Suit Up! : The Greatest Hits of Rick Froberg
"The streets are awful with people / I don't feel close to them"
Sometimes all you need from a band is their hits (see: Phil Collins, Creedence Clearwater Revival) and sometimes a band’s hits are the best jumping off point to dive into their deep catalog (see: Johnny Cash, David Bowie). If you're not a "Big, Rich Rock Band" you don’t usually get to release a greatest hits compilation. In this ongoing series, I'll be making Bootleg Greatest Hits compilations on behalf of the overlooked, underappreciated or otherwise passed over.
Previously on Greatest Hits:
Today: RICK FROBERG, an American Punk Rock Titan, who left behind a discography that would be the envy of someone living multiple lifetimes.
Author’s Note: I started working on this in 2023, not long after Rick passed. I’ve picked it up and put it down at least two dozen times since then, never truly feeling capable of being able to capture Rick’s legacy, or properly articulate how some of his art makes me feel. I hope I did it justice. This is one of those pieces I could tweak endlessly for the rest of my life and never finish, so I just decided to do as best as I thought I could and set myself the deadline of publishing on June 30, 2025, the second anniversary of Rick’s passing. It is sent with gratitude, love and respect; it is finished but never truly completed.
Rick Froberg would probably be embarrassed by what you are about to read. As I noted at the end of 2023: The little I know about Rick from talking with him would be that a long and flowery write up of his artistic output would not be his style. So my apologies to Rick, because this is a celebration of the monumental achievements therein. Rick lived a little over a half century and Drive Like Jehu’s magnum opus Yank Crime would be enough - in and of itself - to be a lifetime’s worth of creative success. Let alone, all of his other music and his art. Go get a nice car, we’re giving Rick a victory lap.
I know with crystal clear memory the first Rick Froberg song I ever heard.
It was If Credit’s What Matters, I’ll Take Credit, which is Track 1, Side 1 of the first Hot Snakes record Automatic Midnight. It is an excellent introduction to Rick, to the Snakes, to everything. It broke open Pandora’s Box for me in less than three minutes. I also clearly remember the first time I listened to Yank Crime, with its unassuming ink pot illustration on the cover, not possibly imagining the thrills that existed within and bracing for impact multiple times during that listen. Nothing can ever fill the same space in my ears, brain and soul as Yank Crime does. It’s truly peerless.
Life presents certain moments to you that are both indelible and world breaking. Very often these are related to physical pleasures, like the first time you are intimate with another person or the first time you get high. Beyond fleeting physical pleasures, there are more metaphysical experiences that can be unlocked with great art. These moments unlock the scope of what you realize is possible in this world and concepts of art and creativity expand beyond what you already knew.
Personal touchstones of these kinds of experiences are things like the first time I read Dune, the first time I saw a Jackson Pollock original in person or the first time I heard certain records. Two of these most foundational of these moments with music occurred a little less than a decade apart from each other: hearing Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath when I was 12 and hearing Yank Crime by Drive Like Jehu when I was 21. Nothing was the same after. I am now in love with a thing I did not know existed or was possible. It’s been almost 25 years since that first listen of Yank Crime and longer still since that first listen of Automatic Midnight and yet both feel as fresh as the first time. Almost never in that time has a week gone by where I didn’t listen to something Rick created. Suffice to say, discovering Rick’s music changed my world for the better.
One thing you experience with cherished bands is that they come and they go. If you are lucky you catch them in their prime. If you aren’t that lucky, you at least learn about them later. Bands come and go because times change, people change, interests change, tastes change, life happens, shit happens.
As part of a typically silly bit on my old radio show, I once bullshitted about some mathematical research I had done1 which pegged the average lifespan of a good or interesting or exciting or insert your own adjective here band at around six years and/or an average of three albums. Interestingly, if you combine all of Rick’s bands and their albums, each of his bands comes in relatively close to those averages. Like I said, bands come and go.
The story those made up numbers above don’t tell us, however, is the 37 year2 musical partnership that Rick Froberg and John Reis had. The partnership that changed the San Diego music scene3 began when Pitchfork added Rick to their lineup. The partnership kept going, ebbing and flowing over time, continuing to evolve and grow into Drive Like Jehu and later into Hot Snakes.
