“Small in size but big in words”: The man behind Pearl Jam’s ‘Dirty Frank’
I can’t help but feel like the days of touring aren’t what they once were. When my teenage self decided to pursue a career in journalism, I thought a life lived by the writer in Almost Famous was what awaited me. By the time I found myself at the tip of the pen, budgets had been tightened, and life on tour seemed a lot less glamorous. Stories like Pearl Jam’s untamed bus driver had made way for pre-watershed games of Uno and deliberating over who owes what for the uber.
Admittedly, Pearl Jam have never been used as my beacon of hedonistic jealousy before. No my romantic images of a life on tour generally centred around smoke filled green rooms and the open collared shirts of Led Zeppelin. The unruly nature of those days is what the legacy of music worship was built on.
But the 1990s was perhaps the last stronghold of on-the-road lawlessness. And while the likes of Oasis were doing their hedonistic forefathers proud, an unlikely member of the Pearl Jam crew was bringing the dangerous energy.
Their 1991 song ‘Dirty Frank’ was dedicated to their off-beat bus driver, who clearly not bothered by anonymity, went by the same name. Within the safety of the band setup, they had a running joke that he was a serial killer and was planning to eat their guitarist, Mike McCready, to give you a sort of flavour for the man behind the myth.
Needless to say he didn’t satiate his guitar-player appetite and allowed McCready time to pen a riff in dedication of him. While the lyrics muse of a mystery man who borders on the strange, Dave Abbruzzese took the chance to provide context on Frank, saying, “He was small in size but big in words. He’d talk like a tough guy but he was a little guy, maybe a buck thirty wet. His first introduction to the band was, ‘Alright. I’m going to do your laundry,’ and this and that. He would say things like, ‘Copacetically speaking’ and ‘I will clean the bathroom per se, but I won’t clean the toilet.’ He was that kind of guy.
He continued, “but he had this one rule. He pointed at this bay under the bus and said, ‘That’s my bay. Nobody opens it, nobody goes in it. That’s mine. That’s my space.’ So, slowly it turned into this theory we all had that that’s where he kept his cauldron of ‘groupie soup’ where he would lure unsuspecting fans to the bus and he would kill them and throw them in the cauldron. So, ‘I got a recipe for anus ankle soup,’ that’s one of the lyrics.”
If you thought the lyrics were something you’d find in a groove-laden Red Hot Chili Peppers track, you wouldn’t be mistaken. In 1991, they were hot off a support tour for the Californian band and harnessed their use of esotericism and placed in into their own track.
But while it’s more uncharacteristic style may have seen the song slipped through the cracks of Pearl Jam fan folklore, if gives way to a more important, wider point. Frank is the sort of character who perhaps in the modern day would be captured for content, within an inch of his life. As the ship of privately protected authenticity slowly sinks beneath the surface, Pearl Jam’s sleeper hit is a comforting reminder that the glory days of touring gave way to esoteric songwriting and the sharing of myths, nothing more.
