At this late date in pop music history, it's probably unrealistic to expect that a respected, prolific indie-rocker would travel to Nashville and enter into the world of the southern baroque. Sure, Bob Dylan did it with Blonde On Blonde 40 years ago, and made something new out of the interaction between session men and leader. But in Dylan's case, the Nashville players he employed were as energized and engaged as the songwriter, and what emerged wasn't so much baroque pop as humanist guff turned sexy and absurdly expansive, the deep sense of America's bounty pushed to its limits.
And anyway, Nashville has never exactly been the place for deep investigations of the baroque, the untamed. For that, you would have had to travel 200 miles southwest, down to Memphis, where 30 years ago producers and performers such as Dan Penn, Jim Dickinson and Alex Chilton tore apart rock 'n' roll and their own pop heritage -- which was, in its own way, as studio-bound and obsessive as anything to emerge from Music Row -- and presaged popular music's mutation into new wave and indie-rock.
Nashville has always provided a safe spot to observe the action, a gentleman's vantage point. So it makes sense that Frank Black's time in Music City didn't involve much in the way of old-fashioned dissipation. "I made a record there, which means I rode in a rental car from my hotel to a recording studio, worked all day, rode back, sat downtown in my rental car late at night watching the cops go by," he says. "There was a Thai food restaurant next to the hotel, and every night I got the catfish."
For Black, who has now released well over two hours of new music in the span of one calendar year -- most of it recorded in Nashville with an assortment of storied soul session players, rock musicians, and honky-tonk singers -- it's all about the work itself, the process, as it has been throughout his career. On last July's Honeycomb and his new two-disc set Fastman Raiderman, released June 27 on Back Porch, he takes a deeply bent, essentially sane, workaholic approach to making pop songs. The baroque makes its presence known, but in Black's case it only lightly touches down in the south. Respectful of the region's musical heritage, he brings his own set of tricks to the proceedings.
As he's done on recordings with the Pixies and with his turn-of-the-century band the Catholics, Black puts the geography of the country, and of his capacious mind, into motion, takes what he needs, makes friends, adopts a bit of the lingo (maybe even a drawl), and keeps working. His songs get exemplary treatment from some of the world's finest musicians -- among them Steve Cropper and Carol Kaye -- even as their unpredictable structures challenge that cornerstone of Music City's recording scene, the Nashville Number System. On his new recordings, you can definitely hear the catfish swimming, but this is the postmodern south, where the bottom-feeder appears on the plate nicely dressed in some new flavors, wearing a bowler, or maybe a Thai straw-basket hat.
Remarried, to Violet Clark (his first marriage, to Jean Black, ended a couple of years ago), Black currently enjoys the life of a family man in Eugene, Oregon. My phone conversations with him are interspersed with domestic sounds: babies (he and Violet celebrated in April the birth of their daughter, Lucy, who joins son Jack and two children from Violet's previous marriage), breakfast-making, the ding of car doors opening. He sounds happy, a bit reflective. "Taking care of children, I don't know how people do it, because I don't have a full-time job, although I occasionally work," he says. "When I'm not out on the road, I'm here all day. Months go by, and I look up and say, 'What happened?'"
This doesn't mean that Black, who was born Charles Thompson 41 years ago in Boston, has lost his sense of humor in some suburban nowhere. He says with a laugh, "We're at the crossroads of deciding whether we should make the family a showbiz family, do like country people and get the bus." That's a funny image, but Black has been plenty busy, what with recording in Nashville and Los Angeles, touring with the re-formed Pixies, and, of course, debating the relative merits of fake-bacon brands with interviewers like me.
Talking to Black, you get the sense of a cagey, highly intelligent human being with low tolerance for bullshit. Some questions that apparently strike him as too broad get a request for rephrasing. He waves away my questions about the breakup of the Pixies, his relationship with fellow Pixie Kim Deal, and the band's recent re-formation. "It was perfectly amusing," he says. "I don't wax all nostalgic about this shit. We had a great time, we made a bunch of money, buried a few hatchets, and that's it."