It was a musical partnership that lived in the under-documented annals of the American underground music scene, so Reis/Froberg may not be as familiar to the average person, who when asked to name such American song writing pairs, may reel off such names as Simon/Garfunkel, Becker/Fagen, Ulrich/Heltfield4, Benjamin/Patton, or Carpenter/Carpenter. I’m sure you can think of many other examples. Reis/Froberg deserves be put alongside every single one of those pairs.
There is a sad lacking of significant, notable or mainstream coverage of their creative partnership, perhaps due to the total collapse of any type of music media that covers anything outside the top 1%. Anything from an early-web or pre-internet time is lost to the sands of technology. Beyond that, the humble nature of both men5 perhaps lends itself to keeping oneself at arms length from the type of praise I am showering. As a result, there’s very little public commentary from either Rick or John on their partnership or their creative processes.
The best I can find are two quotes Rick gave to Vish Kanna, which were transcribed and published in an Exclaim! article,6 that came out around the release of Hot Snakes Jericho Sirens album in 2018:
"It's just a relationship like any other relationship," Rick Froberg tells Exclaim! about his 30-year friendship with John Reis. "If you have friends you collaborate with, and you like it, it works good, you might as well keep doing it. Why not?"
"We're just friends like anybody else and we like to play in bands together I guess," Froberg says of Reis. "We like this kind of music and think there's a lack of things like it out there that we want to go see. I guess we're trying to fill that void by doing it ourselves."
These quotes are extremely instructive, and reinforces an essential tenet which I try to keep centered in my life: friendships are a gift and are a very powerful instrument for creating the world you want to live in. And of course the second quote speaks to the single most important maxim of punk rock and also of life: no ones gonna do it for you, so you better be ready to do it yourself.
We can’t talk about Rick without talking about his art. Despite the fact there are probably two dozen posts on this blog in which I talk about and attempt to deconstruct music, I do no consider myself a music critic. I’m just a fan with a loud mouth keyboard and a lot to say. I’m also not an art critic. What I know about art, art theory or art history would just about fill half of a page of a very small book. Which makes it hard for me to talk about Rick’s art.
Fortunately, one of the few things I do know about great art is that it speaks for itself. Additionally, in Rick’s New York Times obit (a very cool thing that happened), there is a quote I can steal to describe Rick’s art style:
Matt Dorfman, a Times art director who worked with Mr. Froberg, described his style as “a hysterical pastiche of 1920s surrealism and Tex Avery cartoons.”
Additionally, in an interview with7 Chris Thomson for nothingmajor.com, Chris describes Rick’s art in this way:
Rick's work makes you pay attention. On first glance everything feels familiar: people, animals, objects rendered in a bold '50s illustrative style. Upon closer inspection what appeared mundane becomes surreal, humans shown as bizarre creatures in scenarios that beg you to create a narrative. Every detail offers a twist and is worthy of exploration. His addition of text and copy adds another layer depth and meaning to his work, resembling bizarre advertisements from a bygone era.
The vast majority of my exposure to Rick’s art - in a physical form - is his illustrations on the covers of various records, with two particular favorites being the aforementioned Drive Like Jehu Yank Crime cover and the cover of Rocket From The Crypt’s RFTC, both of which you already scrolled past.
More of Rick’s work across his band’s releases can be found in the retrospective “Rick Froberg: The Beating You Deserve” produced by Ian Lynam for Idea magazine issue 404 images of which can be found here: https://ianlynam.com/work/rick-froberg-the-beating-you-deserve/
The bulk of Rick’s most seen work outside of his own record covers, is most likely the many show posters, flyers, promo pics and other music related ephemera he created. There are also many non-music related paintings and illustrations. Many of these can be seen in full at the website from his 2022 show at Trash Lamb Gallery in San Diego: https://www.trashlambgallery.com/let-my-people-go-rick-froberg
A particular favorite of mine from that collection is this promo poster for the Pitchfork debut 7” Saturn Outhouse.
