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.
In Closer You Are, biographer Matthew Cutter quotes Pollard talking about the old days: “The most interesting, spontaneously creative, and psychotic, moronic thing we did, we labeled Acid Ranch.”
So it seems that they had the band name at the time.
What they didn’t have was any notion or ambition that this music would ever be heard by anyone. It was all barks at the moon. Unfiltered, unselfconscious. Plug in the cables, pick up the lyric notebook, press “record” and then go. It was music made for its own sake, made just to drink in the lifeforce of making music.
It’s what anyone who seeks to develop their creativity should do. Just start. It doesn’t matter if it’s bad. When you’re bouncing new ideas against the wall, it’s none of your business even if they’re bad. No one else has to see any of it. Hide it. Lock it away. It’s just for you. Get enough bad ideas out of your system and maybe you’ll eventually find a good one. When finding and honing a vision, you should be free and generous in your own world with your badness. It’s good for you.
Don’t be uptight, in other words. Be like a 5-year-old who’s just been handed a crayon and a blank piece of paper.
Be like Acid Ranch.
That said, Acid Ranch are a lot of fun. Their inspirations are the weird side of rock. They bring drugs, drones and mostly drumless wandering. In a time when new wave and jangle were all the rage, Acid Ranch were on a hippie trip. It’s all 1968 San Francisco up in here. Psychedelia is Acid Ranch’s guiding star as they tumble about. It’s what frees them to get wild with everything from five minutes of speak-sing poetry to fiery garage rock to soft ballads to an instrumental made with only drums and a squeak toy.
I’ve argued in this space before that Guided by Voices are a psychedelic band more than anything else and Acid Ranch supports that. Bee Thousand is still far away, but you can hear that future vision ferment in these early freakouts.
Another Guided by Voices ingredient here is a curious ambition. Acid Ranch are just three guys in a basement with only modest tools and modest skills to work with, but they play like they’re imagining a lot more sound happening around them. They’ve got organs, effects and lysergic guitar solos blasting loudly not on the tape, but in their heads. You can feel it. It’s very charming.
They’re Jefferson Paper Airplane. Far out, man.
As for Robert Pollard, he was just plain nuts back then. He was crazy about words. He writes long, wild beat poet lyrics (faithfully transcribed in the large-sized LP insert) and sings in styles that he would eventually drop, such as sudden garage rock shouts and attempts at falsetto that may irritate your pets. Pollard here gropes toward sounding like a “real” singer with highs and lows, shouts and whispers, growls and croons. If his voice cracks more than a vase dropped down a flight of stairs, so what? In the spirit of Acid Ranch, he’s trying. He’s working on it. He hadn’t yet found his mature, Peter Gabriel approach to vocals in which he achieves power and personality without reaching for an expansive range. He’ll never be Van Morrison, but as the singer for Guided by Voices, he’ll do.
Along the way, Pollard lays down ideas that would turn up in later songs. There are so many that I won’t attempt to catalog them all–and it’s fun to find them on your own anyway–but two examples of this that come to mind instantly are the foreshadow of “Cut-Out Witch” in “Edison’s Memos” (a song unrelated to “Edison’s Memos” on Choreographed Man of War) and “Morning Has Broken”, a melody that evolved thirty years later into “Dunkirk is Frozen” for Pollard’s Boston Spaceships project.
As for highlights… Yeesh, where does a boy start?
The beginning sounds good. Opening track “The Theory of Broken Circles” tells us a lot about what’s coming. It’s not just the barebones music of only a pensive guitar and maybe a bass lurking in the back. It’s not just how Pollard speaks, bellows and whines at the mic. It’s also not just that the track is more a poem than a song and that it goes on for over five minutes.
No, what interests me most here is its attitude and message. It’s about persecuted freaks, rebels and prophets and how history repeats. It begins with Jesus Christ and ends with rock music, with a bizarre bit of JFK assassination conspiracy in between. “If you’re into rock ‘n’ roll/ You’ve got to sell your soul/ To the theory of broken circles”. Rock ‘n’ roll is a religion, but it’s also dangerous, and when you accept it, you’re doomed–and this song says that’s COOL.
It’s a perfect opener because it’s gloriously dated. No one writes about rock music like that anymore, in such heavy terms.
The weirdos of Acid Ranch did, though. If you think that they suck, that’s your problem. They sold their souls to suck like this and that’s fine with them.
Best rocker: “Exploratory Rat Fink Committee”. I think it’s about selling out to become some bullshit authority figure who mostly just makes peoples’ lives harder. Maybe Mr. Pollard, 4th grade teacher, wasn’t happy with the school board or something. Whatever it’s about, it’s one of Pollard angriest, most screaming and unhinged vocal performances on record, even now.
Best pretty one: “Beatles and Stones”. Maybe this five-and-a-half minute heartbreaker could use some tightening up, but if you listen to the album the right way–all in one sitting, in a comfortable place and with an open mind–it feels right. It sits toward the back of side 4 where the water in your brain has been percolating to Acid Ranch for well over an hour. At that point, what even IS “time” anymore? One minute, five minutes–who can tell the difference? I can’t. This song has a nice sway and a powerful yearning and it stands as an early example of Pollard’s ear for a ballad.
Best weird one: “Daily Planet”. Superman is dead and Pollard wrote a little audio play about it in “song” form (he sounds like he’s making up the melodies on the spot). He performs as multiple characters, sometimes in crazy voices, and accompanied only by trilling feedback. It’s eerie and campy at the same time. I’m comfortable calling it psychedelic.
In conclusion, people who like his records often wonder how Robert Pollard does what he does. Three to five albums a year? How does he put out so much music? Where do all of these songs come from? Did he get hit on the head? Does he write songs everyday? If I drink enough Miller Lite, can I do it, too? What’s the trick?
On records like this, Pollard pretty much gives away the secret, which is that he simply started and then never stopped.
He allowed himself to be bad.
He didn’t torture himself over perfection.
He didn’t get discouraged because he didn’t have an audience.
He wrote stacks of songs years before anyone outside of Dayton, Ohio knew who he was, years before even had a record pressed–and with time and trial and love (for music and for making it), he nurtured a brilliance for it.
If you can’t hear many good songs in Acid Ranch’s shadowy world, at least try to tune in to its accidental wisdom.