Robert Pollard
Motel of Fools
2003, The Fading Captain Series
By 2003, it was clear that Robert Pollard had no interest in listening to his critics.
Those who couldn’t keep up with his 4-5 albums a year were just going to have to catch up later maybe.
Those who didn’t know what to make of projects such as Circus Devils were just going to have to remain confused.
Those who wanted only pop from Pollard and had no ear for his weird, personal Midwestern psychedelia were just going to have to miss out.
In the meantime, he continued to move forward, like any real artist would do, and make strange and wonderful things like Motel of Fools.
As Guided by Voices settled into a sound–a muscled classic rock kick made for the stage–Pollard’s other projects became the place where he did his searching. Much like how early Guided by Voices albums were always different from each other, Pollard solo releases at this time always took a turn that the previous ones didn’t.
Motel of Fools went for home-brewed, shoestring prog-rock. It has only seven tracks, which is normal for prog records, but this one blazes through ’em in just over thirty minutes. It’s modest and ambitious at the same time. It’s also weird and funny and another melodic marvel.
I love the grandiose titles.
“In the House of Queen Charles Augustus” is great. Queen Charles Augustus? I have no idea what inspired that name, but it sounds like a beer-drunk Ohioan’s attempt to recall members of the British royal family. It opens the album with a lo-fi acapella section that jump-cuts into a dreamy dragon-slayer that sounds like Genesis laying down a demo.
“Red Ink Superman” sounds big, too, and it IS big. Like a few of these songs, it has an extended intro. This time, it’s a sample from Greg Demos’s old band 3 Dream Bag very simply slowed down until it sounds like some kind of dark incantation. When the song itself starts up, it’s an apocalyptic tension-builder, a march to battle, that ends with repeated shouts of “We’ll even the score in World War IV!”. Meanwhile, the Red Ink Superman sounds badass, but is he enough to save us after we lost World War III? Guided by Voices used to play this one live.
“The Vault of Moons” is another BIG title, though the song itself is a modest acid ballad with samples and effects flown-in like UFOs.
“Saga of the Elk” is my sleeper favorite. It has “saga” in the title. That sounds pretty big, but the song is a seething winter animal, slow and concentrating and with non-rhyming verses that negotiate themselves into a quietly beautiful melody. (Sample lines: “Ride out on an instant railroad/ With blackness borne in strength/ Removed its arm/ Stained at calvary/ Racehorse and deadness”).
Then there’s “The Spanish Hammer”, a nearly seven-minute suite of clashing parts, slotted near the end to let you know that supper’s ready. Its four sections feel like different angles on an absurd dream.
And I haven’t even talked yet about the two loveliest songs here.
Track two, “Captain Black” takes us gently by the hand to lead us into this weird world with a slow, torchy song that I think is about death. Captain Black. He’s coming for us. I think about him everyday.
Motel Fools closes on a high note. “Harrison Adams” is one of those pop songs that’s plucked from heaven. It, too, has an extended intro (and outro). This time it’s one of Pollard’s drinking buddies being a loudmouth while a tape recorder runs, making everyone laugh though we have no idea what he’s talking about. Like all of these intros here, it’s a sideways homage to classic prog-rock presentation.
Then the song kicks in and it’s an all-timer. John Lennon forgot to write this heartbreaker while he was growing out his beard in the late 1960s, but Pollard caught it. If you didn’t like what came before, “Harrison Adams” explicitly apologizes to you with its of chorus “You aren’t happy with me/ And I know it”.
Robert Pollard was in a prog-rock mood in the early 2000s.
In 2001, after completing Isolation Drills, he talked in interviews about wanting to take Guided by Voices into a prog direction afterward.
The much fussed-over Universal Truths and Cycles brought a strong whiff of that and I think that Pollard is proud of its nineteen-song craziness, but I wouldn’t call it a prog record.
So, Pollard proceeded to scratch that itch over a batch of independent records that each took a different angle on prog.
The Harold Pig Memorial is a concept album.
Motel of Fools is an attempt to go prog with his buddies in Ohio (with some guest spots on “The Spanish Hammer” from Chris Slusarenko and out-there noisehead fan Rat Bastard) and himself on most of the guitar work. He goes for mystique on a budget. He dangles the stars and the moon from strings. Isn’t that the spirit of Guided by Voices?
His next two albums would approach prog-rock yet again, but in different ways. More on that later.
In closing, I just have to say that when this album came out in the winter of 2003, I worked a graveyard shift job at the time in a lonely small town office park and I played this on a cassette (dubbed off the vinyl) every night when Coast to Coast AM got a little dull.
Bob Pollard’s weirdness here competes very well with 2 AM discussions about UFOs and shadow people while cold weather rages outside.
All of these years later, I still think that Motel of Fools is the strangest solo record. It’s wasted and wintry. It’s beautiful and fractured in fifteen places. One of its hallmarks, I think, is that it’s full of overdubs that don’t care to hide the fact that they’re overdubs. Odd sounds threaten to invade every song at any time. They’re the audio equivalent to the visible Scotch tape in Pollard’s collage art. They reveal the artifice of it all.
No matter how professional and powerful Guided by Voices get, Robert Pollard will always relate to being an Ohio outsider making music on cheap cassettes and dreaming big dreams.