DOCTOR FRANK

DOCTOR FRANK

What are some of your earliest memories of creating songs? Were these attempts encouraging? When did it occur to you that you might have a knack for it?

All of my musical activities started as play-acting, beginning with tennis racquet guitar playing, moving to using my dad’s old Spanish guitar as a prop, and eventually pretending to write songs for my imaginary rock star career.  It was very much like playing Batman or cowboys and Indians.  I would make noise on the guitar at random and yell out whatever seemed like the sort of stuff rock stars would yell, like “oh baby you are a baby why don’t you grow up a little and go to school and play sports”… that kind of thing.  Eventually these took on a more definite form, but they were still just props so no “song” was ever finished.  By the time I had started listening to the radio and had discovered rock and roll and punk rock, the Spanish guitar had been largely destroyed (and was eventually to wind up in several pieces) and I do recall some of the titles of fake songs from that time:  “God Rot Your Bloody Soul” with the chorus “curse the living, bless the dead” and “Dipping Mice in Bleach” which was later finished (kinda sorta) as an actual song several years later.

Not a very auspicious beginning, and there was never any question of a knack for it as it was only playing around.  You might as well ask if I had a knack for catching the Riddler or joining an Indian tribe as a renegade to avenge the death of my family, the great revenge of the Pawnee.  I was well into my 20s and my so called career as a punk rock guy before I decided I had something special to offer as a songwriter and then a good deal down the road from that decision before I realized I wasn’t as good as I was pretending to be and had to up my game.  All the while, and to this day, there was a strong element of playing Batman about the whole thing.

From what I recall you sharing, you learned to play open chords first. Are you self-taught? How did you become familiar with rock chord progressions? Was there a particular sound that you tried to emulate in the beginning?

My dad taught me G, C, D, and B7.  After that it was books I got from the library.  Rolling Stones easy guitar, which was basically just the piano sheet music with (often not quite accurate) chord diagrams printed above.  There was also a book with Pete Townshend’s handwritten instructions on how to play various Who songs.  That was too hard for me, mostly, but it introduced me to the idea of of letting chords and open notes ring out.  I was very far away from trying to emulate any particular sound.  It was all I could do to remember how the fingers went on the neck and the transition between chords could take anywhere from a few seconds to several hours.  It was all just strummed, campfire style.  I was that kind of guitar-player for about a decade.

Were you able to recognize early on that you had a distinctive style of songwriting? Who did you show your songs to in order to get feedback? Were there people rooting for you? When did you begin building confidence in your abilities?

I didn’t show anything to anyone.  In my own mind they were all great, but there wasn’t a reason for any of them to be more than half baked.  When I started playing with people, I came with this slate of half-unfinished songs but it still didn’t matter that they weren’t quite together.  We were just playing around, so nothing was ever subjected to any scrutiny, least of all by me.  I don’t know what would have happened had I had an incentive to try really hard to make them great, but that didn’t happen in any real way till well into my “career” after around ten years and a bunch of releases.

Did your family support your songwriting in the beginning? What feedback did you receive from them? Do you feel that anyone in your family particularly "gets" what you do musically?

It was always quite separate from my family.  They obviously heard me playing the guitar and singing (though it was really more like mumbling in that context.)  We used to do band practices in my living room and basement, and they tolerated it.  Now they appreciate it, but for most of those years I think it was just mystifying to them.

As you've mentioned in posts and in interviews, lyrics are key and lines ought not be wasted. How did you develop your style of lyricism that has become known for it's cleverness and high quality? Also, how were you recording ideas for titles and lines in the early days? I've seen your notebooks - was that format in use in the beginning?

It was mostly trial and error, with a whole lot of the trials and errors being, unfortunately, committed very publicly.  In the background of that, though, was an appreciation of good, traditional writing.  I was drawn to well-written songs, and had a lot of those pop standards and the more cerebral artsy rock songs always running through my head.   (I mean like, Tin Pan Alley, “show tunes”, Who/Kinks/Beatles, and, a bit later, country music.)  Occasionally I’d stumble on something of my own that would kind of work in similar ways, or parts of it would.  But weirdly, it never occurred to me till relatively late in that trajectory to think about what it was specifically that drew me to those sorts of songs and to try to reverse engineer them and try to make my own songs do that as well.  When I did think of doing that as a deliberate “project" (beginning around ’92/’93) my writing suddenly jump-started and leapt way up in quality, and then just kept improving.

It was only then that I started writing things down systematically (the notebooks).  Before that, lyrics often were often only written down at the last minute, right before recording them.  

So in one way, I suppose I could have skipped a lot of these steps and got a lot better a lot sooner.  But in another way, this idiosyncratic path probably did result in an idiosyncratic style that, for better or worse, couldn’t be done by anyone else.  Anyway, even if not ideal, it is the way it happened.

