Thanks to Mister Poof, we are now able to view an entire MTX show from the possibly-golden era of 1992 (the Milk Milk Lemonade tour). This show was videotaped in Störtebeker, Hamburg and is typical of the murky-but-watchable footage of the pre-digital era.
Let us know what you think of this vid in the COMMENTS section!
In the spirit of the age of the rapid-fire re-re-issues, here's the (also unrealized) Legacy Edition of Show Business is My Life (see here) with a bonus disc of Dr. Frank performing solo acoustic for KALX Radio in 2006. The eighteen track set-list includes lots of MTX stuff (from B-sides to album tracks to their 1986 college radio hit "Danny Partridge Busted") as well as songs from Show Business is My Life, songs from the soundtrack to his novel, King Dork, plus the unreleasble masterpiece: "Cingular Wireless, Worse Than Hitler".
Legacy Edition bonus disc link is in the comments
Speaking of comments, give us your take on "Cingular Wireless..."
P.S. The recording levels were deep in the red so play at singer-songwriter volume for best results.
Liner Notes For An Unrealized Tenth Anniversary Re-issue
While no one asked, “What is this shit?” when Dr. Frank’s solo album arrived in early 1999, some fans of his pop-punk band, The Mr. T Experience, were similarly stumped. “Where’s the Ramones-riffing and the frantic tempos?” they asked.
And it’s true that in the good Dr.’s oeuvre, Show Business is My Life was a genuine anomaly (“That’s a thing without a name”.) On first encounter, it seemed to commit all the cliché mistakes of the “solo-album-from-member-of-a-well-established-band” genre, like “celebrity guests” (members of Me First, The Hi-Fives, Crimpshrine, The Queers drop in), “one-man songs” (that sometimes sound demo-ish), “unusual instrumentation” (keyboards, horn sections etc.) plus “new stylistic tricks” (check out the falsetto!)
But it didn’t all turn out to be crazy. It was, in fact, a very deliberate break with the past. Frustrated by the “more-of-the-same” reviews of the brilliant and varied Revenge Is Sweet and So Are You in 1997, Dr. Frank threw out a lot of the tricks of pop-punk that were growing hackneyed by the fin de siècle. However, the brevity of the songs, the catchiness of the hooks, the nervousness of the energy and the deceptive use of self-deprecation - all integral to pop-punk - were still there, just given some new arrangements.
It's arguably the most fascinating set of songs the man ever released. The albums whips back and forth between hilarious peaks and suicidal lows like one of those evil roller coasters created by The Joker. The variety here, which echoes dozens of strains of mid-sixties American rock, country and pop, initially threw people for the loop but it’s actually the source of the album’s enduring strength.
While it’s no concept album, the wealth of detail on depression, madness, alcoholism and marital breakdown Dr. Frank employs to show the interdependence of comedy and tragedy in our lives makes it such a complete work that you might stay in your seat and wait for the credits to roll after track thirteen ends.
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1. She Turned Out To Be Crazy A blast of guest-star powered garage-rock snarl kicks the album off and provides some of the best punch lines on an album drunk with them.
2. I Made You and I Can Break You Dr. Frank, alone with his guitars, offers up the album’s first high, lonesome ballad, one that makes fine use of that clever recasting of clichés so beloved of the great sixties Nashvillians like Bill Anderson.
3. Knock Knock (Please Let Me In) Here’s where the girl group vocals and knock-knock jokes show up – and the result is a Goofy Greats-style novelty tune, which at 2:23 just ends too damn soon!
4. Suicide Watch Sure, as the title telegraphs, this is a sad, affecting slow one but keep your ear on Dr. Frank, who still manages to throw a sly Dr. Kevorkian allusion into the fray.
5. Bitter Homes and Gardens Leading a little band of lesser-knowns, Dr. Frank keeps the mood dark for this sad but clever tune, which Glen Campbell oughta cover.
6. She Alright Channeling the sheer drive of Roger Miller' amphetminabilly, Dr. Frank strums his acoustic to the breaking point for this one.
7. Ask Beth Back to the garage, for this organ-driven rocker that might call to mind Blonde on Blonde era Dylan with less pharmaceuticals and more distortion.
8. Population Us Another in a long line of “Let’s do it!" songs that abound in the Dr.’s catalog, this one’s got energy and a fantastically busy rhyme scheme though it does really sound like a solo electric demo for an MTX song.
9. Thinking of You One of the solo album clichés that Dr. Frank assiduously avoids here is the tendency to stretch the songs out. After all, once free from the shackles of band-dictated democracy the first thing many artists do is lay down that long-suppressed harmonica extravaganza or a free verse be-bop piece. But brevity is the watchword on Show Business is My Life as shown by “Thinking of You”, which, like John Prine’s unforgettable “Yes I Guess They Oughta Name A Drink After You”, doesn’t even have a full chorus, just a tag line at the end of every verse.
10. I’m In Love With What’s-Her-Name The final member of the power trio of garage-rockers on the album (too bad former MTX member Jon Von couldn’t have dropped by!), this one is powered by the irrepressible Hi-Fives.
