Circus Devils
The Harold Pig Memorial
2002, The Fading Captain Series
Night. Stars shine and shadows crawl over the fresh grave of Harold Pig. The other bikers who knew him gather and talk. Stories about dangerous days and deadly nights fill the air like exhaust fumes. Some of those stories might even be true.
Harold Pig is an abstract presence here, a collage of stitched-together skin and mismatched eyes and limbs belonging to Sonny Barger and Peter Fonda and the hairy Hell’s Angels goons at Altamont, as seen in the great Rolling Stones concert documentary Gimme Shelter. He’s the loser and outlaw that defines the classic vision of the freedom-loving icon on two wheels.
Some say that the world is better off without him, but Robert Pollard refuses to keep it that simple. He had an idea for a story about a dead biker. His wrote a batch of songs that circled around it and approached it from the weirdest angles. Like most good rock concept albums, The Harold Pig Memorial is flummoxing. It doesn’t have a plot, but it does have a mood.
Roll me a fat joint at 2 AM and give me a lighter and turn off everything except for the stereo and I might be able to connect some dots between tracks such as “Dirty World News” and “Exoskeleton Motorcade”, but I don’t have those things now.
I turned 45 last week (Pollard’s age when this album came out on Halloween, his birthday, in 2002) and all I have is this old body and some sparkling water and The Harold Pig Memorial sounds to me like an album about saying goodbye.
By your mid-40s, you’ve said goodbye to so many things.
Movie theaters that I used to love back in the 90s. Record stores, Video stores. Bookstores. Restaurants. Weird businesses like the 24-hour donut shop that I used to stop by in the AM hours while coming down from a night of live music and this one store in Dallas that sold nothing but movie posters.
Pretty much all of the places that impressed me and meant something to me once upon a time are now gone.
And they’re never replaced by anything equally cool. They’re all corporate yogurt shops now or nail salons or fucking parking lots for sparkling new office buildings.
On The Harold Pig Memorial, Robert Pollard reaches back to a curious thing from his own youth. He was born in 1957, which puts him at the perfect age to remember when biker gangs scared the shit out of regular people. They were the boogeymen of a previous time. Bikers, so the story went, were all impulsive thrill-seekers on Harleys with screaming motors and if enough of them gathered in your town, all hell was sure to break loose. You were lucky to be alive the next day.
This fear inspired a vast wave of great, sleazy drive-in movies such as Satan’s Sadists and Hell’s Bloody Devils.
It also inspired deconstructionist works such as Hunter S. Thompson’s landmark book about the time he spent hanging out with The Hell’s Angels and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, a pessimistic biker art film (and a huge hit in its time).
The Harold Pig Memorial is in line with that stuff, but thirty-five years later when all that a motorcycle means is that a dude with money has a hobby. He likes to feel the wind when he drives home from his job as Executive Director of Marketing.
The counterculture biker of old is now dead and gone and this album is his funeral. No one else was talking about the demise of the motorcycle rebel so maybe Robert Pollard felt that it was up to him.
Nostalgia takes you to weird places sometimes.
For the second Circus Devils album, Todd and Tim Tobias wisely didn’t try to top the evil, manic horror show of Ringworm Interiors. That’s my favorite record of 2001 because I love how the music sounds like a twisted film score and I love how it’s so different from anything that Robert Pollard had worked with previously.
But after you’ve taken us to Hell maybe the most interesting place to go next is back to Earth. Guitar, bass, drums, piano. Sound like a regular rock band. They even stretch past three minutes twice, which is one time more than the previous album.
Weirdness still rules. Circus Devils have a metal plate in their head and it’s always picking up strange radio signals. There is still noise here, as well as odd musical turns, but this time you can usually tell what’s making that sound. You can hear picks hit strings and fingers tap keys.
The mood here is an American brand of scary. John Carpenter. Wind blowing over jack-o-lanterns. Autumn leaves scraping against pavement. The old house on the block with the overgrown lawn and the peeled paint and that the kids are afraid to go near.
Happy Halloween.
The songs here all fucked up and I mean that in the best way. Many of them are structureless blurts. Others open with a verse, leap into what sounds like it’s a chorus and then end right there. Through melody and mystery though, Pollard gets away with that.
There are three “hits” here, I’d say, and they all sound different from each other.
The classic punk of “Bull Spears”, with its uptempo drive and memorably aggressive bass, became a Guided by Voices live staple back in the day.
The friendly breeze of “Soldiers of June” (despite lines such as “How proud was he of his favorite fighting son?/ Taught him to eat, drink, fuck and hold his gun”) is another one that won over some of those who didn’t like the first Circus Devils album.
Meanwhile, blistering side two opener “Last Punk Standing” sets up an anthem and Pollard is ready for it in full Pete Townsend mode.
The rocker “I Guess I Needed That” hints that Harold died of natural causes (“In May, an X-ray/ In June, a sample/ Took 1/4th of July/ For me to die”). “A Birdcage Until Further Notice” suggests that he did some time behind bars. “Festival of Death” gives Harold’s afterlife thoughts.
Meanwhile, I have real affection for the few tracks on which Pollard just talks from his notebook, poetry style, and gives us lines such as “A clown suit moon/ Brings tobacco and vampire”. Sometimes that’s all that a singer can do with this crazy music that drones and hisses with the same facility that it rocks and sways.
Robert Pollard puts out so many records that it starts to come off like it’s easy for him. Part of the kick of his work with Circus Devils is that it sounds like it was a challenge. Even as Circus Devils got more “normal” there continued to be moments of clang and clatter and UFO bleeps.
I love hearing Pollard deal with that stuff.
A man in his 40s needs to stretch out like that. It keeps you limber.
It keeps you alive, even when you’re singing about death.
(Willem Dafoe as Norman Osbourne meme) “You know, Jason, I’m a bit of a Biker Scum enthusiast, myself!”
Great writeup as always. (BTW, it says “the first Circud Devils album” in the paragraph about Soldiers of June.)
FIXED. Thank you for both the compliment and the typo-spotting.