Month: May 2021

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #71: BACK TO THE LAKE

Guided by Voices
“Back to the Lake” b/w “Dig Through My Window”
2002, The Fading Captain Series

The least controversial music news of 2002 was that Guided by Voices were back on Matador Records.

Everyone who cared was happy about it. Everyone knew that it was better this way. The prospect of a more free and spontaneous approach from the band was a welcome thing. The world needed a Guided by Voices who were under no pressure to achieve heavy radio rotation next to Puddle of Mudd.

The hits didn’t happen, but they got through the TVT era without becoming sellout jerks, which counts as a victory to me. Dignity was intact. Inspiration was running at a high. The band seemed to hardly take a breath between labels as they got to work on what I consider one of the very best albums to carry the Guided by Voices name, Universal Truths and Cycles.

But we can’t talk about that yet.

First we have to get into the whopping FOUR 7″ singles of preview tracks, released on The Fading Captain Series, because, hey, maybe the best way to hype an album is to make a big show of confidence like that rather than… whatever the hell TVT did.

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Philip Jose Farmer’s TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO

Philip Jose Farmer
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
1971, G.P. Putnam’s Sons/ Berkley Medallion

I love Philip Jose Farmer’s imaginative, often daring, outright scandalous short stories (see “My Sister’s Brother” and “Riders of the Purple Wage”), but I’ve never gotten around to reading his popular Riverworld series of novels.

The name put me off, I think. I hate the river. There are creatures in it. I’m sick of the river. Do I want to go to a riverworld? No, I don’t.

Also, does Riverworld have anything to do with Riverdance? I hope not.

But as the pile of unread books around me expands so perhaps will my tastes, so I decided to check out Riverworld finally and this first book in the series turned out to be a perfect read for my current state of mind as a middle-aged man who worries about death all day.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #8: THE JOHN PEEL SESSION

Frank Black & Teenage Fanclub
The John Peel Session
1995, Strange Fruit

It’s a 1960s rock ‘n’ roll dance party! This fast and loud 4-song EP bridges the gap between screamin’ Frank Black and screamin’ Freddy Cannon. It burns up the dragstrip. It rips into old school sounds that Black tastefully hinted at in past moments such as his “Duke of Earl” cover for the 1993 Hello Recording Club EP and his own starry ballad “Sir Rockaby” from Teenager of the Year. It’s rough and wired with no synthesizers or UFOs anywhere.

The time was May 1994. Teenager of the Year was brand new. Black was in Europe doing promotional stuff. Like the Pixies several times before, he got invited to record a set for John Peel at the BBC, which is always cool, BUT… he didn’t have a band. He would soon have a band for the upcoming tour, but at the moment, no hay banda.

So he asked Scottish guitar pop heroes Teenage Fanclub to back him up. They said yes and everyone got together to bang out four exclusive tracks fueled by classic influences. It was a performance worth savoring enough that Peel’s own label Strange Fruit put it out on disc the following year.

The first thing you notice about it: NO Teenager of the Year songs. Not even any of the B-sides. What you get instead are two covers and two Black originals that hadn’t yet appeared anywhere else.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #70: SOME OF THE MAGIC SYRUP WAS PRESERVED

Acid Ranch
Some of the Magic Syrup Was Preserved
2002, The Fading Captain Series

No one else in rock makes more colorful use of their unreleased archives than Robert Pollard, but then most musicians don’t share his collage artist sensibility.

The vastness of it all–thousands of songs on decades’ worth of tapes–helps, too. Throw in a powerful nostalgia for his own past, the hard-earned independence that allows him to put out whatever he wants and a segment of his audience who are always up for a trip, no matter how strange, through Pollard’s famous suitcase full of old cassettes and you get Some of the Magic Syrup Was Preserved.

The conventional way to release an album like this, a double LP of lo-fi cries in the night from two decades previous, is to present it as a row of tagged and bagged corpses. Cold specimens to study for your advanced degree in Pollardology. Call it something like Guided by Voices: The Early 1980s Tapes for a straightforward approach. Or, more wisely, maybe call it Robert Pollard, Jim Pollard, and Mitch Mitchell: Archival Basement Improvisations to temper expectations for the ragged ride ahead.

It should sound useful and not confusing, right?

WRONG, Pollard says here. That shit’s boring. Art doesn’t have to be useful–what is it, a spatula?–and it’s okay if it’s confusing. His eye and ear for presentation—enigmatic sleeve art, crazy track-lists, impeccable song sequencing–won’t let him treat his old tapes like museum pieces. No, he has to put a unique band name on them. Build a mystique around them. Make a living thing out of them. Otherwise, why bother?

Enter Acid Ranch, where Pollard gives body and breath to a strange early phase of his music circa 1981-82.

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