The Mr. T Experience

          By Dr. Frank admitting his "vocals" are of an acquired taste, he strikes a preemptory bow against people who ask, "Why are you trying to be the lead vocalist when you can't sing?"

          Dr. Frank is Mr. T Experience's well-educated instigator. He and band mates, Jym and Joel, are chain-locked out of Ft. Lauderdale's venue on their Revenge Is So Sweet And So Are You (Lookout) tour, so the doc himself had few other choices than one of Florida's many shopping malls to call me from. At a pay phone in Target, he professes his angst about American pop culture iconography, for starters.

          Never a fan of the A Team of heavily clad men in gold chains, he named his band The Mr. T Experience (MTX) in 1986 to gain entry into "the general absurd program of the long-string of Mr. T products, from underwear to cereal to air freshener to tennis shoes to god knows what."

          Recently, MTX has mutated into MTX "Starship," in line with Jefferson Starship. Dr. Frank decided on the name change, but in retrospect doesn't think it's the kind of joke many people get. "By the time it became Starship [Jefferson], very few of the original people were involved." Roughly nine different people have joined and left Dr. Frank over the past decade. During the stilted musical adventures of MTX, Dr. Frank says he was trying his best to "cobble together a semblance of a life." Contributing factors to his then struggles were his perceived "colossal failure" of the band and its attempt to make music that anyone wanted to hear. He was more often than not severely depressed and in a drunken stupor. Scotch is what he fancies and says, "I drank it any way I could get it, baby."

          MTX was never more than barely cohesive over the past 10 years. "I never knew from day to day whether we were together or not. It was all very tenuous. All the breakups and the band members quitting all sort of happened in this smarmy passive-aggressive way on both sides." He likens it to a relationship, where one of the two thinks it's over and the other has no real sense of a pending dissolution. "The band was a dysfunctional relationship to some degree."

Dr. Frank's sweet love songs, set to classic punk rhythms, have chronicled his life experiences. Records including Big Black Bugs Bleed Blue Blood (1990) and Milk Milk Lemonade (1992) catalogue things gone wrong. He says, "There's something kinda cool about it. If I were not me and I didn't cringe at a lot of that stuff, I think I would find it kind of interesting."

His lyrics do not refer necessarily to one romantic interest at any particular time. He says being in love and getting "messed up" is a universal constant in life. "I think it's a good thing to write songs about. A lot of people believe you can take each song as a literal diary entry. It's not like that. Some of them are just characters. A lot of times I sit and quietly watch people in a bar or at a show... or in a Target."

          Dr. Frank graduated from U.C. Berkeley -- he studied history of the middle ages and late antiquity -- and had every intention of continuing on to graduate school; he went so far as applying and getting accepted. His ultimate deferral to further study was not for the sake of the band: "It was really because deep down I didn't want to do it. I would've been good at it. Making the decision of failing to make the decidsion turned out to be the right decision, for once."

Just as a sonic shoplifting beep echoes in Target's background, Dr. Frank finally gets around to explaining his title. "People started calling me that [doctor] because of my curmudgeonly pedantic nature. I sprung from the womb that way, and it was a derogatory designation. I adopted it as my air name when I was a college radio deejay and then continued with it. Everyone thinks that I really am a doctor of some kind when it's really just a name."

          About the bulk of contemporary pop-punk, skate-rock, "NOFX kind of groups," Dr. Frank is not impressed -- except for bands signed to the reputable Lookout Record label -- because they don't have enough rock and roll in it, nor relevant history. "If you're going to deconstruct something, you've got to have an understanding of what you're deconstructing."

          Growing up, Dr. Frank took in quite a big of country music and admits that in an anti-hero sort of way his idol as a songwriter and singer is George Jones. Jones, tells the doctor, would choose ridiculous songs, dare the hesitant audience to go along with them, and consistently get them hooked. With MTX, Dr. Frank attempts the same sort of thing with his "screwy, goofy" songs. The wackier they are, the more sincerity there is. "I can't think of a better model [than Jones]. If only I had that kind of voice.