NEW YORK, NY.- Rick Froberg, the vocalist and guitarist best known for his work with the influential 1990s post-hardcore band Drive Like Jehu, whose urgent howl was one of rock’s most distinctive voices, died on June 30 in San Diego. He was 55.
His partner, Britton Neubacher, said the cause was an undiagnosed heart condition.
Froberg, a beloved linchpin of the San Diego underground music scene that flourished in the 1980s and ’90s, sang in a raspy roar that segued smoothly between snarl and scream. “He always wanted to effortlessly sound kick-ass,” said John Reis, Froberg’s longtime bandmate and songwriting partner in the bands Pitchfork, Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes.
Froberg particularly loved the gnarled growls of Australian vocalists Bon Scott of AC/DC — his favorite band — and Chris Bailey of the proto-punk Saints, and he strived to follow them, Reis said. “I would tell him, ‘Dude, you have that in spades, and you actually have another gear those people don’t have.’”
Froberg and Reis met as teenagers in 1986, at a picnic organized by a local anarchist publication at a San Diego park. They bonded immediately and soon joined up in Pitchfork, with Froberg on vocals. The band was inspired, Reis said, by the noisy music being issued at the time on independent labels like Dischord, Touch & Go and SST. By the time Pitchfork’s debut album was released in 1990, however, the band had broken up.
Froberg and Reis quickly regrouped in Drive Like Jehu, where Froberg also began playing guitar, inspired by Sonic Youth’s atonal, unorthodox guitar tunings — which “made it seem like you could just do anything you wanted to do,” Froberg said in a recent web interview.
Drive Like Jehu’s two albums featured dissonant, tightly coiled compositions with off-kilter rhythms and cathartic explosions. The group built a small but fervent following, with the enthusiasm it inspired far outstripping its record sales. The band’s single “Bullet Train to Vegas”/“Hand Over Fist,” a marvel of feral intensity and relentless locomotive force released by Merge Records in 1992, was described by the author Nabil Ayers in a recent Substack post as “arguably the best 7-inch single ever to be released.” A tribute to Froberg on the Merge website called it “one of the most revered in our catalog.”
Reis soon became busy touring with another of his bands, Rocket From the Crypt, and Drive Like Jehu fizzled out after its second album, “Yank Crime.” Released on Interscope, it was Froberg’s only recording for a major label.
Froberg was also a prolific visual artist. His artwork gradually evolved from flyers, posters and album covers into silk-screened graphics, linocut etchings and gouache paintings. He had three solo exhibitions, most recently at Trash Lamb Gallery in San Diego in 2022, and his work was included in over a dozen group shows.
He moved to Brooklyn in 1998 and pursued a career as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer; he also had a stint doing animation with the artist Gary Panter. His illustrations were published in The New Yorker and The New York Times; Matt Dorfman, a Times art director who worked with Froberg, described his style as “a hysterical pastiche of 1920s surrealism and Tex Avery cartoons.”
Eric Gerald Froberg was born on Jan. 19, 1968, in Santa Monica, California, to Eric and Sylvia (Phillips) Froberg. His father, a business consultant and entrepreneur, legally changed the Swedish family name from Froberg to Farr in 1979; Rick Froberg used the ancestral surname professionally, though he sometimes signed his artwork “Rick Farr” or “Rick Fork.”
His parents divorced soon after his birth, and he never had a relationship with his birth mother, who died in 1992. His father married Lynne Wacker, a sales training manager for Hooked on Phonics, in 1973. The family lived in Glendale and Playa del Rey before moving to Carlsbad when Froberg was 8. He lived primarily in the North County area of San Diego until he moved to Brooklyn.
He married Amelia Halverson in 2003. They divorced in 2015. In addition to Neubacher, he is survived by his father, his stepmother and three younger brothers, Christopher, Justin and Gregory.
In 1999 Reis formed a new band, Hot Snakes. Dissatisfied with his own vocals, he sent a cassette to Froberg, who agreed to join even though they lived on different coasts. In contrast to Drive Like Jehu’s distortion, Hot Snakes favored a clean guitar sound and short, efficient tunes, Reis said, “letting Rick’s voice and the attack of the pick carry the power.”
Froberg also sang and played guitar from 2006 to 2015 in the Brooklyn band Obits, which released three albums on Sub Pop. The name was Froberg’s idea, said Sohrab Habibion, Obits’ other guitarist, a comment on ageism in music.
Painters, photographers and filmmakers can grow old, Habibion said, “and jazz musicians and classical players are allowed to get long in the tooth. But rock ’n’ roll is stuck in this youth culture rut, so we wanted to put a stake in the ground and say that middle-aged people could make rock music that was relevant, vital and worthy of being part of the cultural conversation.”
Drive Like Jehu reunited in 2014 for an outdoor concert at Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park in San Diego, attracting a crowd estimated to be the biggest since Theodore Roosevelt delivered an address there in 1915. “Intoxicated by the high of that day,” Reis said, the band later reconvened to tour.
After moving back to San Diego in 2021, Froberg collaborated with Neubacher, a botanical artist, on large-scale installations at the San Diego Museum of Art and at Mothership, a space-themed tiki bar. “Watching him get lost in the secret places of his imagination was a daily pleasure of mine,” Neubacher said.
Froberg had recently been working on what would have been Hot Snakes’ fifth studio album. “He was really firing on all cylinders,” Reis said. “His voice gave me a lot of freedom as a songwriter, because I didn’t have to worry about where the chorus or the melody was. I could go wildly off into what I considered uncharted territory for myself, and always knew that he would make sense of it and turn it into something beautiful.
“I’m just lost without him,” he added. “I don’t know what to do now.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
