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.
Some of my favorite overstuffed suitcases in rock are A Wizard, A True Star by Todd Rundgren, Songs of You & Me by Chris Knox, Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things by The Loud Family, Post-Minstrel Syndrome by The Negro Problem and several Robert Pollard albums.
I’d also throw in The Kinks’ Are the Village Green Preservation Society, a record that strikes me as a distant English cousin to what Frank Black was doing at this time. They don’t sound alike, but both made contrarian statements in their day.
For Ray Davies, it meant turning his back on the psychedelic and bluesy concerns of most hip English rock in 1968 to make a beautiful 15-song LP about traditional country life values.
For Frank Black, it meant never being too impressed by the 90s “alternative” rock boom. For him, I suspect it was a whole lot of “been there, done that”. So, as every popular American rock band in ’94 was screaming about their angst over back-to-basics arrangements with lots of loud guitar, Black put out Teenager of the Year, a gloriously cluttered, 22-song epic of outer space and junk culture and some of what goes on in the vast expanse in between.
(Incidentally, Black recorded TWO Kinks songs in the mid-90s for B-sides, “This is Where I Belong” and “Better Things”, so maybe he was feeling a connection to Ray Davies at this time.)
It comes off like a feverish blast of inspiration, the work of a guy who one day started to write about everything around him and he couldn’t stop. He wrote songs about his girlfriend and The Three Stooges and California and lost Russian space probes.
But WHY, really, is Teenager of the Year so long?
Oddly, it’s because Frank Black had writer’s block.
He cranked out lots of music, but it took him awhile to top them off with songs. He and his collaborators–pretty much the same crew who made the the first solo album, with the notable addition of guitar wizard Lyle Workman–kept making instrumental tracks as if Frank was happy to keep doing that forever.
Meanwhile, producers Eric Drew Feldman and Al Clay were watching the budget. They knew that they needed some songs post-haste, so they took at least one of these pieces and wrote their own lyrics for it in a Frank Black sci-fi parody style. As Feldman and Clay intended, Black was so horrified by their work that he finally found the motivation to finish the songs, which he did quickly.
And THAT’S how the great Teenager of the Year was made, boys and girls. The most beloved album of Black’s post-Pixies era was started without much of a plan and then rushed at the finish like a late science project.
Works for me. That’s a perfect story to explain an overstuffed suitcase. (Black himself told it in the press release for his 93-03 solo career compilation from 2007.)
Also, none of that should be taken as a statement that Teenager of the Year is lazy or careless in any way. It’s not. Whatever attention that Black and company gave to the music while he held out on the songs pays off. Most of these tracks are oddball, restless things that get right to the point and squeeze a lot into small spaces Over half of the songs blow by in less than three minutes, but manage to boast diverse sets of full-bodied arrangements and even (usually very quick) solos. There’s real ambition here, a devotion to left turns and unexpected moves WHILE also being unpretentious and playing like pop music. It’s a crazy trick.
The effect is that it’s one of those albums that you can hear something new in every time you play it. A lot of music that I was into twenty-five years ago doesn’t hold up for me now, but Teenager of the Year remains an inspiration. What continues to hook me is how this album feels like browsing a cool book collection, or maybe reading some eclectic magazine that’s not only beautifully designed but that also covers a variety of unusual topics with real personality.
In this tornado of words and sound, Frank Black made an album that uniquely (and with no self-consciousness, I think) reflects the values of its time, almost to a point where future generations may not even understand what the hell he’s talking about. The music will hold up, but… Shopping malls? Record stores? CB radios? Going to Mars? People used to think about that stuff?
“Whatever Happened to Pong?” Shit, whatever happened to… a lot of things? Let’s break it down. On Teenager of the Year, you get…
Frank Black as Lowbrow Culture Freak
It’s best that we start there because that’s how the album starts with “Whatever Happened to Pong?”, a quick punk rock punch-in-the-face (with furious harmonica!) that pays tribute to one of the early video games. Pong was just a few primitive pixels bouncin’ around on a low-definition screen, but this song treats it like it’s so, so important. Black recommends it like he once recommended Un Chien Andalou, with an irrational fury. It’s a perfect opener because it rocks, but also it brings the message that if something as silly as Pong matters, then everything that Black is gonna tell you about here might also matter.
Other songs in this vein include “Two Reelers”, another violent punk thrash-about (with keyboard break!). Some bands might use this music to tell us about some gritty street scenes from a life lived on the edge, but Frank uses it to tell the story of The Three Stooges, their rise and fall. What a nerd!
