Robert Pollard-Mania! #89: FICTION MAN

Robert Pollard
Fiction Man
2004, The Fading Captain Series

April 24, 2004. Guided by Voices played The Bowery Ballroom in New York City.

Robert Pollard often gets chatty on stage and this night he spilled the news to the crowd that Guided by Voices were breaking up. It was the first public announcement. The people in that room got the scoop before any music journalist did.

One of the few bands out there that seemed incapable of ending without an act of God stopping them was closing up shop. It felt weird, but it made sense, too. Middle-aged people will understand.

Pollard went on to say that night that the final GBV album, Half Smiles of the Decomposed, was coming out in August with a farewell tour to follow. The last show would happen on New Year’s Eve and he promised that the band would go out grandly. Everyone was getting along. Past GBV lineups went down in drama, but this one would get a happy ending.

(If you want to hear that announcement, you can. A recording of it came out on Meet the King: Asshole 2, one of Pollard’s later “comedy” LPs composed of excerpts of his stage banter. The track is called “Blaze of Fire” and it still plays as a heavy moment today.)

A little over two weeks later on May 10, 2004, Pollard’s next solo album, Fiction Man, came out. The break-up news overshadowed it, but Fiction Man was the secret beginning of the post-GBV era.

One of the charms of Fiction Man in retrospect is that no one knew this at the time, including, I suspect, the two men who made it. Every Pollard solo record back then was different. They had different moods and different collaborators. In ’04, Fiction Man was merely more of that.

It was a batch of new Pollard songs, but this time played, arranged, and recorded by multi-instrumentalist oddball and fellow Ohioan Todd Tobias.

You know, Todd Tobias. The Circus Devils guy. I hear that he has two glass eyes and a hook for a hand.

Not everyone cared for the apocalypse that Ringworm Interiors showed them in 2001, but Pollard, who never listens to his critics, kept Circus Devils going. He also hired Tobias to produce Guided by Voices, starting right away with Universal Truths and Cycles.

Circus Devils would grow on people over time, but in 2004, they were the creepy side of the lake, the one with the overgrown algae and the ghost stories. Some Pollard fans avoided them outright. There was no consensus. It was like a cult movie. Some loved it, others ran away screaming.

I was among those who loved it and it meant a lot to me that Pollard shared my enthusiasm. There are worlds of sound in that first Circus Devils LP alone. Todd and Tim Tobias made that music, but Todd’s vision dominates (see the album’s entry at GBVDB.com for a breakdown of the credits for each track). I  wanted to hear him make more noisy freakouts AND I wanted to hear him arrange classy singer-songwriter pop and it looks like Pollard did, too.

Fiction Man is a space for Todd Tobias to show his range. It’s also an album recorded in what was becoming Pollard’s preferred method: he’s the songwriter and vocalist (and sleeve artist and overall editor-in-chief) while trusted collaborators handle everything else.

The songs on Fiction Man are bite-sized. Only three of the fourteen are over two-and-a-half minutes and within them all are a variety of moods and styles. It’s a handmade, Midwestern Revolver.

Sometimes it rocks (“Run Son Run”). Other times it lays a slow acid ballad on us (“Sea of Dead”) or a misty dirge (“Built to Improve”) or power pop (“Paradise Style”) or post-punk (“Trial of Affliction and Light Sleeping”). Sometimes it’s crass (“It’s Only Natural”). Other times it’s beautiful (“Night of the Golden Underground”) or funny (“The Louis Armstrong of Rock and Roll”, a tribute to GBV’s old “manager for life”, Pete Jamison, from what I understand).

If it was a new band’s debut album, I would think they were completely nuts. They’re psychedelic freaks who want to take you on a trip and they love studio creativity, but they’re also punks who see value in the quick and raw. They love Syd Barrett and they love Wire. I’d want to ask them if they’re also into Big Star’s Third because so much of this album is similarly off-kilter, but without the depressing mood. I don’t know who their peers are in 2004.

Fiction Man is all good, but there are three songs at the top of my pyramid.