Like many musicians whose style is based upon idiosyncrasies that require the ministrations of other participants, he likes to talk about his work as an expression of impulses that thrive in a relatively unexamined state. Still, he's a gracious, fascinating conversationalist.
Honeycomb was recorded in spring 2004, and since Black was set to go out on tour with the Pixies, had to be done more quickly than originally planned. Sessions took place at Dan Penn's studio, with Jon Tiven producing. (Four songs from those sessions found their way onto Fastman Raiderman.)
Black liked the sound he got at Penn's, describing it as a "warm, dry sound I've always wanted to hear in a regular recording studio." Penn's contribution to Honeycomb seems to have been limited to the occasional suggestion. "He may have interceded one time, when Jon and I had an argument about a song," Black says. "He was the senior of all of us, in terms of experience and everything else. And he was working as an engineer, so he didn't attempt to get involved in our art project."
The result was a modestly radical departure for Black, whose albums with the Catholics were recorded and mixed live to two-track. The Frank Black & the Catholics records hold up well today -- 1999's Pistolero is particularly strong, with "85 Weeks" a piquant miniature driven by an ingenious acoustic guitar figure.
That song prefigures Honeycomb and Fastman, but the live-to-two-track process threatened to lock the band into their own mannerisms. As Black's longtime guitarist Rich Gilbert says, "We all got used to the two-track thing. The only disappointment some of us had with the process -- and we had this conversation with Charles [Frank] -- was that sometimes, since it was being recorded and mixed at the same time, certain elements might not come out in the final mix the way you'd hoped."
The performances on Honeycomb suggested a way out of the sound of the last Catholics records, which sometimes sounded a little muddy. The title track, with its delicate, nervous guitar figure, was one of the most complex things Black had done to date, while "My Life Is In Storage" was one of the most overtly autobiographical songs on what turned out to be at least partly a divorce record. Its lyrics veered toward a kind of compulsive wordplay ("I had a castle/I had no hassles/Now tears are tassels") that couldn't hide the pain of Black's divorce. And "My Life" featured a masterful guitar solo by Reggie Young that expressed everything the lyrics couldn't, or wouldn't.
Still, Honeycomb was somewhat uneven. Black's take on Penn and Spooner Oldham's "The Dark End Of The Street" came off as pro forma, and while Black took chances with a deliberately understated vocal style, there were moments when his singing threatened to fade away entirely. The record received mostly good reviews when it was released in July 2005; Werner Trieschmann, in the Village Voice, was one of the few dissenters, describing the record as "downtempo numbers anesthetized by Spooner Oldham's tux-ruffle keyboards."
Fastman Raiderman is a stronger effort, and, at 27 songs and 95 minutes, far more varied. Once again, the cast of players includes Cropper, Young, Hood, Jack Clement (who overdubbed the odd dobro part and harmony vocal, and whose Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa was where most of the record was cut), Buddy Miller, Levon Helm and Al Kooper. "If Your Poison Gets You" uses a swinging, dropped-beat drum pattern played by Billy Block, Helm, and Free/Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke; "Fast Man", an updated soul ballad, reveals Black's debt to Leon Russell. Other songs play on the conventions of New Orleans R&B and country blues. "Fitzgerald" reveals a sharp-eyed observer of everyday life with tremendous sympathy for the downtrodden.
For his cover of British songwriter Ewan MacColl's working-class ode "Dirty Old Town", Black met up with Marty Brown, a Kentucky-born country singer whose 1991 MCA record High And Dry intelligently updated honky-tonk, creating perhaps the record's most telling cultural collision. "[Brown] didn't know that 'Dirty Old Town' was a kind of folk song," Black says. "He's the same age as me, and we were making small talk, waiting for something to happen. We were talking about breakup songs, and I strummed a few lines of one. He said, 'I got me one of those', and got down on bended knee and sang full volume, like he was at the Grammies."
