Robert Pollard-Mania! #64: RINGWORM INTERIORS

Circus Devils
Ringworm Interiors
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Sometimes on the internet, an innocent lamb who’s in the middle of discovering Robert Pollard’s body of work will step forward and ask where they should start with Circus Devils.

It’s a fair question. At fourteen albums released over sixteen years, this collaboration with fellow Ohioan oddballs Todd and Tim Tobias is not only Pollard’s longest-running side project, but it’s also the strangest. Their sound is a kind of psychedelic rock birthed from a mutant strain. It’s a creature that rose up out of toxic waste. Lots of slime, lots of teeth.

There are quiet Circus Devils records and loud ones and ones that sound like they were created by lizard men from Jupiter. Sometimes they sound like a rock band, sometimes they sound like mad scientists performing sinister experiments in a backyard tool shed. Their records are as varied as dreams, and often as haunting.

Their music comes in a few different flavors, but it all has a demon inside of it. There’s an eeriness in every sound that they make (Pollard got into the spirit and timed most of their albums for a Halloween release). It hides somewhere in even the project’s gentlest moments.

It’s a demon that runs naked and free and howling at the moon on their unhinged first record.

So, where to start with Circus Devils?

I say start at the BEGINNING. Start with Ringworm Interiors. Meet the demon. Get the full Circus Devils experience. Be surprised and assaulted like we were back in 2001 with what’s still one of the most bugfuck albums in Pollard’s whole discography.

It’s also my favorite Pollard album of the year. It’s a 28-track sonic horror show–the same number of tracks as Alien Lanes and only about a minute longer in total length–that takes nothing but left turns and doesn’t know how to relax. It’s hyperactive and always changing. Its sound is an unholy tangle of arms and legs belonging to Devo and Black Sabbath and Pere Ubu. In some ways, it foreshadows all future Circus Devils records because everything they would ever do blows around in the tornado of Ringworm Interiors, even if we only hear it for a few seconds.

The unsettling quiet of “You First” and “Playhouse Hostage” predicts the Escape album. The rockers such as “Buffalo Spiders” and “Straps Hold Up the Jaw” blow out the same smoke that you’d later hear on Pinball Mars and Stomping Grounds. Its art-rock bombast would later develop into unruly concept albums such as The Harold Pig Memorial and Capsized!

Now, noise and weirdness were nothing new to Pollard’s work. Guided by Voices would accidentally tip over an amp in the middle of recording and then keep the sound of the crash on the record. They left in tape machine flubs and embraced the rough and raw. The goal was spontaneity, as well as mystery, but also disorientation. That’s why I insist that Guided by Voices are a psychedelic band more than anything else, with alcohol as their drug of choice.

The difference between Guided by Voices noise and Circus Devils noise is that the Circus Devils are… Well, they’re sober.

Again, they’re mad scientists. Dr. Moreau didn’t get drunk at the vivisection table and neither do Todd and Tim Tobias. For all of this record’s insanity, there’s an almost surgical precision to these sounds and how they were made and how they’re used. The longest track here is a cool 3:10 and the shortest is a mere eighteen seconds. The Tobias brothers find an idea, execute it and then move on. Don’t call the Circus Devils experimental. They know what they’re doing.

Their music would make a mother of a film score (which happened in 2012 when Todd Tobias directed the movie I Razor). Their pieces often play like theme music in search of characters. Strange scenes and eccentric people live in the Tobiases’ work like ghosts on an old hotel’s haunted floor.

They were so confident in the eclectic sonic hellscape they created that they offered it to Robert Pollard complete and as is. They didn’t break it up into separate tracks to be reshuffled. They made an album with a beginning, a middle and an end and Pollard could take it or leave it.

(A little more brief history: Tim Tobias was the new bassist in Guided by Voices at the time and Tim and Todd had been making music together for awhile–if Scat Records still has them, their two 7″s as 4 Coyotes from way back in 1990 are worth your time–and both were also in the band Gem with Doug Gillard.)

Pollard accepted the challenge and wrote songs for music that was made with seemingly little regard for a singer. He lets eleven of these tracks sit as instrumentals. For the other seventeen, Pollard goes with the weirdness and leans into his art-rock influences. His songs sound like parts stripped from a pile of unrealized rock operas. Pollard gets cosmic and grotesque and absurd. He shouts and then whispers and sometimes just talks. With real authority, he sings lines such as “Star peppered wheat germ/ Dark colonies/ Erratic constellations” like he knows exactly what they mean.  He tells us about lizard food (“grandfather smoked it”) and silver eyeballs (“some they can see you/ some they can feel you”). He becomes the ringmaster of this circus.

On “Feel Try Fury”, Pollard shouts a dare behind a demonic guitar riff. “Feel try fury/ Try it, man/ Blow up head”. He sounds like he’s pressuring us to try a drug. Or take a dangerous curve in the road at 70 mph. Or give a chance to this crazy music.

“Knifesong” offers the tasteful phrase “Knife fuck the fallen moon” and conjures up images of a populace drugged into submission, accepting their own destruction (“Well-dressed before the slaughter/ Dark Judas pimps the fold/ Make us see freedom”).

Sandwiched between a spooky instrumental (“Kingdom of Teeth”) and a manic rampager (“Lizard Food”), the mood gets sad and serious with “Oil Birds”, four lines about the awful images of seabirds covered in toxic pollution every time the lovely human race goes and spills a million barrels of oil into the ocean.

