Phantom Tollbooth
Beard of Lightning
2003, Off Records
The Off Records label run by Chris Slusarenko out of Portland, Oregon worked with Robert Pollard on two releases that were on a mission to pair him with unlikely collaborators.
As Pollard fired out multiple LPs a year made mostly with people he knew, Off sought to show us how his singular energy works with other minds and other sounds that you didn’t see coming. They’re left turns. Rock ‘n’ roll non sequiturs. Robert Pollard is perfect for this not only for his work ethic, but also because his tastes include noise and fucked-up shit. He has one of those free and freaky minds that can go left or right at any time.
The first mutant from this experiment is The Tropic of Nipples, in which Pollard and writer Richard Meltzer trade the spotlight in a noise-rock poetry slam. It’s not for everybody.
The second one is a lot closer to a “regular” rock LP, but it manages to be an even stranger idea. In fact, I don’t know if anyone before or since has made an album with anything like the process of Beard of Lightning.
Its story begins in New York City in the late 1980s.
That’s when the three guys in Phantom Tollbooth (Dave Rick, Gerard Smith and Jon Coats) make the kind of music that grows best in polluted urban climates. Their violent smear of riffs and queasy rhythms seems inspired as much by jackhammers chopping into the pavement outside your bedroom window as it does by free jazz, Captain Beefheart, and Sonic Youth.
Their second (and final) album, Power Toy, comes out in 1988 and it’s wall-to-wall tortured electricity. It’s dark. It’s mean. Its songs follow no rules. Phantom Tollbooth are one of those bands who find their sweet spot in the sound of things falling apart and going off the rails. In the midst of this, Dave Rick is sort of an anti-“frontman”. His yelps provide necessary texture, but he seems a lot more interested in his relentless guitar abuse.
It’s another killer release from Homestead Records, one of the day’s finest excavators of underground sounds.
Now flip the calendar to the middle of the next decade. That’s when Chris Slusarenko met Robert Pollard. He tells the story to Rock Town Hall:
“In the mid-90s I meet Robert Pollard for my first time after a Guided By Voices show. Doug Gillard and Ron House were also backstage and we started talking about Homestead, since they both used to be on that label. I mentioned Phantom Tollbooth and Bob starts singing “Nobody knows what we’re saying” from Phantom Tollbooth’s last album Power Toy. I tell him they are one of my favorite bands and then the night progresses into a mess of us singing bits of their songs back and forth. At one point he mutters, “I wish I had sang for Phantom Tollbooth. We would have ruled the world.”
So right there is the initial germ of Beard of Lightning.
Later in 2001, the first release from Slusarenko’s Off Records is Colonel Jeffrey Pumpernickel, a concept album with a twist. Its story is told via a compilation of exclusive tracks from an impressive variety of indie luminaries. Guided by Voices are on it and so is Dave Rick.
Connections are made, conversations are had. Next thing you know, the long-defunct Phantom Tollbooth consent to slide over their old Power Toy tapes so that Robert Pollard can lay new songs on top.
This new record would not be a transformative remix. With the exception of the vocals, nothing about Phantom Tollbooth’s work would be removed or remade. The sequence would be reshuffled. One track would be omitted, a cover of Heart’s “Barracuda”, and replaced with the A-side of Phantom Tollbooth’s first 7″. Otherwise, this new album would be the same unruly racket made during the Reagan Administration, but with Robert Pollard doing an original thing on the mic (in a mix by Daniel Rey that makes Pollard sound like he’s always been there).
“Postal rock” becomes “time travel rock” here as our man joins Phantom Tollbooth as their singer about fifteen years after they broke up.
The fuming beast of a record that results is my favorite Pollard release of 2003. It brings the same kick that I got from Ringworm Interiors in that the music sounds like nothing that he had ever worked with before.
If someone puts out five albums a year, there needs to be variety to keep us thrilled. We need surprises and strange twists. Five albums a year is only interesting if the artist challenges themselves and us along the way. Arguments may rage among fans, but that’s healthy. Some listeners want the same thing all of the time, but blasts of fresh air like this were my favorites when they came out and they still are twenty years later.
This music is crazy, but it also rocks. Phantom Tollbooth crash into brick walls at 100 mph at one moment and then brood like cave bats in the next. They don’t just play like this is their last record, but like it’s the last record that anyone will ever make. When it’s over, rock ‘n’ roll is dead. Again. For now.