The resulting duet suffers, as do some of Fastman's songs, from the one-take aesthetic and dry sound that Tiven favors, but the two men yell their way through the last verse; when they sing, "I'll cut you down/Like an old dead tree," you get the sense this is the kind of loose, conflicted, fucked-up energy that Black and Tiven are going for, and not always getting. The supersession format holds advantages for an artist like Frank Black, but Fastman disperses into attenuated rockers that sound like nothing so much as old Brinsley Schwarz records, mono reprocessed into stereo. Still, with someone as prolific as Black, it seems a little churlish to complain, and even the lesser numbers on Fastman have moments where you think, boy, that's a great idea right there.
In fact, the greatest moment on Fastman Raiderman wasn't done in Nashville at all, but in Los Angeles, during a two-day session in January 2006 that yielded four songs. "In The Time Of My Ruin" features much-recorded drummer Jim Keltner, whose work with Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell helped redefine pop drumming as an extension of the R&B aesthetic, and Carol Kaye, whose bass playing has graced masterpieces by Phil Spector and the Beach Boys. Incredibly, this marvelous performance was captured live, with Duane Jarvis' guitar and former Catholic Dave Phillips' pedal steel bringing the right note of twangy weirdness to what sounds like a great lost west coast pop song. While all the musicians -- including songwriter P.F. Sloan, who adds a perfect, understated piano part -- make an indelible contribution, it's Keltner whose energized performance holds everything together, pushing and pulling the beat.
"On 'In The Time Of My Ruin', I noticed that Keltner was playing it a little conservatively on the first run-through," Tiven says. "So I went up to him right before we did the song, and I said, 'I just want you to know that your artistic license is unlimited on this song.'" Similarly, on another L.A. track, "Don't Cry That Way", Black and Tiven gave Carol Kaye the opportunity to add a part to the song. "Carol comes out and says, 'You know what would be really great on this? A real nice, swinging, rhythm guitar part. Let me show it to Duane,'" Tiven recalls. "I said to Carol, 'As long as you know the part, why don't you play it?'" Her overdub makes the song, and how often do you get to hear Carol Kaye play guitar?
What makes Honeycomb and Fastman Raiderman work is the way they confound categories, throw out lots of ideas. Black, it seems, likes to work quickly, and he relates to his fellow musicians as leader, as friend, and as master psychologist.
"I work with people I get along with, people I like," he says. "If they're musicians, as I am, well then, we're gonna make music. I don't say, 'I need someone who's got a Jaco Pastorius vibe on the bass.' That's not how you pick a bass player -- you pick someone you've met, who seems like a nice guy. Obviously, if they end up sucking, not a good match musically, then that might affect your working with them, I suppose."
This sounds a bit simplistic until you realize that Black seems always to be after the elusive chemistry, the groove, whether he's working with the Pixies or the Catholics or Cropper and Keltner. He's adaptable while at the same time unwilling to compromise musical quality. "Reggie Young, he can look at a chart and absorb it so fast, and because he can think so fast, he can spot whatever idiosyncrasies there are even before he plays them," Black says. "Whereas a lot of the guys I've played with, in the Pixies, for example, it's the opposite. They're not gonna go, 'That's strange,' because they're not even thinking on that level. They ask me what the next chord is, which is the level I'm at."
While he was obviously impressed by the skills of the session men he worked with in Nashville and Los Angeles, Black seems not to have been overawed by them. "It's never gonna be, 'Oh, now I can achieve nirvana because I'm working with Steve Cropper and Spooner Oldham, now I can achieve the soulful heights I was striving for in the Catholics, but always failed to reach.'
"I'm a rock musician trying to hang down south a little bit. Obviously, if you replace those players in the Catholics with the likes of Reggie Young, you're going to get a certain quality. Working with dudes who have played with Elvis and Johnny Horton, how can you not get some magic?"
While Black acknowledges that these latest records might seem a radical divergence from his recorded legacy, he believes his latest work merely builds upon what he's always done. "Well, if the last record you heard by me was a Pixies record, and then you started listening to what I've been doing the last couple of years, then it would be, I guess, a dramatic turn," he says. "I was known for a sound that was a little bit abrasive or angular.
