It’s 1995 and Drive Like Jehu are playing CBGB in New York City. Guitarist John Reis unfurls the riff to Sinews as some people in the crowd talk over him. To his left, looking like Thurston Moore’s little brother with his long arms emerging from an oversized T-shirt, Rick Froberg stands almost completely still, adding piercing notes to the squall. Almost 30 years later, while watching a VHS rip of the show on YouTube, it is still possible to feel the power of the moment, knowing that the blowhards in front of the stage are about to have their heads caved in by noise.
Much like Moore and Lee Ranaldo in Sonic Youth, Froberg and Reis made guitar music that resembled a smashed mirror being glued back together, its pieces slotting into place along with bloody fingerprints. “It’s no holds barred,” Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins once told Louder of their interplay. “It challenges you with dissonance and forces you to really reckon with what’s being presented.”
Drive Like Jehu made difficult music, employing catch-and-release tension that honoured the drawn-out drones of the Neu! school, but Froberg was a lightning rod. He rose above the melee with paint-peeling screams and surprising washes of melody, his voice an emotionally resonant rocker set against a backdrop that might otherwise have felt like it was all antagonism and no heart. The feeling behind his barked refrains helped the group become a foundational influence on the emo boom of the mid-1990s.
Born in Los Angeles and living variously in San Diego and New York, the teenage Froberg, like so many others, found his way into music through punk. As he recently told Jim Ward’s podcast, after hearing Sonic Youth he bought a pre-CBS Fender amp and Mustang for something like $300, later selling the sought-after gear to finance a PA for Pitchfork, his first band with Reis. Their short discography melded abrasive volume with a metallic edge that would be sanded down in other projects by swatches taken from hardcore, surf-rock and straight-up noise.
After Pitchfork’s dissolution, Drive Like Jehu found Froberg and Reis teaming with bassist Mike Kennedy and drummer Mark Trombino, former members of Night Soil Man. Inspired equally by the Gories and the jarring innovations they had absorbed from Washington DC hardcore, their 1991 self-titled album introduced a fearless approach to post-hardcore built on the feeling that everything might collapse in on itself.
Before the release of 1994’s Yank Crime, Drive Like Jehu were, improbably, picked up by Interscope Records in a two-for-one with Reis’s other band Rocket From the Crypt. Nothing much changed. Their songs became more epic – Sinews and Luau broach 10 minutes apiece – yet also more direct and lacerating. Here Come the Rome Plows, for example, is one of the most sickeningly confrontational openers ever to feature on a major label record. Its final verse, delivered with true fervour by Froberg without ever losing sight of the hook’s potency, captures his brilliance.
As Rocket From the Crypt gained traction, Drive Like Jehu faded out, aside from a reunion run between 2014 and 2016. Froberg worked as an illustrator – he had already designed Drive Like Jehu’s sleeve art, alongside countless flyers and merch items – with his eye for Raymond Pettibon-style black-on-white imagery operating in harness with a self-deprecating streak carried over from his belief that he couldn’t play guitar. “I’ve been drawing pictures since I could hold a pencil,” he said in 2013. “Art, not sure. For others to decide.”
Subsequent musical projects placed greater focus on his voice and penchant for devilish melodies. Reuniting with Reis in 1999, he made four excellent records as Hot Snakes, with songs such as LAX showing what their simpatico guitars sounded like over more conventional garage-rock structures, and also fronted the quietly impressive Sub Pop-signees Obits. Prior to his death Froberg confirmed that a new Hot Snakes album was “very near done”. His story isn’t over yet. For those who have had their worlds shaken by the force of his music, it probably never will be.