An unconfident frontman couldn’t survive this. Predictable songs or cliche lyrics would also wilt in this music’s presence. Only the boldest and weirdest hearts can hang with this heat.
And Pollard’s got the stuff.
The original Power Toy feels very art-punk bohemian. In its surgical tempo shifts and controlled noise is a very urban mood. It’s a great 80s New York City album. Each track is another walk around a dangerous block.
Robert Pollard manages to hear the prog in it. He hooks into this music’s ambition and goes wild with words. The second track “Atom Bomb Professor” may be his longest ever set of lyrics. In its six minutes and over some of the band’s fastest, most abrasive moments, Pollard works out a song with two different choruses, one of which is a direct lift from Power Toy (“In this stream of consciousness playing/ Nobody knows what we’re saying”–the same part that Chris Slusarenko mentioned him being hooked on when they met) and another that resembles nothing from the original. I guess that it’s about the atom bomb and maybe a meditation on what happens when science goes wrong. Or not. Pollard covers his epic in shadows and lines such as “The horror gift shop silhouettes/ Pulls a nail with false teeth”.
The album’s other epic, the eight-minute “Crocodile to the Crown”, is slotted in the second half. We are deep into the dream here and when he we hear Pollard bellow about “The chain yankers of the puppet dance/ Frozen with their chemical erections”, we believe him because all that really matters is his power and presence as he rides Phantom Tollbooth’s aural warzone of uneasy calm and sudden violence.
Other highlights include “Iceland Continuations”, a portrait of a relationship on the skids as told in crazy images that refuse to rest on cliches (“This house is built on lack of trust/ And its doors are hymen-thin”) and the magnificently stuttering “The Cafe Interior”. Then there’s “Gratification to Concrete” (a completely different song from a later Pollard solo album track of the same name) in which Pollard gets in some great garage-rock shouts at the end of another weird melody.
If you’re looking for “hits” for your mixtape, I hear three.
Opening track “Mascara Snakes”, set to the powerful music of “Valley of the Gwangi”, Phantom Tollbooth’s 1986 single, is the most anthemic song ever to explicitly nod to Captain Beefheart (boldly, in its title). It’s big and strange and sets you up for an epic. Guided by Voices played this live a lot in 2003 and 04, Doug Gillard mightily interpreting its spastic guitar lines.
For a relatively quiet moment, see “A Good Looking Death”. Dave Rick’s fast acoustic guitar carries the music and Pollard finds a haunting 60s melody in it. My interpretion of the lyrics is that they’re a demented parody of daytime TV commercials for the elderly and sedentary. Arthritis relief. Cosmetic procedures. Retirement planning. Look good and be taken care of in your winter years. Each product and service is a different play in a rock-paper-scissors game of how to “fake a good looking death”. That’s dark, but this music tolerates no sentimentality.
Side two opener “Capricorn’s Paycheck” flexes some strong heavy groove rock muscles, On the original Power Toy, it’s side 1, track 1 (“Extinction Plus”) and it’s got the swagger of an intro. Pollard’s words are a dark room that I’m still feeling my around all these years later, but he seems to be tearing someone (or something) down. The line “Can micro-analyze anyone/ That’s why he functions in small time” has always stuck with me.
From what I’ve read, the original Phantom Tollbooth approved of this strange remake. They even reunited and opened for Guided by Voices for a one-off gig shortly afterward.
From other things I’ve read, some admirers of the original Power Toy don’t care for it. Matador Records top man Gerard Cosloy (who has roots in Homestead Records) was going to write liner notes for Beard of Lightning and then bowed out when he didn’t like the album.
ME though, in 2003, I had yet to run into Phantom Tollbooth in the bins and so this music was all new to me and it was GREAT. I eventually collected more Phantom Tollbooth records and this band’s out-of-print music lived on for one Texas boy.
Robert Pollard turned me on to another band, just like he did with Genesis.
What most impresses me when I play this album almost nineteen years after I first heard it is what a bizarre talent it takes to write new (good) songs over familiar music. How do you even begin to do that? If Led Zeppelin yanked Robert Plant off of Houses of the Holy could Robert Pollard throw cool original songs on top? I’d be curious.
It’s a very weird thing to do.
Maybe the great triumph of Beard of Lightning is that it lives up to that weirdness.
Jason Loewenstein called this album “sacrilege”.