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.
Oddballs is the first of FIVE unique collections of B-sides and other non-album moments from Black’s various phases. I don’t have a favorite. They’re all so different.
This one covers the raw, rocking side of his pre-Catholics 90s. You could call it a companion piece to The Cult of Ray even. Ten of its fourteen tracks are plucked from its orbit and have the same no-frills sound of a four-man band in a room.
The main difference is that these songs tend to be more mean and feral and were recorded without much fuss or polish. Almost none of them sound like simple album outtakes.
The record was done, but, oh yeah, the singles need B-sides.
Also the UK label wants to put out a special edition of The Cult of Ray with four exclusive tracks on a second CD.
And some people at Warner are putting together a compilation of songs officially “inspired by” the X-Files TV series and they just got in touch.
A natural songwriter and ambitious, Black said yes to all of that stuff and then went to work on filling up space. All gathered together on Oddballs, these songs sound like Black wrestling with his punk side and his classic rock side. The result is a truce that you can hear in his next phase with Frank Black and The Catholics.
The sequence darts all over the place. The songs are not in chronological order. Three Teenager of the Year-era B-sides show up and fit right in. They’re not cast-offs from Eric Drew Feldman’s synthesized production world. Jon Tiven produced these. The songs are every bit as nerdy as the ones on the album, but the sound is more garage.
“At the End of the World” is a killer punk-by-way-of-The-Who rocker that says R.I.P. to John Candy, who died in March 1994 (“Candy went and blew my mind today/ Now he’s going to spend some time away”).
It’s one of those songs that only Black would write, as is “Oddball”, an attempt at a geeky outsider’s anthem. In it, Black questions what the point even is of living if you’re not going to be a little weird. It’s the weirdos who change things. “Trying to be Stones”, Black writes in the sleeve notes. It’s hard to imagine Mick Jagger singing lines such as”Mathematics moves at such a crawl/ And gravity is mighty strong/ It’s so strong that every place is an orb”, but the band goes for that Stones-y interaction in which the playing sounds loose and comfortable, but they also waste no time. They push the song forward.
“Hate Me” zips through the punk fixation that Teenager of the Year touched on in moments. It’s about being judged for your clothes and hair (“My shirt is shitty”, which rhymes nicely with “Yeah, I combed by hair/ It’s still not pretty”) and Black unleashes a guttural roar to express the unfashionable outcast’s rage.
As for the rest, Frank Black himself produces and I remember buying the “Men in Black” CD single back in ’96 and loving how borderline sloppy the B-sides were. Each one has the attack of a great first take. Even Black’s vocals are on the ragged side for these songs, but in a way that feels right. I liked all three of them more than the A-side and they’re all here.
“Pray a Little Faster”, which opens Oddballs, and “You Never Heard About Me”, which is next to last, are blistering shouters. The former is punk and the latter is (sorta) blues and they’re both full of roundhouse punches and lots of tension in the neck and shoulders to work out.
Then there’s “Announcement”, six minutes of a band clicking together perfectly to unleash thunder and lightning. From what I’ve seen, this song is a major cult favorite. The deep-diggers are way into it. Back in the day, you NEEDED that “Men in Black” CD for this song alone. I love the drums (by Scott Boutier, I presume). Even when the song is soft, the drums stay angry and the cymbals get a workout. “Trying to be Daltrey”, Black describes the track and, yeah, I can see that (think “Behind Blue Eyes”), but he’s just as much Townsend. Like The Who could do in their prime, the band make a modest song sound like an epic. They give the impression of a vast expanse and then they slice through it like a razor.
Black’s band could do punk and they could do something like “Announcement”. No wonder that he stuck with these guys for awhile.
For other B-sides, they reached for covers and only a grinch could complain. Black’s punked-up version of Roxy Music’s “Remake/Remodel” is necessary to maintaining good blood pressure for me, as is his vocal imitation of one of the original record’s horn parts. A few tracks later is a faithful take on The Beau Brummels’ 1965 hit “Just a Little” introduced with a shaking tambourine for extra 60s flavor.
In 1996, there was a limited UK edition of The Cult of Ray with four bonus songs and Oddballs scoops up those, too. They aren’t as noisy as the “Men in Black” B-sides, but they have their charms. I like that they’re all different from each other.
“Village of the Sun” is a made-to-order anthem that sneaks in a trilling organ in the background.
“Baby, That’s Art” goes for a tight, bass-driven strut. I think it’s a sarcastic song about creating something and then soaking in the good vibes afterward when people like it. Everything you do is a great (“And I laughed ’cause I said something funny”). Your ego is stroked and you’re riding high. Your farts smell like roses. Black has been there and now he satirizes it.
“Can I Get a Witness” shoots for a classic rock ballad. It sounds like something that was written in a tour bus. You’re watching rural roads and cow country zip by and you kinda want to tap into the universal heart. Frank Black and the Catholics would later be all about this sound.
“Everybody Got the Beat” brings more punk. Pogo ’til you plop. It sounds like it was written in about five minutes and I mean that in a good way. It rocks. The words aren’t very important, but I think it’s about how we’re all cool when we’re bopping around to the music we love, but we’re dorks inside. That goes for both the audience and the band.
The one previously unreleased track here is “Jumping Beans”. We got a lo-fi homemade demo five years before on Black Sessions – Live in Paris and now here’s the studio attempt. It’s just fun. It’s one of Black’s silly songs. Fast, light, areodynamic. “Jumping Beans” is about jumping beans and that’s that, daddy-o.
My favorite comes last. My favorite leaves us in a cloud of smoke. My favorite sounds great when you’re driving at night.
My favorite is “Man of Steel”.
It originally appeared on a compilation formally titled Songs in the Key of X: Music From and Inspired by The X-Files from 1996.
I have never watched The X-Files. I know that it’s about paranormal investigators. Aliens. Ghosts. Conspiracy.
All of those subjects were Frank Black’s hot topics at the time, but the song he gave them had nothing to do with that. “Man of Steel” is, in my interpretation, about a long haul truck driver. The loneliest job. Truck drivers tour the country like a rock band, except that they’re hauling essential goods. Black salutes his brothers of the highway here. Somehow the main riff captures the feel of a spinning wheel and rest of the song conjures up the road and stars.
There are a whole bunch of country songs about truckers, but not a lot of rock songs. Frank Black takes care of that here.
Oddballs is not a complete collection. It dares to leave out one of the BEST Frank Black B-sides, “Surf Epic”. That’s a ten-minute instrumental from 1993 that’s heavy with the synthetic tones of Frank Black. It brings mellow surf music vibes with UFO theremin trills for a truly cosmic experience. It’s a stunner, but it didn’t fit on Oddballs so you still need to go to the “Hang on to Your Ego” single for that one. As if to make up for its absence here, Black reworked one of the most fetching parts of “Surf Epic” for a song on the next Frank Black and the Catholics album, Dog in the Sand.
Also left off are Black’s TWO mid-90s Kinks covers (“This is Where I Belong” and “Better Things”), a likable lounge music instrumental called “Amnesia” and an early version of “Men in Black” (which first came out as a B-side in 1994).
I don’t miss them, though.
Oddballs is a rock album. It doesn’t care about collecting everything. It came out at a time when Black was stripping things down and it shows that he didn’t go there only because he no longer had big label budgets to work with. No, he was always cool with that sound.
Give him a guitar and a mic and some kind of recording device and he’ll make it work.
Oddballs can survive anything.