Class of '85

Frank Black, Throwing Muses, and Treat Her Right

Cellars by Starlight by Brett Milano

Three songs into Frank Black's new Frank Black & the Catholics (spinART) comes an unusually straightforward tune called "Do You Feel Bad About It?" It sounds less like a Frank Black song than like a classic-model pop song, and not just because the hook is partially nicked from the Mamas & the Papas' "Monday, Monday." What's new for him is the down-to-earth subject matter, about making up to a friend or lover after an unspecified break-up. "Do you feel sad about this parting of the ways?" he asks before pleading his case: "If I were you, I would give me a break . . . I'd help you with your defection, but I still think I'm your best friend."

It's a convincing little flash of warmth, with the singer carrying off the heretofore untried role of nice guy. Read a little more into it and the song could be a thinly veiled message to fans who are still feeling bad about the Pixies, who had their own parting of the ways in 1993.

It's hard to hear a new Frank Black album without thinking of his old outfit, especially since that outfit keeps rearing its head. Last month's Live at the BBC was the second Pixies retrospective within a year. A Pixies tribute album (with Letters to Cleo doing "Debaser") is due next month. And the supply of Pixies-influenced bands hasn't let up. Meanwhile Black's still playing clubs, refusing to do most Pixies songs (though he dusted off "Wave of Mutilation" on his last tour) and recording for a small but respected indie label, with an album that his last label (the now-defunct American) rejected. So you can't blame him if the above tune is his way of saying something like, "Sure, my old band changed your life 10 years ago -- now can we please get over it?"

It's a relevant question in the wake of three new or reissued albums -- Black's new one, Throwing Muses' In a Doghouse (Rykodisc), and Treat Her Right's The Anthology (Razor & Tie) -- that are all rooted in the Boston underground, circa 1985. If you were in town then -- when Treat Her Right and the Muses were still extant and Frank Black was still Black Francis -- the real challenge is to hear these discs without dwelling too much on the artists' (and maybe your own) glory days.

That's not a problem in Black's case, since Frank Black & the Catholics is his first thoroughly satisfying post-Pixies album. And though it's ostensibly a return to the Pixies style, with no computers and a punkish two-guitar band, it's really as far from the old groove as he's gotten -- which is good news, since the old ways were hitting a dead end. After Black went solo, it didn't take long for the self-conscious weirdness to grate and a computer-geek sensibility to prevail, as he packed his songs with too many oblique lyrics and too many chord changes. His last track to warrant airplay, 1994's "Headache," would have been a better song without its three modulations. And the sci-fi themes that worked fine on the last Pixies album, Trompe le Mode, were past tired by the time of their fourth go-round on 1996's The Cult of Ray (Bradbury, of course -- in the old days it might have been Davies).

Although it was made with the same band as Cult, Frank Black & the Catholics effectively throws everything out and starts from scratch. With production that verges on nonexistent -- false starts, amplifier buzz, and all -- the sound here is a full-blooded live band kicking their way through songs they're not sick of yet. Even LA-based lead-guitarist Lyle Workman, who played like a studio hotdog on the last album, sounds like an inspired garage punk -- in fact he sounds a lot like Boston guitarist Rich Gilbert, who's since replaced him in the band. Best of all, Black's remembered how to write hooks, and when he comes up with something simple and catchy -- like the opening "All My Ghosts," a three-chord stomp about the trials of living to be 200 -- he doesn't feel obliged to complicate it.

One suspects that Black's distrust of alternative rock is leading him to rediscover music he's looked down on in the past, whether that's the Beatles or Buck Owens. The one cover, "Six Sixty-Six," is a boozy stumble of a country song, and a country sensibility turns up elsewhere. "Back to Rome" is an old-fashioned, "going back to my roots" number in every respect but the choice of locale -- it seems likely that he wrote it as "Back Home" before throwing in the Rome twist. When he digs into '70s arena rock ("I Need Peace"), he doesn't play it with ironic detachment or implied satire, he just jumps in and plays it. As on previous solo albums, the one glaring omission is a harmony singer to balance his somewhat limited vocals -- one more reminder of how important Kim Deal was in the Pixies. But Black's getting better at carrying a tune as well as the spotlight.

The newer, nicer Black is especially evident on the closing "The Man Who Was Too Loud" (originally cut on an import single with Teenage Fanclub), the story of a rock-and-roll brat who turns down the volume long enough to realize that he likes his life, he likes the music, and he likes the kids in the audience. After "Wave of Mutilation," who'd have thought it?

