On paper it looks like some ill-advised Dr Moreau type gene-splicing experiment. Take a renowned Dada-rock scatologist, lock him in a room with a bunch of country-soul session pros, simmer for several insomniac sessions, then sit back and see what resulting mutations emerge.
That’s pretty much what happened when the artist formerly known as Black Francis, latterly known as Frank Black (and whose friends just call him Charles), went south a couple of years ago to record his Honeycomb album with the cream of Nashville’s session musos. Mr Black liked the process so much he repeated it six months later at Cowboy Jack Clement’s studio during a fleeting window in The Pixies’ touring schedule, and ended up producing a double album, Fastman/Raiderman, that’s quite remarkable in its range and diversity.
Sure, there are a few instances where the cowboy boot just doesn’t fit, but on balance the new collection boasts some of his finest tunes in years, rendered in an old-timey style whose orthodoxy is as startling in this context as the avant guitarisms of The Pixies were in theirs: here be rollicking Van-and-The-Band vaudeville tunes, Storyville-style talking blues, an E-Street gospel romp entitled ‘Elijah’, and a career high classic called ‘In My Time Of Ruin’.
“I think there’s still some oddball stuff going on,” Charles avers, alternating press and parenting duties at his home in Oregon. “It’s just a little more subtle, not as high strung, maybe not as tightly wound as in an old Pixies song. But for sure, your point is not invalid, there’s a lot of straight-ahead songwriting going on.”
Much of this is down to the band assembled by producer Jon Tiven (B.B. King, Wilson Pickett, Graham Parker), a list of players that reads like a Nick Hornby nerdboy dream-team: Al Kooper, Steve Cropper, Spooner Oldham, Jim Keltner, ex-Free drummer Simon Kirke, The Band’s Levon Helm…
“As far as the musicians are concerned, that all started out a few years ago as a hunch based on Bob Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde record,” Charles explains. “Even though that was so long ago, 1966, he and other musicians like Neil Young go to Nashville because the standard of playing is very high, and it’s also very well schooled in various genres, including but not exclusive to country: there’s a lot of folk music, rhythm ‘n’ blues, soul, r&b, whatever you want to call it.”
For Charles, one of the benefits of working with such a skilled studio crew was the sheer speed at which they operate.
“To give you an example,” he says, “you spend all day working with these legends on your record, they’ve been there since 10 or 11 that morning and it’s getting to dinner time, so everyone starts to pack up and leave for the evening and you figure people are going home… these guys are all 60 years old or whatever. But if you listen carefully to the little comments they make to each other, you start to realise they’re not even going home, most of ’em. They’re on their way to some other session or some gig at a club or something. They play so much in different contexts. There’s a lot of playing going on.
“In a way I suppose Nashville has a similar kinda reputation to Ireland in that you go to various towns and you’re gonna find all kinds of people sitting around playing songs and interacting with each other through music. I remember a couple of years ago I was on a press tour in Dublin and Glen Hansard invited me out for a drink after we both got done working. I figured we were going to have a drink at a bar, and we did, but there was like, guitars there! And we all ended up singing. Which was kind of great because it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.”
That strategy, I suggest, may have less to do with artistic expression than slowing down the rate of drinking.
“Well that may be what’s going on, y’know, but there’s also a lot of playing going on! It’s the same in Nashville. You go to the tacky plastic brown Holiday Inn lounge on a Monday night at nine o’ clock, where anywhere else would be dead, or closed, and it’s some singer-songwriter night and there’s 10 guys with guitars waiting to get on the mic. So there’s all this activity going on, and it’s a great place to record because of that.”
I was more than impressed to read that Levon Helm drove down from New York for one of the Fastman/Raiderman sessions. HP’s resident Band fiend Roisín Dwyer will do irreperable damage to my kneecaps if I don’t ask Charles about one of the most graceful living practitioners of the traditional stick grip.
“Yeah, he drove down and just showed up,” Charles says. “I’m hoping that he had some other reason to be that far away from home! But he was a brilliant presence. Obviously he was recovering from some recent radiation treatment, he’s had this long battle with cancer, so someone like that who’s been to hell and back about ten times, they have an aura, they’ve made their peace with the universe so to speak, there’s no stress in them whatsoever. What can I say – they come off as a little spiritual or something, they wander in the room and they’re not worried about anything, not the complications of the arrangement or the odd tempo changes or any of that. He was just like, ‘Yeah man, gimme some drumsticks, gimme a tambourine, I don’t care, I’ll play some music.’ It was great to have him.”