Richard Meltzer, Robert Pollard, Smegma & Antler
The Tropic of Nipples EP
2002, Off Records
There’s a charm to music that doesn’t care about being liked. Music that farts right in your face and doesn’t even say “excuse me”.
You can criticize it for being tuneless, I guess, but what does that mean if it doesn’t seek to be tuneful? You can call it trash, but how sharp is your blade when the music is happy to be damaged? You can say that it’s an insult, but how many megatons is your bomb when these sounds are intended to be an affront?
Tropic of Nipples is one of those records. It’s one of those outsider things. It’s proudly ugly, pointedly disheveled and wantonly fucked. A negative review is as much of a recommendation as a positive one. Its twelve tracks (it’s a stretch to call most of them songs) all crammed up on the original 7″ come and go too quickly to enjoy much on their own. They’re parts of a whole, individual scribbles of graffiti on the same brick wall.
Our two vandals are Richard Meltzer and Robert Pollard.
This isn’t really a Robert Pollard record. He’s the co-star. The title is Meltzer’s. Meltzer also gets the first and last tracks on the original release.
Pollard contributes cover art and six tracks (plus two more on the CD), but the real auteur here looks to be Off Records founder Chris Slusarenko.
I’ll let him explain in an interview from way back for a webzine called Only Angels Have Wings, copied and pasted in glorious original all-caps:
JUST FINISHED PUTTING TOGETHER A LIMITED 7″ EP WITH ROBERT POLLARD (GUIDED BY VOICES) AND RICHARD MELTZER (LEGENDARY ROCK CRIT AND LYRICIST FOR BLUE OYSTER CULT!!) CALLED THE TROPIC OF NIPPLES. I JUST ASKED IF THEY WANTED TO WORK ON SOMETHING TOGETHER SINCE THEY ADMIRED EACH OTHERS WORK SO MUCH AND THEN I CUT AND SPLICED AND FUCKED WITH THE WHOLE THING.
Slusarenko’s approach is to sequence these tracks as sort of a duel of poets. Both men have their way with words and they take turns at the mic.
Meltzer is a cranky, tortured bohemian who chronicles a world of shit (“You’re born alone, you die alone, you pull into a truck stop in Gallup alone where every trucker looks like the devil”). Pollard is a curious product of the psychedelic era and Midwestern beer-and-sports-and-sex regular guy stuff, but who finds the craziest fucking colors in it all (“Throat mirror magic show/ lost in the brain of ‘all grown up’/ fiery synapses around dome & globe/ made her bound in metal/ and wounded pregnancy”).
Meltzer is backed by the whirs, drones, crashes and queasy jazz of Smegma. Meanwhile, Pollard is accompanied by “Antler”, which is one of the many fake band names from Suitcase. Much of “Antler” could pass for past GBV basement tapes–the likes of Mitch Mitchell and Steve Wilbur are thanked in the credits, so I assume that they make cameos here–but then “Ovarian Angel Architect” (Pollard’s intro) is built on loops, which isn’t something that old GBV tended to do. Mysterious!
In Meltzer’s contributions, the words take center stage while Pollard goes for songs, but on a caveman level. Any hint of craft is not welcome here. In the Tropic of Nipples, you shoot from the gut. (That said, I really like Pollard’s quick and dreamy “All For Sex and Better Whiskey”.)
Meltzer and Pollard can both hang with that sorta thing.
Every time I read Richard Meltzer, I always imagine a grizzled guy with an eyepatch and a tattered raincoat and a hook for a hand and a liver condition. He doesn’t look like that, but that’s what I see–and I mean that in a good way. I like that image. The weathered poet. He’s a rock critic from the very oldest school of it–he’s been wrapping his words around rock ‘n’ roll since the 1960s–but he writes like he’s disgusted by the very idea. You don’t read Richard Meltzer for tips on what’s hot in the racks this week; you read Richard Meltzer for… Richard Meltzer and whatever stories and character assassinations he plucks out of the air around the thing that he’s writing about.
(A good intro to Meltzer that you can find on the internet is his article “Vinyl Reckoning”, published in The Chicago Reader in July 1999. It’s about his memories of vinyl records as written in a digital world, with plenty of off-road excursions in the telling.)
The expanded CD (titled The Completed Soundtrack for the Tropic of Nipples) that came out a few months after the 7″ further makes this more of a Meltzer thing. Along with two more unfriendly oddities each from Pollard and Smegma are five tracks from Meltzer’s 70s Los Angeles trash band Vom rudely thrown into this affair like a corpse in the trunk.
Vom are classic, in-your-face, fast/loud, break-some-windows punk. Works for me. Vom songs such as “Electrocute Your Cock” and “I’m In Love With Your Mom” live up to their titles.
What I like about this record is how it presents Pollard as a natural part of a noise-rock lineage. Pollard’s peers are the poets and crazies. Yes, classic pop and rock songwriters inform his work, but so does a lifetime of digging through the bins so deep that one eventually burrows underground.
Like me, Chris Slusarenko seems to really like that weird side of Pollard’s music. He likes the noisy, jarring stuff that some fans wish that they didn’t have to deal with. He encouraged more of it with two of Pollard’s most aggressively odd collaborations ever: Richard Meltzer and then a year later Phantom Tollbooth, a long defunct band who let Pollard go to town over their old tapes.
More on that one later.
For now, let’s breathe in this strange start to Pollard’s 2002. Guided by Voices was off the major label and he was done seeking radio hits. Lesser artists would have crumbled. Meeker visionaries would have floundered. Needier souls would have required more time to heal.
For Pollard though, everything at this point was wide open road and it was exciting. Which way to go? Which turn to take?
The cool thing about art is that you can pick more than one.
I believe Vom contains members of Angry Samoans who have a long history with Meltzer.