Frank Black and The Catholics
Black Letter Days
2002, SpinART Records
Frank Black’s music is always annoying somebody.
When an artist makes Surfer Rosa and Teenager of the Year and Black Letter Days in a fourteen-year span, they might leave a few fans figuratively stranded at a few train stations. Not everyone follows.
Today, the brief Frank Black and the Catholics period (1998-2003) is well-loved among the deep-diggers. A new vinyl box set of their six formal studio albums is out and the reappraisals are glowing.
Twenty years ago though, when, for all that anyone knew, Black might make Catholics records forever, some people were over it after three albums. They weren’t into this classic rock sound. Maybe they were tired of the broken-heart songs. Others resented that the guy who launched his solo career with expansive studio visions not long ago was now hooked on recording everything live in the studio to 2-track tape like it’s 1963.
On the flipside though, plenty of us enjoyed it. For me, Black was my mutant Bob Dylan. The songs were stunners, but I also got engrossed in how he was building a body of work that would someday look like a bottomless well, full of phases and stages that sometimes conflict and that people argue over.
In 2002, Black and the Catholics moved at the pace of a band signed to Elektra/Asylum in 1975. A new album (or two) each year nearly. Then a lot of long road trips. They sounded like a classic rock band ready to launch their own Rolling Thunder Revue, yet they also had the discipline of a great 80s punk band who take a blue collar approach to the work. They’re ambitious, but not in a way that has anything to do with breaking big in the mainstream. They’re not even thinking about that. It’s more about honing a vision.
After four years of getting better at it, the eighteen-track lost highway of Black Letter Days sounds like what naturally emerges.
Every great classic rock act needs a double album. Get five Rolling Stones fans together and someone’s favorite will be Exile on Main Street. Sit five Dylan fans at a table and one of ’em will say that Blonde on Blonde is the best.
The challenge was laid down long ago for certain bands to go epic. Get arrogant. Indulge. For a prolific band, a double album can be a new place to go. It has its own unique weight and movement and sense of experimentation. It’s the place to drop two versions of the same song on a record, along with a woozy extended groove.
Black Letter Days fits on one CD, but so do many classic double LPs. There was no vinyl pressing when it came out, but I call it a double album because Black is clearly going for that here.
In some ways, it’s also the definitive Frank Black and the Catholics album because it sounds like the road. The songs themselves come off like they were written on the road. It’s not only the several references in the lyrics to travel (“End of Miles”, “How You Went So Far”, and “21 Reasons” leap to mind right away); it’s also the shape and motion of the songs themselves. They breeze by like highway signs and old motels.
Meanwhile, as a writer, Black dedicates himself to the timeless art of the sad song.
Sad songs are the sound of the earth. Every culture and every long-lived music movement thrives on them.
The greatest American songwriter is Hank Williams and that’s most of what he wrote. Listen to his famous 40 Greatest Hits for a perfect thunderstorm of sad songs. Orginally made for the jukeboxes of the 1940s and 50s, only one track on it is over three minutes (and that one is a cool 3:04). Everything flies by fast and the effect of it all gathered together is a cataclysmic, earth-splitting sadness. Williams could write a simple break-up song that somehow taps into a deeper well of loneliness. His characters are transients, drunks, the estranged, and people who missed the boat in life (and, for a lot of them, it was their own damn fault). Songs such as “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle” and “Weary Blues From Waitin'” are concise anthems for people who’ve had their world crushed and there’s no recovering from it.
I have no idea how much influence Frank took from Hank at this time (though Black would reference the real life tragedy of Hank Williams in the later song “Everything is New”), but Black Letter Days is a descendent in any case. It lives in the same overcast climate.
Among the notable differences is that Black Letter Days is not straight country. It’s a rock album with a country music heart. It scratches the itch that you might have picked up from the Stones’ “Torn and Frayed”. Or The Flying Burrito Brothers. Black was also big on citing Leon Russell as a favorite at the time. Listen to Russell’s first solo LP from 1970 for a taste of what the Catholics were after.
Another difference is that the songs of Hank Williams come with the baggage of knowing that he was living them. Williams died of heart failure on New Year’s Day in 1953 at a hard-lived age 29. He was a dedicated drunk and a pill-popper and his first marriage was every bit the disaster reflected in his songs. Williams was such a wreck that the Grand Ol’ Opry cut ties with him at the height of his fame because they couldn’t count on him to show up for his gigs. His songs are the work of a man who knows that he’s on a bad path,.
By contrast, Frank Black has his head screwed on a little better, as far as I know. When he writes about losers, sinners, hard luck cases, and people left behind, he’s only telling stories, but he’s really into it. He’s always told stories, after all, going back to old Pixies’ songs about incest and aliens.
As if to underline that these songs are about characters, not confessions, there’s nothing personal about the first three tracks.
“The Black Rider” explodes at the start like a firecracker and it’s a Tom Waits cover. It’s a song from a demon who happily invites us into a nightmare from which he doesn’t expect us to wake up. The Waits version comes off like a tribute to Kurt Weill via demented carnival music. The Catholics rock it up by several notches while respecting its jumpy, Threepenny Opera rhythm. They tear through it like this is all great fun and Black lets rip with shouts and falsetto.
Don’t take this too seriously, it says. Enjoy the show. The popcorn is fresh.
