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.

In 1999, I can’t remember what I expected from Frank Black. I liked Frank Black and the Catholics, but if it was just a one-off that probably would have been cool with me.

Then I saw the band play in Dallas on February 1, 1999 (thanks for the date, FrankBlack.net gigography) and it was like I got struck by lightning. They had become a MONSTER on stage. Rich Gilbert’s tough lead guitar sound had settled with the group, after an amicable parting with Lyle Workman awhile back, and they were ALL about the road. They were hard and scarred and they tore through the songs with hardly a pause. Black was his usual aloof self, rivers of sweat rolling down his shaved head, but little emotion on his face as he and the band destroyed a 250-capacity rock club. They closed with “So. Bay”, I remember. It was a new song that I’d never heard before, but couldn’t forget afterward. Its quiet outro, Black singing from the point of a view of a kid on a bike (or maybe a skateboard) riding around his rough neighborhood, was the sound of smoke rising from the crater of the explosion that just happened in the room.

Pistolero wasn’t out yet, but the band played what seemed like most of it that night.

When the album was released over a month later, it had all of roar of the show that I saw. It was (and still is) slam-bang. It crashes into brick walls. It screams. Its impatient. The band are fierce and loud, getting even better at their live-in-the-studio swing.

It sounds like an album that, well… that a maturing punk would make. He still identifies with the outsider, but he’s also more focused on craft. He’s done being an affront to his time and now wants to try being timeless. From Joe Strummer to Bob Mould, the old wild ones who keep going scatter in their own directions over time. Frank Black drifted toward classic vibes. He sought to prove himself worthy of whatever he’d earned in the thirteen years (and ten records) since he started by singing sad songs in bars while also blowing the roof off the joint.

On Pistolero, the young punk meets Freddy Fender, Doug Sahm, Hank Williams and Bob Dylan and they eventually all figure out that they’re the same person.

Black is still an oddball songwriter. His songs go for sucker-punches and left turns, but, as always, in the service of rocking harder. If this was the first music you’d ever heard from him, you might still think he’s nuts, even as he opens with two takes on the ancient subject of love gone bad.

The classic rock crunch of “Bad Harmony” deals with a couple who are all wrong for each other. Our narrator is attached nonetheless and hopes for the best, but there’s no fixing bad harmony. Then “I Switched You” could be its sequel when the relationship is finished and now red-hot, blood-curdling anger remains. The old paint-peeling Black Francis scream is back, but even louder, and it’s the perfect twist to go with the song’s demonic blues.

No singles were released from Pistolero, but if SpinART Records called me up and asked, I might have suggested “Western Star”. It’s wound up tight and in a breathless rush that matches the energy of its main character and his dream of being a Western star. He wants to be John Wayne (or maybe Garth Brooks), but he’s also thinking about “Heroes-period Bowie”. I have no idea what inspired it, but I see the streets of Hollywood and its sometimes odd parade of wannabe stars. Bonus points for this great bonkers lyric: “I get my freon bingo inside your cool and soft sarong/ Rolling on the moquette inside a cul-de-sac kampong”. Sounds dirty to me. I think.

Or maybe “Billy Radcliffe” would be the pick. This gem from the album’s second half is the most “typical” Frank Black song here. It’s all nervous hooks and jumpy melody and Black sings it like a cowboy who’s been to Mars. The lyrics go for enigma. Whether Billy Radcliffe is a clone or some Artificial Intelligence tech or some other modern Frankenstein creation, I’m still not sure. Not that it matters. Mystery is a good thing in rock. If Black has ever explained this one, don’t tell me.

Other highlights include the nearly six-minute “So Hard to Make Things Out”, where the guitars roll in like big storm clouds until the whole thing becomes a punk song halfway through. It could be on Neil Young’s Ragged Glory. Then “85 Weeks” is a perfect light follow-up, a mellow campfire tune in which Frank Black tells the story of Eric Drew Feldman telling the story of the time Captain Beefheart claimed to have stayed awake for eighty-five weeks. I have no proof that it’s not true. Do you?

Another nice pairing is “Tiny Heart” and “You’re Such a Wire”. One’s a rocker, one’s a ballad. Both are short and sharp summaries of Black’s increasing country leanings.

The breakneck “I Want Rock & Roll” burns the house down. Bands used to write songs about rock music all of the time. Chuck Berry. The Rolling Stones. Even The Velvet Underground. Rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay. Or at least Little Queenie can’t get enough of it. All of that was considered corny in the 90s, but Frank Black didn’t care. He decided to write his own take on the topic and this band threw down hard on it. Black may sing “I’d like to go back to ’55”, but, as always, his take on 50s rock comes filtered through punk rage and noise.

My favorite song here is “So. Bay”. It closed the killer live show that I saw in February 1999 and it closes the album. I’ve never been to the South Bay section of Los Angeles County. I live in Dallas, Texas and this song makes me think of South Dallas or maybe the seedy parts of Harry Hines Blvd., where you can see discarded needles and wine bottles in the grass. It’s a place of no hope, but Black’s narrator is a kid whom no one notices, but who notices everything and this bleak place is his whole world. He rides it all of the time. The adults are mired in their problems, but he still has dreams and hope and this song is about that contrast (in a completely unsentimental way). Its quiet intro and outro and the hard rocking middle section draw a clear line between worlds. “So. Bay” rocks you hard and it’s beautiful.

I’m glad that Black didn’t do the alphabetical sequence thing for Pistolero like he did for the last one. “So. Bay” needed to close this album. It should close every album. By everyone.

Pistolero is a stunner. It’s noisy and energetic and lush with songcraft. It punches you from the left and then from the right, but always with a tune.

I wanted more Frank Black and The Catholics after this and, lucky me, I got more.

I got a lot more.

Because Frank Black got hooked on this sound, too.

The consistent problem with aging rockers is that they get lazy and trust studio trickery to hide their shortcomings over time.

Frank Black didn’t want to do that. His band instead played live to 2-track tape. He avoided all pretension. He wasn’t a diva. He even eventually assembled his own mobile analog studio so that the Catholics could record just about anywhere. He also kept writing more and more songs. Lots of them.

While few were looking, Frank Black became a goddamn punk.