Hazzard Hotrods
Big Trouble
2000, The Fading Captain Series
I like bad music.
And by bad music I don’t mean the soulless junk that we all hear everyday piped into drug stores or issuing from other peoples’ cars. Those forgettable aural space-fillers. Those frat party soundtracks. That slickster stuff that they tell me is country music, but that sounds like the regular ol’ Top 40 except that the singer has something that resembles a twang underneath the electronic pitch correction.
No, I’m talking music that’s too lo-fi to live. I’m talking about noise. Total racket. Audio chaos that you can’t recommend to just anybody–or anybody at all most of the time. I’m talking about shit that’s fucked.
I don’t love every little thing that’s moaned or droned into a microphone, but if you like rock music and you’ve dug even slightly underground in an attempt to find other worlds, you probably like bad music, too. Maybe you’re a big trash-brain. Feedback is fine with you. So is tape hiss. Room noise. Accidents. Maybe you like the results of a cheap microphone and a simple 90s-era consumer-grade cassette recorder that strains to capture a room full of sound, only to come off like a hazy transmission from Pluto.
Some might call it garbage; you call it otherworldly. Or maybe it’s actually perfectly of this Earth. Gritty. Human. Raw. Blemished.
This weird space is where Hazzard Hotrods live. The original vinyl-only release was limited to 500 copies, which sounds right to me. That’s about how many people might like this.
So what the hell is it?
Sometime in 1990 (I can’t get a bead on the month), Robert Pollard got together with Tobin Sprout (guitar) and Mitch Mitchell (bass) and Larry Kellar (drums) in a store called MC Video (after closing time, I assume) and banged out at least seventeen new songs 100% live just for the hell of it. None of these guys were even thinking about this set as a record that was gonna come out. No one was ever supposed to hear it. We are intruders, you and I.
The band were probably turned up loud, probably shook the walls, but their recording set-up was less than professional–a LOT less than professional–so the tape of it that’s left for the ages is muted and spacey, a distorted secret passed down ten years later (now thirty years later).
It’s in the running for the most lo-fi LP that Pollard has ever released. It’s got no dynamics, but it’s got heart.
So what are the songs like?
Well, Robert Pollard’s body of work pretty much always covers what he calls “The Four P’s” of good rock. Pop. Prog. Psychedelia. Punk. They’re his obsessions. He’s always blending them and fitting them together in odd ways.
“But you know what he hasn’t done?”, you might think after about seven beers in my living room.
Jam band roots-rock. Muddy grooves that go on for several minutes. Music in which the band get in touch with their bluesy side. Songs in which Pollard babbles and shouts out lyrics so improvised that he quotes Aretha Franklin in one song. Southern boogie. Creedence Clearwater Revival. Wet Willie. Or at least Green On Red and Jason and the Scorchers.
Here come Hazzard Hotrods to fill that niche, God help us all. My guess is that Pollard and company maybe had a phase where they were into that stuff. The story goes that this whole set was improvised right there in the room. The band settled into varieties of shambling and swampy headspaces while Pollard (credited here only as the singer) gives his most screaming, shouting vocal performance on record to this day, his words riffed off-the-cuff from the VHS covers that surrounded them.
And if that’s 100% true, I’m impressed because most of these songs do have something that resembles structure. It’s not amazing, but it’s more coherent than you might think if you’ve only read about it. You can hear Robert Pollard the skilled songwriter–and Tobin Sprout the skilled songwriter, for that matter, too–just underneath its tinny surfaces, finding hooks and pleasant shapes and leaning into them.
Take the opening track, “A Farewell to Arms”, with Sprout’s Peter Buck-style lead guitar and the song’s insistent beat and angry melody. Hand it to Mitch Easter and he could probably shape it into a potential radio hit. Back in the day, at least. It’s a good song.
“39 Steps” and “Tit for Tat” are back-to-back breakneck takes on what used to be called cowpunk. Punk in a cowboy hat. Mitch Mitchell’s bass–the most audible instrument here some of the time–is the driver. He plays fast and simple, like Dee Dee Ramone. It’s all dum-dum-dum-dum-DUM-DUM-DUM-DUM.
Side closer “Sabotage” is where this record really starts howling at the moon. The band keep it slow and smokey while Pollard growls a sob story on top. “You let a lot of people down.” I’m not sure if his narrator talking to someone else or himself.
Side two begins with more cowpunk, but even faster this time. Somebody’s in “Big Trouble” and the band has to go heavy on the gas pedal to talk about it.
“Runaway” is soft and fuzzy until Pollard stops feeling it after two-and-a-half minutes and tells the band to go faster. The result is a whole other song, “Get Dirty”, a pretty okay blast down the highway.
The whole shebang closes with a ballad, “Solid Gold”. Pollard shoehorns words into the verses in a way that he probably wouldn’t do if he worked on it more, but the skeleton of a good song is here. It’s very pretty. If you hate this record, maybe you’ll accept “Solid Gold” as an apology.
The outside world first learned about this when three songs from the tape made it to Suitcase (“Sabotage”, “Big Trouble” and “A Farewell to Arms”). Nobody was asking for more, but an album that collected more of that night’s set came out anyway a month or two later–so soon that it was surely planned before Suitcase even came out–on bitchin’ pink vinyl that sold out in about the same time that it’s taking you to read this.
Not everybody was going to like it, but I think that the songs aren’t bad. The recording is your big obstacle. It’s worse than Vampire on Titus because that album was at least intentional; this one is just a mess. Still, Robert Pollard liked it enough to make it #8 in his own Fading Captain Series and it wouldn’t be the first or the last time that he’d go back to the weird areas of his archives for a new release just for the freaks.
In fact, Fading Captain Series #35, five years later, in 2005 is the CD reissue of this album with seven bonus tracks. It’s called Bigger Trouble and it’s just more stuff to enjoy or scratch your head over why it ever came out, depending on how you feel about the original.
It covers a lot of the same ground. “Walk in the Sun” is more cowpunk. The tightly wound “A Star is Born” sounds like the band’s follow-up hit after “A Farewell to Arms”. Or maybe that’s “We Want Miles (Of Land)”, a fist-pumper anthem oddly buried at the end. Meanwhile, how can you not mention the nine-second “Rat Infested Motels of Dayton” even if it is just the set-up for the punk workout “Really Gonna Love Me Now”?
When you’re listening to Hazzard Hotrods bonus tracks, you’re REALLY far gone into your Pollard fandom. You’ve crossed some cosmic threshold and that’s where this site likes to hang out.
Also, the original LP came out at the end of the year on the same day as another oddball record. In 2000, we rocked around the Christmas tree with Hazzard Hotrods and The Howling Wolf Orchestra. The latter is coming up next.