’m not hooked on them like I am on guys like Frank Black, who dare to evolve, even if they lose some people along the way.

And I really get sold on them when they quietly put out masterpieces such as Dog in the Sand.

So much comes together here. Its sound is a step up in sophistication from what came before. Its twelve songs touch on where Black had been and where he was interested in going at the time. Its subjects are outer space, California, sadness, death, and the beautiful thing that occurs when pedal steel guitar and piano collide with rock ‘n’ roll.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #15: ODDBALLS

Frank Black
Oddballs
2000, no label

Oddballs has some of my favorite inner sleeve notes of any album. They’re simple, but strangely touching.

It begins with a brief explanation written by Frank Black himself that the disc in your hands is a collection of B-sides and other off-road trips from his early solo years (1994 to 1997). Below that is the tracklist and for every entry Black adds a quick note about who he was “trying to be” on that particular song.

Opening track “Pray a Little Faster”? “Trying to be Dylan”, Black says.

Second track “Oddball”? “Trying to be Stones”.

He goes on to namecheck Springsteen, Bowie, Daltrey, Strummer, (Doug) Sahm, Lou (Reed) and even himself.

It may not seem like much, but for a rocker like Black, who prefers a veil of mystery about him, these tidbits felt like a rare moment of opening up. It was Black saying that behind his aloof stage persona is just a dude who likes rock music. The Stones, The Who, The Clash. He’s not that weird. He’s perfectly normal even. He’s so normal that he sometimes even has to “try to be” Frank Black.

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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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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! #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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