Music Interviews
Here are some links to interviews I did in my former life as a music journalist:
HOWE GELB (GIANT SAND)
FRANK BLACK 2004
There’s perhaps no crueller fate than to be adored for the art you created as a young man. As every year you grow away from the person you used to be, it’s that discarded and forgotten version of yourself that your audience crave. It’s why they put up with you. You create something that affects people and then you have to spend the rest of your life living up to it.
Salinger had to disappear into hiding and seclusion. Van Morrison spent the rest of his career trying to catch something of it. Fante dissolved into bitterness and Billy the Kid well, he knew when to exit and where to place the full stop.
Though, as a solo artist, Frank Black (‘call me Charles’ he says when we meet but I just can’t – rock and roll stars are not meant to be called Charles) has released more than twice the amount of albums the Pixies ever did, yet it’s always going to be for ‘Surfer Rosa’ and ‘Doolittle’ that his place in the hall of fame is assured. And that’s both a shame and a woeful lacunae because his solo work is as powerful and plain out weird as anything he did with his former band while encompassing ranges of emotion and musicality that the Pixies never even thought of broaching.
In a world more perfect than this one, Black’s new solo album ‘Honeycomb’ would redress the balance. Recorded barely a few days before the Pixies hit the road on their comeback tour, it’s a statement of intent – the Pixies may sell out your-local-stadium but Frank Black will remain a solo artist. Perhaps like Dylan, Black needed to get behind a strong record before visiting his back pages.
Abandoning the 2-track-live-to-tape-by-the-skin-of-their-teeth approach of The Catholics (with whom FB had made six records) and entering the fray of Nashville, session musicians and chord charts, Black has created one of the most resonant and affecting works of his career, backed by Spooner Oldham, David Hood, Dan Penn, Chester Thompson and a whole host of others who’ve probably never heard of a band called the Pixies from a time long ago and far away.
We meet in a Kensington hotel whose façade is a grim reminder of why Stalinist architecture and grey skies can induce serious depression and an interior modelled as a mahogany olde England pub. It’s like sitting inside a violin. To our right a group of middle-aged Swedish conventioneers are drinking, smoking and talking. Even if we could understand them the world they inhabit is a million miles away from us. And, as for the Pixies, well it’s safe to say they’ve never even heard of them. Perhaps that’s why Frank/Charles seems so relaxed today.
What made you decide to go to Nashville and record with session musicians rather than making another Catholics record?
Well, I didn’t decide those guys specifically; the producer (Jon Tiven) picked them. I’ve known him for ten years. So I said to him, ‘hey, one day I want to do my ‘Blonde on Blonde’. I want to go to Nashville. I want to have a bunch of guys who don’t know who I am but that are legit or whatever…of a certain calibre’. Like Neil Young did too, using some of the same people for his ‘Harvest’ record so it was kind of like a loose following of footsteps.
A sort of Black on Black?
Black on Blonde was our joke title. So, anyway, he said he would organise this for me and this was like ten years ago so every year he calls me up and reminds me whenever you want I’m ready to do the black on blonde so this has been going on for ten years. Then the Catholics did their last tour. Wasn’t declared as the last tour but sure as hell felt like the last tour. We’d been doing so many tours these last however many years and I think we were just tired and there was talk of a Pixies reunion but at this particular time, this was over a year ago, the Pixies and I were squabbling about whatever…and it got to the point where it was drawing lines in the sand. It was all business stuff, it wasn’t anything personal. Not even between us, just in terms of management…the classic things that a band would fight over. For a while that was off actually, it was officially off and in that moment I was like well, I’m in no mood to go back on tour with the Catholics, the Pixies thing isn’t going to happen, I’d just moved out of LA and gotten a divorce so there I was up in my loft, my middle age loft apartment, looking down on the city lights in Portland, Oregon and I said okay what am I going to do this year, musically? So I called up Tiven and said ‘okay, Black on Blonde – let’s go’. He called me back the next day and said ‘it’s all set up, I got Cropper, I got Oldham etc’. I was like wow!
Were the songs written beforehand or did you write them as soon as you got the go ahead with this particular band in mind?
As soon as. And then I had to call him back the next day and say the Pixies tour is back on, I only have a four, five day window I can do it in. So I had maybe two months to prepare for the session. I started writing the songs then so all the songs were written in that brief period with the exception of Selkie Bride which I had written a few years ago and was never happy with.
