High on the success of his reunion with The Pixies, Frank Black is making new fans - and getting airplay! - for a new album of alt.Americana. Brian Boyd finds out what made him decide to play the blues
'This has all to do with Dylan's Blonde on Blonde album, so much so that I was even going to call it Black on Blonde or something along those lines."
Frank Black is talking about his new solo album, Honeycomb, his first since 1996's Cult of Ray, and a major artistic left turn for the Pixies frontman. "Blonde on Blonde has just stuck with me over the years and I always wanted to do a sort of version of it. As it turned out, what I came out with is only modelled on it in the very loosest sense, but it was the inspiration. Having said that, some people think it sounds like other Dylan albums, not Blonde on Blonde, which just shows you what can happen."
Honeycomb is an alt.Americana affair that blends rock, blues, soul, folk and country. It's entirely unexpected from someone who made his name fronting an iconic indie guitar band, but diligent students of Black's non-Pixies musical career won't be all that surprised by it. At previous solo gigs he has thrown in covers of Johnny Horton and Doug Sahm songs; when he was with The Catholics, he released an album - sold only at gigs - of cover versions of acts such as Del Shannon and Donovan.
Honeycomb was recorded over a brisk four days in Nashville last year, just before Black reconvened The Pixies after a 12-year hiatus. The album was produced by Jon Tiven, more famous for his work with BB King and Wilson Pickett, and the stellar cast of musicians includes Steve Crooper (from Booker T & the MGs, who co-wrote Otis Redding's Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay), Spooner Oldham, Buddie Miller and Reggie Young.
These are musicians more used to backing the likes of Dylan, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin and Willie Nelson - what did they make of this fortysomething indie screecher?
"It was all bizarre," says Black. "First of all, it was one of the most mind-blowing musical experiences I ever had. Steve Cropper actually co-wrote the first rock'n'roll song that I ever sang in front of an audience (In the Midnight Hour), so it was a real case of coming full circle there. Before I went down I had these really strange images of what these guys might be like. I was thinking that they'd be all these grizzly guys with beards - guys who had been to hell and back. And to them, I was just someone who their younger relatives might have heard of from The Pixies."
The sessions exceeded his expectations. "Where we met, I think, was that we both come from a raw, unschooled place. I tend to break a lot of obvious rules in music, and they were OK about that. They did sort of poke fun at my non-Nashville chord progressions, but they let me know that they approved of and enjoyed the songs.
"When these guys record, they really, really mean it. I had never recorded with people who meant what they played so much. They just oozed mojo. Even though it was only four days, we spent most of the time charting out the songs; when it came to the actual recording, everything was done on the first or second take. The way these guys are, they don't listen to the music or look at the songs beforehand. What you hear on the album is them playing and hearing it for the first time - there were no rehearsals. But they're very talented professionals, so there was no problem there."
The title track, with its falsetto vocals, steel guitar picking and subdued piano work, sets the scene nicely for a meandering journey into the core of the real American songbook. Black sounds spookily like Richard Thompson on more than a few tracks, and the covers add to the overall mood. He unearths Song of the Shrimp, originally done by Elvis Presley in the film Girls! Girls! Girls!, and puts an inspired, uplifting swing into Dan Penn's classic downbeat ballad, Dark End of the Street.
It's all a metamorphosis for the man behind some of the most raucously declamatory guitar rock of the 1980s. What strikes most is how his usual vein-throbbing, belt-it-out vocal style has been replaced by a bruised baritone.
"They always say you have to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues," he says "And it seems like I've paid all of them over the last few years."
Prior to The Pixies reunion, Black had just broken up The Catholics, he had problems getting a record deal, and his marriage had ended. "I was very far down. There was this situation just before I went down to Nashville where there's a marriage breaking up and The Pixies reuniting - and The Pixies didn't end that well . I think that's why I touched on things on this album that I would have been afraid to go near in the past. Maybe all that contributed to giving the songs a bit more legitimacy or made me write better songs, I don't know.