“Children Come On”

Pollard sounds like a brilliant amateur in this one. It’s playful and it opens its eyes wide. It’s a song that could come from any point in his body of work. If Pollard reveals that he wrote this lullaby in 1969 when he was 12, I’d believe it. If he says that he pulled it out of the air in 2003, when he was in his mid-40s, I’d believe that, too. Todd Tobias gives it a beautifully weightless arrangement. We’re floating. Earth doesn’t matter in this song’s minute-and-a-half.

“A Conspiracy of Owls”

A lost 60s freakbeat classic newly discovered in Robert Pollard’s head. It’s lean, but trippy. It’s a fat-free specimen of melody with some great words (“A birthday on the doll’s theater/ Where all great wonders must die/ Lift to the gift shop of the stars/ I prefer a stormless sky”). If John Lennon dropped acid at 9 o’clock instead of 10 o’clock on some Tuesday in 1968, he might have written this instead of “Dear Prudence”. Todd Tobias gets it and lets a shy piano plink in the background like raindrops. It’s a great touch.

“Their Biggest Win”

The grand finale! It’s over four minutes long, but it’s one of the album’s trashiest pop songs. Its words mean NOTHING to my ears (chorus: “And we say nothing but when we want some/ And we do nothing but when we get some”) and this song roars out that nothing like thunder and lightning. Tobias’s furious drums sell us on the nothing and his closing guitar freakout gets us high on the nothing. That might be the perfect skeletal description of pop songs. They’re nothing that somehow convinces us that it’s something.

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Starting with Fiction Man, Todd Tobias becomes the co-star of this series for about the next ten years of releases.

Between seventeen solo albums that may as well be credited to “Pollard & Tobias” for all of the performing and arranging work that the latter put into them, fourteen Circus Devils albums, three records from Psycho and the Birds (yet another Pollard-Tobias collab with a neat twist), and numerous other projects on which Tobias was merely Pollard’s go-to recording engineer, I reckon that he holds the record for most credits of any other person, place, or thing in the Pollard universe.

Todd Tobias is the Spock to Pollard’s Captain Kirk. He’s a little odd and doesn’t always jive with our earthly customs, but he opens up to us over time, purely through his arranging, playing, producing, and even filmmaking.

We’re going to talk about all of that.

When Guided by Voices broke up, for some people that was an ending.

However, as the philosphers say (a few them, I think), every ending is also a beginning.

For us deep-diggers, the (temporary) end of Guided by Voices was a crazy, unpredictable, exciting beginning. I never stopped having fun. Some of my best memories of being a fan of Robert Pollard are from this time, when you didn’t know what the hell each record would be.

Many writers gloss over this period that’s coming up. Pollard was as prolific as ever after ’04 and the results can be convoluted to the new or casual listener. You lose the anchor of new Guided by Voices for about seven years.

Personally though, I never stumbled over that because all Guided by Voices is Robert Pollard and all Robert Pollard is Guided by Voices to me. It’s all one big thing. It helps that Pollard’s music interests don’t change much. The same influences that form the bedrock of Propeller and Bee Thousand are still there in his songs as I write this in October of 2022 and they’re in every record in between.

Pop. Prog, Psychedelia. Punk. His famous four P’s.

There are no blues workouts coming up or tributes to the Great American Songbook or ambient experiments. There’s a “country” project called Cash Rivers that happens way down the road, but even that is a psychedelic joke that does everything but play it straight (and no, it sounds nothing like Ween’s country album).

Pollard is forever hooked on his four P’s and how they can blend together. He treats them like Eugene Atget photographed Paris in the early 20th century. He looks at them from every possible angle.

Some albums approach them from the right, others from the left. Upwards. Downwards. In the daytime. In the nighttime. At dusk. At dawn. Winter. Spring. Summer. Fall.

The light and the textures change, but the subjects are the same.

There’s a treasure chest of brilliance there if you’ve got the time.

I had the time when these records came out and I hope to still have the time now to tell the story. After eighty-nine articles, I continue to feel like I’m just getting started.

We’re going to get into it. We’re going to visit the shadowy corners. We’re going to climb up onto rooftops and hang out in alleys. We’re going to be Eugene Atget.

We will be dedicated to seeing as much as we can.