Local musician, folk-purist, punk, rock ‘n’ roller, germaphobe, petty criminal, freight hopper, and drunkard, Matt Frank, headlines his CD release show at Sugar City on February 27. I met with him on the anniversary of Buddy Holly’s plane crash to discuss his latest CD, recent misadventures, and the upcoming show.
Frank adopts the traditional American folk idiom, singing with the nasally husk that can be heard in Uncle Dave Macon or The Bently Boys. Indeed, listening to Matt Frank is an excursion into the “Weird, Old America”: the lo-fi sound is more than just a departure from the over-production of the charts; it’s a journey into the cat-houses and medicine cabinets of the early twentieth century, the bread lines and freight yards of the depression, the paranoia and personal crises of the 50s: that gritty, blood-stained canvas where America was really painted.
Frank picks me up from the grim Red Jacket loop on a sunny February 2 in his 1990 Ford Crown Victoria. Frank’s wearing his black wayfarers: the blue arms of the shades tucked behind his ears and disappeared into a mass of wiry black hair. Sitting on the bench directly ahead are a group of tough cookie suburban kids, and they laugh at the vintage spectacle as it rolls past them; the behemoth of black hair turns to me and intones, “I can’t wait for this tin-horn planet to go down, man.”
Frank’s third CD, Matt Frank Vs Microbes, is crammed with such nihilist sentiments. “Reise Street” most openly deals with this destructive impulse. In the song, Frank removes himself to the German countryside (circa 1939 most likely) and considers his own demise, concluding with the reckoning we all eventually have to make with death. Frank allows no room for optimism in the song, however, revealing that his desire to be buried on Reise Street stems from a wish to haunt his doctor from the grave.
The clean-cut image that folk music acquired in the 1960s through acts like Peter, Paul and Mary and Tom Paxton is shunned by Frank, who sees folk music rather as the music of outsiders, the people down on their luck and the down-right nasty, like Railroad Bill. Frank, therefore, charts a linear progression from folk music to the early rock ‘n’ roll of Little Richard, the dirty blues of The Rolling Stones, and the punk-rock of Jonny Thunders and draws from them a common theme: the recurring clash with mainstream culture and disregard for popular morality. As such, one shouldn’t think of Matt Frank as a college kid making traditional music, but as a drunken scumbag, spitting songs of murder, revenge, and self-pity in your face and asking “Are you really that pure?”
Frank and I get to Akron where I manage to find a pound of jerky in a convenience store. We head to the falls listening to Buddy Holly sing “Not Fade Away,” and Frank starts beating the wheel with his palm and shaking his head like Gene Vincent. There’s a huge crack on the passenger side of the windscreen, and Frank describes the story. Mark, the drummer from the punk band Raunchy Sex, tried to shove his boot through the window after a bad gig in Rochester. The band were hounded out of the venue after a typical night of Raunchy Sex indiscretion, and as tempers flared in the car Mark repeatedly struck his boot against the window until it cracked and then trashed his own living room when they reached home. Frank continues to tell me it’s just an ordinary night for his band.
As a solo performer, Frank shows little reserve. His self-deprecating humor and between-song rants often draw a big laugh from the crowd and leave them bemused after, more often than not, hearing a song of death, disease, and drug addiction. The song “A Lesson in Life Called Pain” marks a departure from these themes, however, and thus is the most arresting song on the latest CD and in Frank’s live repertoire. The song emerged from Matt’s traveling experiences and describes the loneliness of life on the road. The song reveals Matt Frank as a fine storyteller with the ability to convey an honest and penetrating account of his own feelings, which often gets lost to songwriters in cliché and moon/June/spoon rhymes. When Frank sings “When you look at the window for something you’re searching for / That something your never bound to find / But we all need mirrors to know who we are / When you cant stand the thoughts in your mind,” he sings as the vagrant, the alcoholic, the rock n roller: the people searching for something that transcends the monotony of factory life, the tedium of an office job or the stiff thumbs and glazed-eyes of a gamer. The songs of Matt Frank speak for an America that’s still hungry, or as American naturalist G. P. Walsh described it, “The incessant fluctuation and instability of American life; a country that’s teeming with curiosities and peculiarities and where a man’ll kill you for your Stetson hat then spit down your back and tell you its raining. “
I can feel the pull of the V8 engine under the hood of the Crown Victoria. We drive back through Clarence and Frank reels off some of its frontier history to me, telling me it’s one of the oldest townships in Western New York. The news of a plane crash is coming over 50 years too late and two weeks too early. Buddy Holly is still being commemorated on the radio and the DJ talks of his crash with the same solemnity and excitement as a historian would to talk about the Civil War.
Frank’s CD release show is at Sugar City on February 27. The line-up includes local musicians Nick Gordon and Matt Frank, Rochester band Albert Einstein & The Hopi, and English wanker Joe Velvet. Visit http://www.myspace .com/mattfrankmusic to get in touch with Frank or to order a CD on the cheap.
