Month: February 2020

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #47: SPEAK KINDLY OF YOUR VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT

Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard
Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department
1999, The Fading Captain Series

At the heart of Robert Pollard’s crazy body of work is just a guy writing about his life and the world around him.

A real writer writes about his or her own life. The things that they see and experience and think about. It can be buried under the surface. It doesn’t have to be “Dear Diary” confessional bullshit. You can write about Space Wizards from the 9th Dimension and it can still be about your life in a way.

Even a Space Wizard from the 9th Dimension might have a few personal problems to talk about.

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Things I Will Keep #20: BUD POWELL, Broadcast Performances 1953, Vol. 1

Bud Powell
Broadcast Performances 1953, Vol. 1
1973, ESP-Disk

Even at my advanced age, I still feel that someday I will be into jazz. Someday I’ll be a guy who references Miles Davis and knows what the fuck he’s talking about. Someday I’ll have strong opinions about alto saxophone players. Someday I’ll put on a jazz record and follow the notes like each one is a hundred dollar bill blowing by in the wind. Someday I’ll hear the emotion in these sounds that dart through the air faster than summer wasps. Someday it’s all gonna hit me.

Until then, I just “like” jazz. I like it when it twinkles in the background. I’m your regular dilletante, a total bird-brain and a complete fuckface. I enjoy jazz, but I’m not conversant in it. I’m like a guy who has a picture of the Eiffel Tower hanging in his living room, but hasn’t spent more than a day or two in Paris.

Someday, though…

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #2: SURFER ROSA

Pixies
Surfer Rosa
1988, 4AD/Elektra

Surfer Rosa is one of those great albums that a band makes once and then never makes again.

That’s not an insult to the other Pixies LPs, all of which I like. The later albums may even have better songs overall, but this one is uniquely apocalyptic. Every crazed and ridiculous (and infectious) song on it feels like one piece of an atomic bomb. Once it’s all put together–BOOM!

They can never do what they did here again. You shouldn’t expect it from them. They will never be this age again. It will never be 1988 again. Their ideas will never seem this strange again. They will never again have the energy of a band who don’t know if they have a future so they’re using up everything they’ve got right now.

At the very least, an upstart band who are capable of could-be/should-be hits such as “Gigantic” and “Where is My Mind?” will almost always try, in time, to make records that are at least a liiiittle bit more slick and shiny than their first. They’re clearly ambitious. They’re not dedicated to being noisy scum-rockers. They’re going to evolve.

Hey, it’s only a sell-out if it sucks.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #46: TEENAGE FBI

Guided by Voices
“Teenage FBI” b/w “Fly Into Ashes” and “Tropical Robots”
1999, Creation Records

I’m the last person who should give advice about how to promote anything. This site’s view statistics are evidence of that. I couldn’t sell cocaine to Fleetwood Mac in 1975. 

I’m the opposite of a good salesman; I’m the dumbfuck who gets convinced to buy stupid shit.  

So maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about when I say that I don’t get why TVT Records didn’t pick ONE song on Do the Collapse and then pound their money hammer on that. They didn’t choose a single champion horse. They never figured out which new GBV song smelled most like teen spirit in 1999.

The album gave them two obvious singles that were groomed for radio. There was “Hold on Hope” if they wanted to go ballad and there was “Teenage FBI” if they wanted to go bubblegum catchy. WHICH TO CHOOSE?

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