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Robert Pollard-Mania! #114: LIVE FROM AUSTIN TX

Guided by Voices
Live from Austin TX
2007, New West Records

We’ve talked a lot about why Guided by Voices went on a farewell tour in 2004, but there’s another reason that was in the air at the time that we haven’t sunk our claws into yet.

Robert Pollard addresses it twice during this set, notably during “Secret Star”. The song is one of the giants from Earthquake Glue and it’s built with a quiet section that, during the Electrifying Conclusion tour, became the platform for him to deliver what amounted to a sermon about the legacy of Guided by Voices while the band rumbled beneath. Much like the always-changing setlist (a mark of a good band), Pollard’s spiel wasn’t the same every night. It rose out of the moment. Ending this chapter of his life was a heavy thing and he didn’t need a script to talk about it.

(Does some crazy collector out there have a dusty CD-R on the shelf of nothing but Electrifying Conclusion tour versions of “Secret Star”? I hope so.)

In the sermon on November 9, 2004, before television cameras and under the bright studio lights of PBS’s Austin City Limits, Pollard says this fascinating thing: 

“Rock ‘n’ roll is for the kids. And all of the adults who think it’s for them, get out of the way. It’s for the kids. The kids are confused…”

That’s a 2004 time capsule moment. That’s a statement from when it was still considered undignified to grow old in rock music. One might get away with it as a solo act, particularly if their music “matures” for the effort (Pollard himself would soon play around with making his solo records more stark and singer-songwritery). Hardly anybody made fun of Lou Reed or Neil Young for aging, but performing under the guise of a band as the wrinkles around your eyes set in was somehow unbecoming.

Read interviews with Pollard in 2004 and when he explains why he’s ending Guided by Voices, he repeats the idea that he’s too old now to be a “gang leader”.

Today, nobody seems to care about that stuff. Why?

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #113: EAT 3: KEEP YOUR CHRISTMAS LIGHTS UP FOREVER

Robert Pollard
EAT 3: Keep Your Christmas Lights Up Forever
2007, Rockathon Records

Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll?

No. Not at my age (just turned 49 this month). All three are fine on their own, I guess. Depends on the sex. Depends on the drugs. Depends on the rock ‘n’ roll. Put them together though, and people get stupid. People become monsters. People start dying young.

My mind is nowhere near that stuff anymore. Tell me the stories again about Kiss or Led Zeppelin’s party days and I’ll only reflect on how some of our flock become pathetic when they feel invincible. I don’t care about how many TVs Keith Moon tossed out of hotel windows. I don’t care about who slept with who in the back of the tour bus.

These days, I’m into people who make things and keep making things long after others give up, burn out, or overdose on their own mythology. I’ve heard all that I want to hear about how humans can flame out by age 27. What I want now are stories of endurance.

Thankfully, my favorite rock star is Robert Pollard and that’s his whole trip. He’s about to turn 68, as of this writing, and he keeps going and going.

Collage art, poetry, and rock ‘n’ roll.

And do it all until you drop, which we hope doesn’t happen for a long while.

Rock doesn’t have to use you up and kill you. It can keep you alive sometimes.

That I can get behind.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #112: SILVERFISH TRIVIA

Robert Pollard
Silverfish Trivia
2007, Prom Is Coming

In a 2014 interview conducted by John Valania for Magnet, Robert Pollard tells a story that has always stuck with me:

“One time I finished an album”, he says,”and I went to this bar and there’s a band playing. And there were all these middle-aged women up there dancing to it. I started kind of just daydreaming and gazing and second-guessing myself about what I just did. I was watching the dancers and was like, “Would they dance to my new record? Would they be dancing like that?” And the answer was yes. Yeah, they would dance to it. So, I got rid of the whole thing.”

Firstly, that’s funny as hell. Secondly, this small moment says so much about Pollard’s thinking at one point as an artist who’s wary of letting his music fall into certain traps as he ages. Thirdly, it illustrates how complex “influence” can be. What an artist doesn’t like, and seeks to avoid, can mean just as much as what they do like.

In the article, we get no further details about this lost album, but people who know Pollard have confirmed that he’s talking about an LP originally called The Killers and once intended as his solo follow-up to Normal Happiness. 

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #111: THE GREAT HOUDINI WASN’T SO GREAT

Acid Ranch
The Great Houdini Wasn’t So Great
2007, Record Company Records

Framed on the wall in my living room is an awful 12″x18″ comic strip that I drew for high school art class in 1993.

In it, I’m walking with my friend, Marty, the Talking Balloon, who floats next to me on a string. He’s a non-judgmental, captive, literally brainless audience for the self-centered thoughts in my clueless teenage head and, boy, do I let rip.

Marty responds by questioning me like I’m fascinating because that’s what you crave when you’re a kid.

Every inch of this rotting piece of paper is devoted to 16-year-old me blabbing about how I do everything wrong, no one likes me, and I don’t know how to fix it. THE END.

It’s junk, but I love the artwork. Past kindergarten, I’ve never drawn much. I still don’t draw or have a feel for how to express anything by doing it. Envy is a useless emotion and I want nothing to do with it, but if I’m envious of anyone on Earth it’s of people who draw well. That’s one of the freakiest talents to me. It’s so interesting because it’s something that one preserves from childhood. Every kid draws. A select few of us never lose that and do beautiful things with it.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #110: MEET THE KING: ASSHOLE 2

Robert Pollard
Meet the King: Asshole 2
2007, Yuk Yuk Motherfucker

Don’t ask me for my favorite Robert Pollard album. There are too many. I don’t have a good answer. I may never have a good answer.

