Rick Froberg: The Beating You Deserve

An overview of the career of the late musician, designer, illustrator and artist Rick Froberg of the bands Drive Like Jehu, Hot Snakes, Pitchfork, and Obits.

An overview of the career of the late musician, designer, illustrator and artist Rick Froberg of the bands Drive Like Jehu, Hot Snakes, Pitchfork, and Obits.

The feature was published in in Idea no. 404.

I wrote and designed the entire bilingual feature. During his lifetime, Froberg never received any critical attention from the American graphic design press despite working in ways that were highly signature. His work has always stood out for me from other music packaging work in the global design landscape.

The Japanese translation was crafted by Manami Yamamoto and Naomi Sinai helped with image production.

An excerpt:

My first meaningful encounter with Froberg’s visual output was when I handled the self-titled first LP by Froberg’s band Drive Like Jehu as a recent high school graduate in 1991. The cover featured a mix of small spot illustrations of earthworms, cracked handset Letraset display type spelling out the band’s name, a few tiny illustrations of flags, and a giant swath of duct tape seeming to hold this broken thing together. It was, in short, a very odd design that was very different from other post-hardcore bands’ album cover designs at that time.

The music was different, as well—it was obviously influenced by the deconstructive tendencies of other current bands like Washington DC’s groundbreaking first generation emotional hardcore (née “emo”) band Fugazi, but the music of Drive Like Jehu itself was literally more emotional, as well as less clinical than the band’s progenitors’… as well as more… well… punk.

They were doing what a lot of other bands all over North America and Europe and Asia were doing at that time, which was disassembling traditional rock ‘n’ roll music, and isolating the most powerful elements to create a whole new genre(s) of music. The Netherlands had The Ex, Japan had Fishmans1, Czechoslovakia had Už Jsme Doma, and Canada had Phleg Camp.

With the exception of the San Francisco band Flipper, punk had largely been known for the genre’s thrift—stripping popular music down to an economy of form (vocals, guitar, bass and drums or a suitable equivalent) and of time—most punk songs rarely exceeded three minutes. Drive Like Jehu’s first album featured two guitarists who did not conform to the usual lead/rhythm formula and songs stretched as long as seven-to-nine minutes.

Over the next few months, I would piece together that the person responsible for the design of this amazing record, credited alternately as “Rick Fork” and “Rick Farr”, was Rick Froberg, and that he was also guilty of designing a series of oddball illustrated advertisements for the San Diego record label Headhunter Records that stood out in the pages of the punk magazine Maximumrocknroll. The ads were both cute and disturbing, featuring bears choking on popsicles, raccoons giving birth, and Disney-like characters stabbing one another. These quarter- and half-page print ads featuring anthropomorphic animals looked incredibly anachronistic alongside the typical ads of that time featuring political scenes, typical punk iconography, and stark photography of punks looking… well… punk.

Froberg was someone who was very good at making things that looked different from other folks’ work. I also figured out that he was the singer in one of my favorite bands prior to Drive Like Jehu, the San Diego post-hardcore band Pitchfork. It was all of this stuff that made me perk up my ears and follow his work—he was as tremendous a singer and songwriter as he was an illustrator and designer.

I designed the 16-page feature in as form-rich a way as possible, placing Froberg’s work front and center.

“Rick Froberg: The Beating You Deserve” is typeset using my typeface family Entendre and was the first public showing of the type family.

Giant thanks to Rick’s family, amazing circle of friends, and bandmates for agreeing to this project. I hoped to honor the memory of one of my favorite designers and musicians in as exuberant a way as possible.

I find it incredibly sad that there may not be another record bearing his voice, lyrics and artwork ever again.