Month: April 2018

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Things I Will Keep #1: Introduction and THE SWEET

Portrait of the Record Collector as a Young Man (Photo circa 2010)

One of the worst things about collecting records is that there are rarely any great stories to go along with it these days. It’s not like those accounts that you read from the 1960s and 70s when record collectors would knock on doors and ask befogged senior citizens if they had any old 78s laying around and then go inside and maybe meet a schizophrenic or a former Nazi in hiding or a woman who once gave Robert Johnson a handjob.

That’s not how it works anymore. If you did that today, it would be creepy. Now we have Ebay and Discogs and you can sit at home at 2 AM and hunt for records with one hand on a computer keyboard and one hand playing with your balls like a normal person. Leave the elderly ALONE. They don’t have obscure rockabilly 45s anymore. Lux Interior and Poison Ivy already found ‘em all by 1972.

Besides, I personally started collecting records because I DIDN’T want to talk to people. It was a hideaway, a great retreat from life. A lot of my collection came from thrift stores where there are few signs of life anyway beyond the decades of microbes on everything.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #4: SELF-INFLICTED AERIAL NOSTALGIA

Guided by Voices
Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia
1989, Halo Records
Reissue (via the Box set): 1995, Scat Records

This is the first Guided by Voices record that sounds like Guided by Voices. It took ’em four tries, but they did it. This psych-pop treat from 1989 walks and talks exactly like the band that I’ve been stuck on for twenty-three years now.

Hey, it takes time to find yourself. Sometimes in life you think you’ve found yourself, but nope, it’s only some jerk-off who happens to look like you and has worse taste in clothes. There’s still more work to do.  More trial and error in your future. More tearing down and rebuilding. It helps if there’s no one around telling you that you’re hot stuff all of the time. We all get big ideas about ourselves. Some of those ideas could stand to be kicked into the dirt. Being humbled makes you a better person and obscurity is the most fertile soil there is for creating something new.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #3: SANDBOX

Guided by Voices
Sandbox
1987, Halo
Reissue (via the Box set): 1995, Scat Records

A review of Sandbox strikes me as a perfect place to tell you about the absolute, numero uno, most misunderstood thing about Guided by Voices.

I’m real sick of seeing this. I’m ready to rumble over it tonight in the alley behind the closed Burger King. It’s time we start busting heads. Let’s put an end to it here and now.

It’s simple: There are some GBV fans out there, walking among decent people like you and me, who think that they’re a power pop band.

They think that Guided by Voices are The Beatle Boots Band Explosion Revival and that Robert Pollard is a pop melody maker who just keeps forgetting to wear his skinny tie. These are the same people who think that Robert Pollard “needs an editor”. These are the people who might love sweet melodies like “I Am a Scientist” and “My Valuable Hunting Knife” and then not understand why that same guy is involved with Circus Devils or writes stuff like “A Hair in Every Square Inch of the House”.  These are the people who say that life would be so much better if Robert Pollard would stop releasing five albums a year and prune everything down to a neat and tidy twelve songs that might sound good piped into Whole Foods while you browse the organic kumquats.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #2: DEVIL BETWEEN MY TOES

Guided by Voices
Devil Between My Toes
1987, Schwa Records
Reissue (via the Box set): 1995, Scat Records

Box set reissue copy, ladies and germs. No, I don’t have an original. This is good enough for me.

When no one’s paying attention to me, I sit at home in pajama pants, drink Trader Joe’s wine and watch Youtube videos for nine hours.

When no one was paying attention to Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices, they wrote songs and made terrific, underrated records just for themselves pretty much.

Clearly, I have a lot to learn from Guided by Voices.

The one thing I do have in common with Guided by Voices circa 1987 is that neither of us get out much. At the time of this album’s release, they weren’t playing live. They weren’t seeking out a label or management. They weren’t auditioning for anyone or anything. They were working guys in Dayton, Ohio making music in basements and garages because that was how they got through the day. Pressing it onto vinyl, on their own dime, made it “real” and inducted them into the rock brotherhood, whether anyone heard it or not.  The songs are the message, the album is the bottle, the outside world is the ocean.

Splash.

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