"There's a song on this album called Strange Goodbye which is about my marriage breaking up and it features my ex-wife on vocals. That's how strange the whole thing is. And the funny thing is, when I was writing these songs it was like I was writing them for only the audience of the musicians who played on them. Because I didn't know them well, I could dig deeper."
Black is sharply aware of how the media fuss surrounding The Pixies reunion gave his faltering solo career a push. "My name is fresh on every editor's brain because of this Pixies thing," he says. "I'm now getting featured in magazines like Entertainment Weekly, which never happened before."
The massively successful Pixies reunion tour ("All these people coming to the gigs, where were they the first time around?") finishes up soon. "We don't want to overstay our welcome, and if we go on another tour after this year's one, we will have to seriously think about either recording new material or packing it in.
"I keep getting asked, 'When are you going into the studio?' and 'How's the new material going?' I am aware of the irony that the only new album out there is my solo one."
The Pixies haven't released anything since 1991's Trompe le Monde, but since their reformation have recorded two new songs: Bam Thwok, which was intended for Shrek 2 but never made it onto the soundtrack, and a Warren Zevon song, Ain't That Pretty at All, for a tribute album.
"We've been discussing a new album, but we're trying not to do one just on the back of a successful tour; that would be making an album for the wrong reasons. When people talk about the band, it's all this nostalgia stuff, but our albums were never chart-toppers. And we don't expect that to change now."
What does he think Pixies fans will make of Honeycomb?
"There's this thing about how you can't do this or sound like that or try to be something else because somehow it's not real. But rock'n'roll is not about what's happening now, this year. Neither is it about what was happening in 1989, when The Pixies were going. A lot of rock'n'roll is from the '50s and '60s and from jazz and folk. You don't just have to invent new sounds all the times.
"Maybe there is a bit of a reaction now to all the soulless music out there; there's definitely a reaction to the ProTools thing - the more processed everything is, the less connected it is to the music. It's not just about perfection, it's about great performance. Look at Chuck Berry, his guitar could be out of tune but he still played brilliantly.
"I don't expect most Pixies fans to get excited about this album, but maybe there are a small percentage of them who will. It's like with me. I don't keep up with every aspect of other people's careers. The uber-fans will be aware of it."
For Black, the new Pixies material will have to fit around his solo commitments.
"The response to Honeycomb has been great so far," he says. "In the US, it's getting played on the triple A stations, which is a first for anything I've ever done. The plan now is to tour it, but the problem here is in asking these musicians to climb aboard a tour bus for a couple of months. It's problematic. Maybe if we had something like a series of five shows in New York, with a few television appearances thrown in, they could be persuaded, but I'm not sure. Plan B is for me to tour the album acoustically, which I'm seriously thinking of doing."
There was a bizarre musical moment for Black when The Pixies played acoustically at the Newport Folk Festival last month. It was at the same festival that Bob Dylan got memorably booed for playing the electric guitar (the apocryphal story is that Pete Seeger grabbed an axe backstage and tried to cut through the power cable). There are some Pixies fans out there who would have thought that their band doing a folk festival with just acoustic guitars was a crime on a par with Dylan's.
"I had this fantasy of Pete Seeger socking me one," says Black. "But seriously, folk music, as I've discovered, can be just as totally psycho, dark and weird as anything going - all those songs about murder and heavy stuff. Folk isn't just Peter, Paul and Mary, it's quirky music. You know, if you remove the amplification, The Pixies are pretty folky."
More immediately, Black has just finished recording a rocked-up counterpart to Honeycomb with a different bunch of veteran musicians, including The Band's Levon Helm and The Faces' Ian McLagen.
"I haven't got a release date for it yet, and it's not really a follow-up to Honeycomb, but it was recorded in Nashville as well. Maybe we should do The Pixies album there as well."
Honeycomb is on the Cooking Vinyl label. The Pixies play BudRising at Lansdowne Road, Dublin on August 23rd