The next two songs deal with Native American issues. They sound like Frank’s been reading Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
“California Bound” is a thunderous tension-builder about the Spanish colonizers in California in the 18th and 19th centuries. To conquer the land, they had to convert the natives to Christianity. To convert the natives to Christianity, the Spanish had to resort to coercion and violence (“God willing, we are Calfornia bound/ God willing, I won’t put you in the ground”).
Third track “Chip Away Boy” is a pretty one in which a Chippewa boy (aka the “Chip Away Boy”) fondly remembers the past in a changed world while a gorgeous, highway-scorching pedal steel guitar sings.
From there the album settles into a groove of songs about people who are barely getting through the day, weighed down by regret and loss.
They sometimes say that they don’t want their old lover back, but you know that they do. Or they beg for her to come back, but you know that she won’t. Even if they’re not alone, they still see their glass as half-empty and all they can think about is what will happen if she leaves. Black writes lines such as “I once had a dog who ran from his home/ But that wasn’t even close to your cold heart of stone” and “My eyes are red, my mood is black/ I called your name and you didn’t look back”.
Meanwhile, the tracks are musical mutts of rock, country, folk and even a slight hint of jazz executed with no-nonsense style.
Two highlights:
“Valentine and Garuda”. The most beautiful melody here, even with its eccentric chord changes.
“Southbound Bevy”. Maybe the Catholics’ loveliest display of piano and pedal steel. Black’s perfectly imperfect Jagger-like falsetto vocals put it over the top.
Sleeper favorite:
“1826”. It’s a testimony to the Catholics’ sonic freedom that this great, nearly seven-minute robotic art-rocker sits so comfortably square in the middle of this. It’s a cousin to “Blast Off” from Dog in the Sand and a strange rest stop between the first eight songs and the next nine.
Double albums are all about the sequencing, after all, and Black Letter Days achieves maximum beauty in its second half when some of the album’s longer songs trade energy with some of its’ shortest songs.
The smokey “I Will Run After You” is a shade under four minutes, but it lands on a catharsis that repeats itself until it can’t do it anymore and it feels like an epic. That leads into “True Blue”, which is not only under two minutes, but its drumless, demo-like arrangement makes it feel even smaller next to what surrounds it, but no less beautiful for it. It’s someone’s favorite song here, I’m sure.
After that, “Jane the Queen of Love” hangs out with us for over five minutes and it sounds, in the best way, like a band who’ve been keeping the crowd drinking all night and the set’s almost over. They can still shake the walls with this anthem, but they’re loose in the joints and when there’s a quiet part, they really lean into it. It reminds me of the Beatles song “Oh! Darling”. Paul McCartney wanted to sound like a nightclub singer who was performing this song for the umpteenth time that week so he sang it everyday until he was just about sick of it. Was “Jane the Queen of Love” worked out in a similar way? Did the band save it for the end of their sessions? Did they record a hundred takes before they got this one? I have no idea, but I’m curious.
Also, “Jane the Queen of Love” is great. It’s a love song that I think is at least partly about bees. It sounds like the end of the record, but it’s not. Black Letter Days wants to wear you out because that’s what a double album does.
“Jet Black River” is another short one that comes in under the two-minute mark and it’s so modest that its percussion is simple handclaps, but the exchange of energy between it and “Jane” is beautiful. I think it’s a song about old school oil prospectors.
From there, the nearly six-minute “21 Reasons” rocks us closer to the conclusion. It’s a driving callback to track 2, “California Bound”. The “21 reasons” are the famous twenty-one Spanish missions built along the southern California coast from 1769 to 1834. They still stand today as tourist attractions, preserved pieces of history, and fodder for a great, mystical Frank Black song.
“Whispering Weeds” sounds light, but it’s what we need just before the closer. The tropical drums let in the sun and it feels good on our skin. The music is cold lemonade, but the words are stronger stuff if you get into them. The “weeds” are “whispering” about history. People dead and gone. The stories aren’t always pretty, but we are alive now and it’s our job to keep living. After all, someday we’ll be gone and the weeds will whisper about us and what will they say?
After that, I can’t think of a better way to end things than with a reprise of “The Black Rider”, the opening track, but performed here in a different, mellower, “surf” arrangement. From what I understand, the two versions happened organically. The band jammed on this Tom Waits song so much that they had a few different interpretations of it on tape and couldn’t decide on one for the album so they went with two.
The effect is powerful. Start and end a collection of songs of misery by making a cartoon character out of Death. Laugh at him. Laugh at ourselves. Life is such an absurd parade.
I never feel depressed when I listen to Hank Williams songs. By some weird magic, they manage to be uplifting. A big reason for that is that none of them are suicide notes. They’re the work of a songwriter who finishes one song and then starts work on another right away. Songs, even sad ones, are a lifeforce and he’s going to write until he drops. When Williams was found dead, he had notes for a new song in his pockets, which is perfect.
Black Letter Days brings a similar kick. It’s not a death dirge. It’s a great songwriter hooked on his latest kick.
And here’s his double album. It stretches out and makes a few bold leaps and someone somewhere will be annoyed and think it should have been chopped down, but the people who love it will really love it. We don’t want a single moment cut out. If you ever take a long road trip with Black Letter Days (the best way to hear it, really), you’re gonna need ALL eighteen of these tracks to serenade the highway.
Black was riding high after this, so much that he and the Catholics recorded another album a few months later. It’s a little different, but in a way that makes sense.
Both releases would come out on the same day in August of 2002. That was fun. I still remember hitting the record store after work when they came out and then doing nothing the rest of the night except spin these two CDs over and over.
More on that next.