Days before this article was due to be published, I was made aware of a new book that will also collect much of Rick’s work, Plenty for All: The Art of Rick Fröberg, due for release on January 6th, 2026 via Akashic Books and which is described as “An exhaustive first collection of artist and musician Rick Fröberg’s stunning visual art” and is available here: https://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/plenty-for-all/
Finally, an under-rated slice of Rick’s art - and, were it not for the Wayback Machine, long lost to the technological drumbeat of “progress” - was the Hot Snakes website, circa 2002-2005, which featured some wonderful never-seen-since illustrations8, some very cool-for-the-time web design/layout, and a variety of very fun flash animations (remember those?), featuring long-time Hot Snakes mascot Javier.
So there we have it, a portfolio of art and a discography of records that could fill multiple lifetimes, let alone a mere 55 years. And now, I humbly present to you, unofficially released via YouTube on my imprint label Chapterhouse: Whitehead Records…SUIT UP!: THE GREATEST HITS OF RICK FROBERG~!
Click that button to listen to the playlist…
Pitchfork (1986-1990)
Thin Ice - Saturn Outhouse 7” - Nemesis Records - 1989
Track 1, Side 1 of the first Rick record ever released is a superb introduction, featuring many things that would become staples over the next 37 years: racing vocals, unbelievable guitar parts and structures, themes of despair, and the burning intensity and urgency that is the hallmark of a Froberg / Reis song.
Burn Pigs Burn - Eucalyptus - Nemesis Records - 1990
First, and as always, ACAB. Second, this is a heck of a way to start your first full length album: with finger-snaps, a sound that always heralds cool confidence. I find it interesting that in some ways the production on Eucalyptus is ‘cleaner’ than on Hot Snakes the records that came a decade-plus later.
Twitch - Eucalyptus - Nemesis Records - 1990
I think that Twitch, maybe more so than the rest of the Pitchfork catalog, is the song in which we see the building blocks of Drive Like Jehu. It’s proto-Jehu, if you will, between the way the guitars talk to each other - in turn, like dialog - particularly at the start of the song and the math-rock9 element of the shifting time signatures.
Drive Like Jehu (1990-1995; 2014-2016)
Bullet Train To Vegas - Bullet Train To Vegas / Hand Over Fist 7” - Merge Records - 1992
If Twitch is proto-Jehu, the Bullet Train 7” is the soft opening of Drive Like Jehu, except soft is entirely the wrong word. This is a mission statement, but due to the constraints of its format, time is limited and we aren’t getting all the way into the deepest waters just yet. But what a statement Bullet Train is, going fast and hard where it cannot go long. I like to imagine someone following these bands in real-time, waiting two years from Eucalyptus, picking up this single, putting it on and just getting their face melted.
Caress - Drive Like Jehu - Headhunter Records - 1992
Without the physical constraints of the 7” format, the Jehu grand opening comes via the greatest format known to humans, the long playing vinyl phonograph. Caress picks up where the Merge single left off, setting the stage for everything that comes after: even more time changes, impossibly louder and more precise guitars, and I should have mentioned this on the last song, the bassist and drummer from Night Soil Man, the rhythm section that John Reis is on record that he always wanted in his band.
Golden Brown - Yank Crime - Interscope Records - 1994
Golden Brown is a yardstick. Play this song to someone and they will let you know within less than 60 seconds if they can hang with the sonic onslaught of Drive Like Jehu. Not everyone is ready to cross over into the promised land, but those of us who do know that the grass really is greener on this side of the fence. Such green grass can be heard at around the 1:40 mark where John’s guitar makes some noises that I didn’t know could be made on a guitar before I heard this song.
Luau - Yank Crime - Interscope Records - 1994
As good as the self titled records is, Yank Crime is many levels above it (or really every other record on this list and maybe in human history.) Luau, as I said once on the radio is the magnum opus of a magnum opus. Every single second of these 567 seconds10 should make you feel something in your ears, in your brain, in your chest and in your soul. It’s a remarkable piece of sonic art, with every touch of every instrument adding to the last and building to the next; it’s almost the musical equivalent of climbing a mountain, each foothold and handhold must align perfectly as you ascend. Play it again and again, louder and louder and call a shaman if you don’t feel something. Suit Up!
