When Dr. Frank started writing songs in the early 1980s, he hardly imagined he’d still be doing it twenty years later. Being in a band was mostly a cool way to stay up late, drink a lot, and meet girls. Frank is the lead singer for the Mr. T Experience, a Bay Area band that has gone through as many lineup changes as Sha-Na-Na, and has just about as big a cult following. Hailed by his followers as the “Cole Porter of Punk,” Frank’s been pegged a key architect of the aggressively melodic pop-punk style. Recently, though, he’s been drawn to more complex, textured music, much to the dismay of his head-bobbing, pogo-dancing fan base. He’s also a staunchly pro-American presence on the Web, setting up his own site generally devoted to the war on terrorism. The politics might ruffle the liberal feathers of some, but perhaps in true punk rock form, this odd mixture of attitudes and influences may just set him apart.
As a cofounder of the East Bay punk scene, Frank’s influence has been considerable — most obviously on Green Day, whose teenage members regularly attended Mr. T shows at 924 Gilman Street long before they were able to get themselves booked into sexy venues like La Val’s Pizza and the on-campus Bear’s Lair. Like Green Day, bands like Blink 182 have also appropriated their sound and taken it into the Top 40 — a mix of melodic power-pop and grinding, power-chord punk, leavened with glib, clever lyrics. But the Mr. T Experience never became a household name, even after sixteen years of constant gigging and the occasional props from other bands.
Frank, it seems, was in the right place at the wrong time. In the early 1980s, he wove the strands of snotty LA-style hardcore and the bubblegummy power chords of the Dickies, Descendents, and Ramones into one nice, neat little package. But the market for his brand of rock didn’t emerge until the early ’90s, when Nirvana and Pearl Jam brought “punk” into the mainstream. Fresh faces like Green Day and Rancid were pulled out of the local scene and transformed into MTV darlings, yet Frank and his bandmates still had to lug their own equipment from small nightclubs to tiny bars and back again. On the whole, though, Dr. Frank is pretty philosophical about the direction his career has taken. “I always like to say that the lack of interest in the band has left us free to pursue our unique creative vision,” he jokes, speaking from his cluttered Oakland apartment. The flat is crammed with hundreds of novels, political science and philosophy tracts (which he actually reads); old songbooks by Noel Coward, the Gershwins, and Frank Loesser; votive candles and Catholic tchotchkes, and an impressive collection of plastic toys that stands like a small army poised to do his bidding. A makeshift recording studio dominates his bedroom, with guitars, keyboards, four-tracks, mixers, and a microphone shielded by a nylon stocking. Frank went the home-recording route a few years ago when his interests shifted from penning 4/4 punk ditties towards a more expansive sound, as much influenced by Elvis Costello as by Joey Ramone or Stiv Bators. Now he delves deep into audio production, adding keyboards and vocal effects at will, conserving his time in “real” studios for trickier, more expensive techniques. The arrangement works fine, except when neighbors complain about the noise. Then he has to dig out the headphones, turn down his guitar, and croon his new tunes in a whisper. This quieter side of Dr. Frank has been emerging for some time. Since the release of his first solo album in 1999, he’s occasionally performed as an acoustic act. Whether this route indicates a step back from rock ‘n’ roll frontman into a more introspective phase remains to be seen, but it wouldn’t be much of a leap.
Dr. Frank grew up in the hinterlands of the San Francisco peninsula, the eldest son of a fairly normal suburban family. Sports were big in his household, but he never played on a team; instead he was a bit precocious, a bookworm and loner whose interests flitted between music, philosophy, and chess. It was music that lured him out of his shell. In the early ’80s, when he moved across the Bay to go to UC Berkeley, he joined KALX and entered its punk rock circle, meeting Jon Von Zelowitz, a fellow Cal student with an obsessive admiration for the Ramones. Discovering a mutual passion for power chords and free beer, the two joined forces to haphazardly form the band that would become affectionately known as “MTX.”In ’86 they scraped the money together to self-release their first album, Everybody’s Entitled to Their Own Opinion, reveling in dopey pop culture with songs such as “Danny Partridge Got Busted.” Subsequent albums found Frank tackling more strenuous songwriting feats, like condensing a philosophy term paper into a two- minute pop tune (“History of the Concept of the Soul”). But the silliest songs with the catchiest hooks — like “Psycho Girl” and “My Stupid Life” — remained the big crowd-pleasers. MTX became one of the headliners that packed in crowds at the all-ages 924 Gilman, along with bands such as Sweet Baby and Operation Ivy. Even so, disgruntled hardcore fans derisively dubbed the East Bay sound as “pop-punk,” which was fine by Frank, who considered his music a return to the style’s real roots. “The first wave of punk rock was really pop songs,” he says. “That was the first thing they jettisoned with hardcore — the rock ‘n’ roll song structure, melodies, and everything. In the process of stripping it down, they sort of threw out the wrong things.”