Then you’ve got “The Hostess With the Mostest”, a song hopped up with excitement about going to the mall to the point of treating it like a religious experience. The early 90s were when mega-malls were a big deal. When a fancy new one opened up, people from several counties over might make the drive to check it out. In 2021, that’s pretty much gone (in the US, at least). There’s a wink of sarcasm here if you want it, but I hear a song about a real experience that people had. Everything in this song is wired and in a rush. What a sensation it was to be among the throngs in this grand palace of commerce! (“In the doors we all flew/ To the see the great indoors/ And her majestic stalls/ Yeah, we flew.”)
Meanwhile, “Bad Wicked World”, another hyperactive one, throws down hard in celebration of The Invaders, a late 60s sci-fi TV series about a guy who no one listens to, but who has the inside scoop on an alien invasion. I’ve never seen it. I should. After all of these years, I’m finally taking Frank’s recommendation. I just ordered the DVD set from Amazon, 2021’s hostess with the mostest (except who wants to hear a song about clicking “Add to Cart”?).
Frank Black as a Regular Guy Just Livin’ Life
Black Francis could never be truly normal because that’s a weird name, but Frank Black can be disarmingly normal if he wants. It’s an everyman name. Sounds like a construction worker. Every city and town probably has a few Frank Blacks.
Frank got into this and wrote some songs that speak up for the Regular Joe.
I’m talkin’ “Freedom Rock”. A fella named Chip goes into a record store and gets attitude from the clerk for his purchases. He’s not cool enough. He didn’t realize that he had to prove himself to the person working the register in order to leave with some dignity. Frank responds to this situation with thunder and lightning. It’s his most Who-like song.
“Pure Denizen of the Citizen’s Band” is a relentlessly weird, but rocking, piece that comes off like country music played by aliens. It’s about CB radios, of course, and I didn’t understand it until I knew a guy in college who had a CB rig in his car. He explained to me that truck drivers don’t like outsiders on the citizen’s band and they will ignore you when they sense that you’re not one of them–and that’s Frank Black’s problem here. It’s another “Freedom Rock” situation in a way, another song about a soul unfairly shunned, but this one’s played for laughs.
This also seems like a good place to slot in “Speedy Marie”, a straightforward love song to Frank’s girlfriend with extra-sparkling guitar sounds. The first letters of the last two verses even form an acrostic that spells her name. Awww…
Frank Black as California Historian and Speculative Dreamer
The Pixies were a Boston band, but when Black Francis became Frank Black, right away he started singing about “Los Angeles”–and he would keep doing that for awhile.
“Calistan” might be the definitive Teenager of the Year song. Sonically, it sparkles with a certain urbanity. The verses cruise the streets and make turns and stop at lights until the chorus hits the freeway. As for the lyrics, there are songs on this album about the past, songs about the present, and songs about the future–but “Calistan” is about all three. In it, Black is in the streets of Los Angeles and ponders the onion layers that define a place. In the 90s, it’s a city of traffic and noise and bustling humanity, but it used to be dirt. It used to be nothing, just another stretch of land. Meanwhile, the song (at least partly) comes from the future when California is called Calistan and when our narrator reminisces about the “valley of tar that once was LA”. It’s a powerful song that speaks plainly, but with a perfect touch of mystery. You can feel its setting. You breathe it in.
(Trivia note: “Calistan” originally came out the previous year in a stripped-down version on a 4-song EP released as part of the Hello Recording Club series run by John Flansburgh from They Might Be Giants. So it’s possible that it was not one of this album’s “last minute” songs.)
Then there’s “Ole Mulholland”, a rocking salute to William Mulholland, superintendent of the Los Angeles Water Department back in the early 1900s. Back then, Los Angeles was a growing city, but it didn’t have much of a water supply. It was a “sleepy monster in the sand”. Enter Mulholland, who headed the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a complex project that piped in loads of water from the Sierra Nevada hundreds of miles away and pretty much set up the city to be big. It was a huge accomplishment and it deserves a song. And it’s a great song.
(Trivia note: Years later, Black would write a much darker song about Mulholland’s later downfall, “St. Francis Dam Disaster”.)
Frank Black as Rock’s Weird Sci-Fi UFO Futuristic Dude
This was his reputation at the time and he embraced it. For awhile, at least.
This is “The Vanishing Spies”, the sad fate of Phobos 2, a Russian space probe that malfunctioned and was lost in the middle of surveying the moons of Mars. It’s a slow, pretty one as told from the point of view of a very emotionally invested stargazer.
This is “Fiddle Riddle”, a speculative scenario in which humanity goes extinct, but our machines are still working, as told from the perspective of Earth itself as a whimsical twist on reggae. “Once stood a man on my face”, the planet tells us in the first verse, “Gobbled him up ’cause my taste/ Leaves nothing to waste”.
This is “Fazer Eyes”, where we pursue strange lights in the night to a sweet little guitar riff and it almost sounds like a love song.
