Robert Pollard-Mania! #88: EDISON’S DEMOS

Robert Pollard
Edison’s Demos
2004, no label

When I wrote about Earthquake Glue six entries ago, I chose to not yet say a word about this limited vinyl-only LP of Robert Pollard’s solo demos of most its songs.

As sweet as it is, Edison’s Demos doesn’t add anything to my take on the album.

Also, the release of it came as a surprise the following winter. It got no advance announcement. It’s not a part of Pollard’s Fading Captain Series label (or any other label). Its artwork, which is almost as stark as a Jandek LP, makes it look like something that’s been sneaked out to the world in secret. In the tradition of past Guided by Voices live records, it presents itself as a bootleg.

So I decided to treat it that way, too. Edison’s Demos is something under the radar and from out of the blue. It’s something that you might miss if you aren’t paying attention. It’s something that no one was thinking about or knew was coming until it appeared one day in a puff of smoke.

The first thing that always hits me about this record is that it doesn’t sound like most Pollard demos that we’ve heard over the years. It’s not recorded on a boombox cassette deck. You don’t hear room noise or hiss or the clicks of pause and stop buttons being pressed. No one knocks over an amp in the middle of a song. The recording gear picks up more than a thin sheet of treble.

This was made at a place called The Warfleigh Labs. Going by the record cover, my best guess is that it’s someone’s pretty decent home studio set-up in front of a kitchen sink.

In that space, Pollard plays alone and he sounds like he can hear the finished arrangements of these songs in his head already, before the sessions with Guided by Voices (listen to the vivid ideas in the opening track, “Mix Up the Satellite”). Some multi-tracked guitar parts flesh out the vision. These recordings aren’t spontaneous blurts; they’re audio storyboards, which Earthquake Glue sticks to faithfully for the most part.

There are people who prefer this record to Earthquake Glue. I’m not one of them, but I also don’t compare the two very much.

Earthquake Glue is a rocket blast of Pollard’s familiar influences with almost painful observations about aging from a mid-40s perspective. I needed to get older myself to understand it. Earthquake Glue has wisdom and power and weight.

Edison’s Demos has most of the same songs, but it hits differently. It’s stripped down (way down) and when I listen to it, I don’t think about the words at all. It’s the melodies that shine and that’s due to Pollard’s guitar. It’s the star of this record.

I don’t know a deep-digging Pollard fan who doesn’t LOVE it when he plays guitar. It’s a big part of 90s GBV records, it’s a big part of Pollard’s early solo albums, and it’s all that we get on Edison’s Demos.

Pollard’s guitar sound is all melody, but he wanders into it naturally. He’s not slick. I’d be surprised if he has much of anything to say about technique or gearhead stuff. Still, his approach grounds everything and there’s a satisfying air between the notes. It might be why his “prog” songs are never fifteen minutes long. It’s definitely why records such as Kid Marine and 2016’s Please Be Honest, Pollard’s strange one-man-band Guided by Voices LP, stand as two of the most beautiful and transporting things he’s ever made.

Also, he never plays guitar on stage. For that alone, there’s a mystique to his relationship with the instrument. It’s a songwriting tool for him, as well as an efficient way to get a record done, but he doesn’t care to perform for a crowd with it.

The Robert Pollard solo acoustic tour? I wouldn’t expect it.

Furthermore, his increasingly furious rate of inspiration hatched projects such as Airport 5 and Circus Devils, for which he never touches a guitar (on the record, at least). He’s the songwriter, the singer, the sleeve artist, and the editor-in-chief while his collaborators compose the instrumental music or work out the arrangements. In time, he would stop playing on his own solo LPs even.

It’s all good, as the kids say. Robert Pollard was putting out 4-6 albums a year at this point. They needed to be different from each other. It’s okay for Robert Pollard solo guitar records to be special and Edison’s Demos is special.

It’s so special that Pollard never released anything like it again (as of this writing in July 2022, at least). He never sat down again in front of another kitchen sink and laid down well-recorded solo takes of the new GBV album that was taking shape in his head and then pressed it up on vinyl. He put out a CD of boombox demos of the last Boston Spaceships albums seven years later, but that was different. We’ll talk about it one of these years.

In the meantime, I say respect this weird artifact.

Trivia notes:

Edison’s Demos was recorded in five hours on October 13, 2002. What were you doing that day? I was probably annoying someone.

This isn’t a parallel version of Earthquake Glue. It changes up the order. Sometimes this LP dreamily drifts into the Earthquake Glue sequence. It knows that certain songs belong together. It also knows that certain songs play best near the start and others play best near the end. However, it also likes to leap around and surprise you a little. Its side openers and closers are all different.

Three Earthquake Glue songs aren’t here: “My Kind of Soldier”, “The Best of Jill Hives”, and “Of Mites and Men”. “Soldier” was famously added to the LP at the last minute. I don’t know the story on the other two.

Perhaps to make up for that, “She Goes Off at Night” and “The Main Street Wizards” appear twice in alternate mixes of the demo (“She Goes Off at Night” gets an acapella mix!). Then there’s “Blasted But It’s Easy”, Pollard’s lovely solo take on “Broken Brothers”, the B-side of the “My Kind of Soldier” 7″. The Guided by Voices version lifts Pollard’s opening guitar part straight from this demo.

I probably don’t have to tell you that this LP is now very much out of print. If you collect and don’t have this you will have to do some digging. Robert Pollard likes to turn his fans into part-time archeologists, always searching for rarities. Some people love that. Robert Pollard is a record collector himself and he knows how to please other collectors. They don’t merely want their favorite artist’s used tissues; they want discoveries. They want curiosities that only a small circle know about. They want alternate angles on the music that they love. They went to hear new dimensions open up .

And they want to hold it in their hands.