Despite constant touring and a devoted fan base, it became increasingly difficult for him to hold the group together. Along with the goofy songwriting, MTX also gained notoriety for its slow cycles of disintegration. Bass players and drummers came and went, and in 1992 Von Zelowitz quit the band, leaving Frank to re-form the group as a three-piece. By ’93, after releasing six albums, he was ready to throw in the towel on what he had jokingly come to call the “MTX Starship.” His friends convinced Frank to at least record the latest stuff he’d written, and his label — Lookout Records — agreed to put the songs out as a farewell EP, The Mr. T Experience and the Women Who Love Them. “Making that record was a disaster,” he recalls. “The band was breaking up, we didn’t have any money, no one was really interested in us, and whether we were still really a band at all was just a matter of opinion. Given how bad the situation was, I was really surprised how well the record came out.” The EP also sold surprisingly well, re-igniting interest in the band and reinvigorating Frank’s waning fascination with songwriting. Armed with a powerful new rhythm section featuring teenage fan-turned-bass-player Joel Reader and MTX’s stalwart drummer Jym, the band gelled really well, and in ’96 the trio recorded the relentlessly uptempo Love Is Dead, a full-length album packed with tightly crafted, hook-laden rock songs. The record was a half-spoof of teen angst themes and a densely constructed, witty pop album full of intricate wordplay masquerading as perky, lighthearted fluff. Frank’s newfound poetic precision seemed to fly in the face of an ultra-indie ethos that placed a premium on unartful lyrics — spending too much time on composition was seen as “inauthentic,” or “not punk enough.”
“I try to take the forms and clichés and conventions of a love song and come at it from an unexpected angle,” he says, admitting that sometimes he puts more into his songs than is absolutely required. “The most effective songs are the ones that you don’t have to think about, they just sort of hit you, and give the impression of being very simple. To get something simple is hard; you’ve got to really work at it.”
The biggest surprise with Love Is Dead came when the low-budget black-and-white video of “Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba” — a catchy punk-rock campfire song — aired twice on MTV’s 120 Minutes. Album sales surged, and suddenly, ten years after forming his band, it looked like Dr. Frank might finally get to grab the big brass ring. “I made The Women Who Love Them after doing all these records that had grandiose ideas that didn’t come off,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’ll try to do something that’s so Neanderthal in its conception and execution that there’s very little chance that anything can go wrong.’ It ended up coming out pretty good, so we did the same thing on Love Is Dead, which is everybody’s favorite Mr. T album.” Dead sold about twice as many copies as any previous MTX album, but Lookout, facing indignant indie-only fans who actually mailed their Mr. T albums back in protest, seemed ambivalent about being seen as “selling out.” The label may have also been out of its depth, hesitant to risk the expensive promotional layout required to build the group into another Green Day. Although the album was a success in indie terms, any mainstream momentum soon fizzled out, and it was back to the drawing board for the band. Revenge Is Sweet and So Are You would follow, which he describes as simply a louder version of the previous record. Caught between sarcastic critics and rigid fans, Frank felt stifled.
On 1999’s Alcatraz, he decided to veer away from his trademark anthemic sound, mapping out lavish arrangements while attempting to steer the album’s production from start to finish, taking over an aspect of music-making he had previously left up to chance. Predictably, the introduction of big Cheap Trick guitar riffs and new waveish keyboards threw many longtime fans into a tizzy.
“To that record’s commercial detriment, I was deliberately trying to make a statement of trying to avoid what was expected of groups like ours,” he says. “That met with resistance from a lot of people. I guess it just depends on what you want your band to be. A lot of rock bands that people think of as one-dimensional — take the Ramones for example — actually changed a lot over time. Some people look at that and say, ‘Well, they were really good and then they started to suck!’ There might be some truth to that, but also they were trying things out, and I think that’s good. You have to try something.”