"But there are certain elements of folk or cowpunk, especially early on. I think it's within my right to go as Americana as I want. It's not artificial. I'm from the United States. Especially on the Catholics records, when we added Rich Gilbert to play pedal steel, that sound suggests Americana, if not necessarily country."
Black's holistic view is echoed by Gilbert, an excellent, elegant guitarist and pedal steel player (his credits include Uncle Tupelo's debut No Depression) who recently relocated to Nashville, where he's played with Caitlin Cary & Thad Cockrell and other Americana acts.
"I was in a Boston band called the Zulus, and Frank and [Pixies guitarist] Joey [Santiago] were fans," Gilbert recalls. "When the Pixies started playing, they did some bills with us, and that's how we got to know each other." Their relationship continues to this day; Gilbert's distinctive playing graces several songs on Fastman Raiderman.
"I was on the last batch of songs we did, the three days at Jack Clement's studio," Gilbert says. "And I definitely see his career as a continuing process. I was in the Catholics with him for seven years, and seeing the songwriting process, you perceive general stylistic approaches, but you can also see the material, and his approach, becoming more developed, with a lot more shadings and nuance."
For Gilbert, watching Black interact with the cast of musicians Tiven assembled for the Fastman sessions was a fascinating experience. "I could tell all those Muscle Shoals and Memphis guys were really liking it, because -- not to discredit what they've done -- so much of the music they've done in the past follows certain formats," he says. "A lot of Charles' songs have a relatively high level of difficulty, because they don't follow traditional patterns. And when you listen to it, it's not necessarily obvious that the normal path is being abandoned."
Reggie Young, the Missouri-born, Memphis-educated veteran of countless sessions with the likes of Dusty Springfield and Wilson Pickett, makes the connection between Black's working methods and those of soul songwriter and singer Joe Tex, with whom Young worked on classic records including 1969's Buying A Book.
"Joe Tex didn't know chords or anything, although Frank is a little different in that he does know the chord changes," Young says. "Joe would say, 'Here's a little song,' and he might have it written on a napkin, some of those things like 'Skinny Legs And All' and 'I Gotcha'. He would run it down, and he would say, 'OK, find me a chord,' and we'd play a chord. You'd do that for a verse, and then you'd start the second verse, and lo and behold, it would be identical to the first."
Often in tandem with Steve Cropper's guitar, Young's fills and solos help define the sound of both Honeycomb and Fastman Raiderman. Along with bassist David Hood, Young helped translate Black's musical ideas into a workable form. "His material wasn't the run-of-the-mill thing, where you could use a number chart," Young says. "You had to put a little thought into it. I was amazed how things would repeat, how they would be exactly like the verse before, because it was structured so unusually....David was doing the chord charts, and I was helping him on some of them. We'd look at each other and say, 'Man, there's another one like the other one!'"
Hood, a native of Sheffield, Alabama, whose resume includes work with Aretha Franklin, the Staple Singers, James Brown and countless others (when I caught up with him at his home in Muscle Shoals, he had been out playing shows with the Amazing Rhythm Aces), was similarly impressed by Black's music.
"When Tiven told me about Charles, he sent me a CD with a bunch of songs on it," Hood recalls. "Well, I was busy working on other stuff, and didn't have time to work on the chord charts. Riding up to Nashville to do the session, I played the CD in the car, thought I'd figure these songs on the way up. When I started listening to them, I realized, hell, I can't figure out these things out driving a car. The number system [a kind of notation, used by Nashville musicians, that assigns a numeral to each chord] would be pretty hard to use with his songs."
Black expresses similar appreciation for the working methods of the players who appear on the two records. "I don't think it was an enormous challenge for them; it was fun," he says. "They were happy to be there. Cropper really got into it; he even left the studio during one song. He wanted to overdub his solo and get it right, and left while we cut the song and then came back and said [Black does a southern accent], 'OK, I'm ready!' And he was really, really into it."
