Circus Devils
Pinball Mars
2003, The Fading Captain Series
If someone puts out five albums in a year, one of them really should be a weird, druggy rock opera.
For the third Halloween in a row, the Circus Devils brought a madness that stood out next to everything else that Robert Pollard was doing. The sounds of Todd and Tim Tobias continue to be never quite of this world. You can hear their influences, sure. Devo looms large, as always. I also detect Chrome and Alice Cooper maybe blowing around in this album’s storm. The echoes come from far away, though. The signal is distorted.
Pinball Mars paints the clearest picture yet of them as 70s hard rock kids who later got warped by punk and other 80s fringe sounds and now here they are trying different ways to make it fit together. What makes them great is that they never slide into too much respect for it all. Everything is a perversion in some way. They don’t imitate their esteemed forebears. Rather, the Tobias brothers treat their influences like a mad scientist might treat a stolen corpse. Try not to slip on the blood.
Their work inspires Pollard to get extra free and absurd with his songs and the results are often crazy and amazing.
Now you might have questions.
Okay, so Pinball Mars is a rock opera. Does that mean it’s a bunch of pretentious horseshit?
NO. Pinball Mars is trashy and strange. It sounds like 70s riff rock tripping over punk on its way to prog and then getting abducted by a UFO. It’s great Ohio outsider stuff.
Do I need to follow some convoluted plot?
NO. There are baffling detours, but this is simple overall. Best I can tell, Pollard’s songs follow a group of drugged-out hellraisers (Pinball, Z, and Flush) who hit the town while high as a giraffe’s eye. They have psychedelic experiences, but every song has a dark edge. There’s trouble and danger and a little sadness. Addiction seems to be an issue. An alien shows up. So does God. And if you have some insight into lines such as “Gout and replenishment/Suckerfish for women/Pregnant mermaid/Flask of cod”, let me know.
If the previous Circus Devils album, The Harold Pig Memorial, plays off of 1960s and 70s biker outlaw imagery, Pinball Mars is another trip to the drive-in, but this time it’s a counterculture acid flick. It finds company with movies such as The Trip and Psych-Out. The Acid Eaters. Alice in Acidland.
The 60s and 70s gave us a bunch of that in all forms of media. Someone takes LSD or quaaludes or angel dust and it changes EVERYTHING. And not always for the better. It might lead to enlightenment, it might lead to a downward spiral. A single trip can make you feel at one with the universe or it could drive you insane!
Pinball Mars takes this model, bends it in odd ways, and flies it to the moon,
Why is it a rock opera?
That comes from the lyric sheet. It lays out the words as dialogue between characters, though Pollard sings everything and doesn’t use any different voices or effects for any of the “cast”. Honestly, if he ever reveals that the rock opera thing was something that came to him while he put together the sleeve art, I won’t be surprised. For now though, as far as I’m concerned, this is opera, dammit. I need a little culture in my life.
I’m still confused.
That’s okay. This is rock music. That’s all you really need to know.
While I have you here, why is the LP so hard to find?
That’s because this was a vinyl-only release of a mere 500 copies when it came out in October 2003. Matador Records had big holiday season plans for Guided by Voices (more on that soon). They asked Pollard to not crowd the CD racks any more than he already had that year with his independent stuff. Vinyl was still a fringe item at the time though, so it was cool to release that and it sold it out fast. The CD came out about six months later.
It’s too bad that the vinyl is so rare (as of this writing) because Pinball Mars is intended to be heard as two sides. The lyric sheet divides it into Act I and Act II, but I have my own theory that side 1 is the “Pinball” side (aggressive and dominated by rockers) and side 2 is the “Mars” side (spacey and mysterious).
On the LP, Pinball Mars is two dimensions seperated by the flip of a record; on CD or streaming, it’s an album that starts out rocking and then slows down halfway through.
Opening track “Are You Out With Me?” kicks things off with an invitation. To the tune of a demonic strut, the radio reports that “Rats are running wild/ Eating pot and speed/ Trucks are buckling”. All that Pinball, Z, and Flush have to say after that is “Let’s go out!”, shouted over and over until it sounds unhinged. The dangerous city doesn’t scare them. We’re definitely going out. They’re shoving us into the car.
We go to “Gargoyle City”, side 1’s most evil freakout. It’s only three-and-a-half minutes long, but it makes a LOT of racket in that space. It’s a great hellfire stomp and I love how Pollard goes with it. Todd Tobias writes in his book, See You Inside, that Pollard did a lot of improvising at the mic for this album. He had lyrics, but no fully crafted melodies. Instead, he found them in the moment (“To me this seemed risky, but Bob had full confidence in himself”, Tobias observes). In “Gargoyle City”, you can hear that approach. It’s meant to capture urban chaos, but Pollard is too creative to do a straight poetry-reading. No, it’s got to be rock ‘n’ roll. He needs to be Iggy Pop. He needs to shout and sound insane. He needs to be as wild as the music.
Maybe that’s why Pollard frames this as a rock opera. He’s as much an actor here as he is a songwriter.
