Lexo and The Leapers
Ask Them
1999, The Fading Captain Series
“Time Machines” is a song that sounds like a door being suddenly kicked in. Or maybe a bomb going off. But, ya know… in a good way.
It’s the kind of explosive pop throwdown that Robert Pollard hadn’t put out in a spell. It’s a real gas pedal-pusher and it wouldn’t have fit on Kid Marine at all, but as the opener to an EP of lean, crunchy rock, it was perfecto.
I even love the lyrics. I think it’s a song about nostalgia and how you might enjoy living in it when you can, but present day reality will always intrude (“Time machines escape the fall/ But cannot climb the prison wall”). “Time Machines” doesn’t put down nostalgia, though. Pollard was 41 when he recorded it. That’s an age when nostalgia can hit you hard. I know from experience. It’s not necessarily about idealizing your past as glory days that can never be topped. Rather, it’s often a state of not feeling finished with your past.
There’s always something back there, too many decades ago, that you didn’t notice before. Something that you didn’t appreciate enough.
But now you think about it all the time.
That sounds sad, I guess, but it doesn’t have to be. You can turn nostalgia into fun and happiness. People who collect things are often piecing together their past, preserving memories so that they can’t go away (a collection of old records or toys or books or comics is a “time machine” when you think about it).
Making music and art are further ways of dealing with it. Your memories then become mere raw material from which to draw. As a songwriter whose work has an undeniable throwback quality, Robert Pollard knows all about channeling nostalgia in a way that works for you.
And that’s what I think “Time Machines” is about.
But I’m probably wrong. It’s probably about beer.
So, anyway, Ask Them.
Ask me about Ask Them and I’ll tell you that it rocks.
For this EP that came out on both CD and long outta print 12″ clear yellow vinyl, Pollard hooked up with a Dayton band called The Tasties and knocked out six songs with them in one day (April 7, 1999, so says the back cover). Also, Pollard decided that when he’s fronting The Tasties, they’re no longer The Tasties; they’re now called Lexo and The Leapers. For this one day, at least.
The record wears its rawness well. It sounds like a band in a room. It’s all punch and roar. You hear electrical hums and analog hiss and picks hit strings. You hear Pollard breathe around the microphone between singing. You also hear six terrific songs from a writer in complete command of his abilities.
After “Time Machines”, we get smacked with another anthem, “Alone, Stinking and Unafraid”, a quick and shouting statement of determination that became a staple of the Guided by Voices live show for the next five years (Pollard eventually liked the way it sounded before “Glad Girls”, so that became its place in the set most nights). You can be alone and stinking, but you can also be unafraid. I can buy that.
“Plainskin” is a chugger that lets us lay back and soak in this record’s in-your-face guitar sound.
Side 2 opener, “Will You Show Me Your Gold?” is the “ballad” of the bunch, but delivered on another bed of thick lava guitar. It yearns in that distinctly Pollard way. It’s another “Blue Moon Fruit”, but louder.
Hidden in the middle of side two is another pop wonder, “Fair Touching”. It sounds catchy and sweet, but I think the lyrics are about insect mating habits. “But a queen’s prize awaits/ She might rub her legs”. Do any insects send out pheremones through the legs? I don’t know. “Perhaps at last the song you sing will have meaning”? That sounds to me like a reference to a noise that a creepy-crawly thing might make with their wings or whatever that attracts mates.
We may need to consult an entomologist to get to the bottom of this song, but I think I’m on to something.
Also, Pollard liked “Fair Touching” so much that he had Guided by Voices record a more polished version as the opening track of their second major label album and it’s been a setlist staple up from about 2000 on up to our present day of Netflix and drones and Trump and people arguing with each other on Twitter about the toxic masculinity of Ronald McDonald and the Hamburgler.
The whole shebang closes exactly how it should, with a swaggering rocker called “Circling Motorheard Mountain”.
There’s a feeling of fun around this record. Pollard sounds happy and it was for good reason.
By the time this reached our hands in May of ’99, the big news was out:
1) Guided by Voices signed to TVT Records and Do the Collapse–the album that they’d been sitting on for most of a year at this point–was finally gonna be in the racks at your local Sam Goody in August.
2) Pollard’s agreement with TVT gave him complete freedom to put out ANYTHING he wanted on the side. He was contractually allowed to go nuts. No more wagging fingers from Matador, who had not-unreasonable business concerns that his prolific nature was diluting the market. TVT didn’t care about any of that though. In fact, TVT only required that Pollard run all of his side projects by them first, in case any of them sounded like something that they might want to put out (which they never did).
Pollard’s new independent venture The Fading Captain Series now had a future and, as if in celebration, they put out two records on the same day. One of them rocked, one of them was fuckin’ weird. Both were the calling cards of an artist who was not on the “sell out” path.
Ask Them is the one that rocks. The weird one is coming up next.