Robert Pollard-Mania! #32: TONICS & TWISTED CHASERS

Guided by Voices
Tonics & Twisted Chasers
1996, Rockathon Records

In 1996, we thought that two albums, two EPs and a couple of singles from Robert Pollard in one year was a lot.

We were so innocent back then.

It was a year in which Guided by Voices ran Matador through their paces and released so many records that it became an issue for some people. The “Bob Pollard needs an editor” cliche started up around this time. Critics were running out of things to say about the band and ho-hum’d their way through reviews. I still remember a guy in my dorm in ’96 who said “I liked Guided by Voices for awhile and then Pollard got musical diarrhea”.

And it was in this climate that GBV put out ONE MORE FUCKING ALBUM at the tail end of the year.

The way I remember it, it was a surprise release. No ramp-up. It just showed up one day for sale on their website, announced first through their e-mail list. Mailorder only. Vinyl only. 1,000 copies in a variety of colors. Nothing that would compete for rack space with their other releases (and, thus, not annoy the Matador folks). The artwork was a crude black-and-white photocopy of the Sunfish Holy Breakfast cover photo pasted onto a plain white sleeve. The band put it out themselves just like the old days. The aesthetic was the pseudo-“bootleg” style that they used for live albums such as For All Good Kids, but this time it was an LP of nineteen new songs.

As for the music, Tonics & Twisted Chasers is the sweetly weird work of savages who never sleep. It’s a pile of lo-fi nutcase stuff that stands apart from the year’s other LPs.

It plays like Under the Bushes Under the Stars was a dream that never really happened.

Here, Guided by Voices are still in the basement. They’re still doing everything themselves, still recording on cassettes, still pounding out ultra-short songs. If Under the Bushes Under Stars finds the band reaching for the light of a more polished and palatable approach to recording, on this album they retreat back to the dark for another run through the shadows. They’re stealthy, on foot, toting nothing but the barest essentials.

Most of the band is gone, even. The majority of the album is made by two men, Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout. That’s all you need. No complaints here.

Sprout wrote and played most of the backing music. Some are melodic pieces that come off like potential set-ups for his own songs. Other tracks are manic shots at the apple that sound like he’s spitballing with a guitar or piano. Brevity is the order of the day, as is Pollard and Sprout’s affection for the fucked-up and damaged. Also, Sprout has a drum machine and he’s gonna use it, goddamn it.

On top of the noise, Pollard digs deep into his notebooks and writes a pile of songs, short little fuckers that don’t have time for the verse-chorus-verse stuff. The quickest track is thirty-nine seconds long. The longest is 2:30. Most hover around a minute-and-a-half. All nineteen songs blow by in a mere twenty-eight minutes.

Here, Pollard inhales Sprout’s music and then exhales a song. It really does sound as natural and simple as that.

It’s also eerily beautiful, touched all over with otherworldly vibes and is my pick for the most overlooked Guided by Voices album. This is the weird, subterranean one of the batch. The secret. The hidden room. The lost gold. The late night happening. Some surveys of the band’s catalog outright ignore it (writer Jeff Gomez’s Self-Inflicted Aural Nostalgia podcast that otherwise covers every GBV album doesn’t grant this one an episode, for just one example).

Sometimes, in the crush of all of these Pollard records, even I forget that it’s one of my favorites, but I shall forget no more. I will hang banners for this album. I will play it all night. Tonics & Twisted Chasers is modest on the surface, but it’s full of triumphs.

My best summary of this album’s effect: It sounds like a couple of noise-loving adult Midwesterners trying to make children’s music, but tripping over themselves while doing it and stumbling into a much stranger place.

Its approach is touchingly “child-like”–and by that, I don’t mean that it’s naive, nor is it some kind of cultivated infantilism.

Rather, it sounds like the product of a free and unfiltered state.

Give a 5-year-old kid a pencil and paper and right away they’ll start to draw. They don’t get stuck. They don’t second-guess. They just go. They’ll draw their house, their dad, their pet, their favorite cartoon character, whatever’s on their mind. It just comes out and they know when it’s finished.