On “Pinball Mars”, our main character, Pinball Mars, gets beat up by the cops (“Police busted his head/ Thought he was dead”). We don’t know why. Pinball is so far gone that he might not know, either. All he has to say is “Bus driver, my mouth is still bleeding” while the music rushes by like demons.
No singles were released from Pinball Mars, but had there been a call for that, “Sick Color” sounds like the one. It’s where the Tobias racket comes together into something that resembles a pop hook and Pollard finds his inner David Bowie. It kicks up so much glitter that the next song, “Don’t Be Late”, a head-bopping rocker, gets covered in it as well. Both tracks deal with troubled women. They might even be the same woman, older in “Sick Color” then younger in “Don’t Be Late”. Maybe.
Side 1 ends with us stranded on a street corner. “Inkster and King”. Something’s happening, though. Something’s changing. The music is great chill-out classic rock stuff with starry acoustic guitar skies and an electric guitar moon. On top, Pollard glowers and then lets rip with a Steven Tyler shriek that I’ve never heard him do before or since.
Then the light flickers out. The curtain closes. Lift the needle from the record. Or imagine that you’re doing that. (I do recommend preserving the effect of the side break here.)
Side 2 is different. The music takes on that film score quality that I’ve always liked about the Circus Devils. It’s mostly slow and eerie. When it rocks, it’s stiff and repetitious. When it’s quiet, there’s still a threat in the air. The songs move differently than the punchy rockers on side 1. We’re in a dream. We’re disoriented. We’re on the floor. The night refuses to end.
According to the lyric sheet, God speaks on “A Puritan for Storage”. He has six spare lines about “the what you got” and “the what it is” and “the soul you built” over a dirge of backward sounds and simmering tension.
Then an alien arrives at an airport in “Alien” and seems to begin a speech that never happens. Or maybe the screaming guitar or cool strutting bass are all he has to say.
Whatever the hell just happened, the reptilian rocker instrumental follow-up, “Plasma”, has no clues. We’re just grooving along, getting used to being on a different planet every few minutes.
I read the mystical “Dragging the Medicine” as a conversation between the user and the drug. The drug (called “Eel” on the lyric sheet) has very little to say because it doesn’t need to say anything. It’s inherently alluring. Meanwhile, the character Z gets downright romantic about it (“How to the enter the nervous system/ Like a serpent or worm/ My pet”) and the music plays like a slow dance between ghosts and witches.
Next comes side 2’s most jarring left turn because they’re the most blunt lyrics we’ve heard so far. The music is an acoustic guitar chugger with drums that play tricks on your nervous system. Over that, Pollard sings one verse four times. “When they let you out/ At the end of the day/ At the end of your rope/ At the end of your dope”. It’s not hard to interpret that. The title, “Bow Before Your Champion”, darkens the cloud. The drugs are winning.
“Glass Boots” is just as repetitious, but more abstract this time. Tension is rising. We’re barrelling toward some sort of ending. Wearing glass boots doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It doesn’t seem like they’d last long.
“(No) Hell for Humor” is a quiet moment that flirts just a liiiittle bit with jazz for slightly over a minute. Over a piano, bass, and drums, Pinball ponders the endgame of a life on the edge. It’s jaded. It’s wasted. It’s a quiet moment that we need before the big closer.
That’s the five-and-a-half-minute suite, “Raw Reaction”. This track alone feels like its own movie. It brings some of the album’s noisiest and quietest moments, right next to each other, interrupting each other, fighting each other. Rock becomes jazz and then becomes noise all in the same arrangement. Being high becomes normal. The “strange journey” of the addict’s life begins to make sense when the junk is racing through his system.
“Raw Reaction” has a killer ending. It has an “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” ending. It just cuts off. No fade. No slow down. It’s rocking hard and then–blank space. “Raw Reaction” ends like a tape that ran out or a heart that stopped beating. (Another thing that makes vinyl the better experience here is that it appropriately leaves you with silence. It doesn’t immediately start the album again or play something else like digital formats tend to do.)
I’ve always heard it as a death, the logical conclusion to too much hard living.
But Todd Tobias hears it differently. In See You Inside, he writes:
Where has Pinball gone? Has he suffered an overdose? Has his car finally crashed? No! Fighting his way out of a blackout and back to the light, he comes out swinging, ready to corral his friends, rustle up more drugs and do it all over again.
Tobias didn’t write the lyrics, but he did make the music so his view has some weight with me.
I’d also like to make it clear that Tobias does not consider his takes on any of these songs to be the final word. Neither do I. Neither does any other writer who isn’t completely full of shit.
Still though, he’s got me thinking. Maybe my interpretation is too obvious. Maybe Pinball Mars isn’t that bleak. Maybe it’s a party record.
Maybe Pinball Mars is the Circus Devils’ Kiss album. It could pass for that in parts of side 1, for sure. (Instead of “Detroit Rock City”, the Circus Devils salute “Gargoyle City”.)
They rock ‘n’ roll all “nite” and party everyday in their own way.
Maybe Pinball Mars LIKES to black out and see God and aliens.
Now I’m confused.
And that’s how you listen to a Circus Devils record.