Super Unison - Yank Crime - Interscope Records - 1994
Super Unison stands out as the high water mark of sonic dynamics on an album whose entire purpose seems to be to perfect the art of sonic dynamics. The build up, build up, build up of ticking time bomb tension that begins around 4:48 before peaking into a explosion of guitar noise is an unmatched payoff of sonic tension across modern American “rock music”. It’s akin to the rains that must come after days of hot and humid weather or, frankly, the orgasm that must come after a build up of sexual energy. In the deep canon of Froberg/Reis collaborations, it is a top 3 all time song.
I will add this to what I said then: this might be my favorite song ever and I wish I had asked Rick about this song when I had the chance. I would suggest playing this at my funeral but it’s too long and kind of a vibe clash for a funeral, so I’ll leave that to whoever organizes my funeral to figure out.
Human Interest - Yank Crime - Interscope Records - 1994
Human Interest is a great example of “Rick lyrics,” hitting pretty much all the recurring themes: dressing down someone or something, wanting a better society, romantic entanglements gone awry but coming at it all with a wry perspective and clever pun. At 3:24 it is the second shortest song on Yank Crime and maybe the most sedate, which is almost like watching a series of car crashes and choosing the most sedate.
Hot Snakes (1999-2005; 2011-2023)
Note: I did the Hot Snakes Greatest Hits a couple years back - it’s linked up there at the top of the page. These are some of the songs that didn’t make that list.
No Hands - Automatic Midnight - Swami Records - 2000
Much as the in-real-time transition from Pitchfork to Jehu must have been mind blowing, the much longer transition to Hot Snakes also must have felt revelatory. Automatic Midnight is monumental almost in the opposite way to Yank Crime. It will knock you over all the same, just quicker.
Light Up The Stars - Automatic Midnight - Swami Records - 2000
On Automatic Midnight, the first Hot Snakes album, it’s easy to focus on the songs that are 150 seconds or less and offer a series of swift and brutal punches to the face, but the middle third of this album has the series of slightly longer, slightly slower songs that in some ways that link back to Pitchfork and Jehu the most of any of the songs on this album, with the longer play lengths of these songs offering more opportunities for tension and dynamics, as evidenced best by Light Up The Stars and 10th Planet.
LAX - Suicide Invoice - Swami Records - 2002
LAX with another band could be a perfectly good instrumental, or even a riff that you tool around with for a while before ultimately leaving it on the shelf. In Hot Snakes, because Rick’s singing style is so in-tune with the guitars, he can add vocals that do not say much of anything at all, but which put the song over that hump from concept to reality. LAX is maybe the best example of such a song.
Hair and DNA - Audit In Progress - Swami Records - 2004
As a counterpoint to what I just wrote about LAX, we have Hair and DNA. Suicide Invoice and Audit In Progress both have some songs where the songs were largely centered around the vocals, rather than the vocals being a layer on top of the guitars. Hair and DNA is such a song and a classic example of Rick’s approach to lyricism, in which he is often saying something that feels both somehow vaguely familiar and completely foreign, and the song being centered around the vocals helps that stand out all the more.
Psychoactive - Jericho Sirens - SubPop- 2018
Although presented here before the Obits songs (due to band order chronology rather than release order chronology), perhaps more than any other song on Jericho Sirens - the only Hot Snakes record made after the Obits records11 - Psychoactive blends elements of both of those bands together, with the vocal style in particular feeling like Obits-Rick on top of the classic Reis-Froberg guitar style.
Obits (2008-2015)
One Cross Apiece / 19. Put It In Writing - One Cross Apiece 7” - Stint Records - 2008
The most essential Obits release is the very first, an all time great Double A side 7” single, which kick-started Obits perfectly. Much like the Drive Like Jehu single on Merge, this is a mission statement, introducing the different but interesting guitar style of Obits along with Rick’s bringing back a mellower singing style perhaps not seen since Pitchfork, some twenty years earlier.
Pine On - I Blame You - SubPop Records - 2009
More classic Frobergian misanthropy here with a true an all timer of a lyric, as quoted in the subtitle to this article. If the idea that "The streets are awful with people / I don't feel close to them" isn't universal to being alive, then what is? The first Obits record was preceded in “the deep swami community” by a bootleg of one of their first shows, most of which later appeared on I Blame You in some version or other, and Pine On was one of those tracks.