This is “Big Red”, in which we terraform Mars. We even brought bees to pollinate the crops and foliage. Our narrator remembers Earth, but doesn’t really want to go back. It’s a long way. Also, it sounds like we fucked it all up anyway. Mars is our future.
This is “Space is Gonna Do Me Good”, a song about how space is gonna do us good. Someday, way out in the future of 2016 maybe, we’re gonna talk about it like we talk about retirement spots in Florida or a nice, peaceful home in Colorado.
This is “Pie in the Sky”, in which we’re in a state of emergency. Everything in this massive rocker sounds like an alarm going off. It’s the end of the album and maybe the end of everything. “Expanding border/ That’s the sauce of chaos”. The universe is constantly expanding, they tell us, and the result of this will be some sort of apocalypse in a million years or so. I interpret this as a song for those final moments.
Frank Black as a Guy Who Craves Escape From it All
Why are we playing Pong, going to record stores, pondering Los Angeles’s water supply and wanting to go to Mars ANYWAY? It’s all escape, I guess. We’ve fucked up the planet, made it noisy, stupid, corrupt and polluted. We’ve got to get away, even if it’s just in our minds. This was a major theme of Black’s previous album and that continues here.
“(I Want to Live on an) Abstract Plain” strips it down to raw bone right away on the third track. Black’s narrator has got to get out of his town. But to where? The best he come up with is an abstract plain. He’s not sure what it looks like. Maybe it changes everyday even. There’s no use trying to describe it. That would just take you out of the idea. (Bonus points for the interesting choice of using the more earthy term plain as opposed to the more ethereal plane.)
“Headache” covers the same ground, but as a glorious pop single. In the middle of this album’s weird wanderings, Black found three minutes to make his modern world malaise sound universal. Even people who think that this album is an overlong load of nonsense give it up for “Headache”. It’s a song about a feeling that you can’t keep inside. You have to do something about it. No one can function normally with a headache. “Well, I found you/ Maybe you can help me/ And I can help you.” The you in those lines can be anything. A person. A project. An idea. Real satisfaction comes not just from feeling good, but from feeling like you’re contributing.
“White Noise Maker” is terrific synth-pop about shutting out the world via the mesmerizing tones of a white noise machine. I’ve never owned one, but they’re out there. Turn it on and fills your world with nature sounds. Rain. Wind. Ocean tides. Birds. It’s your rebellion against the noise. It’s the new rock ‘n’ roll.
Then we have “Superabound”, one of those Bob Dylan-style enigmas full of strange, scattered imagery to piece together. Some days for me, it’s the best song on the album. As a musical moment, it’s rapturous, but it’s also one of those songs that people trade theories over. Me, I think it’s about searching. The sun hits your face and nature is bountiful, but it’s not enough. You eventually “buy a ticket to the freaks” and then get sent down a strange path. You encounter amazing things, but you use them up (“I superabound/ But I still got nothing to do”) until all that’s left for you to do is create your own world. The ultimate escape.
And one last guiding star…
Frank Black’s body of work is remarkably coherent. There are different phases and stages that appeal to different tastes, but he’s so productive that if you’re following along in chronological order, you can often hear a hint of where he’s going next. For all of the tricky aspects of his songwriting, there aren’t many jarring left turns in the overall vision.
The Pixies’ cosmic B-sides in 1989 lead into the sci-fi themes of Bossanova. He got more nerdy about it on Trompe le Monde. Plus that’s where Eric Drew Feldman entered the picture along with some spacey synthesizers and it’s not a huge jump from there to Frank Black and now Teenager of the Year.
And what song here moves toward what’s next for Frank Black?
I submit “Sir Rockaby”.
We’ve talked a lot about Black’s various interests during this period, but there’s one thing that hasn’t come up yet and that’s that he was starting to identify with 1950s and early 60s rockers. He even recorded a lovely solo acoustic cover of Gene Chandler’s 1961 hit “Duke of Earl” for the previously mentioned Hello Recording Club EP in 1993.
In the middle of the madness of Teenager of the Year, sits “Sir Rockaby”, Frank’s 50s-style love ballad, sparely produced and lit by street lamps. Nobody in rock music was writing songs anymore about how they were the best lover underneath the moon. Nobody was writing “The Duke of Earl” anymore. Nobody with a guitar and a voice was struttin’ and preenin’ and singin’ lullabies like this anymore. So, Frank Black had to do it.
After the accidental epic of Teenager of the Year, Frank Black seemed to have gotten the need to make crazy studio masterpieces out of his system. Where do you go after this?
The writer of “Whatever Happened to Pong?” decided to go backward. Lose the production. Get into the sound of a band in a room. That’s how it used to be done. What’s wrong with that? You can still sing about Mars.
More on that soon.