11. Two Martinis From Now A hummable, bit of alcoholic word-play that, geo-musically speaking, lies somewhere between Frank Sinatra’s Las Vegas and Merle Haggard’s Bakersville.
12. Sad, Sad Shadow When Dr. Frank chooses to use the word sad twice in the title, it might imply he’s fallen under the cloud of Leonard Cohen but don’t worry the echo-ey guitar work here offers a silver lining.
13. This Isn’t About You Anymore Those dizzying heights and depth-plumbing lows that mark this album are all present and accounted for on this mini-epic, which crams endless ideas – percussive sound effects, disorienting keyboards, falsetto verses, internal rhymes, a sing-along chorus and a spoken word bridge into an extended metaphor that ends with the killer kiss-off line,
Now you’re a footnote, to somebody else’s footnote In a book no one ever wrote
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Show Business is My Life remains little-known and until the Future People of Tomorrow start adding it to the canon of “Neglected Works of Genius” lists, until cool-kid bands start covering these tautly-written songs, until Will Ferrell’s production company options the rights to adapt the album for a full length feature film to premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival later this century, it’s up to you to spread this anomaly around.
Show Business is My Life works its twisted magic best as an entire album. So, for once, I will put up an album that is actually IN-PRINT but with these cavets, since Monsieur Portman didn't exactly relish the idea of his work being given away here:
1. Post will be up for only 48 hours and then removed permanently.
2. A cheerful reminder to buy the album, ifyou like it, has been placed in the tags - please consider doing so as nothing would honour this blogger as much as even a tiny bump in sales!
3. While this album is available on many file-sharing sites, I'd still like to request that you not share this evaluation version elsewhere.
Show Business is My Life link is in the commentsNO LONGER WORKS - go HERE for some live Dr. Frank.
Speaking of comments, give us your take on this album.
"My songs come from my soul,
God just gave me a funny soul."
Roger Miller
Whom the gods of creativity would destroy they first call, funny. In no art form is this as apt as in music, where gaining the limelight with a funny song as, say, Louden Wainwright III did with “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road” gets songwriters caught in the trap of novelty, a word always preceded by an unspoken just a. Once caught in novelty’s leg hold, a musician can either gnaw off his own leg to demonstrate his new-found seriousness or work that bloody novelty angle till they turn into Weird Al.
Berkley pop-punk legend Dr. Frank sure screamed novelty at the outset of his career. After all, his break-out hit (if that's not too strong a term for it) was a topical-circa-1986 song called, "Danny Partidge's Busted", by his band The Mr. T Experience, who followed Barney Gumble's advice to “pick a name that's less funny every time you hear it". The fact that he stuck by that "Dumb Little Band” name and the sounds and themes of that first album (but bettering them a thousand times over) for almost twenty years proves he’s pretty adept for a man in a steel trap. (Ironically, under his real name, Frank Portman, he wrote a best-selling novel about a kid who's continually creating ever-clever names for his fledgling band.
The few musical funnymen who survived being a novelty, seemed to do so by being a bit bi-polar. The late Roger Miller wrote amphetamine country-jazz songs that were either zany ("You Can't Rollerskate in A Buffalo Herd”) or the sadder than hell ("One Dyin' and a Buryin'"). The late Warren Zevon was most widely-known for the witty “Werewolves of London” also had a catalog of bleak song-noir ballads like “Carmelita”. Similarly, the still-kicking Dr. Frank can pen a song based on knock-knock jokes (“Knock, Knock”) and then follow it with a somber song about death ("Suicide Watch"). If comedy is tragedy plus time, then maybe these funny song-writers were just slightly ahead of their time.
"...And I Will Be With You" would not be my choice for the A-side of the single from Revenge is Sweet and So Are You (coulda been "The Weather is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful") but it's a fine riff-driven pop-punk song with those classic Dr. Frank cultural grabs, like the reference to American Ninja II.
For the B-sides, Kim Shattuck (of the Muffs) plays Kiki Dee to Dr. Frank's Elton John in their roughed-up cover of "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" plus there's "You Alone", 2:21 of neat little rapid-fire pop moments, most of which you only really notice if you listen a few times.
MRML is a blog about the devestating effects of culture: music, politics, comics plus etc. blah blah blah. At times MRML will post fine, unpurchasable three-chord obscurica (punk, pop-punk, new wave, mod, power-pop, gospel, reggae, hardcore, rockabilly, folk, country...whatever.) - - - - - - "The otherwise unavailable files in this blog are posted for a limited time and are intended for educational, non-commercial use. These files were transcribed from what are believed to be out-of-print sources. If you are aware of any of these items being readily available from commercial sources, or if any of these files infringe upon rights that you hold, please notify us so that we can quickly remove the referenced items immediately." - - - SUPPORT THE ARTISTS - BUY MUSIC!
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Re: Re-Ups
MRML does not plan to restore all of the content lost in The Great Mediafire Gutting of 2012. Polite requests may be made in the appropriate section, regular commenters will get priority.
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