Robert Pollard-Mania! #29: NOT IN MY AIRFORCE

Robert Pollard
Not in My Airforce
1996, Matador Records

I can tell you exactly when I went from being a casual toe-dipper fan of Robert Pollard’s music to being the mental case presently on display before you.

It was in the fall of 1996 when I got hooked big time on Pollard’s whale of a first solo album, Not in My Airforce. 

This record kept me up nights, was a constant companion and it still feels like a part of me nearly twenty-five years later. I sank deep into my headphones for this one. For years, I considered it my favorite Pollard record of all, GBV or otherwise.

So, what’s the difference between Guided by Voices and a Pollard solo album?

In 1996, not a whole hell of a lot.

With the exception of drummer Kevin Fennell, who plays on much of this, the other guys in GBV make quick cameos here at best. Pollard plays the lion’s share of the guitar, but that’s nothing new. On the seminal Guided by Voices records, Pollard does a lot of playing that not many people know about. His warm, melodic guitar work is all over those albums, as is his drumming and assorted other noise-making.

Guided by Voices are not The Beatles. They’re more like The Fall in that they amount to one crazed man’s vision. If Robert Pollard is writing, singing, and playing, the result will sound like Guided by Voices no matter what. It’s just a medical fact.

Also, Pollard is obsessed with rock. His solo work doesn’t unveil a hidden jazz side or a weakness for the blues or a powerful desire to compose for string quartets. Nope, Pollard forever competes with the likes of The Beatles, The Who, Wire, Genesis and whatever psychedelic obscurity that he’s digging lately. Every record he’s ever made reflects this.

The solo albums can be a little looser at times, sure. They take the occasional left turn that GBV might not. They tend to be under no obligation to provide a single. Often they’re dominated by songs that Pollard has no immediate plans to play live for whatever reason.

Anything can happen on the solo albums, but they’re still products of a very familiar voice and style. Right from the beginning, Pollard’s solo work has always sounded like more of the same to me. I don’t separate the solo records from the band records, right down to how I file them in my collection. I’m one of those sickos who looks at it all as one big thing. Any survey that only focuses on Guided by Voices is doing it all wrong, in this asshole’s opinion.

Also, it’s going miss out on the greatness of Not in My Airforce, an LP that can get a fella to break whatever petty rules he has about categorization.

It’s an album that finds Pollard at a curious crossroads. The future of Guided by Voices was in flux. The 1996 line-up of the band with Tobin Sprout and the gang played their last show on September 8, a mere two days before this album’s release (the same day as Tobin Sprout’s first solo album; Matador Records’ idea). I don’t know how much Pollard knew about that when he put this together, but clearly he was already thinking outside the band.

Also, here Pollard deals with the question of hi-fi vs. lo-fi. While Guided by Voices were marching straight toward the studio sound on Under the Bushes Under the Stars, this solo album mixes it all up.

Fuzzy lo-fi boombox recordings here sit pretty next to full-bodied studio bangers. Pollard works these shifts in texture again and again like it’s nothing, like it’s perfectly natural as long as the song is good. The result is a big, splashy patchwork executed with a collage artist’s sense of freedom and contrast. (That transition from “Quicksilver”, which sounds like it was recorded on the cheapest cassette recorder sold at Radio Shack, to the big, crisp drums of “Girl Named Captain” is sweet stuff.)

Hi-fi or lo-fi? Pollard will take both. Whatever works at the moment.

What REALLY kicked my ass and mugged me in a back alley way back in ’96 though was that I couldn’t fathom how Pollard had it in him to put out two great albums in the same year. Under the Bushes Under the Stars came out six months previous and it’s so exhaustingly good across twenty-four songs that my little 19-year-old brain had trouble processing this one. How could he be THAT brilliant? I didn’t know, but if I played Not in My Airforce enough, maybe I’d figure it out.

Today, it’s normal for Pollard to put out five or six LPs a year, but in ’96 this sort of thing was audacious. Or indulgent, depending on how you felt about it. (Reviews at the time were generally positive, but this is also about the point when critics began to write about Pollard as indie rock’s drunk uncle who could maybe stand to “edit” himself a little more.)

This was all new to me.

It was my freshman semester in college. Everything was new to me.

Now it’s decades later and this album is old to me.

But I still love it.

I still think that “Psychic Pilot Clocks Out” is one of Pollard’s greatest anthems. An easy top 5 pick, though it’s not particularly triumphant on the surface. The line “I feel life passing on by us” is its roof-raiser climax, shouted again and again, drilled right into your brain. It’s a sad notion, but Pollard leaps so fiercely into the line that you can tell that he doesn’t accept it. He wrote it so he could stomp on it. This song casts out a demon to the tune of thunder and lightning.

Its tales of domestic drama hit me harder than ever as I’ve gotten older. “Maggie Turns to Flies”, “Chance to Buy an Island”, “Get Under It” and, in particular, “I’ve Owned You for Centuries” all sound like they were written in the midst of arguments with the wife about money and what to do with it.

“I’m not in your dream–get out of mine” from “Girl Named Captain” might still be my favorite closing line to any song ever.

And I still love the weird final six songs, a set of solo acoustic lo-fi quickies, the longest of which clocks in at a whole 1:28 while half of them are less than a minute long. On these songs Pollard drives off the main road and into a world of shadows. Each one is a little story delivered with sparse winter tree language.

Fun fact: Pollard intended those songs to be their own six-minute EP, but Matador Records were less than jazzed on the idea, so he slapped ’em on to the end of this album. Why not?

But I didn’t know about that until years later. In 1996, I just thought that this LP’s oddball ending was your regular old, garden variety, quirky touch of genius.

When Pollard’s own Rockathon Records label pressed a vinyl-only reissue in 2016, he went with his original plan and put those six songs on their own 7″ and that’s peachy keen, but I prefer them on the album as its slow, dreamy finale. Pollard’s cover collage is all bright sunshine colors and these songs are the sun setting.