I had only seen the Frost once before, just after the release of their first LP, Frost Music. I remember walking down to Howard’s Record Store on the corner of Genesee just kitty corner from the Saginaw Auditorium to line up with other eager kids to lay down a heavy $3.98 to get a pristine cellophaned copy. Some kids were buying 2-3, even four copies. I never asked them but I wondered why they needed to buy so many, perhaps getting’ copies for friends or bandmates or teammates, not girlfriends, no, girls didn’t seem so taken with the Frost. This was a GUYS band, a beer swilling, shoutin’ fist-in-the-air macho guys’ band. Man, did we play some mean air guitar to Frost Music, whew!! Lunchtimes at the AHHS gymnasium was jammin’. Rich Miller did a mean Baby Once You Got it… with a little help from yours truly. And forget about Mystery Man, it was all OURS... it had a great hook with an indelible harmonic majesty that recalled the Beatles - but with a harder edge. It was an almost perfect tune to jam to and so we did, every lunch hour for at least a semester. We were over-the-top, lost our heads, possessed insane clown posse rockin’ Dick Wagner worshipers. If he was the “mystery man” then we were too - that was the power of our almost cultish devotion, at least at noon hour anyway. The girls would watch us (‘cos we were watchin’ them but pretending not to) and they would shake their heads and talk about us. We thought they were complimenting us like, “Lookit Bo, he really plays a great air guitar, he’s so cute and sexy… wish he would ask me out.” But it was more like, “Lookit that dork, he’s a real failure, how could he be so stooopid…yeeew, hope he don’t ask me out.” All the while we thought they thought we were cool. Oh well. At least we could work out some pretty urgent adolescent frustrations that way and avoid thinkin’ about how boring and useless high school really is. Try as we may, few of us could admit to ever learning anything of substance from our classes, at least most of our classes. We had learned more from watching the young teachers pair off and get romantic or when we snuck down below into the caverns under the AHHS pool, and watch the young ladies swim. The school provided us with swimsuits back then and they never quite fit very well. For the girls it proved to be quite a challenge to keep the top of the suit in its proper place…oops, ahhh, quite a show for us guys. So what if we’re perverted, we didn’t see it that way- just a little innocent fun. A custodian, we called him Illya Kuryakin – ‘cos he looked like that TV-sidekick in the “Man from Uncle” – arranged this simple pleasure for us. He was always there…hmm.
By the time I attended this concert, The Frost had already released their second album, musta been a sophomore jinx, the disappointing, half crappy live, half crappy studio, Rock and Roll Music. Don’t get me wrong I loved the title song and the country rocker Sweet Lady Love blew me away but it was the poignant 1st time romantic lust of Linda that really popped my cork. YEAH. Wagner had already written the Frost’s underrated third album and many of those tunes had been in their concert repertoire since ’69.
The opening act was Brownsville Station, a good solid, rootsy band. Good old rock ‘n roll with the peripatetic Cub Koda running, jumping and bouncing all over the stage. He had quite a schtick goin'. But the rhythm guitarist Michael Lutz was a great singer with a commanding presence, the sex symbol of the group. The songs were solid…Rock and Roll Holiday, Be Bop Confidential, Road Runner… great retro stuff and not too loud. I recall a Brownsville fan once gushing that Cub & the boys were the loudest band he ever heard, louder than God… or even Led Zeppelin – not yet, not at this show anyway. Brownsville Station put on a good rock steady show even got a good ovation at the end but everyone was there to see the Frost and no one made any bones about it. These are the hometown boys and they were makin’ a stir in Detroit and beyond, even played the Fillmore. Yeah, they were goin’ somewhere. Though there were a few naysayers, I recall a Lester Bangs article in Creem in which he’s riffin’ about the school of metallic music that supposedly inspired the Stooges…”think of Grand Funk’s noxious sludge, the Frost clanging along like a brassy fire engine, appealing but just a shade inhuman…” The Frost is...Metallic? ...inhuman? Hmm, I never thought of them in that way. When I thought of the Frost I thought of great lead vocals and harmonies, the Bossmen, the Beatles – pop songs, but not metal, certainly not the dreadful atonal slasher, Iggy? I was in for a surprise.