Undaunted, Frank pushed the proverbial envelope even further on his follow-up, the five-song Miracle of Shame, which was largely recorded in his home studio, and sounded more like a Robyn Hitchcock record or a lo-fi outing by Sebadoh than the typical MTX power-pop confection. In the disc’s offbeat endpiece, “I Don’t Know Where Dan Treacy Lives,” Frank made a backhanded reference to a 1981 Television Personalities song that purported to know the whereabouts of Syd Barrett, the reclusive ’60s burnout who led Pink Floyd through its early psychedelic years. In turn, the Television Personalities’ songwriter Dan Treacy became something of a hermit himself, retreating from the public eye in 1998. It was almost as if Dr. Frank was placing himself in the long line of super-creative kooks, saying to his fans, “Look, folks, I have to try something new, or I’ll drive myself nuts. And if this doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll just disappear somewhere into the English countryside … “
Although he has been in the studio on and off for the last two years, Frank is in no hurry to release his next record. (True to form, MTX fell apart again, after Reader left to start his own band.) Frank continues to compose , but these days he seems as engrossed by the process of audio engineering as he is with penning lyrics. Since September 11, he’s moved into a newer form of DIY writing, one that may prove baffling to liberal local fans. Now sharing space with guitars in his jumbled apartment is an orange iMac, at which the rock singer sits down daily to bang out his thoughts about current events. The destruction of the World Trade Center awakened his latent sense of patriotism, yet he couldn’t see a means to fit his earnest anger into the glib confines of his musical self-expression. Searching for news about the war in the days after the attack, Frank was inexorably drawn into the world of “blogging,” where hundreds of home pundits and confessional writers share their thoughts with the voracious cybermasses through web logs, or “blogs.” After spending the entire autumn lurking on various Web sites and firing off impassioned war-related e-mails to family and friends, Frank decided to post his own blog, thereby joining in the chorus of amateur micro-pundits critiquing the journalists, academics, and politicians who seem to be shaping the war on terrorism.
Like most of the war bloggers, Frank supports military action, seeing it as the only response possible. His Web site, “The Blogs of War,” went up last December. It’s densely written, focusing on the serpentine cross-currents of debate about the war’s meaning, its execution, and its uncertain future. With characteristic sarcasm, Frank’s blog bears the slogan “Bromides for the sensitive warmonger.” Caught between his socially liberal Berkeley background and post-WTC fervor, Frank anticipates the indignation that will arise when fans in the left-leaning Bay Area and the wider punk rock community catch onto his dual role as punk musician and part-time cheerleader in the struggle against Muslim extremism.
Nonetheless, Frank takes unflinching potshots at liberal-left icons such as Noam Chomsky and Christopher Hitchens, whose initial ambivalence toward the Bush administration’s war plans made him see red. He links to news stories and errant postings that seem worthy of “Sontag Awards,” war blogger in-speak that refers to author Susan Sontag’s now-infamous September essay which suggested that Muslim radicalism may have its roots in poverty and political oppression. In a typical entry last month, Frank pondered the Bush Administration’s use of the term “evil” to describe state-sponsored terrorism:
… Much of the current Left’s reality-gap has to do with nostalgia for the glory days of “antiReagan and stuff, man, yeah.” I was (to a degree) one of those hecklers as well. At that time, “evil” seemed a distant and unreal abstraction. It was not at all a part of the vocabulary of the self-regarding hipster sophisticate (unless the topic of discussion was heavy metal music, or perhaps an ex-girlfriend or two — like I said, we were sophisticated … ) If 9/11 taught us nothing else, at minimum it brought the word “evil” back into legitimate usage. How else can you describe the WTC attacks, or for the quest to acquire the means to continue the jihad against America through nuclear and biological terror?
Yet amid the swipes at “hippies” and unregenerate lefties, Frank also has some of the attitude of an alternative-media true believer, seeing blogging as a new democratic forum which has the potential to challenge the establishment and reshape the media. It’s an idea that was familiar to Frank, a twenty-year veteran of the DIY music scene. He writes:
In many ways the weblog phenomenon is a lot like the often unrealized ideal of punk rock, which is that everyone has a band, and all the members of all the bands are in the audience when they don’t happen to be on the stage. There is an absolute equality of opportunity, yet it’s also a true meritocracy, since the ones with the most appealing or interesting content get the most attention; there’s very little subversion of this meritocracy, very little incentive for people to pander to the lowest common denominator to increase “market share,” since the financial angle, if it’s there at all, is minimal at best. At least, that’s the ideal.
While the war on terrorism is his blog’s main focus, Frank’s site also reflects time spent in the UK, where he has been visiting with his English fiancée. Numerous postings analyze op-ed pieces and columns from the London Times, The Guardian, and other bastions of British intellectualism, refuting what Frank sees as thinly-veiled anti-Americanism. Still, every once in a while his fascination with popular culture reasserts itself, and he can’t help but comment on an oddball news story, such as the recent announcement that spider genes have been spliced into the DNA of goats, or lurid articles about European Satanist vampire cults. Recently, he has even given mention to his career as a rock musician, apologizing for missing an entry or two due to post-concert hangovers.
Dr. Frank’s next musical project is still up in the air — he’s not even sure if it will wind up being an official Mr. T Experience release — but while bullets and bombs continue to rain down in the Middle East, or as long as farm animals are genetically engineered to spin unbreakable milky webs, he’ll continue to moonlight as the Walter Winchell of the World Wide Web. Let’s just hope his fans don’t find out.
