There are two types of music album – those that immediately grab you by the balls with a hooky chorus or thumping intro, and then the “growers” – those you initially dismiss, but whom with time can become best friends. The ball-grabbers often just fade to obscurity in the cupboard of the head – fun for a while, but ultimately dispensable. The growers however are lasters, they softly insinuate themselves into your life – without you even noticing – until one day you realise with a burp – how “bleeding deadly” a piece of work it really is.
Amongst my growers, I must give pride of place to “Dog in the Sand” by Frank Black and the Catholics.
I first encountered this album when I was about 17 – and I was immediately underwhelmed. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was disappointed with the lack of big choruses and the presence of a country tinge, slide guitars to the fore in several songs. I didn’t like the pace – too slow – and the chord changes seemed odd to me. I rarely got past song one or two, before putting back in my dusty CD rack and putting on Weezer or Soundgarden, some easier sells.
But I kept coming back to it. Whenever the rest of my collection seemed stale, I’d give it a spin. Whenever I wanted background music for my studying, on it went. Often, I’d procure new albums and, again, it would be sent to CD purgatory, but like a loyal friend or a cat that keeps turning up no matter how many stones you toss at it, it would not be put off.
Only years later, I came to appreciate its craft – its fine, witty, surreal lyrics – the consummate musicianship of the Catholics – its cryptic subject matter – its passion and simultaneous cynicism – the coherence of the album, yet individuality of each song. Now I count it as one of my all-time favourites.
The first song, “Blast Off”, encapsulates everything about the genius of Frank Black as a songwriter. From the first line, he conjures up a slightly cracked narrator – the narrator’s motives seem clear, crack Hollywood:
“I’m going to make my mark. Maybe in showbiz.
Maybe on solid ground. I just don’t know.
But I’m thinking all the time,
and I’m saving all my dimes…”.
But this is no rags-to-riches Hollywood hero. He prefaces his mission statement with:
“I’m headed for the dark, take shit as shit is.
If you can take this town, I say “good show”.
Because city hall all are freaks,
and the coffee here’s getting weak…”
In the space of two verses, I’m seeing a disillusioned nut – in the vein of Lee Harvey Oswald or Mark David Chapman, desperate to be famous with this desperation capable of leading them to extreme acts of lunacy. And so it proves. The song shifts violently uptempo, and the lyrics shift alarmingly into the realms of the bizarre, as the narrator “blasts off” into probable insanity. “Blast off… I’m not leaving it to chance, I’m going to claim it for France,…, I’m wearing Beckett’s pants, FROM ALL THE CHEMICALS!”
Probably the last line in the chorus is the most relevant.
The second song is equally cryptic. It showcases Black’s talent for throwing his voice from the lovably cynical to the almost-sincere. But he never quite reaches sincere. The song opens with a slow piano intro, before erupting – accompanied by a Frank Black scream – and unfurling with the most deliciously laconic guitar solo. The song appears to be addressed to a famous actress – from the point of view of an acquaintance perhaps, or again, from an obsessive stalker… “I see your smile all over the place – heck all the billboards reserve you a space…” The lyrics again become garbled as the song progresses, and you have to question the mental stability of the narrator. Black starts a lyric, then cuts himself off mid-sentence, mid-word. Great stuff! I visualise the narrator in the vein of John Hinckley Jnr – he attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981 in order to impress Jodie Foster, with whom he was dangerously obsessed. The chorus only comes once, witty but gibberish slogans, before reverting back to the theme of obsession:
“I read the slogans of the sloganeers!
I smelled the engines of the engineers!
“I saw the prophet of the profiteers!
But still your smile in the stratosphere…”
The third song is a lament to a tragedy that took place in 1928 in San Francisco, the “St. Francis Dam Disaster”. This is less cryptic than its predecessors. Wikipedia has a good entry on the actual event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Francis_Dam_Disaster
Black writes first from the point of view of the dam keeper on the eve of the disaster, then from the point of view of the water itself, personifying it as a restless wanderer, pushing against the walls in a quest for freedom.
“Because that water sought to flow,
She had a desire to go,
She was looking for some place to go…”
It is an example of superlative balladry, and comes in stark contrast to the previous two whimsical numbers. Interestingly, the disgraced engineer of the dam was Irish…
The fourth song, “Robert Onion”, returns to the cracked whimsy of the majority of the album. It is the song most likely to be a “single” on the album – not that this album ever spawned singles… I used to think this song was perhaps about a historical character, perhaps an inspirational rustic philosopher, like Thoreau, perhaps a participant in the dusty American civil war. I envisioned another restless wanderer, light-feet in the universe, a traveller and opportunist.
“Robert leads me into thought,
Onion layers wait for you…”
I see a sailor, an explorer or a Thoreau-type character, perspicacious and enduring, living nobly in a log cabin.
“Three cheers for Robert!
…One ponders layers and layers…”
But subsequent research suggests this song is actually a tribute to Robert Zubrin, a leading proponent of a manned trip to Mars! In fact, the lyrics spell out in acrostic the phrase:” Robert The Case for Mars Zubrin”. Shows what I know!
