Robert Pollard-Mania! #44: SURGICAL FOCUS

Guided by Voices
“Surgical Focus” b/w “Fly Into Ashes”
1999, TVT Records

Summer of 1999 was the last time that the music industry was truly comfortable. They were the last few months of business as usual.

Napster was brand new, but the controversy over it didn’t kick in until autumn when college kids went back to school and had access to their university’s high-speed internet connection. For the average schmoe like me, it was still a dial-up world, and in a dial-up world an album could take hours to download via your 56k modem–and that’s IF your fragile connection didn’t crap out on you every ten minutes.

It was also a world without portable digital music players. CD burners were around, but they were expensive and only a niche saw the need for one. Meanwhile, it was normal for cars on the road to still have cassette decks in them, even some new cars.

In 1999, the future of music as an intangible digital experience was here… and it was free and illegal. And it also kinda sucked unless your favorite place to listen to music was at your computer through speakers that were probably shitty.

Things were in transition. The rules were changing. We were all mixed up.

And this was the world in which Guided by Voices went major label.

The title Do the Collapse was an old one from deep down in Robert Pollard’s notebooks. “I’ve wanted to call the last five albums Do the Collapse,” he said, as quoted in a vintage press kit, “but now it finally makes sense, at the end of the millennium.”

All of that scary new millennium shit amounted to nothing, though. January 1, 2000 was just another day. The sky wasn’t all purple. People weren’t running everywhere. The “Y2K” problem that was supposed make the world’s computers stop working and empty our bank accounts and have us fighting in the streets for resources and turn daily life into a cyberpunk Mad Max movie didn’t pan out that way.

Still, the title was prescient. The world didn’t end, but the music industry as we knew it in the summer of ’99 did the collapse over the next decade. Sales dropped. Layoffs galore. Lawsuits were filed against 12 year-olds and grandmas for copyright violations. Companies merged or folded altogether. Record stores closed. The mad signing sprees that characterized much of the 90s were over and the majors no longer took chances on oddball rock bands such as Guided by Voices.

TVT Records itself would do the collapse nine years later.

One could argue that ground zero of this was June 1999, when Napster debuted and you could  now freely download Aerosmith albums from somebody’s computer in Zimbabwe–and then somebody else in Omaha or Tokyo could download them from your computer.

It also happened to be the month that this advance single for the upcoming GBV album debuted.

COINCIDENCE?!

Maybe.

---

Oh yeah, “Surgical Focus”.

At the time, TVT had their eye on three Guided by Voices tracks for future radio domination and, if you ask me, the best of them got the least amount of promotion.

“Teenage FBI” got a slot on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series soundtrack CD (even if it never actually aired on the show). “Hold on Hope” got big-time exposure on an episode of Scrubs and got put on its soundtrack album.

Meanwhile, all that “Surgical Focus” got was this 7″ in a fancy sleeve with an arts-and-crafts spinny-wheel thing behind the front cover that allowed you to change the model’s eyes. TVT house designer Ben Wheelock got the credit, but the idea likely began with Pollard, who had something similar from years back sitting in his pile of unusued album art. You can see it in the DVD bonus features for the Watch Me Jumpstart documentary about the band. (The cover model also looks like an old magazine clipping, which is another Pollard thing.)

(If you’re a collector it’s curious how GBV’s albums on TVT got low-budget, obligatory, “vinyl is dead” presentations on wax–a step down from Matador’s gatefolds–while their two TVT 7″s are their most nicely packaged singles.)

As for the music, “Surgical Focus” is the best of this period’s singles because it’s the one that doesn’t sound like the band are trying to be something that they’re not. It fulfills the promise of big-studio GBV in that it’s a no-frills great song all punched up full and loud. Its melody is as naturally satisfying as ocean waves crashing against rocks and Pollard sings his heart out for it. Lines such as “I’ve been waiting in line for this/ Now that it’s taken forever, I insist” come from a real place. You can hear it.

In an old interview that, best I can tell, doesn’t seem to be on the internet anymore, Pollard said that the lyrics are about a loser who meets someone who has their shit together in life and then is inspired by them–and that’s cool, too. It’s a very Pollard sentiment. His album may be called Do the Collapse, but his optimism is unshaken.

As for the flipside, it might be the most frequently released Pollard song ever. It’s been used as a B-side more than once and appears on multiple compilations. It’s called “Fly Into Ashes” and it’s the fluffy whipped cream on the “Surgical Focus” sundae. Ask me on a day with nice weather and I may even like it as much as the A-side. Ric Ocasek didn’t produce this one. Instead, that job went to Pollard’s go-to guy in Ohio at the time, John Shough.

Shough, who’s also put out some great solo albums that this website needs to cover sometime before the bees go extinct, had a hand in most Pollard records for about seven years.

He was always a welcome name because Shough understood that there were options beyond lo-fi and hi-fi in 1999. There was also this warm, cozy, 1960s-style place in between. Guitars could be crisp and chunky and ringing, drums could sound like drums, the vocal melody could sit right on top of it all and the room could sound like there’s some air in it. That’s what you get on “Fly Into Ashes”, a little piece of pop candy. All it’s missing is Davy Jones shaking a tambourine.