Frank Black and the Catholics
Dog in the Sand
2001, What Are Records?
As I crumble and stumble through old age, I’ve learned that the musicians who mean the most to me have two things in common.
1) They never go away. They’re always there. Even after their band breaks up, their album bombs, their label drops them, or they fall out of fashion, they keep going. They have a new record out next year. They don’t hide away for a decade. Bad reviews bounce off of them. I find this life-affirming.
2) They’re ambitious. However, I’m NOT talking about the sort of ambition that drives a person to do anything for success. Stab their collaborators in the back. Bow to the big entertainment shit machine. Con their way to the top of mountain. No, I’m talking about an ambition that means challenging yourself and putting out work that reflects a vision and a variety of interests. People change. They go through phases. I like when musicians do the same. If a band or solo act has ten albums out, I’m most impressed when album #10 is on a different trip from album #1.
Now, there are great bands who don’t fit into one or either of the above descriptions.
The reckless types who burned bright and flamed out early, like Robert Johnson or Syd Barrett, are perpetually fascinating.
There’s also something to be said for bands like Motorhead or the Ramones, who found their one sound and then worked it until they dropped.
That’s all fine, but I’m not hooked on them like I am on guys like Frank Black, who dare to evolve, even if they lose some people along the way.
And I really get sold on them when they quietly put out masterpieces such as Dog in the Sand.
So much comes together here. Its sound is a step up in sophistication from what came before. Its twelve songs touch on where Black had been and where he was interested in going at the time. Its subjects are outer space, California, sadness, death, and the beautiful thing that occurs when pedal steel guitar and piano collide with rock ‘n’ roll.
Maybe it happened during one of the band’s endless tours. Or maybe it happened in the studio, where they always recorded live to old-fashioned two-track analog tape, no edits or overdubs allowed.
Whenever it happened, at some point, Black began to hear that the seasoned players in The Catholics (Rich Gilbert, Dave McCaffrey, and Scott Boutier) could do anything.
They could raise hell in one song and then gently whisper through the next one. They could adapt and lean into moments and read each others’ minds to the point that the group could play different sets night after night without anything written down.
Dog in the Sand shows off what this band could do and yet is more than a simple snapshot of their stage chops.
The first pair of Catholics albums were two guitars, a bass, and drums mostly knocking the needle into the red over and over again. They were taut and wired, often filling every space with sound. They’re great, but Black couldn’t keep doing that.
It’s that ambition that I was talking about before.
So he brought in more players and more sounds. Old friends Joey Santiago, Eric Drew Feldman, and Moris Tepper show up in frequent guest spots. Also, the Catholics add on a new full-time member, guitarist Dave Phillips, who could coax ghosts out of any stringed instrument that you gave him (he passed away in 2021).
The result isn’t just great; it’s graceful. Dog in the Sand is full of natural movement and atmosphere. All of this extra sound frees the band to let the space between the notes breathe more than they might have done a few years ago. They slow down and savor. They also treat rock ‘n’ roll, country, folk, and torchy cabaret music like they’re all the same thing, until you can barely tell the difference between them.
Frank Black and the Catholics progress here the same way that fellow road warriors Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones progressed back in the late 60s and 70s, not by chasing trendy new sounds, but by digging deeper into old sounds and regarding them as living things rather than nostalgia.
The seven-minute opener, “Blast Off”, is raw confidence. It’s a stinging groove, but in a 70s European style. It recalls a period when bands were moving past blues jams and the likes of Roxy Music found swagger in hypnotic repetition. Black’s twist is to start it off like a showtune. One character tells their story alone in a spotlight (“I’m gonna make my mark/ Maybe in showbiz/ Maybe on solid ground/ I do not know”). They’re a wannabe star and then, as the band shifts into high gear, our narrator somehow ends up in space among the stars. The real stars. It’s a curiously relevant song in 2022, when some of our billionaire class are building private rocket ships. Maybe space travel is the last status symbol. So, you’re famous and rich, but you have been to another planet?
It’s a song that lets us know right away that the Catholics are more than a great bar band, which frees them to BE a great bar band next on “I’ve Seen Your Picture”. Rich Gilbert’s pedal steel sings the high notes while Black growls like Mick Jagger. The lyrics are his poison arrow directed toward the ubiquity of advertising. It sounds like it was written in a tour van as it blew past billboards along the highway and headed toward rock clubs tattooed with band stickers, Black quietly annoyed the whole time. You can’t go anywhere without brand names jumping for your attention. The song gets better when you learn that Frank Black walked it like he talked it and stopped selling T-shirts on the road (well, until the Pixies reunion, at least). After 1999 or 2000, the merch table at a Catholics show offered CDs and nothing else.
After that rant, it’s time for a history lesson and my pick for the album’s best moment.
“St. Francis Dam Disaster” is one of Black’s California songs, but it doesn’t mess around with the abstractions of “Los Angeles”. He’s a straight folkie here who relates the story of one of the worst engineering disasters in American history. March 12, 1926. Los Angeles County. Just before midnight, the St. Francis dam gave way and water flooded fifty miles of communities as it rushed to the Pacific coast, destroying homes and killing at least 400 people. The man in charge of the dam was William Mulholland, who Black previously celebrated in “Ole Mulholland” from Teenager of the Year for bringing irrigation to Los Angeles. “St. Francis Dam Disaster” is its dark sequel. For it, Black is a classic storyteller who treats the water itself as the main character (“That water seeks her own/ She had a desire to flow/ She was looking for somewhere to go”).
It’s a landmark for Black’s songwriting. No one expected something like this from him in 2001. It also shows off the Catholics’ new mastery of quiet elegance.