You Gotta Lose - Moody, Standard And Poor - SubPop Records - 2011
This is the second opening track of an album in a row, but an overlooked aspect in our journey thus far is that all of Rick’s record are perfectly formatted. I love that You Gotta Lose is a song released by a band that already has songs called I Can’t Win and the aforementioned I Blame You. Obits era Rick is locked in a powerful battle of wills with someone. Could it be himself?
Military Madness - I Can't Lose / Military Madness 7” - 2009
And here we end our victory lap with
the only cover song Rick Froberg ever recorded in his entire careera rare cover song in Rick’s back catalog12 . Think about everything you knew about Rick and ask yourself who he would cover. With 100 guesses I would have never guessed Lancashire lad, Hollies member and the light tenor in Crosby, Stills & Nash (and sometimes & Young), Graham Nash. Rick’s only cover is a cover of a folk-psych-pop song. It’s unexpected but it works. The Obits version completely blows the original out of the water and Rick’s vocals add some pathos lacked by the post- original version, and by Nash’s voice in general. Not to say I don’t enjoy the original, I do. Most of all, “so much sadness / Between you and me” though written by Nash, feels like a suitably Frobergian lyric to end our journey on.
Rick Froberg
January 19, 1968 – June 30, 2023
Forever in my ears
I had done no such research, I was just doing what I often did on live radio: making up a lie in the moment, often not knowing where a sentence would end when starting it.
Honestly, it was probably longer than that, I’m just going off what the research says about when Pitchfork formed.
This is not my hyperbole, this is the narrative as told on the 2014 documentary It’s Gonna Blow.
Ironically, and for all their many faults, these two dudes would probably agree, given James Hetfield is a noted Hot Snakes and Rocket From The Crypt fan.
Did I just describe John Reis as a humble man? I did. Speedo is not a humble man but I believe John is. Or for the wrestling fans: you gotta know a work from a shoot.
https://exclaim.ca/music/article/hot_snakes_reunion_album_jericho_sirens_fuelled_by_30-year_history_that_includes_drive_like_jehu
This interview is case study in the humility I talked about in the intro.
How about these head shots of each member of Hot Snakes?
I can say this safely now, many many years later, but there was a point in time - before password discipline was part of my life, where my password to everything was Mathr0ck
Yes even the 6 seconds of silence at the end.
At time of press. I assume the final Hot Snakes record will be released eventually.
The original post noted this as the only cover. This was incorrect. Thanks to (My Friend) Peter for these details: Rick did a few other covers. Hot Snakes covered "Time to Escape" by Government Issue for the soundtrack to the 2005 video game 'Tony Hawk's American Wasteland' (it's also the B-side of the 2011 "Do Not Resuscitate" 7"). Obits did Kokomo Arnold's "Milk Cow Blues" on 'I Blame You' and a 7" of 2 covers in 2012: "Let Me Dream If I Want To" by Mink DeVille and "The City Is Dead" by The Kids. All the 7" tracks are also on their 2014 comp 'L.E.G.I.T.' They also did "Besetchet" (originally by Orchestra Ethiopia) on 'Bed & Bugs' (it's an instrumental, but still a cover). Live versions of "The City Is Dead" and "Milk Cow Blues" are on 'Die at the Zoo'.
Sorry it took me so long to get to this. Very well done and it goes without saying how hard this would be to write. Top to bottom excellent rundown on everything. I appreciate the Ian Lynam link, I hadn't seen that before. Cheers to Peter for the copy editing.
You mentioned Vish Khanna, I'm just making sure you heard his epic incredible monumental Drive Like Jehu audio documentary that he did. I'm sure you did but just making sure.
Thanks for doing this! I just wish you didn't have to if you know what I mean. 2 years, still weird to think about.
Sidenote 1 - Wife shoutout - I forgot about the modern art piece that was HotSnakes.com - still proud that her stuffed Javier made an appearance once upon a time on that site...
Sidenote 2 - Just framed and hung the piece Rick did for our 10 year wedding anniversary, hand delivered in Brooklyn just before our 11 year wedding anniversary. Great memories.
Sidenote 3 - Still proud to be a part of the larger Swami community that has brought so many together and given us lots of stories and memories.