The fifth song, “Stupid Me”, is a delightful Dusty Springfield-esque song of gleeful regret for the “one who got away”.
“Stupid me, I deserve it now I’m standing here all alone.
Stupid me, I’m reserving all my thoughts for her now she’s gone.
She gave me her whole heart, and I threw it away.
I practiced a black art, oh why did I send her away?”
It sounds heartfelt, but Black sings in an outrageous falsetto that contrasts with the earnestness of the lyrics, and again, you feel you can never quite pin down what Frank Black actually means to convey. The song could be a showband number – “I don’t know what became of her, but I hope she finds true love, oh why did I send her away?!” – but you can’t get past the cheesy falsetto and infectious tune, entirely incongruent to the content of the lyrics. Another example of Black consciously messing with convention.
The sixth song, “Bullet” is a gem. It is probably the most country number on the album. When the slide guitar kicks in, you can nearly fell tobacco rolling around your mouth and the cowboy hat on your head. Lyrically, it bears repeat listens. It is ostentatiously a deathbed expression of love from a father to his only son. But the father is clearly unhinged, a trigger-happy gun nut in the vein of Hunter S Thompson, who declares he’s about to take his place in “Valhalla” and bequeaths his set of guns to his son for use in a coming revolution.
“Please tell my friends from outer space,
You are my son you’ll take my place.
And if the revolution comes,
Take my rifles, take my guns.
A single bullet loaded in each one…”
What the son thinks of this arrangement we are not told! Each verse is a garbled version of the last.
The seventh song is, lyrically, bizarre. It references chariots and old Grecian warriors, but, to be honest, it is impossible to even hazard a guess what it is about – good tune though.
The eighth, “Hermaphroditos” is an uptempo number, apparently and obviously enough, about an unhinged hermaphrodite lamenting his/her predicament. “How do you love me? I am a dog, I am a cipher, I’ve got a mouth full of suicidal drugs...” It’s a rockier number, with a big chorus – “HERMAPHRODITOS IS MY NAME! WHATS MY NAME?!”
The ninth is my current favourite - “I’ll Be Blue”. The song, in a minor key, seems to be addressed to an ex-girlfriend/lover, and is about that moment when he falls out of love, when he has the jarring realisation that she is not perfect, worse, he can’t actually stand her… after describing these moments, Frank drifts into a chorus expressing his bizarre self-pity – probably a self-parody;
“I will be blue!,
Like a hermit in its shell,
Life Jesus Christ on the hill,
Like the reign of mastadon,
Like the streets of Old Lyons…”
The chorus shifts into a major key and I think reflects Black’s conscious self-parody (evident in the lyrics – he compares himself to Jesus on the cross…). When he hit’s the high note in the coda, “I’ll be blue, IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII WILL BE BLUE”, wow, it makes me smile every time.
The tenth – nearly there! - “Llano Del Rio” is a tribute to a socialist micro-state set up in the Nevada desert in 1915, founded on idealist principles. He writes of it in its hey-day, when it apparently attracted the hippies of the time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llano_del_Rio
Its a nice song, intricate in its musicianship, with big key changes to beat the band (but not the Catholics).
“Going down to Llano, Llano Del Rio,
Try to find utopia, in the stucco grids and the tumbleweeds…”
The eleventh resumes the pop theme – “If It Takes All Night” – a song which is notable in the context of the album because it is one of the few that it is the first person and Frank Black has not assumed a different persona from whose point of view to represent. It seems a simple paean to those evenings that seem alive with possibilities – warm air and a buzz of anticipation:
“We heard some other fellers talking,
I think its going to be a good fight,
I’m going to hear my favourite song,
If it takes all night…”
The last song, “Dog In the Sand” is a curious closer – a somnolent and slow song, with a languorous and ponderous air. Frank seems to be addressing his own mood directly, talking himself into perspective:
“Where the moody flows,
I won’t go back…”
Overall it is a truly superlative album, full of expert musicianship and a sense of such utter competence that you feel totally in safe ahnds. Black is so in control of the sonic – how he wants to sound – and simultaneously so arrogant and cocky, that there is never a creative step taken on the album imbued with the slightest doubt (unlike the self-conscious sonic forays of, say, Radiohead or Elliott Smith). Black knows how it is to sound, and he doesn’t care if you like it or not. He’s been around the block so many times, that at this stage he’s doing it for himself, not for anyone else. This arrogance allows him to plaster his songs with the aforementioned delicious gibberish and it is not for Black troubling himself with things like narrative or meaning or coherence. The end product is like a miracle of outsider contemporary art – a million references abound, a million possible interpretations. It is rooted in folk, country and rock, yes – but goes off in wicked tangents from these lodestars – taking in science fiction, history, madness, sexuality, Aldous Huxley, idealism, disaster, autobiography, space exploration, spaghetti western. It has it all!
9/10
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