Here’s a juicier question for the deep-digging Pollard freaks in your life: What is your favorite year of his music?

Now that’s something to think about. As I revisit these old records, I find a curious coherence in Pollard’s path. Even when he puts out five albums that explode in several different directions in a year, he will circle around the same topics and there’s meaning in the contrasts.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #109: NORMAL HAPPINESS

Robert Pollard
Normal Happiness
2006, Merge Records

Double albums are peachy keen and all, but their follow-ups are also fun to think about.

Or what does the artist do AFTER they’ve made an epic? This is a vulnerable place and where they go is revealing.

Some authors and filmmakers get into a groove of thinking in grand terms every time. See Marcel Proust or David Lean. There’s nothing wrong with that, but rock music, rooted in blues, folk, and jukebox 45s, seems to come with a natural gravitational pull back down to Earth after a big statement.

There are many paths to take. Here are a few that come up a lot:

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #108: CHECK YOUR ZOO

Psycho and The Birds
Check Your Zoo
The Fading Captain Series, 2006

I wish I had great memories to share of cruising to Mel’s Drive-In with my buddies in a Chevy Impala on the last day of summer vacation while Wolfman Jack unleashed new Psycho and the Birds tracks on the radio all night.

The truth is though that I barely remember playing this record when it came out. I bought it, spun it, filed it, and forgot it.

That’s not because it’s bad. No, it’s a vital artifact of the crazy things that can happen when Robert Pollard and Todd Tobias get together. Check Your Zoo rocks, slips into pretty art-rock drama, and closes with some of the best out-to-lunch trippy clatter on a Pollard record from its year. I didn’t hear that at that time, but I hear it now–and it’s important that we have it.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #107: BLUES AND BOOGIE SHOES


Keene Brothers
Blues and Boogie Shoes
2006, The Fading Captain Series

Ask me for my favorite of the three albums that Robert Pollard released on the same day in May of 2006 and my answer will vary depending on that day’s pollen count and how I feel about my gut microbiome.

Each record is a different camera angle, a different lighting scheme, a different movie from a different section of the video store (we still had some of those in 2006).

Turn to Red is my favorite when I feel light and, at age 48, like I have many decades ahead of me. It’s weathered music that rocks with defiance.

All That is Holy appeals to my introverted side. All that I want to do anymore is sit and think. And when I sit and think, I end up thinking about God and death and eternity and the ancient world and all things unfathomable.

Blues and Boogie Shoes sounds best to me when I feel every hour and minute of my age and I’m happy to just still be here right now. Tomorrow, who knows? Might get hit by a truck.

The Keene Brothers are seasoned. There are decades behind these sounds. There are major label promises that didn’t work out, great albums that never got their due, and a lot of living behind these sounds. There’s a lot of beauty just for the art behind these sounds. You can hear that.

Tommy Keene and Robert Pollard sound good together. They’re two melodic giants, about the same age (Pollard is eight months older) and at this point doomed to be mavericks.
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Robert Pollard-Mania! #106: ALL THAT IS HOLY

Psycho and The Birds
All That is Holy
2006, The Fading Captain Series

I wouldn’t recommend All That is Holy as anyone’s first Pollard record, or even their tenth or their twentieth. I can say from experience though that if it’s your 106th, you might be weird enough at that point to get along with it.

The collaboration era between Robert Pollard and Todd Tobias is deep, deep waters. There should be a book about this period alone. Counting only the ones for which Tobias contributes writing, arrangements, or one-man-band work, it’s about three dozen LPs that sometimes have nothing in common on the surface except for that weird, free Ohio energy that those of us who know our Devo from our Dead Boys can hear. It’s music from a proud ancestry, generations in the making. The soot from old steel mills passed down.

They’re a pair of eccentrics who understood to not “typecast” the other.  Excitement happens in the left turn. I imagine that these two were constantly surprised by what the other did with his work.

In Circus Devils, the music by Todd and Tim Tobias is often unlike anything else in Pollard’s discography.

On the seventeen solo records that he made with Todd Tobias, Pollard hands over songs that don’t always call for a Circus Devils-style treatment. He wants to hear how Tobias handles other sounds. He wants to ask Dr. Moreau to go on Sesame Street and explain the science behind flowers and rain.

Then there’s Psycho and The Birds, a further twist on the Pollard-Tobias method.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #105: TURN TO RED

The Takeovers
Turn to Red
2006, The Fading Captain Series

I recommend making bold statements sometimes. I’ve heard that it’s good for your circulation.

My bold statement of the day is that Robert Pollard fans have more FUN than any other fans in rock music. What sets Pollard fandom apart is that it’s long-sustained fun. I’ve been on this ride for thirty years now and it’s still going.

Now I’m not saying that those of us who know our Mars Classroom from our Elephant Jokes are guaranteed to throw the craziest parties or be the most enthusiastic whitewater rafters, but when it comes to having over 100 albums of music to explore and re-explore as we follow an eccentric genius who won’t take a year off and is determined to use rock music to draw his own step-by-step map of the insights and calamities of aging, I think that us Pollard freaks have it pretty good. Things are always happening. We never get radio silence.

Had my formative influences been a little different, maybe I’d be a Juggalo today and I’d have no idea who Robert Pollard is and I’m glad that didn’t happen.

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