“I work with people I get along with, people I like,” he says. “If they’re musicians, as I am, well then, we’re gonna make music. I don’t say, ‘I need someone who’s got a Jaco Pastorius vibe on the bass.’ That’s not how you pick a bass player — you pick someone you’ve met, who seems like a nice guy. Obviously, if they end up sucking, not a good match musically, then that might affect your working with them, I suppose.”
This sounds a bit simplistic until you realize that Black seems always to be after the elusive chemistry, the groove, whether he’s working with the Pixies or the Catholics or Cropper and Keltner. He’s adaptable while at the same time unwilling to compromise musical quality. “Reggie Young, he can look at a chart and absorb it so fast, and because he can think so fast, he can spot whatever idiosyncrasies there are even before he plays them,” Black says. “Whereas a lot of the guys I’ve played with, in the Pixies, for example, it’s the opposite. They’re not gonna go, ‘That’s strange,’ because they’re not even thinking on that level. They ask me what the next chord is, which is the level I’m at.”
While he was obviously impressed by the skills of the session men he worked with in Nashville and Los Angeles, Black seems not to have been overawed by them. “It’s never gonna be, ‘Oh, now I can achieve nirvana because I’m working with Steve Cropper and Spooner Oldham, now I can achieve the soulful heights I was striving for in the Catholics, but always failed to reach.’
“I’m a rock musician trying to hang down south a little bit. Obviously, if you replace those players in the Catholics with the likes of Reggie Young, you’re going to get a certain quality. Working with dudes who have played with Elvis and Johnny Horton, how can you not get some magic?”
While Black acknowledges that these latest records might seem a radical divergence from his recorded legacy, he believes his latest work merely builds upon what he’s always done. “Well, if the last record you heard by me was a Pixies record, and then you started listening to what I’ve been doing the last couple of years, then it would be, I guess, a dramatic turn,” he says. “I was known for a sound that was a little bit abrasive or angular.
“But there are certain elements of folk or cowpunk, especially early on. I think it’s within my right to go as Americana as I want. It’s not artificial. I’m from the United States. Especially on the Catholics records, when we added Rich Gilbert to play pedal steel, that sound suggests Americana, if not necessarily country.”
Black’s holistic view is echoed by Gilbert, an excellent, elegant guitarist and pedal steel player (his credits include Uncle Tupelo’s debut No Depression) who recently relocated to Nashville, where he’s played with Caitlin Cary & Thad Cockrell and other Americana acts.
“I was in a Boston band called the Zulus, and Frank and [Pixies guitarist] Joey [Santiago] were fans,” Gilbert recalls. “When the Pixies started playing, they did some bills with us, and that’s how we got to know each other.” Their relationship continues to this day; Gilbert’s distinctive playing graces several songs on Fastman Raiderman.
“I was on the last batch of songs we did, the three days at Jack Clement’s studio,” Gilbert says. “And I definitely see his career as a continuing process. I was in the Catholics with him for seven years, and seeing the songwriting process, you perceive general stylistic approaches, but you can also see the material, and his approach, becoming more developed, with a lot more shadings and nuance.”
For Gilbert, watching Black interact with the cast of musicians Tiven assembled for the Fastman sessions was a fascinating experience. “I could tell all those Muscle Shoals and Memphis guys were really liking it, because — not to discredit what they’ve done — so much of the music they’ve done in the past follows certain formats,” he says. “A lot of Charles’ songs have a relatively high level of difficulty, because they don’t follow traditional patterns. And when you listen to it, it’s not necessarily obvious that the normal path is being abandoned.”
Reggie Young, the Missouri-born, Memphis-educated veteran of countless sessions with the likes of Dusty Springfield and Wilson Pickett, makes the connection between Black’s working methods and those of soul songwriter and singer Joe Tex, with whom Young worked on classic records including 1969’s Buying A Book.
“Joe Tex didn’t know chords or anything, although Frank is a little different in that he does know the chord changes,” Young says. “Joe would say, ‘Here’s a little song,’ and he might have it written on a napkin, some of those things like ‘Skinny Legs And All’ and ‘I Gotcha’. He would run it down, and he would say, ‘OK, find me a chord,’ and we’d play a chord. You’d do that for a verse, and then you’d start the second verse, and lo and behold, it would be identical to the first.”
Often in tandem with Steve Cropper’s guitar, Young’s fills and solos help define the sound of both Honeycomb and Fastman Raiderman. Along with bassist David Hood, Young helped translate Black’s musical ideas into a workable form. “His material wasn’t the run-of-the-mill thing, where you could use a number chart,” Young says. “You had to put a little thought into it. I was amazed how things would repeat, how they would be exactly like the verse before, because it was structured so unusually….David was doing the chord charts, and I was helping him on some of them. We’d look at each other and say, ‘Man, there’s another one like the other one!'”
Hood, a native of Sheffield, Alabama, whose resume includes work with Aretha Franklin, the Staple Singers, James Brown and countless others (when I caught up with him at his home in Muscle Shoals, he had been out playing shows with the Amazing Rhythm Aces), was similarly impressed by Black’s music.
