Robert Pollard
Eat
2003, Rockathon Records
I’m curious to know when Robert Pollard figured out that he was a serious collage artist. If you’ve looked at nearly any record he’s ever put out, you’ve seen his work (the TVT albums are among the few exceptions) and you’ve seen it evolve.
The earliest Guided by Voices LPs have collage elements. Found clippings are a part of albums such as Devil Between My Toes and Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia, but the compositions are primitive and the images tend to come off as truly random. They look like old punk rock show flyers. That’s a part of their charm, but as GBV got more famous, Pollard stepped up his art game.
By Bee Thousand he was playing with empty space, ultra-bright colors, and asymmetry. Throw in the lyric sheet on which each song is attached to a simple and memorable piece of imagery and the result is iconic and it doesn’t age almost thirty years later. If the rough, lo-fi music bothers someone, the artwork alone might persuade them to give it another chance. It both offsets and deepens the mystery.
Nine years later in 2003, Pollard launched an art magazine dedicated solely to his own work. He called it Eat and, as of this writing, there are seventeen issues of it, with more to come.
Collage art dominates most of them. Lots of poetry shows up in the early volumes. The presentation would get fancier over time (the latest issues of Eat are basically softcover books; they’re heavy with a thick spine). A few later installments come packaged with a 7″ record. Then there’s the oddball issue that’s all short, wry prose pieces by Pollard, telling stories from his past.
Eat is a full-color, psychedelic happening. It’s a place for the REAL deep-diggers. And it starts here.
Pollard’s devotion to collage art highlights how much it has in common with rock music. Let’s break it down.
Collage art and rock music not only forgive the recycling of the past, but celebrate it.
Our conversation with the past never stops. Old records, old videos, old magazines. These are all things you can use and they’re everywhere. Clip from them. Steal from them. Parody them. Defile them. Love them. Turn memories into strange dreams. You can take a thing that someone threw away and make something new out of it and it can be powerful. Collage does this and so does music. There are no new sounds to make from a guitar, but there are new contexts. That’s why art is endless.
Collage art and rock music both question the idea of “mistakes” in art.
When one embraces mistakes, as Guided by Voices aggressively did in their 90s lo-fi period, that means that there are no mistakes. There’s good and there’s bad, but neither has anything to do with the slickness of the execution. A great album can have a jarring tape machine flub in the first minute. The “mistake” doesn’t matter. The color of it, the effect of it, does. Collage art is also a form in which the artist can’t do anything wrong if they believe in it. It has no rules to follow. A beautiful harmony of images can be pleasing, but so can a violent clash.
Collage art and rock music both thrive on absurdity.
In collage art, you can snip off a bikini model’s head and tape a lizard face on there and it might be cool and it doesn’t matter if there’s a “deeper meaning” if it makes someone laugh or enjoy a moment of disconnection. Collage art exists in another dimension’s reality, where our scientific laws don’t apply. And so does rock music, which pioneered and thrived on songs that mean absolutely nothing beyond the noise. Country songs always mean something. Blues songs always mean something. Cole Porter songs always mean something. Rock songs, by contrast, can be 100% nonsense–sometimes you don’t even KNOW the words–and they can still crush you. What makes a collage great? What makes a rock song great? Whether or not they make rational sense is nowhere on the list.
The cover of the first issue of Eat is a simple collage in which a furious eyeball gazes at a topless woman, while the word “EAT” looms below.
The voyeurism theme is obvious. We are the eyeball taking a peek at something here that most rock musicians don’t give you.
The woman is the contents of Eat. Pollard has put out many words and images, but never stripped nude like this before. No music, no album. Only true voyeurs will care.
The word Eat is an invitation to dig in and to not think too hard about any of it. Eat is an eating experience. Try this, try that. Enjoy one, forget another one. No one expects you to like them all.
Poetry dominates this first issue. There are thirty pages of it.
Robert Pollard writes the kind of poems that I’m not sure that he even knows what they all mean. He’s interested in the color of the words, the shape of them. He likes a good title (“Nasty Witch Backwards” is my favorite) and then he likes to start off with a concrete statement (or often a question) and then he blows fog over it in the next lines as he sneaks in words and images that sound like they don’t belong.
Take “Hollywood Through a Spanish Coin”.
What is the cost?
Subliminal horizons
Make me not quitOff the sticky coast
Trip and fallAnd victory soars
In her squeaky voice
I think it’s about success, but what is success? And why does it have a squeaky voice?
Pollard also likes to list things and the list gets more absurd as it goes on (see “Loser’s Dog” and “Vampire Playing a Red Piano”, which became a Circus Devils song eight years later).
The poems go on for fourteen pages and then the collages come in. There are fourteen pages of that, too.
Some pieces are future sleeve art (we see foreshadows of Half Smiles of the Decomposed and Brown Submarine, among others). Some are presented as rejected sleeve art (alternate covers for Alien Lanes and Waved Out). Most of them though are free-floaters that never turned up anywhere else.
I like “Are They (Fresh or Frozen)?”. You don’t see this color scheme very often. Forest green. Red-tinted photo of a person. A strange sun in a sandy sky. It feels like a dream of the past. I dream about the past often and the colors are often crazy. There’s either too much sun or no sun at all.
After the collages, we get something that only Robert Pollard would do, which is a big page of band names, under the heading “Suitcase 12: Captain Crunch is in the Milk Again”. I like Ape Wave. And Increase the Frankenstein. And Exploding Phonebooks.
The band names put everything into perspective. Band names are fun to come up with because they’re ridiculous. They don’t need to have any point at all. If it sticks in your head, it’s good. What you imagine afterward is up to you. (Robert Pollard got me into the spirit and now I love to come up with band names. A few from my personal files: Headless Princess, Terror Mirror, Tongue Accident, The Bad Guys From Robocop. Somebody steal one, please.)
If the list of band names is pure fun absurdity, then maybe so are the poems and the collages. Maybe they’re all the same. Your head might try to make sense of some of it, but you might have more fun if you relax.
And eat.
Sixteen pages of more poems follow. I enjoy lines such as “Just spit my smile a shadow/ And give it time to die” (from “Nine Beats at Dawn”) and “He took a knife from her diary/ And then slipped into her fog” (from “Fireman’s Box”).
I think “His Battle With the Moon” is about insomnia. I think “Victory and Dinner” is about war and how we come up assuming that some people are our adversaries (“Red, yellow, brown/ And other shades of enemy”). I think “I Expect a Kill” is about searching and needing to find something. Maybe you’re searching a record bin or maybe you’re searching your own head for ideas. If you’re determined to find something there, you will. Don’t doubt yourself. Expect a kill.
“I Expect a Kill” turned up as a song on Pollard’s next solo album, Fiction Man. Almost all of that album was previewed here as poems, which was fun at the time.
Rock music, for the creator, often begins with notes and chords, but it can also begin with words. Or images. Or a band name. Anything can light up a new spark.
Robert Pollard’s wild creativity tends to flummox some people, but, as I’ve written before, he’s always giving away his secrets. Suitcase box sets and Acid Ranch records are lessons in how to relax and spit out stuff without caring if it’s good or not. The misfires are healthy. They exorcise bad ideas and sometimes contain good ideas that you didn’t notice at the time.
My best guess for when Robert Pollard figured out that he was a serious collage artist was when he started to compile his archives on releases such as the Nightwalker LP and Suitcase and then realized that every single thing he was putting out was collage art in some way.
Eat is Pollard’s further advice on how to keep your mind agile. Write poems. Make collages. Come up with band names.
Do that enough and you’ll start to hear songs in it.