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It would be nice to say that the first Throwing Muses release, now part of the two-CD set In a Doghouse, was an enormously influential album. But it's hard to find anyone who went out on the same limb that Kristin Hersh did here, including the bandmembers in later days. (Hersh wrote most of the album, though Tanya Donelly's one song, "Green," introduces the melodic knack she'd develop in Belly, and it was the one song that got commercial airplay.) Taking the late-adolescent confusion of the first Violent Femmes album a few steps farther, this set should have pre-empted all the bad confessional songwriting that you've heard from anyone in the past 10 years. Some of the musical aspects that sounded radical in 1985 -- the choppy rhythms, fragmented hooks, and vocal shrieks and ululations -- all seem normal enough now. What lingers is the startling directness of Hersh's songwriting, which was less oblique and more diary-like than it is now. With its intimations of sexual shame, romantic betrayal, and personal breakdowns, the album anticipated the Prozac Nation school of unloading -- except that Throwing Muses had genuine drama, underlying intelligence, and a good beat.

Filling most of the second disc is the band's original 10-song demo, which was long rumored to be much better than the finished album. It will be good to see that myth laid to rest, because the album versions generally have the edge. Producer Gil Norton, who later did two Pixies albums, kept the same basic arrangements but punched up the sound a tad, coaxing stronger vocals from Hersh and Donelly. And the original tape didn't have the powerfully creepy "Delicate Cutters," which paved the way for Hersh's solo career. It did have "Raise the Roses," a punkish Donelly song that was never redone.

On the four-song Chains Changed EP, which was released six months after the first album and is included on the new collection, you get the beginnings of the band's trademark sound, as they tone down the raw nerves with more straightforward hooks and a more craftsman-like approach. "Snailhead" even includes a guitar riff borrowed from Aerosmith's "Shela," a local hit at the time (maybe somebody was blasting the radio next door while Hersh was writing it).

Some may think that Hersh has since backed away from the edge, but that's not really the point. Rather, she did what an artist should do, creating something beautiful out of personal chaos. Then she moved on.

IRONY TIME

When Mark Sandman started Morphine, in 1991, it was seen as the oddball side project to his regular band, the much-liked Treat Her Right. But the side project outstripped the regular band, and now Treat Her Right's The Anthology (Razor & Tie) comes with a sticker identifying them as the pre-Morphine outfit of Sandman and drummer Billy Conway. So it's being pitched to an audience that won't remember when Treat Her Right were local kingpins who headlined somewhere in town on damn near every weekend.

That audience will definitely want to hear "I Think She Likes Me," once a local hit and still one of the half-dozen best songs Sandman's written. This number introduced his now-familiar lover/hipster persona, who's dogged as usual by bad luck: he doesn't get the girl in "I Think She Likes Me," but he does get to wise off to her husband.

Treat Her Right were never the world's most authentic blues band, but they made up for that with a songwriting knack (Sandman and co-guitarist David Champagne were on equal footing) and a line-up that fostered a spare, slinky groove: no bass, two low-pitched guitars, and Conway sticking with a single "cocktail" drum (actually a floor tom with a bass pedal). Harmonica ace Jim Fitting handled a lead role similar to that of Dana Colley's sax in Morphine. Although the band made only three albums, this disc isn't a complete enough wrap-up of their career -- their second local hit, "I Got a Gun," isn't included (possibly because Champagne promised to use the gun on "trendies, critics, and art-school punks,"). And there are plenty of strong originals that would have fit here in place of their nice-try covers of James Blood Ulmer and Captain Beefheart. So you might want to pass over this collection and hunt the local bins for the band's two RCA albums, which can probably be had for less than the cost of this CD.

COMING UP

Tonight (Thursday) the Spacemen 3 spinoff Reverberation are at T.T. the Bear's Place with Lockgroove and Wheat, the Sugar Twins play the Lizard Lounge, Slide are at the Plough & Stars, the Austin Lounge Lizards are at Johnny D's, and one of the better retro-swing bands around, New York's Flying Neutrinos, are at Bill's Bar . . . Tomorrow (Friday) it's former Trona singer/guitarist Mary Ellen Leahy with her new band the Mob, along with Jason Hatfield's Star Hustler at the Lizard Lounge, the Spinanes at the Middle East, and Eddie Kirkland at Johnny D's . . . The Knack reunion we're sure you all asked for is at Mama Kin on Saturday. Also on Saturday, it's Tugboat Annie and Cherry 2000 at the Middle East, and the Bottle Rockets, Marah, and the Darlings at T.T. the Bear's Place . . . Vegas love child El Vez hits the Middle East Tuesday . . . And two of the great British eccentrics, Gong founder David Allen and songwriter Roy Harper, share a bill at Mama Kin on Wednesday.