This song was written by Bob back in the early seventies and appeared on that Vanguard album. Buddy Spicher played the fiddle on that cut. KFAT, a hippie radio station in Gilroy, California, couldn’t get enough of it. It was written one cold winter evening over in Harrison, Arkansas, when Bob was staying in a house there with Bert Stegall. Nobody on earth ever did more dope or sang more songs or played more guitar than Bert Stegall. Put these two guys together and it would be a miracle if a song like this didn’t emerge from the ingredients. Bob claims credit for having written it, but if he hadn’t been trying to keep up with Stegall, this song probably never would have happened. It’s so close to being a true story, we won’t go into all the details here. Bob’s wife might get her feelings hurt, and then he’d have to open another can of soup.
Here’s a song that was written when Bob was still at East High School, there in Memphis, where Bob was born and raised. Being a southerner, born and bred, of course he was steeped in the Civil War from the time he was a little kid playing in the neighborhood. Howard McKenzie, the famous artist that influenced a whole school of art at the Memphis Art Academy, lived down the street from Bob, and when they were just in grade school, Howard was the guy who first showed Bob a rebel flag. Everything Howard ever did was dramatic, and without saying a word, with just a look in his eyes, he told Bob the true meaning behind the Stars and Bars. It has nothing to do with rednecks and the KKK. Instead, what it’s really all about is loyalty to your neighborhood. The simple truth of the American Civil War, which everybody but Shelby Foote seems to have overlooked, is that the South was invaded. This song tells the story from that point of view, in a humorous way, through the eyes of four different volunteers from four different states of the old Confederacy. If it offends some delicate and misplaced sense of political correctness, that is just another sad commentary on these degenerate times we’re living in.
A funny story about this song is the one where Bob and some of his high school buddies went to Biloxi, Mississippi, to a Key Club convention back in 1962. Bob didn’t take his guitar on this trip, because it was only for one weekend, and he figured he could live without it for that long. As it turned out, there was a talent show at the convention, and Bob’s friends urged him to enter it. “But I don’t have a guitar,” he said. “Don’t worry,” they said. “We’ll get one.” They went to a pawn shop and bought this little old handmade piece of crap that had some sort of picture painted on the front of it. It was only about half the size of a real guitar, but it was all they had. It cost about eight dollars and fifty cents. When they got to the talent show, Bob was ready to go on and do his thing, little old piece of crap or not. Then, he noticed that the guy who was going on right after him had this really nice gut string classical guitar. Bob talked the guy into letting him use it, “just for one song. I’ll give it right back after I do my song,” he told the guy. The guy was very reluctant to let this stranger use his prize instrument. “I won’t hurt it,” Bob said. Finally, the guy relented. “Go ahead,” he said, “but don’t mess with the tuning.” “Don’t worry,” said Bob, “I won’t.” Bob went out there and the first thing he realized was, the audience was cold. They needed warming up. Like the fella said, first you gotta get their attention. So Bob told them a good joke. This got them laughing. Then, before they had a chance to regroup, he hit ‘em with “Sabers.” Seeing as how this was a convention down at the southernmost tip of the southernmost state in the Union, and seeing as how all these boys were Southerners, of course they just naturally went apeshit. Bob got a standing ovation. By the time he left the stage, it was all over. The other acts were anticlimactical. When Bob gave the guitar back to its rightful owner, that poor boy looked like he wished he’d never even heard of Bob Frank.
“Sabers” is on Bob’s new CD, Keep on Burning.
Here’s a song that has gone through more changes than a old pair of drawers. The way Sam Jackson sings it is one of the original versions, but you’d probably have to go to Missouri and find Sam Jackson to understand what I’m talking about. There’s some tapes of that version laying around somewhere. That’s the way Sam’s brother Bruce played it with Bob when they had that group called the Hardheads, back in the seventies, and it’s pretty much how the song was originally written back in Tennessee, when Bob was staying in a little shack on a farm outside of Nashville in the winter of ‘71. About a year later, Gary Walker and Cletus Haegert took Bob to a studio down in Birmingham, Alabama, brought in some backup singers and some rock musicians and tried to cut a single on this song. After spending all day and God knows how much money, they decided it was hopeless. Years later, out in California, Bob rewrote the song and his oldest daughter used it for her wedding song. This is how it appears on this website, and this is the way Bob sings it now.
This is one of the strangest songs you’ll ever hear, bar none. In the first place, it was not written, it was dreamed. I mean that literally. This whole song came to Bob in a dream. Not as a series of pictures, that is, not as a movie, but as a song. This might sound strange to some, but the truth is, Bob dreams songs a lot of the time. In the old days, he was so hungry for a new song, he would wake up at the end of it and write it all down. Nowadays, he just lays there and enjoys it and doesn’t realize it’s a dream until he wakes up. “Damn. There went another song,” he thinks. In the dream, it always seems like he’s just listening to a song that already exists. But when he dreamed “Judas,” he knew it was something special. He remembered it all, word for word, and wrote it all down before it slipped away. That was back in 1969. There’s more to the story, but we won’t go into it all right now. Maybe later. This song is also on that Vanguard album.