We can go anywhere from there. So Black decides to go back up to outer space with “Robert Onion”, a powerful post-punk tension-builder. There’s something very 1983 about it. It reminds me of Mission of Burma. It’s an explosive anthem, but tricky, finding its most rocking moments in its left turns. The lyrics are a word game. Each line’s first letter forms an acrostic that pays tribute to aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin and his book The Case for Mars, a non-fiction plan for Mars colonization. We’re blasting off again, but this time for science. And maybe rock ‘n’ roll.
After that, we need something down to earth and that’s where “Stupid Me” wafts in. It’s old-fashioned heartbreak stuff, in and out in two-and-a-half minutes. Our narrator is lovelorn under the same nighttime street lamps that every 50s R&B group sang beneath. His baby left him and here is his tale of woe, complete with falsetto and malt shop jukebox piano.
Then “Bullet” gets personal with a song about fathers and sons. Black’s own father died around this time and left behind a collection of guns, each of which was oddly loaded with a single bullet. The discovery inspired one badass twangy rocker that sounds like a mythic tale. Black is a cowboy from Hell in this song and he got hooked on playing it live. From the Catholics to Black’s solo acoustic shows for years, “Bullet” almost always got fired out. It was too cool to be forgotten.
The first half of Dog in the Sand is a concise tour of Frank Black’s songwriting obsessions at the time, not just the subjects, but the styles. It’s a blend of dusty old things and a 35-year-old man’s point of view and it all had little in common with much indie-rock or “alternative rock” at the time.
The next half keeps all of that coming.
“The Swimmer” is the album’s prettiest song and maybe its saddest. I’ve seen a few different interpretations. Mine is that it’s from the point of view of a captive sea creature, maybe a whale exploited in a theme park, who escapes into the vast ocean. The freedom is amazing, but it also means death (“In the wake of his chariot…”). Our swimmer has no skills to survive in the wild. Humans have always provided for him. He probably won’t last long, but he swims off anyway, “ignoring the rescuers”. It’s happiness and sadness all in the same moment. Or as Black sings, “The scene was so tragic/ But that was the magic”. Rich Gilbert’s brilliant, aquatic-sounding pedal steel work sets off the restrained arrangement perfectly.
“Hermaphroditos” (or “Hermaphroditos Is My Name”, as the lyric sheet calls it) draws from Greek mythology and goes for the big rocker that you might need after “The Swimmer” crushed your heart. The band plow through it like they’re playing for 1970s FM radio and with a wailing slide guitar from Dave Phillips. As for the words, Hermaphroditos isn’t any happier than anyone else in these songs. He/she is all mixed up. It’s a curse to not know yourself.
“I’ll Be Blue” is my sleeper favorite and it goes for a universal sadness. Our narrator is a black cloud who can’t hang with everyone else’s good time. Why? Fill in the blanks yourself. There is no shortage of things in the world to be depressed about. Black’s song is all about the mood. The piano-heavy arrangment is a beauty. It starts off with a jazz ballad feel, but then the pedal steel kicks in and I don’t know what to call this song after that except a magical blend of cool and sturdy old stuff.
Fun fact: According to the credits, Frank Black just sings on “I’ll Be Blue”, without his ever-present rhythm guitar. Maybe that’s why it’s so jazzy.
Fun opinion: I wish that Jimmy Scott covered this song before he left this plane.
“Llano Del Rio” is more California history, as related through beautiful, mystical country-folk. It’s another song that makes me wonder if Black read City of Quartz by Mike Davis (I speculate on this in my article about Black’s first solo album). The book opens with the story of Llano del Rio, the socialist commune painstakingly established in the California desert in 1914 and that failed by 1918. Black pays tribute, writing from the point of view of someone relocating there. He doesn’t acknowledge that the idea wouldn’t last, but that silently hangs in the air if you know the story. It’s not explicitly about politics, though. It’s a happy song about something ill-fated. It’s about that dark irony.
“If It Takes All Night” is workingman’s rock. Enough with the fish, the mythology, the jazzy sadness and socialist communes. This song is about something that everybody knows about: the highway. Late at night, people are driving on it for all sorts of reasons. They’re truck drivers, or they’re bands on their way to the next gig, or they’re people just trying to get home. The radio is on and things are getting done. We’re in France in one verse, then Texas. It’s an upbeat head-bopper that makes the quiet closer all the sweeter.
That would be “Dog in the Sand”. One of the most fetching melodies from Black’s great instrumental B-side from 1993, “Surf Epic”, shows up in it like a surprise guest. It has the same eerily beautiful effect here in a hushed song about home. It’s about a new home, actually. A place to settle after sadness. If “Bullet” references the death of Black’s father, I wouldn’t be surprised if “Dog in the Sand” is about his mother picking up the pieces afterward.
The sad songs and classic rock sound of Dog in the Sand as a whole became Black’s “home” for awhile. He and the Catholics would mess with it further in the next few years of heavy touring and prolific record-making.
There’s nothing unique about rock musicians going “rootsy” as they age. If anything it’s a big cliche. The edgy young mind-blower who was told that he was God’s Gift gets older and starts to see through the bullshit. He’s now drawn to the unpretentious.
And there’s nothing more unpretentious than the contents of an old honky tonk jukebox. That’s a place where cliches live and nobody minds.
The cliches are good. The cliches can ground you. The cliches can also be a challenge.
We can all think of lazy music that’s too devoted to its influences and has no confident voice of its own. Turn on the radio and you’ll find plenty of that.
It takes a certain kind of artist to make the cliches live and breathe.
If you ask me, I think it takes some experience. I think it sometimes takes an artist who’s been going at it for awhile and is fully comfortable in his own skin. And I think it takes ambition.
That’s the sweet spot.
That’s Dog in the Sand.