What was it like being in the studio with session musicians who didn’t know your work as opposed to the live two track process you used with the Catholics?
There were some things that were similar because even though we were multi-tracking and there was no discussion about purity, should we overdub?, should we re-do a vocal?, that wasn’t even a question. I was on their turf, I was on the producer’s turf. Let them run the show. I’m just the singer songwriter guy, you guys do whatever you do, you want me to redo a vocal, I’ll redo a vocal, whatever. Having said that they were all extremely accustomed to working very quickly so we were all playing live and actually having made all those Catholics records really prepared me for that session because I could really sing and play the songs consistently because I’d got so used to doing that with the Catholics because that was our whole thing to be consistent as possible without being boring so I was very pleased suddenly finding that while I didn’t have the prowess of these guys, I did have some kind of muscle which allowed me to be solid.
Did you enjoy abrogating responsibility to others?
Oh, it was great. Flying into Nashville with my guitar: I’m here for the session! The whole thing is either take one or take two, never rehearsed, they’d never even heard the songs, they’re just looking at a numbers chart and playing. It’s great to see the prowess, to have to be, on the one hand completely reliant on some notes on a chart but, at the same time, being so good and so accustomed to that that they were free to be as creative as they wanted.
Did they surprise you in the studio?
Yeah, because there was nothing hack about it. You know, hearing it now, you can hear them commenting on the lyrics with their instruments, not in a cheesy way, but little fills and things, and they’re so good at that and at the same time none of them are stepping over each other, they’re all playing around each other and they’ve never even heard the songs before! Which just shows you where they’re at technically.
‘Honeycomb’ seems to be a much subtler record than your previous ones. There’s more consideration given to texture and shading, would you agree?
Yeah. And it wasn’t at all orchestrated. I was used to maybe doing that in a (Catholics) session but it would be through a lot of rehearsal and a lot of arranging and blocking it out like you were filming a movie scene or it was just being spontaneous, whatever happens, happens and either it’ll be a beautiful thing or it won’t but this was sort of like having it go down as if it was all planned out but there was nothing planned out at all. Like the long solo at the end of My Life is in Storage, they all knew exactly where to end.
You definitely seem to have been inspired by this. There’s a much more confident tone to your singing than I’ve ever heard before.
I don’t know if I was more comfortable but there’s a certain thing when you get to the point where (I’m thinking) I don’t know how he convinced all those guys to be on my record, they didn’t know exactly who I was – so I guess when you finally get to this situation you just have to do it, like I don’t want to embarrass myself, I don’t want to crumble under their weight. I think if there’s any confidence going on it’s just because you feel you have to be confident.
Was it a relief to be playing with musicians who weren’t cognisant of your history?
Yeah, at the time I was like I only ever want to record records like this, I don’t want to do anything else. Obviously that’s extreme and I’m quiet happy to make records the way I’ve been making them but there was something about that session, man, that was really magic. We did another session in November (provisionally titled ‘The Sicilian’) with some other players and this was an all night session, after a Pixies gig, I went in to the studio in Nashville and we stayed up all night and just recorded and sometimes there was like ten guys playing at once and that was really cool and we recorded a lot of great stuff and it was pretty special and awe-inspiring but because there were so many people and it was so late at night and it was so fast, that session sounds totally different and it’s a different vibe and it’s going to require work to declare it finished, I think, as opposed to this one where we had a few days so it was more like a band. The more people you add to anything the more complicated it gets so it was just enough and felt so settled and magical. It sounds really hokey to say it was spiritual but it really was and those guys you know they’ve seen it all, played with everybody, just their lives…you could just tell. And there’s their humility. People that age they’ve either soured and retired, have a jaundiced view about it all or they’ve made peace with the universe.
Getting back to ‘Honeycomb’, this is your divorce album right, Charles?
Yeah.
But, unlike most divorce albums which are very bitter and bruised, this seems almost romantic and optimistic, strangely amicable and somehow transformative.
Yeah, it’s my divorce album but I would like to think mine’s the more friendly, lovable divorce album. Of course my ex-wife sings that song (Strange Goodbye)with me.
How did that come about?
I was writing the song at the Burbank airport and I said I want to sing this with Jean as a duet, as a kind of Johnny Cash and June Carter thing, almost showbizzy, and so I called her and she said ‘yeah no problem’ and so I did write it with that in mind. We weren’t in the studio at the same time, I think we both would have got a little too choked up if that had been the case but it was our way of sealing things and also to present a kind of happy, almost humorous face in the light of it all.
