The result was a modestly radical departure for Black, whose albums with the Catholics were recorded and mixed live to two-track. The Frank Black & the Catholics records hold up well today — 1999’s Pistolero is particularly strong, with “85 Weeks” a piquant miniature driven by an ingenious acoustic guitar figure.
That song prefigures Honeycomb and Fastman, but the live-to-two-track process threatened to lock the band into their own mannerisms. As Black’s longtime guitarist Rich Gilbert says, “We all got used to the two-track thing. The only disappointment some of us had with the process — and we had this conversation with Charles [Frank] — was that sometimes, since it was being recorded and mixed at the same time, certain elements might not come out in the final mix the way you’d hoped.”
The performances on Honeycomb suggested a way out of the sound of the last Catholics records, which sometimes sounded a little muddy. The title track, with its delicate, nervous guitar figure, was one of the most complex things Black had done to date, while “My Life Is In Storage” was one of the most overtly autobiographical songs on what turned out to be at least partly a divorce record. Its lyrics veered toward a kind of compulsive wordplay (“I had a castle/I had no hassles/Now tears are tassels”) that couldn’t hide the pain of Black’s divorce. And “My Life” featured a masterful guitar solo by Reggie Young that expressed everything the lyrics couldn’t, or wouldn’t.
Still, Honeycomb was somewhat uneven. Black’s take on Penn and Spooner Oldham’s “The Dark End Of The Street” came off as pro forma, and while Black took chances with a deliberately understated vocal style, there were moments when his singing threatened to fade away entirely. The record received mostly good reviews when it was released in July 2005; Werner Trieschmann, in the Village Voice, was one of the few dissenters, describing the record as “downtempo numbers anesthetized by Spooner Oldham’s tux-ruffle keyboards.”
Fastman Raiderman is a stronger effort, and, at 27 songs and 95 minutes, far more varied. Once again, the cast of players includes Cropper, Young, Hood, Jack Clement (who overdubbed the odd dobro part and harmony vocal, and whose Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa was where most of the record was cut), Buddy Miller, Levon Helm and Al Kooper. “If Your Poison Gets You” uses a swinging, dropped-beat drum pattern played by Billy Block, Helm, and Free/Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke; “Fast Man”, an updated soul ballad, reveals Black’s debt to Leon Russell. Other songs play on the conventions of New Orleans R&B and country blues. “Fitzgerald” reveals a sharp-eyed observer of everyday life with tremendous sympathy for the downtrodden.
For his cover of British songwriter Ewan MacColl’s working-class ode “Dirty Old Town”, Black met up with Marty Brown, a Kentucky-born country singer whose 1991 MCA record High And Dry intelligently updated honky-tonk, creating perhaps the record’s most telling cultural collision. “[Brown] didn’t know that ‘Dirty Old Town’ was a kind of folk song,” Black says. “He’s the same age as me, and we were making small talk, waiting for something to happen. We were talking about breakup songs, and I strummed a few lines of one. He said, ‘I got me one of those’, and got down on bended knee and sang full volume, like he was at the Grammies.”
The resulting duet suffers, as do some of Fastman’s songs, from the one-take aesthetic and dry sound that Tiven favors, but the two men yell their way through the last verse; when they sing, “I’ll cut you down/Like an old dead tree,” you get the sense this is the kind of loose, conflicted, fucked-up energy that Black and Tiven are going for, and not always getting. The supersession format holds advantages for an artist like Frank Black, but Fastman disperses into attenuated rockers that sound like nothing so much as old Brinsley Schwarz records, mono reprocessed into stereo. Still, with someone as prolific as Black, it seems a little churlish to complain, and even the lesser numbers on Fastman have moments where you think, boy, that’s a great idea right there.
In fact, the greatest moment on Fastman Raiderman wasn’t done in Nashville at all, but in Los Angeles, during a two-day session in January 2006 that yielded four songs. “In The Time Of My Ruin” features much-recorded drummer Jim Keltner, whose work with Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell helped redefine pop drumming as an extension of the R&B aesthetic, and Carol Kaye, whose bass playing has graced masterpieces by Phil Spector and the Beach Boys. Incredibly, this marvelous performance was captured live, with Duane Jarvis’ guitar and former Catholic Dave Phillips’ pedal steel bringing the right note of twangy weirdness to what sounds like a great lost west coast pop song. While all the musicians — including songwriter P.F. Sloan, who adds a perfect, understated piano part — make an indelible contribution, it’s Keltner whose energized performance holds everything together, pushing and pulling the beat.
“On ‘In The Time Of My Ruin’, I noticed that Keltner was playing it a little conservatively on the first run-through,” Tiven says. “So I went up to him right before we did the song, and I said, ‘I just want you to know that your artistic license is unlimited on this song.'” Similarly, on another L.A. track, “Don’t Cry That Way”, Black and Tiven gave Carol Kaye the opportunity to add a part to the song. “Carol comes out and says, ‘You know what would be really great on this? A real nice, swinging, rhythm guitar part. Let me show it to Duane,'” Tiven recalls. “I said to Carol, ‘As long as you know the part, why don’t you play it?'” Her overdub makes the song, and how often do you get to hear Carol Kaye play guitar?
What makes Honeycomb and Fastman Raiderman work is the way they confound categories, throw out lots of ideas. Black, it seems, likes to work quickly, and he relates to his fellow musicians as leader, as friend, and as master psychologist.