The Frost took the stage. Wagner walked on all chest and shoulders while Gordie and Don almost bounced onto the stage. They were pumped. Bobby Rigg started pounding the skins and bangin’ the cymbals, guitars are wailing...then that familiar riff… baah…baah…bah-bum…”rock ‘n roll music, rock ‘n roll music…rock and ro-oh-o-oh-o-oh-o-oh-oll. And it set me free just like Wagner said it would. It was all energy and momentum and like a Zen meditation that repeats itself until you find its deeper meaning, a simple truth revealed by our adolescent longing. Baby Once You Got It is an almost throwaway blues rocker that is salvaged by the energetic interplay of Hartman and Garris, the heart and soul of the band. They stand in stark contrast to the older Wagner, they dance and move around the stage as if possessed, visually striking, this enfant terrible duo gives the Frost its “human” side, they are the everyman to Wagner’s tortured genius vibe. Wagner may be the mystery man but these cats are here to party with you. Both Don and Gordy sing well and possess a several octave vocal range that give the band depth and compliment Wagner’s incredible lead vocals. I must admit that the Frost had changed considerably since I last heard them, less pop and much more jammin’. I’ve heard a few critics that said the Frost were not much more than a bar band or that they were little more than high energy or mid-energy noise (whatever that’s supposed to mean). So let me set the record straight. The Frost used West Amps which provided a rich full sound and was not as loud or explosive and piercing as say the Marshall amplifiers used by the Mc5. In those days the sound came FROM the stage not from some crappy arena PA that homogenizes sound and fury. So the Frost was not metal and they weren’t a jam band (like the Grateful Dead) but they did several extended instrumental workouts, based in the 12-bar format that essentially revealed that Wagner was in a class of his own. He wasn’t showy and gymnastic like Nugent, though he riffed with incredible speed and precision. Wagner wasn’t a guitar-god and he never seemed content just to riff for the sake of the riff, no, he was more musical. He didn’t just rely on major or minor chording but would modify the sound with inverted chords - inverting the order of the notes in a particular chord. For instance, Wagner may change the combinations of the CEG notes while playing the C chord. Grand Funk’s Mark Farner once told me that Wagner was one of his early influences and that he taught him all about inverted chords. Wagner could produce an incredible aural landscape with almost effortless grace, he would hit that E-string and produce an astonishing vibrato effect, evident in songs like Mystery Man, Take My Hand, and Who Are You, all of which were performed that night. Early in the show, Wagner showcased some new songs on a medley that included Black As Night, a song Donny Hartman says Wagner tinkered with from night to night, shifting keys and tempos, a song that was never the same from show to show, 1500 Miles (From the Eye of a Beatle), and Big Time Spender. The combination worked well in showcasing Hartman’s soulful vocals and Wagner’s increasingly complex improvisations. At about this time in the show, Wagner addressed the crowd like a school marm to willful child, “Hey Saginaw, it’s about time you found out where’s it at.”
seemed a bit snippy to me. But he had a point, we were boppers, not yet adults and we had a very limited perspective, at least, that is, I had a limited perspective. I was wet behind the ears and didn’t know shit from shinola. I was looking for the Beatles through Wagner’s viewfinder only to discover that he changed the landscape. The music was complex less pop and more pile-drivin, ball-bustin’ blues based rock with a capital ‘R’. Mystery Man was the highlight for me, the closest thing to pop confection that evening. It’s still a great song with one helluva hook. But the closer, an extended 15 minute jam based on the opening bass riff of We Gotta Get Out of This Place proved to be the nadir of the evening. Wagner’s incredible virtuosity couldn’t even save it, they didn’t even try to bolster the song by singing a verse or two. And Bobby Rigg’s plodding drum solo only served to make a questionable arrangement even more abrasive. I grew up diggin’ Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa and Rigg, like most rock drummers, just couldn’t muster up the more intricate and complex patterns that a true master learns. It was just bang, boom, crash. Don’t get me wrong I felt Booby was an excellent rock drummer, powerful with rock solid timing, plus he could sing. But rock 'n roll drum solos were always a disappointment or a waste of time, except for maybe once. I saw Ginger Baker's Airforce and Baker made it jazzy and interesting, riffin' on some complex syncopation and African rhythms, incredible!
I left the show feeling a bit let down. I still considered Dick Wagner to be an enormous talent, an icon - and the Frost was an excellent live band. But something was missing, something just didn’t seem right. And then I remembered what Lester Bangs wrote about them…”clanging like a brassy fire engine, appealing, but just a shade inhuman” and I wondered what it all meant and if I could only get past those words maybe I would discover a cosmic truth, why my heroes never made a splash in a bigger pond.
Peace,
Bo White
12/30/2005
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