Was there any point during the writing of the songs when you realised this was the prevailing theme?
Well, yeah some of them are really obvious like My Life is in Storage which was pretty literal. Songs like I Burn Today or Song for Joy, I don’t know if they’re narrative to the degree that people would necessarily understand what I’m singing about but that’s what I’m singing about, I’m just singing about my life, it’s just straight out.
Around the time of ‘Dog in the Sand’ there seems to have been a shift in your writing from the disjointed, fractured, heavily allusive lyrics you’re known for towards a more straightforward and personal narrative style?
It started out at the encouragement of my ex-wife actually. A few years ago I was having a frustrating time writing some lyrics and she said ‘look, you should be a little more open maybe, a little more personal or a little more universal anyway. People are listening to these songs and they want to get behind them, they want to relate their own lives to the songs, yeah that’s me, and they want to be pissed off along with you’ and that was really the first time I was encouraged by somebody to go that route or the first time that I listened anyway and so that’s when I started. I allowed myself to go there and then it began to happen more and more.
Did you find it therapeutic? A way of resolving issues, of telling yourself things you don’t know you know?
I don’t know. It’s satisfying and it was a relief to do that because sometimes you can get into…it’s probably more marijuana paranoia in the past, I would say, more than anything else it was that, but you can become afraid of your own songs sometimes. It’s an ego thing, it’s kind of like I’m prophesying my own life and all that and you become afraid of that and become too haunted by your own songs so you’re afraid of being too personal so you deliberately try and go the other way – it’s just this neurotic kind of thing and then finally some bad shit happens to you and you go (sighs) just fuck it, man, I’m going to sing my song whatever and when that happens it’s a relief. I don’t have to be afraid anymore – who gives a shit? I can be autobiographical, so what if I’m prophesying, who cares? You’re lucky you have your music, be happy, continue, what are you going to do, sit there in the corner and shake?
You seem to be doing that thing which Dylan does so well and that’s taking autobiographical material and transforming it into this whole mytho-poetic construction which resonates on several diverse and non-congruous levels. Like the way he transmutes his marriage and subsequent separation into Isis – would you say this was a fair summation of what you’re trying to do?
Yeah, especially with songs like I Burn Today and Song to Joy, even Selkie Bride which was a song about the mythical creature. I started writing it a few years ago and it wasn’t a personal song. I was never quite happy with it and I brought it up to my therapist, read the lyric to her, and she said ‘well, okay, here’s what’s going on…you know who the Selkie Bride is, don’t you?’ and then she said ‘now that you realise who the song is about, I think you can finish it’ and she was right! It’s like women, their psychic antenna is so much stronger than men’s. I would sing on records, say ‘Show Me Your Tears’ or Dog in the Sand’ and it was in code because I didn’t want to know at the time but Jean, my ex-wife, was like ‘hey what’s up man?’ And I would be like nah…nah…nah, I’m just trying to write a song and she’d be ‘okay man, okay Charles, whatever you say.’
There’s a rumour that suggests that Springsteen’s ‘The Rising’ (which is ostensibly an album about a woman coming to terms with the death of her fire-fighter husband in 9/11) is actually a coded goodbye letter to a woman he was seeing and broke up with. Do you think we can ever say what we mean or are multiple and divergent, polysemous readings inevitable and actually as much part of the creative process as intended meaning?
What you realise is that no matter how much you say it’s something else and you intend it to be something else, it’s not that. In hindsight when you get there you can see, ah, I see what I did there. Now I think I’m in a place where I’m not doing that anymore because I’ve caught myself enough times having done that in the past and so now I just want to be direct.
Well, ‘Honeycomb’ definitely sees to be your most direct and least obfuscating album.
Yeah, yeah, I would say that. And because I knew those guys would play on it I felt I had to meet them halfway on some level and give these guys something they can get behind, musically or thematically. I just can’t give them a bunch of weird quirky songs just because they know how to play them.
You’re not known for recording covers and yet you chose three very different songs, Dark End of the Street (written by ‘Honeycomb’ engineer Dan Penn), Doug Sahm’s Sunday Mill Valley Groove Day and probably the plain-out weirdest song Elvis ever sang, Song of the Shrimp. Why those?
