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.
One of the most common criticisms of Pollard’s work is that he puts out too much music. Today, people accept it simply because he’s fired out records at a rapid pace for a hundred years now, but back in 1999, some were aghast at how he put out FOUR albums in one year. Monocles popped out, pearls were clutched. Radiohead would never do that. Tortoise would never do that. Whoever was on the cover of that month’s issue of CMJ would never do that.
But Pollard did that.
He works fast. He’s impatient. He likes to bang ’em out.
He has an audience who eats it up, which certainly helps.
Also, I think that Pollard never goes too long between releases because he wants to tell you about what’s happening NOW.
Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department is a whole album about what was happening now, circa 1999. It’s full of great songs and powerful arrangements, but it’s also a news report and a scrapbook about the state of Guided by Voices at the time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know now that Pollard’s attempt to take Guided by Voices to the next level didn’t pan out, but in 1999, it seemed possible. Stranger things have happened.
Guided by Voices were certainly trying. They were touring their brains out to promote Do the Collapse. Putting in the work. Interviews with every magazine and website and local alt-weekly out there. There was a crackle in the air. A buzz. A rumble. A hum. A tremor. Maybe even a rustle and a throb. Shit was happening. The needle was doing the Lindy Hop all across the meter.
Speak Kindly is about that. It’s all gassed-up on that energy. Just look at the sleeve art. It’s candid pics from the road. Friends, family. No trippy collage art here.
The lyric sheet was made with a typewriter that looks like it could use a new ribbon. Pollard likes the authentic typewriter font as made by an authentic typewriter. He uses it often. It looks timeless and gives the art a handmade quality. Also, it conjures up an old-fashioned image of a reporter banging out his story about the governer’s race on an old Smith Corona. These lyrics are like the news. Again, they’re what’s happening NOW.
This LP even came out smack in the middle of the tour. November 5, 1999. According to the stats at GBVDB.com, the band was playing Columbia, Missouri that night. Two weeks previous, they were in England. Two weeks later, they were in Texas (where, incidentally, I saw my first GBV show; it rocked; I have a tape of it, yay!).
I don’t know how Pollard and Doug Gillard wrapped this up in such timely fashion, but they did it.
If Kid Marine is an album from a guy who’s sittin’ around at home while he waits for the music industry to catch up to him, this album comes from a guy who’s out there playing the game. He’s got a goal, he’s got a tour schedule that’s a mile long and that crosses multiple oceans and he’s in vans and hotel rooms and rock clubs and he has so much to talk about.
GBV are out promoting their big album, full of ambition (“Do Something Real”), “going out into the sea where the others cannot be” (“Slick as Snails”). Meanwhile, Pollard thinks about the family back home (“Messiahs”) and addresses the temptations out there (“Tight Globes”) and even gives a nod to the fans on the internet talking about the shows on their stupid bulky 90s computers the next day (“And My Unit Moves”).
I think that opening track “Frequent Weaver Who Burns” is Pollard talking about being a guy in his 40s playing to young faces every night.
“Soul Train College Policeman” sounds like a classic Pollard mishear that became a song. Guided by Voices played a lot of colleges in early ’99. Maybe someone said something like “So train college policeman…” in a sentence around him and then Pollard’s internal song title radar beeped. Just a guess. I’m probably wrong. I usually am.
In “Pop Zeus”, Pollard lets his head get a little big, but he deserves it. He’s the Pop Zeus, no doubt. He shits out the magic. He gives love to angry children. When a roomful of people are jumping around to your songs every night, you might feel like King Shit of Fuck Mountain from time to time. It’s a great song that explodes at the end like a showtune. Also, the “electric newspaper boy” in the lyrics refers to one of Pollard’s drinking buddies who would print out select posts from GBV’s fan e-mail list (Remember mailing lists? Every day you’d get 9,000 new e-mails from a bunch of people arguing with each other! They sucked!) and share them with him.
I think that “Slick as Snails” is just about one of the most beautiful songs that Pollard has ever conjured. Ask me right now and I’ll tell you that it’s in my top ten. It’s gorgeous. A 22-year-old couldn’t write that song. It’s an experienced man’s response to success. It’s a little bit of bravado and a little bit of reality, too. Luck is as big a factor as talent and drive. “Life is quick and very slick/ Slick as snails”. Sounds like a life lesson to me.