A key phrase that stuck with me in one of our earliest conversations was your apt comparison of retaining good song ideas to "catching lightning in a bottle". Prior to iPhones with voice memos (which I use), how did you catalog melodic ideas, song structures, etc.?

A lot of it just got lost, honestly.  But I always had tunes and words bubbling in my head, and part of songwriting was just pacing around, going about my business muttering the forming songs in my head.  That preserves things a bit:  people have been doing that for thousands of years, before writing was even invented.  But if inspiration were to happen to strike while I was sitting there with a guitar to catch it with, that’s the best scenario. The same as now really.  The iPhone voice memo thing has never worked all that well for me.  I have to go through the “massaging” process, whether it’s just in my head or otherwise.

Were you doing home recordings in the early days? I've heard many of your more recent demos and one thing that strikes me about them is how meticulous they are. You've commented on how you tend to massage the lump of clay that will become a song with care and consideration for a long time before the final form reveals itself. Have you always been very meticulous in your songwriting?

I never did solo demos of any kind till the mid 90s and at first it was only live recordings of more or less finished songs just to show them to the band and producer.  (Before that, the method was just, I’d play the song and the band would play along and that’s how we’d learn them.)  It wasn’t till I got a four track cassette “portastudio” around ’96 or ’97 or so that I started to use demos as part of the writing process.  That changed things a lot, because of being able to try stuff out on my own and also because I could be more specific about how I wanted the arrangements to come out and be better at communicating it to the band.  Soon after that I upgraded to ADAT (8 track)  and that’s when the demos got elaborate.  

As I’ve explained above, I hadn’t previously been very careful about the writing, though I did spend lots of time on it.   I was probably as meticulous as I could have been considering how slapdash the whole project was.  But when I started doing the demos it certainly got a whole lot more detailed and the songs improved accordingly.

Through the years, have you been able to appreciate and acknowledge the evolution of your songwriting? Were there certain periods or milestone accomplishments where you felt especially successful as a songwriter? Also, how do you feel about listening to your own songs? Do you do it often, and what's your general feeling towards revisiting your own creations?

Listening to my own records is a cringe-fest, almost without exception.  I only hear the flaws and the missed opportunities and the screw-ups and I’m kind of praying continuously in the background that it’s not as bad as I fear.  But as for the songs themselves, I am able to appreciate the ones that work particularly well, and all due self-deprecation aside, there are actually quite a lot of them, thirty years on.  I think each album, for all the considerable flaws of all them, represents a successive milestone of a sort, and a lot of the relative failures do genuinely result from trying to push, to stretch, to move beyond where things stood before.  And I appreciate the value of that, even though it can result in some awkwardness and things going off half-cocked.  I’ve mentioned the ’92 “leap”.  The Revenge Is Sweet songs (as songs, leaving out what happened to them in the studio) were a big leap as well.  etc.  The songs I’m writing now are the best of them all by sheer standards of composition, though it is an open question if anyone will every hear too many of them other than my cat.

Anyone who's had the privilege of beholding your vinyl collection could testify to your deep knowledge of what many would consider "classic" rock n' roll, in particular 70's rock. As you gained momentum and became MTX became more successful, did you feel a sense of disconnect with your audience? Many like myself have 90s nostalgia to spare, but I surmise that you have little.

Socially I have always felt a disconnect, and in a way that is the consistent thread running through the whole “career,” as writer and performer.  There has always been a bit of mutual hostility, of “us against the world” coming from both sides, from the earliest days of the MTX.  We/I were the odd man out in every situation, and that was largely self-engineered despite the fact that we’d occasionally complain about it.  Q; Why don’t you guys like our band?  A: Well, could it possibly be because you have deliberately tried as hard as you could to present us with material you knew we wouldn’t like?  Could it have something to do with that?  

But as to your question about aesthetics and nostalgia and such, you’re right.  I have no particular feeling about “the scene” in the ‘90s.   For me that psycho-dynamic would be more for Manchester or Belfast ’77-ish or Ray Davies’s Muswell Hill living room.

The 90's also saw the rise of several very formulaic variants of punk rock that MTX sometimes gets lumped into - the Ramonescore, the skate punk, etc. These aesthetics remain compelling to many (myself included), but it occurs to me that your songwriting has very little in common with this phenomenon. When did you first become aware of that association? Do you feel that being on Lookout! kind of reinforced it based on their roster at the time?