Well Dark End of the Street I knew only from the Gram Parsons version. I didn’t know much about the history of the song. The song meant something to me emotionally too. I didn’t know it was a soul song.
Yet the vocal is perhaps the most ‘soulful’ of your career.
It was scary. It’s a voice I kind of copped off Freddy Fender. It’s kind of a gentle, fragile voice and I’ve only done it once or twice before. Dan Penn, who wrote it, went out on the mike with the rest of them and first they did a reggae version of it which was great and then they were ‘okay, fuck this’, and did the real version and his vocal was just smoking, it was so good. I was like how am I gonna do that? You know what I mean? But he was so cool, the next day he went up to take a nap and that was my cue to do the vocal without him sitting there. I didn’t think I was going to do it but Jon Tiven was really good at walking me through that. He showed me a good trick about doing vocals. When you’re overdubbing vocals you sing with the bass, not anything else, just bass and drums, and it’s amazing how it transforms the way you deliver it.
And yet, despite the seeming incongruity of these covers, a closer scrutiny reveals that they all somehow deal with themes of separation and estrangement, pretty much like the rest of ‘Honeycomb’, especially that line in the Doug Sahm song: “You’ll be king of what you survive.”
Yeah, it’s a great line. That’s the line that’s been slave-driving me on since I first heard it.
Do you know the Townes van Zandt version of Song of the Shrimp, the way he plays it as if it’s the saddest ballad you ever heard?
Yeah, that’s the version I know. And he’s barely playing the song, stopping, making comments. It’s funny and I guess it’s got a lot of double entendres and it’s sad – is it about the human condition? You can take it in so many ways.
Any plans to take the musicians out on the road to tour the album?
I’m trying to get those guys. They’re all interested but they’ve got careers and other concerns so I don’t know if I can get them all lined up. This record, I have to try and get those guys to give it that special feeling. I really want to do it. It’s the guitarists, Cropper and Buddy Miller, that are hard to pin down.
There seems to have been a marked influence and interest in country music on your records since ‘DITS’.
You have to credit one of the great Americana bands of all time, the Rolling Stones, they’re totally responsible for bringing all that into rock and roll music. Starting way back in the mid sixties. Dylan and The Band too of course.
You’ve covered Springsteen’s I’m Going Down, is that right?
That was a while back, like six years. The Catholics are doing a box set and that’s going to be on there. I always loved that song.
Any details?
It’s coming out on Cooking Vinyl. All the B-sides, plus other things we need to look at and try and find so you’re not buying the same stuff twice. The way English marketing is you’re always asked to do extra tracks for the singles and that’s the only reason all that stuff exists because in the States they never ask for it…they could give a shit.
Any particular favourites amongst your solo albums?
Yeah, actually probably the least popular, ‘Devils’ Workshop’. Some of the tracks are a little bit dark sounding. It’s only got 11 songs on it but it’s got a pretty good variety of songs. It’s the most rock and roll of all of them.
That was released simultaneously with ‘Black Letter Days’, your acoustic album. What was behind the decision to release them together?
We recorded ‘BLD’ in a loft space with a producer and it was much more worked on. We wanted to prove we could make a great record with all this gear we had compiled. So that was done and we were hanging out in LA and so we just said let’s do some more recording, see what happens. We didn’t need to do it, there was no pressure coming from anyone…it was cool, kinda more guerrilla style.
Any solo albums you look back on think and think oh no, what was I thinking?
Not really. There are a few songs on every record but even the much demonised ‘Cult of Ray’, when I listen to that I’m actually pretty satisfied with it. I really like the way it sounds. Sometimes when you make records it’s very internal and you’re not doing it for other people and other times it’s more like you’re trying to project out.
What’s next for you?
I’m writing new songs. I was talking with Jon Tiven about doing some sessions with all the old New York punks from that scene. He’s from there so he’s got all those guys waiting in the wings.
Which writers do you like?
Kim Stanley Robinson. Vonnegut, stuff like that. I like to think I’m a Samuel Becket fan but have I really truly absorbed his work? I’m a fake Samuel Becket fan.
Your lyrics always seem to have been influenced by film and literature more than by music, would you agree with that?
Yeah. Especially with the Pixies stuff. I took my cue from all that. But I don’t know about now. It’s hard to connect the dots sometimes. I try not to think about it too much, firstly because I’m lazy but secondly I think it’s probably better that I don’t.
