Robert Pollard-Mania! #65: SOME DRINKING IMPLIED

Guided by Voices
Some Drinking Implied
2001, MVD Music Video

If you’re under 40 and outside of the US, you probably won’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but back in the 1980s and up to the early 90s, there was an amazing TV show called Night Flight. It came on after midnight on Saturdays and it was three hours of weird short films, music videos and random artifacts from pop culture’s junk pile.

In one night, you might see a Public Image Ltd. interview, an episode of Dynaman, some bizarre Church of the Subgenius short, a World War II-era Daffy Duck cartoon and what felt like about five hundred other things. Whether you were staggering in from an evening out in your cool 80s clothes or a kid like me up late and learning the ways of the night owl way too young, Night Flight was the perfect hallucinatory trip-out. Turn your brain on or off. Either is fine.

It was formative. It twisted me up pretty good. Looking back, I can see what it helped turn me into, which is a culture freak who will watch anything no matter how old or strange or low-budget or tossed aside. (See this site’s film section for the damage wrought.)

It made me the kind of goofball who enjoys the wrecked spectacle of Some Drinking Implied.

Is it a documentary? No.

Is it a live concert disc? Hell no.

Is it a tidy collection of music videos? Fuck no, though there are music videos on it, exclusive to this disc, for left-field tracks such as “Particular Damaged” and “Why Did You Land?”.

Some Drinking Implied is the kind of thing that only Robert Pollard would make–because it’s a collage (“A Robert Pollard Film”, says the closing credits).

You can’t forget that Pollard is a collage artist. I’ve talked about it before and I’ll talk about it again. I’ll never stop talking about it because it’s vital to understanding what he does. He takes things that don’t belong together and then Scotch tapes them together to achieve some new effect. It’s there in his sleeve art, it’s there in his songs and it’s there on his albums where pop, prog, psych and punk–and sometimes lo-fi and hi-fi–are always working together in the service of noise, mystery, freedom and disorientation.

And it’s here, too, on this finely fucked-up DVD (originally released on VHS, with the DVD out a year later; DVDs were still new in 2001.)

In a way this is like a Suitcase. but in visual form. Pollard and his friends have an archive of video footage mostly shot on moving tape with regular-ass camcorders. Backstage moments. Live concert video shot from the crowd so that the crowd are actually the main focus. Pollard jumping on stage to sing with the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments in Dayton in 1996. A soundless Super 8 monster movie short called Wild People that Pollard appeared in as a skinny kid game for floating in a swimming pool with fake blood on his face, repurposed here as a video for Nightwalker’s “Lucifer’s Aching Revolver“. Footage from the recording of Same Place the Fly Got Smashed in which we see Pollard struggle to sing the chorus of “Pendulum”.

It’s all raw material for a new collage.

What’s interesting about Some Drinking Implied is that it’s not exactly about the music. There are live performances in it, but we usually jump into the middle of a song–and then jump out of it before it’s over. We’re not meant to get into the music. It’s all noise anyway, sometimes barely audible.

No, instead Some Drinking Implied is about the circus happening around the music. The (terrible!) audio of GBV playing Hare Arena in Ohio in early 1994, opening for The Breeders, is less important than the feeling of it. The party atmosphere backstage. The loud blur of the show.

The clip that best illustrates this is footage of GBV performing in a college library, but the camera (as wielded by Mary Lou Lord) whips away from the band–you can barely see them anyway–and instead focuses on some kids dancing like maniacs in the upstairs area to “Closer You Are” and “My Valuable Hunting Knife”. It’s funny. It’s sweet.

Back to Night Flight, one important aspect of it was that it was a late night thing. You found it while you flipped past reruns and teleevangelists. Night Flight played to an audience that looked for signs of life while the world around them slept. It hit you while your defenses were down. It slipped you some weirdness while you were half-asleep.

That’s how you watch Some Drinking Implied. You don’t put this on at 10 AM with your morning coffee. This is a midnight movie. You’ve got to get real relaxed. Shut off the lights. Have no immediate plans. Sink into your couch or your chair or whatever you’ve got and get to a place mentally where you’re up for anything. 

It’s a fun place to be. I’ve been going there for awhile.