Somewhat improbably, Honeycomb and Fastman Raiderman initially came about as the result of a joke. In 1993, Tiven worked with Frank Black on an Otis Blackwell tribute album Tiven was producing. That was the first time the two had met, and they hit it off. "He was interested in making this record he called Black On Blonde," Tiven says. "He wanted to go to Nashville and use seasoned, veteran musicians, make a traditional singer-songwriter record. It was in very general terms. We might have mentioned [drummer] Kenny Buttrey at the time." (Buttrey, one of the session musicians on Blonde On Blonde, didn't play on either of Black's Nashville records; he died in September 2004.)
Black says the title was just a play on words, a useful conceit for an inchoate idea. He and Tiven kept in touch, and every so often Black would call up Tiven, and, as Black says, would ask, "'Hey, Tiven, when are we gonna do our Black On Blonde?'"
Black says he "didn't know who was gonna be playing on the record, if they were gonna be soul guys or country guys; all I knew is that it was going to happen in the 615 area code."
The songwriting on Honeycomb and Fastman Raiderman reflects Black's recent life, just as the compositions on a Pixies or a Catholics record give listeners a mediated yet intimate portrait of the artist. For all his odd meters and unexpected chords -- no other songwriter seems so in love with jamming elements together, confounding harmonic expectations -- Black takes a pragmatic, even reductive approach to his compositional methods.
When I ask him who of the classic '60s and '70s songwriters have been a major influence on his work, he replies, simply, "I can't think of anyone."
"I listen to music like anyone else: I like it or I don't," he continues. "I'm definitely not a student of songwriting, and whatever idiosyncratic behaviors I put into the song, I've done it long enough that I know when it's gonna have a groove, when the math works out....My songs are just one little glimpse into that world, and so I don't know how much method there is."
This is reasonable enough, and a fairly typical Blackian answer. When I ask him what music from his childhood moved him, I get this response: "Anybody from that generation first heard pop music via the Beatles. They were the first big international pop group to penetrate." Which is perfectly acceptable, but hardly revealing -- a classic pop-star non-statement.
More illuminating is his admission of love for '70s rockers Jethro Tull. "When I was about 13 years old, Tull were out promoting their new live double record, so on the radio you heard 'Aqualung' a lot," he says. "That's one of those '70s bands you could trace the sound of, the vibe of Ian Anderson as a vocalist, to me. That kind of slightly folky, melancholic, grand, musing vibe -- I can draw a line from that to a song of mine like 'Los Angeles' [from 1993's Frank Black]. That's my 'Aqualung'."
Black might not be a "student" of songwriting, and he might choose to talk about his work in the most practical of terms ("I write a bunch of songs every year, and here's my recent batch," he says of Fastman), but his art draws admiring comments from his musicians, and from no less a songwriter than P.F. Sloan, author of the '60s classic "Eve Of Destruction", who plays piano on the Fastman songs that were cut in Los Angeles.
"On 'In The Time Of My Ruin', what's amazing about that song is that it's basically a three-chord song structure," Sloan says. "It goes through 99% of the song, and yet it holds your attention, spellbindingly." Sloan, an avatar of 1960s west coast pop, says Black's song structures, his transitions from section to section, remind him of the work of Jan Berry (of Jan & Dean) and John Lennon.
Joe Tex, John Lennon and Jan Berry are some kind of holy trinity, all coming together to produce music that deftly balances the mannered and the heartfelt. Black's integrity and adaptability have something to do with it, of course.
Perhaps the only thing left for him to do is to get that custom-lettered tour bus, load up the family, and make the circuit with a few songs he wrote in the hotel room last night. Just make sure you try the whitefish sandwich on white bread, with mustard and hot sauce, next time you hit Nashville, Frank.
Edd Hurt lives near Nashville, on the outskirts of the southern baroque, and recommends the catfish sandwich at Joe's Bar-B-Que & Fish in north Nashville. No extra hot sauce needed.
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