You live near Portland, Oregon these days, right?
Actually a hundred miles from there. But I don’t live there (Portland) at the moment and even if I did I wouldn’t have time to check out the music scene because I have gone from thinking about having kids to having three kids. When I’m at home it’s just like I’m making pancakes and driving them to ballet lessons.
Did you ever imagine this life for yourself?
I think I always wanted it and always fantasized about it and it was very fearful going into it. I met a woman who had two children, we had another child and I think it was very nerve-racking at the beginning. I was very stressed out about the whole situation. I didn’t want to mess it up or be a bad dad but the lifestyle totally suits me. I have no problem with it. I love it. And it’s good because, for example, I used to not really be able to write on the road and I’d be like, I’m on the road, I don’t want to go to the museum, I don’t want to write music, I have my show tonight and I’m going to be focussed about that and if I’m not focussed about that I’m going to be focussed about napping, or relaxing or doing whatever, but now I can’t do that much at home so I’m kind of forced to do it. I’m like, I’m on my own for a week so I should take advantage of that and I found that I can actually write on the road. I told myself I couldn’t do it for so long that I believed it but now it’s not the case.
Do you regard the Pixies as an albatross?
Well, as much as I like to believe in art over commerce, the numbers do speak for themselves and so I have to give that some credit but there’s nothing I can do about it so I don’t worry about it too much. I think it used to bother me but now it’s not an albatross, it’s a blessing. It’s what gives me my financial freedom to be a musician.
On last year’s ‘Frank Black Francis’ you seemed to be reclaiming those songs by presenting one disc of Pixies favourites recorded solo before the band even went into the studio and then a disc of those same songs recorded and radically re-arranged. Was that the thinking behind that album?
It’s funny because I had that notion when I still had a bad attitude about doing a reunion. It was like I wanna be like Lou Reed where he did that live album and he was doing all those old Velvets songs. People then, because of Walk on the Wild Side, they associate all those Velvets songs with him and not with the Velvets. That’s what I need to do. If I could have a hit then I could do a live record, do some of the old songs and then that’s what people will associate me with. That was my theory. It’s a nice theory but it isn’t how things have worked out. So that was not my intention in reclaiming anything but if it ends up working that way then fine. But now I don’t have such a bad attitude about the Pixies.
Yet the second disc totally deconstructed the Pixies template, slowing down songs like Wave of Mutilation into almost minimalist gothic chamber pieces.
I wish I could claim that kind of involvement with it but I really just gave it over to the Two Pale Boys and I just went over to their place, sang some stuff into a microphone and said okay go for it, see you guys later and didn’t really get involved. They sent me some roughs and I said, I like this, I don’t like that, but basically it’s their production, so I wish I could claim it’s my vision but it’s really their vision.
The Pixies are about to tour again. Any plans of going into the studio to record an album?
We’ve done a couple of songs but that was just one-offs. I don’t know if there’s any demand for us to make a record. It’s a live thing. That’s what people want to hear, I think. They want to hear those old songs and it’s not necessarily because they’re nostalgic it’s because they’re young and they never heard us before and they want to hear us, it’s still the reference point. We’re a little bit wary of doing that. We might still do it but it won’t be because we’re trying to cash in on our wave of popularity because of the reunion tour, that wouldn’t feel right.
When writing songs do you change the way you do things if it’s for a solo record or for the Pixies?
I’ve tried to go there a little bit but my brain doesn’t seem to work that way and Joey Santiago discouraged me from thinking in that way. He said ‘just write some songs – leave it to the Pixies to make it sound like the Pixies, don’t worry about trying to write for us’ and he’s right.
You’ve gone through more name changes than a James Ellroy bad guy. What were the motives behind that?
To have a stage name. I thought I was allowed and so I did. If it’s good enough for Iggy it’s good enough for me. That was the only reason I did it. Theatrical affectation.
Even when you released your first solo album, ‘Frank Black’ while the Pixies were still together? – do you see them as different entities and therefore felt you needed to change the name accordingly?
That might have been, hey, I’m my own person now. That was also a way to normalise Black Francis because people never knew what to call me, like other musicians. So they’d be like ‘Black’ or when I first met David Bowie he would always call me (in actorial British accent) ‘Fraaancis’, because he just couldn’t call me Black. So I was like I’ve got to change that. People have no problem calling me Frank.