San Francisco’s Fillmore theatre recently marked the first stop on Frank Black’s celebratory tour for the thirtieth(!) anniversary of his sophomore solo record, Teenager of the Year. While the (temporary) dissolution of the Pixies following one of the greatest five-album runs of the late eighties and nineties was a blow to listeners at large, it also demarcated the beginning of a particularly fertile time in Frank Black’s solo career, releasing albums consistently under various monikers, including Frank Black, Black Francis – his original assumed stage name, and Frank Black & the Catholics. The tour is about as authentic as they come, considering Black has reassembled much of the original recording lineup to play it live, including drummer Nick Vincent, guitarist Lyle Workman, and Eric Feldman on bass and keys – the lineup is rounded out by Rob Laufer, also on bass and keys, trading roles with Feldman from song to song.
Recreating Teenager live is no short order, either – the album is a hefty sucker, coming in at 22 tracks and a whole hour in length. It’s not difficult to get into, whether you’re coming to it by way of Pixies or otherwise, but it is strange in places – you can hear Frank exploring, pushing the envelope of the sound he shaped for that band, and seeing where the experiments take him. There’s the familiar alt-surf-rock, toned-down acoustic compositions, and more overt forays into synth usage. But most of all, just as so much of the Pixies’ discography does, it feels like it was the blueprint for so much music to come, and none of it sounds like it’s entering its fourth decade of existence. If album highlight ‘Thassalocracy’ came out today (for the first time, not the remastered version that 4AD released on January 17th), it would rightly be the talk of the post-punk and larger “angular guitar music” fanatics the world over – and the newly-polished masters are a good excuse to either visit or revisit the record.
While much of the night is, of course, occupied by the band playing the record from first note to last, the band bookends it with a few other cuts, opening with a trio that includes ‘I Heard Ramona Sing’, hailing from Black’s debut solo effort. It gained an unorthodox second life as part of the soundtrack for Edgar Wright’s 2010 adaptation of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, although in introducing the song Black notes that it’s actually about the Ramones. He gives a good handful of these tidbits of backstory across the night – turns out the impetus for Teenager of the Year opener ‘Whatever Happened to Pong?’ was time he spent in his youth hanging out at a restaurant where his father worked, which eventually got the original Pong game. Not all of it is that personal, though – on ‘(I Want to Live on an) Abstract Plain’, he admits that the idea of having a parenthetical in the title just “seemed cool” as he switches over to his acoustic guitar for the song.
The exercise of playing the entire record is truly a testament to the variety of it – ‘Speedy Marie’ on one hand can highlight the need for the Mellotron and Nord keyboard at stage left, ‘Two Reelers’ features some of Vincent’s most impressive drumming throughout the night alongside one of Frank’s most intense vocals, and ‘Big Red’ is a straight-up bluesy jam. And while it’s not at any extreme stylistically, ‘Headache’ is one of the most enduring tracks on the record, featuring what is genuinely a fantastic, poppy chorus. Black reminisces on how the song’s music video ran afoul of the notably sensitive Australian censors around its release, as it features a monstrously-sized pain relief tablet. ‘Bad, Wicked World’ – inspired by a TV show, though he can’t remember which – is a perfect penultimate song with how it builds and builds to an abrupt stop, and they put the cap on the album with closer ‘Pie in the Sky’.
Not leaving the stage, they opt for two more from Black’s self-titled 1993 debut, starting with the heavy, fuzzed-out ‘Czar’, and in the impressive lights one can see the silhouette of a man standing up in one of the second-floor boxes shouting along to every line – he continues the same for ‘Ten Percenter’, the last song of the night. When the lights come up, the band unites together at center stage and takes the classic performers’ trio of bows, and coming back up their faces are lit with smiles. They’ve got a second night in the heart of SF as part of this tour opener, but suffice it to say the first one was a successful celebration of some of the best rock music the 90s gave to us all.
Photos and words by Collin Heroux
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