In “Apparent the Red Angus”, the most Guided by Voices-y song here, Pollard dons his prog-rock crown and sings about war as told by a king on a crumbling throne.

The sleeper favorite in this home is “Correcto”, which is loony tunes all around. In a speak-sing delivery, Pollard describes a Theater of the Absurd type of scenario, a show where the lead never shows up and the audience’s dissatisfaction is the point. It’s like the Eugene Ionesco play The Chairs, in which an elderly couple throw a party for invisible guests–the stage is full of empty chairs that stay empty–on the occasion of an important announcement by a man called The Orator who shows up late and turns out to be a deaf mute who can’t communicate anything. So we never find out the message–and that’s the show, ladies and germs. In Pollard’s scene though, the curtain doesn’t even open. Instead, a fly comes out and somehow swallows the microphone (hello, surrealism) and that’s it, and yet the audience still watches, waiting for something to happen (“everyone stares/ you can’t move through the tension”).

Still maybe the weirdest moment is “New You (You Can See and Believe)”. It’s a fake live song slotted next to last, where the album’s climax should be. In it, a sampled stadium crowd goes nuts for some of the finest braindead cock-rock riffing of the year. It sounds like a group of hair metal hopefuls’ first attempt at stretching past AC/DC covers. What makes it great, other than its inspired position on the album (THIS is where all of this noise has lead us?) is the weird song that Pollard lays on top.

“Let me cut up your picture!/ Let me move around the parts!/ I’m gonna make a new you!”, he shouts.

It sounds like it’s about Pollard’s collage art process, but then it goes on and becomes a song about a bad relationship. “I’d put your eyes back in place, baby/ So you can see me/ Take your head out of your ass/ So you can see.”

You’d be perfect and we’d get along great if you were a different person. 

Sounds like some fans’ feelings about Pollard at the time.

You’d be perfect if you just didn’t make albums like Ringworm Interiors.

(By the way, even the title is absurd. A ringworm isn’t actually a worm. It’s a contagious skin infection, usually shaped like a ring and that mostly effects animals. Dogs and cats from animal shelters sometimes have a touch of it.)

At the time, this album was considered well off the main road and out in the wilderness where Nightwalker live. It had the stench of the “inaccessible”. If you were into Pollard as Lennon, McCartney and Townsend all rolled into one, this is not what you wanted.

Me though, I was craaaaaazy about it right away. God, I loved it. It wasn’t just great; it was necessary.

Previous to Circus Devils, The Fading Captain Series was good stuff, but it was also guitar, bass and drums forever and ever. Pollard’s collaborators were mostly either well-established in Guided by Voices or were formerly in the band, people we’d heard before. That’s not to say there wasn’t plenty of diversity. Pollard put a lot of care into seeing each release was distinct from the others. No two Fading Captain LPs at this time sounded just alike, which is remarkable. Even the two albums made by the same band–Kid Marine and Choreographed Man of War–sounded different from each other and brought very different moods.

The Fading Captain Series was running at advanced levels of inspiration and Ringworm Interiors–#15 in the catalog–kept it going with the label’s first record that had the power to shock. The Tobias brothers’ music not only sounded like nothing that Pollard had ever worked with before, but it sounded like nothing that anyone expected from him–and it was NEW, not lo-fi tapes from a decade ago.

Ringworm Interiors was the music equivalent to the dream sequence early on in Twin Peaks. You know, the scene in the red room where the detective encounters the dead girl and a dancing dwarf who speaks backwards in non-sequiturs that turn out to be clues. It was risky and it came out of nowhere and it didn’t make rational sense, but it also opened up the possibilities. The creators were embracing a new kind of freedom and even if it confused or annoyed the audience, there was no predicting what was going to happen next–and you either appreciated that or not.

Pollard’s records got just a little stranger after Circus Devils. We’ll get into that later.

As I write this, Ringworm Interiors is nearly twenty years old and it’s aged extraordinarily well. I’d even call it ageless. Its noise is of a personal brand and not a response to any trends of the time. It could have come out twenty years later or twenty years before and been just as dangerous.

Whether or not it’s still “shocking”, it’s hard for a rough old duck like me to say. I’ve lived with it for awhile. What this album has never lost for me over the years though is its sense of adventure. There’s not a single moment from its long tracklist that I would remove or consider filler, not even the instrumentals that sound like cats fighting.

All of it contributes to an album where anything can happen.

Future Circus Devils records would drift into many different moods and sounds, so much so that they, in time, became a project without a simple defined sound. Rather, their signature was that anything could happen on their records. A strange turn was always coming. If their next album was made entirely with brass instruments (okay, they never went that far, but they could have), I wouldn’t have flinched.

By extension, this meant that in Pollard’s larger body of work anything could happen. He was into bizarre turns. He had little interest in the middle of the road. He wanted to swerve side to side and take the occasional mysterious exit.

Any real rock ‘n’ roller likes noise and weirdness. This has been true ever since “Rocket 88” back in the early 50s, the first rock song, some say, which was recorded with a damaged bass amp that was barely holding together. Every great rock record has at least a whiff of chaos. Maybe it just starts from there and moves on or maybe it hangs out there all day. There’s more than one way to approach it. There are a million ways to approach it.

Circus Devils rip open the portal to yet another open road.

Let’s ride.