Catholic taste

Frank Black gets pissed

by Brett Milano

If you're in Los Angeles and hit the Rhino store on Westwood, you can probably still grab some of the Pixies collection that Frank

Black used to own. "I traded in everything I had -- all the boxed sets, the 4AD promotional ones in the wooden box, all the stuff that I never listened to. I didn't do it for cash, I just wanted some store credit." Did they at least give him a good deal? "Not really. Mostly they were trying their best not to embarrass me."

That's about as close as Black's gotten to his former band since their demise, in 1993. But the real news about his current tour, which hits the Met Cafe on Friday, July 30, isn't that he's doing Pixies material again -- which he is, in limited doses -- but that he has a new band worth seeing and new material worth getting behind. That's especially true if you think that he sounds best working with a guitar band and keeping his songs relatively simplified -- in which case, you got alienated by the first two post-Pixies albums, Frank Black and Teenager of the Year. Despite some good tracks, those showed his songs getting wordier and more obscure, and a certain computer-nerd sensibility was starting to prevail.

Judging from those albums, you would have expected Black to become a David Thomas or a Captain Beefheart type, getting deeper into irony and time-signature changes. Which is why his most recent albums, last year's Frank Black & the Catholics and the current Pistolero (both Spin Art), have been a pleasant surprise. Some fans have griped that he's grown more conventional; but to these ears, what Black's doing now is a rarer thing: classic/garage rock for thinkers, music whose wit doesn't get in the way of the cheap thrills. And it doesn't hurt that he's rediscovered catchiness in a big way. The first Catholics album has the slight edge songwise, but the new one benefits from having Boston guitar hero Rich Gilbert replace LA session hotshot Lyle Workman. (Black's group also features local boys Dave McCaffrey on bass on drummer Scott Boutier.) In recent years, Gilbert's played tastefully with singer-songwriters (Steve Wynn, Tanya Donelly) and artfully with his own bands (Concussion Ensemble, Cornet Premiers). But more than any band he's been in since the Zulus, this one gives Gilbert room to crank up and go berserk.

"He's an angrier guitarist than Lyle. He's got a messed-up interpretation of rock, and a lot of the Pixies diehards like that," says Black, who's also eager to deflect some of the critical knocks Workman got. "Lyle was very California with a lot of chops; having him was like playing with Eddie Van Halen -- I'd never played with anyone like that, so we loved it. Some guitar players draw a lot on '70s metal guitar, and a lot of people are turned off by that, because that time in rock is forever blacklisted -- people hear that style and say, `It's bad, it's bad!' Having said that, Rich is great. He's a more East Coast type; every time he plays a note he's rebelling. He even rebels against us in our own material. Even when his guitar goes out of tune, he's got that attitude -- `If you don't like this note, fuck you.' We love that, and the fans do as well."

"That's a good way of putting it; very insightful of the guy," says Gilbert in a separate conversation. "I don't know what I'm rebelling against, though -- maybe just the norm. Charles [Thompson, Black's birth name] was a Zulus fan, so he knew what he was getting. When I play with someone like Tanya, it's more like playing parts -- her compositions are very solid, so you're working in that framework. But this is more like having your own band; everybody comes up with his own parts, and I personally feel that my playing's jumped up a notch lately."

The two Catholics albums were recorded live in the studio, which explains both the immediate sound and the fact that they're not on a major label. "Everybody wanted me to redo it, from my manager on down," Black admits. "People at record labels have a kneejerk reaction about marketing to radio -- even with somebody like myself who obviously isn't going to get on the radio." Although he's since linked up with Spin Art, he's not inclined to wave the indie-rock flag. "I never had that attitude about indie-versus-corporate; to me they're all corporate. There's not much distinction in terms of philosophy -- the philosophy is about making the most money, which is fine. Certainly, right now a lot of artists don't want to be anywhere near a major label. They're all caught up in buying each other out."

Perhaps the biggest surprise on both albums is the number of relatively straightforward relationship numbers. Unless you count the twisted-sex songs Black wrote for the Pixies, it's the first time he's approached that topic. "That's been a conscious move of mine for a few years. I hate to use a phrase like `development of my songwriting skills,' but you get more comfortable with certain clichés and parameters and get more confident about stepping into that well-trod territory. I would have been afraid to do that a few years ago. It probably started when my girlfriend encouraged me to write a song from an angry or pissed-off point of view, à la [Buzzcocks leader] Pete Shelley. There's something about that negative aspect that she felt was important in terms of connecting with the audience. Some people relate to that; that's why they feel so good when they listen to a Buzzcocks record."

Still, it hasn't all been negativity: on the first Catholics album, "Do You Feel Bad About It" was a pretty surprising flash of warmth from the guy who wrote "Debaser" 10 years earlier. "Right, but look at Meet the Beatles and the `White Album' -- same band, not that many years apart. They're my first rock-and-roll reference point anyway, and if they can say `I want to hold your hand' and then say `Yellow matter custard,' that covers the gamut."

As for Pixies songs, he's now playing two: "Wave of Mutilation" (the "surf" version from a B-side, not the rocking one from Doolittle) and an obscure one, "Holiday Song." Both were added on the last tour, after he'd spent years refusing to play any Pixies. "I was probably just making a mountain out of a molehill. To be honest, I was afraid of being snubbed by the press or whoever for daring to do one of my own songs. Especially in England, they think there's a magic line-up, a magic time, and a magic album, and you can't mess with that. They didn't want the band to break up, and now they didn't want it somehow taken away or watered down by me. Obviously, in some people's minds my entire solo career is this watering down of what I used to do. So for a while I just avoided it in order not to piss anyone off."

When he finally relented, it turned out to be an anticlimax. "I did it in London, where the Pixies were most popular, and I had built it up in my mind so much that I was nervous -- here I am, finally unveiling a Pixies number in my set. And when I played it, the reaction was like, `Oh.' Half the kids in the audience didn't know what it was."