Robert Pollard
Kid Marine
1999, The Fading Captain Series
Robert Pollard works fast, but the music industry works slow. Negotiations for the first Guided by Voices major label release–it was all`recorded and pretty much ready to go–took time. Meanwhile, the band played the odd show here and there in 1998 and early ’99, but without a new album out, maybe Pollard wasn’t feeling a full-fledged tour.
So that meant sitting around at home a lot.
(I love this vintage Dayton Daily News article about Pollard’s downtime in 1998. He rented 676 movies from Blockbuster that year! Wow! I wonder if he ever rented Shakma.)
For a guy like Pollard, who never stops writing, it also meant a fresh batch of songs. About sitting around at home a lot. Contemplating the ceiling (literally, in the song “Living Upside Down”). Watching TV. Observing the human parade. He also got into leafing through an acquaintance’s personal photo album–that guy would be mullet-sporting cover star Jeff “Kid Marine” Davis–and then wrote songs inspired by that.
Pollard settled on his perch in Dayton, Ohio, USA and took in the things around him.
And Kid Marine is the result.
Twenty years later, it’s still one of Pollard’s most strange and beautiful albums. Its fifteen quick songs are ethereal and earthy at the same time. There are no sugary hooks on it, let alone much that resembles a single, though opening anthem “Submarine Teams” stuck around in GBV’s live set for some years. Meanwhile, Pollard’s lyrics turn everyday Midwestern life into a strange dream of “fine mussels and selected brains” and “a town of mirrors”, where there’s a “matchlight liquor establishment” and everything boils down to “heads, hearts and nebula”.
Pollard’s giant gift for melody carries us through it. Stark naked melody is all that this album is, even when it shirks verse-chorus-verse conventions. Like the previous LP Waved Out, Pollard’s own guitar work is everywhere here. It’s a warm and unfancy sound that always gets right to the point. Meanwhile, producer John Shough keeps the sonics toasty and urgent. Most of the arrangements are simple guitar-bass-drum affairs with a few drizzles of cozy analog effects. There’s the trippy vocal loop in “Submarine Teams” that nods to the organ in The Who’s “Baba O’Riley”. The gentle bed of feedback under “Flings of the Waistcoat Crowd”. The apocalyptic wash of noise into which “Town of Mirrors” fades out.
This is not lo-fi, but it was recorded quickly (one week in the studio) and has a homemade quality, which was always the real charm of the ragged fidelity of old Guided by Voices records. It sounds timeless.
Still, it might take a few spins for it to soak in.
In early 1999, I was 22 and confused about lots of things and Kid Marine was one of them. The first time I put this album on, I waited for my new favorite pop song to blast out and sock me square on the bridge of the nose, as usually happens with Pollard records, but I got no such moment here. All I felt was mud and shadows. I couldn’t hear songs; I only heard little sketches that didn’t seem to go anywhere. Even the words didn’t resonate. I had no idea what Pollard was on about here. I didn’t get any of this.
Hey, sometimes you’ve just got a bunch of shit in your head that prevents you from hearing your future favorite music. Sometimes the best records don’t hit you until sometime down the road after you’ve lived a little more. One day, a great record that you weren’t ready for at first grabs you by the shirt and demands to be really heard. All I wanted from Kid Marine in ’99 was some whiz-bang pop songs to get me through the day, while Pollard was busy giving me a world. Today, I don’t know how I didn’t see that.
How did I not hear “Flings of the Waistcoat Crowd” as a beautiful rendering of the mundane image of blue collar guys drinking at a bar after work? How did the quirky marijuana anthem “Far-Out Crops” not totally win me over? How did “The Big Make-Over”, which plays like an update on the state of Guided by Voices at the time (“Gotta get gassed/ For the opening of the new highway”), just blow right past my pleasure receptors?
How about beautiful melodies such as “Snatch Candy” and “Powerblessings”? How the hell did I not notice those? Or the spooky acid-ballad “Enjoy Jerusalem!”?
What the hell was wrong with me?
I blame high fructose corn syrup.
My favorite song here is “Town of Mirrors”. In my interpretation, it’s about how a person is a product of where they come from, whether they like it or not. You always come from a town of mirrors. Or maybe when you live in a place long enough, it becomes a town of mirrors. You see yourself in it. You’re a part of it.
I’m probably wrong, though. It’s probably about beer.
All I know is that Robert Pollard has lived in Dayton, Ohio his whole life. He has the resources to pull up stakes if he wants, but it doesn’t look like that will ever happen. It’s his home. He’s attached to it and he’s written hundreds of songs about it. Dayton might not look like much at first, but there sits endless poetry in the streets and snow and wind and people. (No crazy collage needed for this album’s cover art. For an album about the beauty of the humdrum, some choice candid photos of a guy living his life will do.)
And that’s true of everywhere, by the way. Even where you are. Even if you’re sick of the place.
Even if you don’t see it.
And that’s another thing that Kid Marine is about.
It was the perfect uncompromising album to kick off a brand new label, Pollard’s own The Fading Captain Series. While Do the Collapse sat in what would be a yearlong state of limbo, Pollard went DIY for Kid Marine. He put it out himself just a few months after recording it, with buddy Matt Davis, who still works with him today (also, no relation to “Kid Marine” Davis), doing the lion’s share of the work in getting the thing off the ground while Indianapolis record store/indie label Luna Music handled direct mailorder.
This wasn’t going to be another pseudo-bootleg sneaked out only on limited vinyl, nor was it going to be sold only through the website like Tonics & Twisted Chasers.
No, Kid Marine was going to be a real release. Vinyl, CD, ads in magazines. Press and radio promotion. On the rack in record stores.
When the music business lets you down, it’s time to take matters into your own hands. It helps if you have a cult audience who will follow you off the main road, which Pollard definitely had at this point.
The Fading Captain Series would go on to release forty-four records over the next eight years and put Robert Pollard on the path to the complete independence that he enjoys today, but at the time all that they were thinking about was Kid Marine. They just wanted this one album out. Nobody knew if the label would continue. If the “#1 in the Fading Captain Series” legend on the back of the sleeve and on the disc turned out to be nothing more than a non sequitur, Pollard was okay with that.
It was a turning point in his career, a bigger one even than the major label debut that came out later. Radio hits were not in Pollard’s future. No, his true lasting success came from going independent and making it work. Retreating from the music industry to become his own industry. Complete artistic freedom. Working with friends who love him and his music. Nobody in New York City to tell him to slow down.
Kid Marine was far from Pollard’s first DIY album–all of the early GBV records were self-released–but it was the first one for which independence was the point, not just a means to an end.
From here on out, no matter what happened with Pollard’s deals with bigger labels, he was also building a body of work away from that. For him, it made artistic sense and it also made financial sense.
And it’s been going on at a wild pace for twenty years now.
Kid Marine is an album about home–and in its independence, Pollard would find a home.
I don’t know much about poetry, but I think there might be a little some of it in that.