Guided by Voices
Same Place the Fly Got Smashed
1990, Rocket #9
Reissue (via the Box set): 1995, Scat Records
Robert Pollard’s music is optimistic. He’s not going to tell you that life is all merry-go-rounds and back rubs, but if you put in some work that’s worth doing and aren’t an idiot, you might enjoy being a living, breathing person on our ruined planet of shit and misery.
There are sad songs and melancholy moments and horror stories in his music, but little that I would call depressing. Or angry. Pollard is so great at anthems because he likes to write about human triumph over things big and small. His way with melody belies an artist who wants to make the world a prettier place. The volume of his work reveals an artist who’s not tired of life and gonna fight the grave for as long as he can.
Pollard sees rock music as a healing thing. It can “trigger a synapse” and “free us from our traps”. At the very least, it’s something cool to think about to pass the time.
(When it comes to the old “who’s your favorite Beatle” question, I’ve read Pollard say that he’s a Lennon man, but his attitude in his music is a lot closer to McCartney. He has almost none of John’s anger and plenty of Paul’s good nature.)
There are people who criticize Pollard’s drinking when he performs live with Guided by Voices. They say that it throws off his singing and turns him into a big sloppy mess on stage. Me though, having seen the band about ten times (a big number to some, a small number to others), I’ve never minded because, as a man who enjoys to tip a few back myself, I separate the good drunks from the bad drunks.
Bad drunks get angry and aggressive and selfish. Their inhibitions relax and their insecurities come alive. They act like jerks. They ruin the party. Fuck bad drunks. I can’t stand ’em.
Good drunks, on the other hand, just get silly. Happy. Easygoing. They’ll listen to your dullest story and sympathize. They’re generous. Your drink is running out? They’ll buy you another. They might get mouthy, but it’s almost always in good humor and with some consideration for others.
Best I can tell, Robert Pollard is one of the good drunks. And like many good drunks, he’s conscious of becoming a bad drunk.
He wrote a whole album about it. Same Place the Fly Got Smashed. A peek over the precipice into the sad void. Way down deep in the darkest hole. A look at the bad drunk lifestyle more cutting than any criticism of Pollard’s stage act that I’ve ever read. Yes, it’s a concept album, but one that’s so down to earth that it’s on the floor. And curled up around a bottle.
It’s Pollard’s darkest record.
I don’t think that this album is Pollard describing his own life. I think he’s telling us about the future that he doesn’t want for himself. Writing about something that you fear can be a way of overcoming it. You trap your fear in a test tube and, from there, you can do anything that you want with it. Maybe even smash it against the wall.
The first track is “Airshow ’88”, one of the most unnerving moments in the entire Guided by Voices catalog. One electric guitar, one voice, one mean chill up the spine. Despite the dog-simple arrangement, you can hardly understand the words. Pollard yells until his voice cracks, but due to some combination of his slurred delivery and the cheap recording equipment, he sounds like he’s bellowing from the bottom of a deep well. There are enough well-recorded songs here to hip you to the notion that everything wrong with “Airshow ’88” is 100% intentional. The words don’t matter. All you need to know is that we’re entering the world of a suffering soul.
The next song, “Order for the New Slave Trade” is a whole other bag of guts. Cleanly recorded and with a confident melody, it’s a sharp contrast to the opener. “Airshow ’88” attacks us, “Order for the New Slave Trade” talks to us. If this was a movie, the first scene would be the lead character throwing up and then passing out. In the next scene, he wakes up on the floor or in a hospital bed on a quiet morning full of regret.
Side one just keeps killing it from there. “The Hard Way” is one of those great Pollard anthems that might go through your head and ease your soul when life is kicking you around. “Doin’ everything the hard way”. Yep. Been there. Still there more often than I’d like.
Moonlit ballad “Drinker’s Peace” is a straight love song… to alcohol. It sounds like it was recorded over the same case of beer that everyone was drinking when they did “Airshow ’88”–voice and guitar only, no drums–but used for more peaceful purposes this time. I want to hear The Platters cover it.
The booming “Mammoth Cave”, lo-fi lullaby “When She Turns 50” and yearning “Club Molluska” all grope for the light in their own lovely ways to finish out the side.
In true classic rock fashion, Pollard puts the “hit” at the very beginning of side two. “Pendulum” snaps, crackles, pops and then throws itself into a giant chorus. We’re riding high. Life isn’t always sad. Every now and then, you feel like you’ve got it all figured out. “We’ll be middle-aged children, but so what?”.
“Ambergris”, another voice-and-guitar song, is whimsical, but the light from “Pendulum” is dimming.
Black clouds continue to roll in on the album’s big guitar workout “Local Mix-Up”, which is a striking early example of Pollard’s mini-“suites”. It’s a song made up of three very different verses joined together, no chorus, and one reprise of the whole thing before it barrels straight into the shouting rock of “Murder Charge” so quickly that a lot of people assume that it’s all one song.
I’m not sure exactly what’s going in the “concept” at this point, but somebody’s definitely dead (by lethal injection?) at the end of “Murder Charge”. Slow, 4 AM hymn “Starboy” continues the death rattle and “Blatant Doom Trip” is a stadium-ready rocker that reflects on self-destruction. You’re gonna hate me for this, but I’d like to hear Guns ‘n’ Roses cover it.
It’s a perfect ending for a mean, pessimistic album. The closing fade-out on the repeated hook “Bottomless hole, rock ‘n’ roll” is a helluva way to go out. A lot of bands would be happy with that. It’s a badass moment. Light up your cigarette, down your shot, snort up your line and walk straight through the gates of hell.
But Robert Pollard, because he’s Robert Pollard, can’t do that. He can’t stand by that message. His optimism won’t let him.
So, he closes this affair with “How Loft I Am?”, a little ray of simple guitar-and-vocals pop sunshine, barely over a minute long that sounds like it was written by Buddy Holly’s ghost.
In heaven, and on Guided by Voices records, everything is fine.
I love these astute explorations into the Pollard canon. Same Place the Fly Got Smashed has never had the potency for me as it has for others, but I do think it is interesting that so many of its songs were performed for the first time on the Electrifying Conclusion/Half Smiles of the Decomposed tour, when everyone, especially Bob, were imbibing more than usual. Perhaps at the first twilight of GBV as a performing act, Pollard is reflecting on the warning of this album, realizing triumphantly that he had not become one of those “bad drunks.”