Every kid is an effortless artist and then we lose that the very moment that we become self-conscious. You can learn a lot by paying attention to how kids excercise their creativity.

I like what Tom Waits once said in an interview with GQ in 2002:

“Children make up the best songs, anyway,” he says. “Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.”

Something in this observation nails down how Pollard seems to work, too. (Maybe it’s because of all those years that he spent teaching grade school.) At least, it’s the only way that I can explain how he and Sprout can cough up an album as fun as Tonics & Twisted Chasers in a year that should have exhausted them.

I formed a powerful attachment to Pollard’s music ever since I first discovered it in 1995. Twenty-four years later, I’ve still got the disease and have yet to find a cure. Part of the reason for my mania, I think, is the fascinating way that Pollard seems to have preserved that elusive child-like state of steady, uncomplicated creativity. In his songs, I never hear a serious songwriter hard at work, breaking a sweat over his notepad, to crystalize a generation’s angst in tortured verses and choruses.

Rather, his songs sound to me like…

Play. Endless play. He never gets tired of it. For me, it’s life-affirming.

Zero pretension. Absurdities rule. Rough edges are fine. When a song feels like it’s said all that it has to say–even if it’s only six lines of verse–he’s ready to call it finished and get to work on another one. Pollard’s way with a melody and his ear for words (there are fetching and mysterious bits of poetry all over the lyrics here) smooth out the path.

Hear the way that Pollard sings the line “Loads of creamy music and lots of time to make it” in this album’s charming “158 Years of Beautiful Sex”. He means it.

The whole record is endlessly playful. If I had to compare it to another GBV LP, I’d go with Alien Lanes. Both albums are buzzing bee-hives of song that grow on you in similar ways, but Tonics is the weirder of the two. It doesn’t have any singles and it leans to the mellow side, while the former goes more for rock. The songs are just as curiously satisfying, though.

“Is She Ever?” might, to this day, still be Pollard’s saddest song, while also being lovely at the same time.

“The Top Chick’s Silver Chord” is a majestic tension-builder that ends with Pollard shouting through vocal delay like Alex Chilton on Like Flies on Sherbert.

On “Wingtip Repair”, Pollard weirds out the poetry slam while he works with a berserk Tobin Sprout piano instrumental.

The hushed and misty youthful rememberance “Look, It’s Baseball” makes me wish I was a sports fan.

Some of these songs showed up again on later releases. The gently filthy “Knock ‘Em Flyin'” got remade for the next Guided by Voices album. “Reptilian Beauty Secrets” got punched up (and retitled “Idiot Princess”) for an EP later down the road. “Dayton, Ohio – 19 Something and 5″ made it to GBV’s live set a few years later and got released (in a live version) as a 7” single. “Ha Ha Man” also got played live eventually and was also re-done in a more polished take, though it only got as far as a slot on the first Suitcase box set of outtakes.

Then there are the CD bonus tracks, all of which are worth hearing (the original vinyl sold out in a few weeks back in the pre-PayPal days; the CD came out a year or two later).

“Long as the Block is Black” and “Kite Surfer” are a delicious little acid ballads. “Jellyfish Reflector” is an absurd and endearing swamp-rock jam that sounds improvised around the title and a few bottles of whiskey. The song also contains one of my favorite GBV tape mishaps–unless that sudden cut-out toward the end was intentional (and maybe it was). The AC/DC riff and Nuggets lyrics of “Girl From the Sun” rattle the landscape good and hard before the weary and beautiful “The Candyland Riots” comes in to sing us to sleep.

Today, the vinyl is one of the top collectibles in the catalog outside of the original pressings of the early DIY albums. If you find a Tonics LP for less than $300, you can call that a bargain. Even the CD has creeped up a little in value ever since it quietly drifted out of print a few years back. If you SEEK your SOUL though (cough, cough), you can still at least hear it.

And you should hear it if you’re hooked on Guided by Voices and digging deep (which is the only way to listen to Guided by Voices, as far as I’m concerned).

I’m serious. You better not skip Tonics. I’m gonna pissed off if I find out that you did.