Pollard follows it up with more advice in the rocking “Do Something Real”, one of a few songs here that feel like better singles than what were on Do the Collapse. Another one of those is the lovely “And I Don’t (So Now I Do)”, a song about nostalgia and the changes that we go through over the years. So is the delightfully raunchy and explosive “Tight Globes”. All deserve the arena treatment.
And, though I wouldn’t call it a single, the barebones “Life is Beautiful” is another highlight. They probably weren’t thinking about this at all, but it comes off like Pollard and Gillard’s response to “Hold on Hope”. A pretty ballad doesn’t need all of the production bullshit. Just a guitar and a voice and a stark naked melody works fine, too.
Speaking of Doug Gillard, we need to talk about him. I’ve been feeling like a giant creep for past the couple of these articles because I’ve barely mentioned Doug Gillard. He’s extremely important to Pollard’s story and he’s half of this album.
Pollard sings and writes the songs, Gillard does everything else. This is the second of Pollard’s albums in that vein–the first was Tonics & Twisted Chasers made with Tobin Sprout–with dozens more to come with several different collaborators.
Over twenty years later, this still holds up as one of the very best of those and half of the credit goes to Gillard’s beautiful, economical arrangements. He recorded it on a 4-track, but I wouldn’t call this lo-fi. It’s polished, vivid and full of presence. It’s the 1960s sound, warm as can be and smokey as a campfire. You can hear picks hit strings and natural air.
Gillard’s work is also diverse. Pollard is unapologetically Beatles-damaged. He doesn’t hop around genres with the same breadth as them, but he likes an album that covers a variety of moods and tempos. He likes each song to pull the rug out from under the previous one.
Doug Gillard can do that. Doug Gillard can do anything. He can rock and he can whisper. He can get so quiet that you barely notice that he’s there. The four songs here for which Gillard has co-writing credit–“Pop Zeus”, “Port Authority”, “Messiahs” and “Larger Massachusetts”–are telling because none of them sound alike. I’m guessing that Gillard wrote and recorded the instrumentals completely on his own and then offered them to Pollard to do whatever he wanted on top. They rank as some of the album’s fastest and slowest and most prog-like moments (see the luscious and mystical “Port Authority”, one of my favorites).
It helps that Gillard is a songwriter himself. The solo albums that he’d start putting out later are all sorts of gorgeous. Gillard’s a giant in his own right. This site has already discussed the first album from his band, Gem and I hope to get to his even better later work sometime before we all get the coronavirus.
GBV fandom in 1999 was in a weird place. The band was doing well, the shows were packed. However, there were people back then who were still attached to the old lineup and could not accept this new one. They wanted Tobin Sprout back (meanwhile, Sprout was busy taking care of his new baby, which was why he left the band in the first place). Some of them did not welcome Doug Gillard into the fold. They got sold on him as some guitar wizard weirdo who couldn’t wait to “shred” all over Pollard’s songs.
Obviously, these people had never heard Gem, which showed that he was nothing like that.
And I have no idea what was on Gillard’s mind when made this, but I do wonder, if maybe–just maybe–he was out to prove himself here.
He is NOT just a guitarist-for-hire. No, he and Pollard are both on the exact same page. They’ve both been around the same block more than once. Gillard gets all of Pollard’s 1960s and 70s references and he knows exactly what to do with them. You want pop? Gillard’s all about it.
The result is not only my pick for Pollard’s best album of 1999, but one of his best albums ever. It’s in the top 10.
It was a wild year and this is the capper. It sums it all up. It’s the New Year’s Eve party.
Yes, there is an EP that came out a month after this in December (we’ll get to it next in #48), but it’s a footnote. Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department is the last real statement of the year. It’s the last case of champagne for 1999. Sip and savor and hear the latest dirt.
In interviews, Pollard has expressed regret that this wasn’t a Guided by Voices album. It should have been one, he says. It was good enough to deserve the attention.
But I like it right here.
The original vinyl came with a postcard set of the first four Fading Captain Series releases.
Those first four are iconic. They summed up the label’s purpose. Personal stuff, weird stuff, spur-of-the-moment stuff–and every now and then, a masterpiece.
The Fading Captain Series would get wilder after this. Weird 7″s, box sets, three albums released in one day.
But Pollard made the most of it in that first year.
It wasn’t just a vanity label. It wasn’t just a place to dump songs that weren’t deemed good enough for the big label.
The Fading Captain Series was a place where the real shit was going down. It was where you heard the latest news.