Airport 5
“Total Exposure”
2001, The Fading Captain Series
Isolation Drills hadn’t yet cooled off in the new release racks back in the spring of 2001 when Robert Pollard was already promoting more records coming out over the next few months on his Fading Captain Series label.
The one that had us all buzzing was Airport 5, a new collaboration with Tobin Sprout.
Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout together again! OH MY GOD! Indie dorks like me fainted at the very thought.
The resulting album is a lovely piece of work, if not quite the tonic that some expected, but we’ll have plenty of time to talk about that later (the album will be #63 in this series). Preceding it were two 7″ singles of preview tracks (with non-album B-sides, of course) and the first one was a song that I like to call “Total Exposure”.
Because that’s what it’s called.
SO, here’s the deal with Airport 5 real quick: Tobin Sprout composes and records the instrumental music on his own and then he sends ’em to Robert Pollard to write and sing songs on top. Simple, simple. So simple that Pollard would go on to make more albums like this with several others collaborators in the future. He was really into it for awhile.
Pollard nicknamed this method “postal rock” because back then Pollard got the tapes in the mail.
So that’s Airport 5 in a nutsac and the first thing that we heard from it was this gentle breeze of an A-side.
Tobin Sprout is in an acoustic mood here. His guitar takes on us on a walk through crisp and lovely weather. He even unplugs his drum machine in favor of… what is that? Maracas? That’s what the percussion here sounds like to me. I don’t know anything about music though, if you haven’t figure that out already. I don’t have good ears. This series is running on all heart and nothing else.
Meanwhile, Robert Pollard’s song is about the simple beauty of day turning into night, but as viewed through an eccentric lens. The narrator of the song is in pain. He wants us to know right away. The first lines: “How dare you say/ ‘You have a good one’?/ When it’s obvious I don’t“. Pollard has the divorce blues that would color most of his music in 2001.
But then, in a few lines, he turns. Because Pollard doesn’t wallow in misery. It’s just not what he does. He has a powerful lifeforce that keeps him going.
“Listen to the way the children play/ As the day slips away/ And the light comes on/ Total Exposure”
Pollard has said in interviews that this song was inspired by a strip club sign that he saw. TOTAL EXPOSURE, all lit up in bright bulbs (actually the club was called Total XPosure and it was located in Troy, Ohio).
Kids innocently run around during the day and then at night the signs blaze up and a whole other creature comes out to play–and Pollard finds a strange beauty in the cycle. There’s something eternal in it. Children will always want to play and men will always want to see naked women. The human animal isn’t evolving past that, I don’t think. I imagine the narrator of this song sitting on a porch, contemplating the state of things as the sky darkens and the street gets quiet and that strip club sparkles in the distance.
On the B-side is “Cold War Water Sports”, in which Pollard sings lines such as “Grand filled father fake maneuver/ It chills the bones in most mothers” with enough conviction that he at least seems to know what it means. Tobin Sprout’s sleepy guitar and drum machine chill out in the background. “The Wheel Hits the Path (Quite Soon)” kicks up a more insistent drive. Sprout’s music is classic GBV, warm and familiar, and Pollard meets it with a terrific song and then just as it comes down from its first run through the chorus… it mysteriously fades out before Pollard’s even finished singing all of the words on the lyric sheet. It’s very odd.
Ah, well. It’s fine. I like my B-sides weird.
Let’s also take a moment to dig the grammar in the message etched into the 7″ run-out groove.
“Ready Of Another Tonic?”
That’s also okay. I like my secret messages on record surfaces weird, too.