Robert Pollard-Mania! #82: EARTHQUAKE GLUE

Guided by Voices
Earthquake Glue
2003, Matador Records

The back cover sums up Earthquake Glue for me.

On the surface, it’s a reluctant “band photo” for a group who prefer to not bother with those things on their records, but there’s more to it.

It’s a photo by Ana Luisa Morales in which the band are featureless stick figures far from the camera. What looks like a church-based charity storefront takes up much more space. An antique shop and a bingo hall sit under a sign that says “Horizon of Hope”. What we see of the parking lot is empty. The place is closed. Added color, drizzled on with the grace of blood stains, gives the impression on first glance that this is the middle of a desert. It looks like a dreamy nowhere.

It’s an image that says Why are we here?

Robert Pollard’s front cover collage has a similar effect, but the back cover is more blunt about it. It’s perfect for an album in which a band wrestles with their place in the universe.

2003 was part of the paranoid beginning of an even stranger century to come. The USA was at war with Iraq. The economy was sputtering. According to some popular wisdom, there was at least a 23.7% chance that your neighbor was a terrorist.

In other news, rock ‘n’ roll was also dead. Again.

You could still turn on FM radio and hear power chords, sure. There was a “garage rock revival” that happened for about fifteen minutes. There were still bands making worthy racket. As always, if you don’t think that there’s any good new music, you’re just bad at finding it.

Rock music though was finished as a force in the culture. The old days were gone. There was no one to blame for it. Something in the wind and water changed and no one turned to rock bands anymore to find their feelings about what was happening now.

Robert Pollard, then 45 years old, remembered a time though when people did. He remembered record stores everywhere. He came up in the days when fans pored over song lyrics and gatefold sleeve art and speculated about the deeper message. He knew times when rock music defined eras.

You could say that he was just getting old, but can you blame a person for noticing that a lot of formerly cool things are now mundane things?

Here in Dallas, my favorite old record store is now a hair salon. My favorite old arthouse movie theater is now a parking lot. Bookstores barely hang on. Places where you used to find things that might stay with you for the rest of your life get replaced by services that last no time at all. A haircut, a parking space.

That’s how the 21st century works. A lot of people are okay with that, but those of us who get attached to things can feel a little lost some days. (Robert Pollard never moved out of his hometown, which I take as a sign that he’s the type who gets attached. I recognize us right away.)

That sounds depressing, but for Pollard it was raw material to play with. Nothing stops him from writing so this change became his subject. The world is falling apart and rock music has fuck-all to say about it and no one wants that anyway. So what now?

Or why are we here? 

Real rockers are defiant. When everything sucks that means that you make MORE music, not less. You deal with it. If nothing is made to last anymore, maybe you can make something that will. Give it a try, at least.

Enter Pollard’s fourth album of 2003, Earthquake Glue. It’s another rush of pop blasts, prog tingles, psychedelic wind chimes and punk sweat and it survives the years mightily. It’s a vision laid out with clarity by a hard-touring, well-excercised band who could probably read each others’ minds at this point. It doesn’t fade away. Nineteen years later, it talks to me clearer than ever.

One of the most rewarding things about Pollard’s songs is that they age with you. When I first heard Earthquake Glue, I was 26 and I liked this fine back then. It was a “solid slab” with “catchy hooks”.

Now I’m 45 and I hear the weight of it as a work that reflects being middle-aged in a world that moves faster than it ever has before. The useless inventions are piling up (tomorrow’s obselete junk brought to you today) and someone wants to replace you with machines.

The key song here is “A Trophy Mule in Particular”. It’s a little over two minutes long, but its screwy structure and prog sense of drama make it feel like a weird epic. It sits square in the middle of the LP’s beautiful and mostly mid-tempo second side. When Pollard sings “I wince when you map out/ How to get it together/ And collect my troubles/ And brave the weather”, he comes off like he understands why no one looks to rock bands for wisdom in 2003. About a minute later, he addresses “the stock market tumbling/ And the rock market crumbling”, but he also calls this “a challenge/ One to go forth and celebrate”.

Pollard always finds the light. He didn’t come up from years of obscurity just to tell us that we’re doomed. He moves forward and engages with life and he’s always revealing the secret to how he does it.

Keep going. Keep doing the work. Don’t need to please everyone. Be out of fashion. Be a soldier for your work. Sleep in the rain, march in the cold. Make music for ten years with nobody listening. That’s how it goes sometimes. You’ll be stronger for it in time.

Another one here that speaks to me is “My Son, My Secretary, My Country”. It was the album’s original opener before it got bumped to second base in favor of “My Kind of Soldier“. The former begins with horns that sound straight from a funeral and then Pollard sings with rock star presence “With your mission wilting/ And your kids sulking/ Happy birthday, Mr. Sink/ Throw your flowers in the river and drink”. Plans aren’t working out and you’re getting older. Shit. Been there.

Afterward, a batch of pop songs crash into each other to ease the pain. Modern Guided by Voices already made a sad album two years ago. They’re not ready to do that again. Earthquake Glue applies sunlight and melody to middle-aged angst. The whole first side puts up serious competion with The Who Sell Out.

In “I’ll Replace You With Machines”, humans aren’t working out so well for our narrator. Maybe machines will be better. Or maybe not. The song doesn’t dwell on the matter. It’s a launching pad for some expert psych-pop. A “what the hell is that?” percussive loop (something from the files of oddball producer Todd Tobias, I suspect) weirds it up a little.