Right,  all that had very little to do with me or my band.  I remember the first time I noted the term “pop punk”:  that was in Europe in ’92 when we had to try to explain what we were doing to skeptical Dutch people.  They called it “kinderpunk” (and they weren’t into it at all.)  After that it became an ironic thing to say mainly, and I’ve never believed it referred to anything real or genuine.   I have always written pop songs, and my band is certainly on a branch of the “punk rock” family tree, so I suppose “punk pop” would be an accurate enough term (and that describes most punk rock of the original sort…. “punks” didn’t start forgetting how to write pop songs till around ’81 or so.)  And yet the records and songs don’t seem particularly “punk” to anyone either.  Nowadays the term “pop punk” seems to mean a kind of emo/screamo thing that is literally beyond my comprehension.  It doesn’t matter a great deal, or at all, really.   This one British journalist invented a genre called “punk pathetique” to refer to the Toy Dolls and Peter and the Test Tube Babies variety of Oi type music as it existed solely in the years 1981 and 1982.   I think it was probably meant as a prank, it’s so absurd.   But maybe some journalist could do that for my band.  It would have to be a one-band genre.  

There've been quotes and articles concerning human creativity that suggest there may be peak eras in a person's life when their creativity is the most potent - I've heard for example the claim that a person's creative peak is age 40. Sounds like bullshit! What are your thoughts on applying the songwriting lessons of your substantial career to fresh inspiration for new material? Do you feel that you're a better songwriter now than ever before?

I definitely do feel that my songs are better now.  They come more slowly (which may tell against me being a better songwriter per se) but they are of higher quality and they reach for new and different places.   I don’t know about this creative peak thing.  It seems more like, your life just gets filled up and you don’t have as much of an opportunity to indulge a largely uncompensated “job.”  Not many people, even great writers, even those way, way better than me, have the luxury of sitting around all day for days on end fooling around on the guitar.  

I'm interested to know if your recent fingerpicking journey has impacted your songwriting significantly? Also, watching you play acoustic guitar is a reminder that you have a seemingly deep knowledge of chord progressions beyond the standards (I-IV-V, I, vii, IV, V, etc.). How did you branch out and learn some of those more nuanced chords? Do you feel that your heightened level of guitar playing also elevates your songwriting?

I believe the fingerpicking exercise has taught me a lot about melody.  You really have to pay attention to what you’re picking out, and if it’s vague or monotonous or poorly conceived it just doesn’t work at all.  (As opposed to when you’re shouting and strumming and you can disguise such failings with histrionics.)  With chords, I’ve always been very utilitarian.  You use what works.  And I’ve never known a whole lot about the terminology or the “theory” beyond the instinctive.  When a song calls for a fancy or unusual chord, I always just invent it, note by note.  Then after the fact I may look it up to see if there are better ways to play it (as there usually are) and what it’s called (though I almost never retain that… I can’t tell you names of half the chords I play, to be honest.)

Your songwriting has always felt distinctly traditional in its form. You've talked about rhyming lyrics as a priority, and your compositions are rooted in the predictable yet often ascend to very high levels of craft melodically and structurally. In an early interview I vaguely recall you stating that you have a strong preference for writing rock songs that have a traditional structure. I can relate to it of course, but where does this tendency come from?

I suppose the root of it is simply that there’s a reason these traditional structures and compositional patterns emerged and established themselves:  they work, and because of that they appealed to me like they appeal to everyone.  But it took me a long road of trial and error, and quite a bit of not trying hard enough and regretting the resulting errors, to get to the point where I was able to make some of this stuff happen in my own songs.  But for all that, I’m not a hide-bound traditionalist either.  Just more like one of those guys who says, you can’t “break the rules” if you don’t know what the rules are.  As I said, it was a long, slow road. And we’re really not talking about anything overly complicated or rarefied here.  Just things like, know what the song’s about, make the rhymes actually rhyme, make the chorus identifiable and related to the topic in some way, make the musical stuff and the sentiments or ideas reinforce each other, make the song develop so that after the bridge you feel like you’ve wound up in at least a slightly different place… it seems very obvious, but it is weirdly hard to notice (maybe because in the best songs the seams don’t show and you take it all for granted); and once you’ve noticed, making it work in your own songs can be frustratingly elusive.  So I don’t exactly blame people for throwing up their hands and settling for less.  As I said, I did that myself for a long stretch.

As we wrap up, how do you look upon your legacy of songs recorded over the past 30 years, and what songwriting goals have you yet to meet? Do you feel that your audience acknowledges your songwriting in satisfying ways? You're known as the best to many, including yours truly.

Well thanks.  I know there are people who do appreciate my songs a great deal, and I appreciate them appreciating them right back at them, even more so.  When a song “lands”  it is immensely satisfying, because that’s the whole reason you spend the effort to construct it and it is so often the case that you’ll do it and no one cares at all.  I don’t have any goals, no, beyond the overall one of doing better and improving on past efforts.  Generally, the specific goals reveal themselves after the fact, after you’ve already stumbled on them and made a bit of a mess of whatever it was.  Then I guess you have the goal of doing a better job of the thing you stumbled on but didn’t quite nail, but that’s on an ad hoc basis.  Part of what makes this whole thing compelling is not really knowing where it’s going to lead and wanting to stick around to find out.  That sounds rather corny, I know, but it’s quite true.