And it is also on Bob’s new album, Keep on Burning.
This one’s also on that Vanguard album, with Charlie McCoy on the harp and Russell George on the bass. They released it as a single, I think, but nothing happened. It’s another true story. ‘Nuff said.
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Here’s another song from that old album. Eric Weisberg was playing the guitar on this one. This is a song that Bob made up just because he loved all those Gordon Lightfoot and Ian Tyson songs, and he wanted to write one of his own. Parts of it are biographical, but the part about running off to Canada to dodge the draft, Bob just made that part up. The truth is, Bob didn’t dodge the draft at all. He wasn’t quick enough. Instead, he got caught by the long arm of Uncle Sam and was shipped off to Nam. It was after he got back, in the fall of ‘68, that he wrote this song. It was sort of his way of saying, “I understand why you guys ran off to Canada. I don’t blame you. If I’d had any sense, I’d have done the same thing.”
This song was written by Bob back in 1976, on the occasion of Cesar Chavez’ grape strike. That’s when all the grape pickers — all those braceros — that worked for Gallo wine went on strike for better wages and better working conditions. It says in the song, “they can’t get a pot to piss in,” and in spite of the fact that this is a funny line, it was true anyway. The Gallo brothers wouldn’t even put portapotties in the field so the women workers could have a little privacy. Bob sang this song at the Santa Rosa Folk Festival that year and won the prize for “Best Protest Song.” Utah Phillips loved it. Originally, this song had started as a simple drinking song. Bob was sitting out on the back porch with Oscar and Tony Palacios there in Oakland, passing round a bottle of Foppiano, playing guitars and singing whatever popped up, as was their wont. Oscar started up this song. Tony followed suit. Bob found the music on his old Gibson J50, and they had the seed of a good song. But at that point, all they had was the chorus. And all the chorus said was, “That old red wine, that old red wine. Don’t let it be known your mind left its home on that old red wine.” Bob stole this little snippet and turned it into “Blood Red Wine.” Oscar still hasn’t forgiven him for this uncalled for breach in etiquette. And Oscar has a point. After all, drinking songs last a lot longer than protest songs.
This is another protest song. Bob wrote this one in 1999, when the Civil Service Employees Union was trying to get a new contract with the City of Oakland. This is basically just a true song that is self-explanatory. Read it and weep.
Here’s a sample of the kind of song that Bob calls his “spiritual” numbers. In this case, all Bob did was take a dharma teaching of Geshe Michael Roach’s and turn it into a song. It is almost word for word the way Geshe Roach presents one of the most misunderstood of all Buddhist subjects — karma. It’s also the way Jesus tried to tell it. But who listens to Jesus anymore?
This song was written by Bob and his old buddy from Viet Nam and the sixties, Tony Palacios. They had just returned from a camping trip in the Sierras, up on the American River, where they dropped acid and went skinny dipping with a couple of beautiful hippie chicks and laid out on the boulders to dry off. When they wrote the song, they were back at Fred Wellman’s old house on Hearst Street, in Berkeley, down below San Pablo, drinking a quart of beer and dreaming of paradise.
Bob and Tony wrote a lot of songs together in those days. Eventually, maybe we’ll get around to some more of them on this site.
This one is on that old Vanguard album. It is a true story, told in macabre terms. Bert Stegall has his own version of this song. Bert’s like Gary McMahan and Jim Dickinson in that respect. Every song he sings, he turns it into his own version of it. Bob would never dream of doing such a thing to a song. No, but seriously, this is what songs are all about. This is the whole point of songs, to have some sort of art form that you can take in to yourself and let it become a part of you and then you can do it yourself, your own way. This is pretty much what happened to the Little Gest of Robin Hood. Bob lived with this thing for thirty years before he put a tune to it, and by then, it had become his own song. If all this seems like it has nothing to do with “Skid Row Joe,” then you haven’t heard the song yet. It’s all about songwriters and how one thing turns into another.
This song was written by Bob Frank and his longtime songwriting companion, Cletus Haegert. When these two guys get together, they couldn’t come up with a serious line between ‘em if they tried. The funniest line that was ever spoken on Music Row came from the mouth and mind of Cletus Haegert. Back in 1969, Bob and Clete and big jolly Tom Hartman were all working at Tree Publishing down on 16th Avenue South. Tom is a big man. His belt is about four and a half feet long. One day, all these important people from L.A. came to town to talk to Buddy Killen, who was the head of Tree back then, and Tom had to run a lot of little errands for Buddy on their account. It was beginning to get on his nerves. By the time lunchtime came around, Tom had had it up to here with Buddy and these guys from L.A. Clete, Bob and Tom all piled in Tom’s Cadillac and went looking for a Mexican restaurant. On the way there, Tom started complaining about his morning. “I tell you what,” he said, “All these big shots can kiss my ass.” Without missing a beat, Clete said, “Yeah, and they could probably all do it at the same time.”
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