“She Goes Off at Night” is a pop song with the weight of a feather, even with its powerful freakbeat drive. It sets up the perfectly gooey stadium swooner “Beat Your Wings”, which is loaded with motivational words and a dextrous Doug Gillard solo that leaps up to us from the paisley era. It’s corny, but it works. I wonder if it’s an attempt to do “Hold on Hope” right. The band never played it live. It said its piece on the record.

“Useless Inventions” is almost too obvious, but it’s necessary. You can’t sing about the 21st century blues without addressing technology. This song goes for it with zero pretension. It keeps this beach ball bouncing.

We need something loose and groovy after all of that energy, which is where “Dirty Water” comes in. Light up your joint for it and then slide into the album’s luscious second single, “The Best of Jill Hives”. Bliss out to the pretty colors.

And that’s side 1.

On side 2, a 70s art-rock mood takes over. RIffs get more jagged and stuttering. Synthesizers take us in cosmic directions. Melody still rules, but verse-chorus-verse slips away as the songs get more free and strange. Little on side 1 would blend in well on the second half.

The bright sun that rose to “My Kind of Soldier” goes down to the tune of “Dead Cloud”. Gillard’s agile lead guitar provides thunder for Pollard’s mystical sermon from a mountaintop. It’s song that builds up to its own curious trance and the follow-up, “Mix Up the Satellite”, sounds like a breakthrough into a new state of being. We went from a cloud to a satellite. We’re way up in the air floating on Todd Tobias’s synthscapes. Earthly concerns mean little.

“The Main Street Wizards” keeps us in the stratosphere, in a way. It’s about live rock music as an ageless experience.

Guided by Voices shows at this time were parties. They played for at least two hours, sometimes three. You left sweaty and exhausted and with about forty songs all stuck in your head at the same time. The band were touring beasts who remained a top draw on the club circuit. Packed rooms. A line at the door before showtime. To see Pollard swing his mic live in front of you and to be among a crowd that sings along with “I Am a Scientist” were essential experiences for many.

At a rock show, something that feels dead the rest of the day reveals itself as very much alive for a few hours. For this moment at least, the year no longer matters. A band, a stage, and an audience is a timeless combination. It could be 2003 or 1973 in that room. The music isn’t wallpaper there. People are excited about it. They’re looking for something (“Can you explain the wrath/ Of everyone’s holy path?”) and when they’ve had a good time that means that they found it. Or they found something even better.

The Main Street Wizards are a band. They’re Guided by Voices. They’re any band that a crowd loves. The Main Street Wizards are the old thing that you miss and the new thing that hooks you. They come to you and then they go away. They’re coming back, though. This song promises that.

“A Trophy Mule in Particular” wakes us up from the fantasy, but still finds triumph. While he’s got some bravado going, Pollard takes a shot at his critics with “Apology in Advance”. The crowd may go crazy for The Main Street Wizards, but there’s always someone around who thinks that they put out too many records. Or that they drink too much on stage. Or that they never should have stopped recording albums in a basement. Or that they’re too old.

Venom turns to beauty for the LP’s climax. “Secret Star” is in a prog rock mood. In just under five minutes the band nimbly carry us through three movements. It begins with a stately march, slips into a quiet dream in the middle and then charges forth with power chords ablaze for the closer.

I think it’s a song about searching and I think it ends with death. Maybe we’re not dead, but the thing that we’re searching for might be. Is that really the end, though? Can an idea die? Can a dream die? Is it alive in our memories? Is it alive when we talk about it? And are our memories accurate? Do we maybe miss something that wasn’t that great? Or maybe it was great and we just didn’t appreciate it?

The closing lines hit hard.

To wish for you to fall
To wish for you to burn
To wish for your return

“Secret Star” plays like an ending, but something in Pollard’s brain and bloodstream looks to thwart the obvious finale. He needs to throw in one more song. An epilogue. Pollard has explained that he likes his albums to end on an effect akin to the closing credits of a movie. On Earthquake Glue that job goes to “Of Mites and Men”,  a nicely tossed-off little rocker.

I think it’s about moving. Finding a home. Finding a place with a good bathroom (“The harvest of every man/ Is in the can”). That’s the Pollard way to conclude a mostly ethereal stretch of songs. Yank us back down to Earth. Names scrolling down a screen.

Now the album is over and if you’re listening to a new GBV record right you’re thinking about the sleeve art at the same time. The front, the back, what’s inside. That’s important to Pollard. He takes total control over it (the TVT albums aside).

Look at the sleeve again. Why are we here?

It’s not an open-ended question. I think that Earthquake Glue answers it.

The world changes. It’s going to keep changing. The world will slide out from under you if you turn your back on it for five minutes.

However, anyone who flips through record bins and digs stuff from the past knows that good music is never made solely for its time. It’s also made for the future. People will find it in 2050 and hopefully enjoy it. George Jetson might be a Guided by Voices fan. At the very least, someone who hears it at age 26 might hear it differently at age 45.

Fifteen great songs don’t need rock music to matter anymore. Fifteen great songs can last a long time. Fifteen great songs can outlive us all.

So you don’t give up. You keep making records while you have the energy to do it. The bins of the future are going to need you.