Songfacts®:

• This song is about Pearl Jam's bus driver, Frank, who they called "Dirty Frank" because they were scared of him. The band had a running joke that Frank was a serial killer and was planning to eat their guitarist, Mike McCready.
• Pearl Jam wrote this song in late 1991 while they were touring as the opening act for Red Hot Chili Peppers. The RHCP influence is obvious, and one lyric is only slightly altered from the song "Freaky Styley" by the Chilis: "F-ck 'em just to see the look on their face" was changed to "Cook 'em just to see the look on their face."
  
  Pearl Jam had released their debut album, Ten, by this point, but were still little known outside of Seattle. Touring with Red Hot Chili Peppers was a big step and a huge rush. "They were supercool to us," McCready said in Pearl Jam's book Twenty. "It set a lot of our standards early on for how we wanted to treat bands that opened up for us."
• The song first appeared in 1992 as the B-side to the "Even Flow" single. In 2003, it was included on Pearl Jam's Lost Dogs compilation.
• The entire band is credited as writers on "Dirty Frank," including Dave Abbruzzese, who was their drummer at the time. Abbruzzese went into detail about Frank the bus driver when he spoke with Songfacts: "He was small in size but big in words. He'd talk like a tough guy but he was a little guy, maybe a buck thirty wet. His first introduction to the band was, 'Alright. I'm going to do your laundry,' and this and that. He would say things like, 'Copacetically speaking' and 'I will clean the bathroom per se, but I won't clean the toilet.' He was that kind of guy.
  
  But he had this one rule. He pointed at this bay under the bus and said, 'That's my bay. Nobody opens it, nobody goes in it. That's mine. That's my space.' So, slowly it turned into this theory we all had that that's where he kept his cauldron of 'groupie soup' where he would lure unsuspecting fans to the bus and he would kill them and throw them in the cauldron. So, 'I got a recipe for anus ankle soup,' that's one of the lyrics. You know:
  
  Wanted a pass so she relaxed
  Now the little groupie's getting chopped up in the back
  
  'Where's Mike McCready? My God, he's been ate!'
  
  And then when we were in the studio that was something we all laughed about. Stone started playing this riff, everybody joined in, and then Eddie started singing the tale of 'Dirty Frank.'"