Robert Pollard-Mania! #98: SUITCASE 2: AMERICAN SUPERDREAM WOW

Guided by Voices
Suitcase 2: American Superdream Wow
2005, The Fading Captain Series

Bad reviews of things I enjoy don’t bother me and I rarely argue with them because the story of a piece of art is never over. It goes on forever. It can outlive all of us. What people think about music the week it comes out is such a small part of what it might become. This is one of my favorite things that I’ve observed as I spiral into old age.

Tastes and trends change. Freaks for culture seek out the obscure and offbeat and then spread the word. People age and get nostalgic for the oddest things. A record that you bought from a cut-out bin becomes a rare classic years later. Next thing you know, something that was neglected or disliked or considered frivolous in its time becomes important in a generation or two. I’ve seen it before, I’m gonna see it again. It’s the normal flow of things.

You can see this play out with Robert Pollard today. Parts of his work once seen as off-putting have arrived at a new respect over time.

When the Box set of GBV’s early years arrived in 1995, most critics wrote about it like the band handed them a bag of old banana peels. Check used bookstores for the old Spin Alternative Record Guide, published in 1995, an otherwise fun book that slaps its lowest ratings on DIY-era Guided by Voices. It’s a time capsule of the day’s consensus. Here in 2023 though, now that Guided by Voices have grown beyond their role as figureheads for lo-fi and ultra-short songs in the 1990s, listeners can hear the early stuff better. There’s a wealth of great music there as the band treated each self-financed LP as a new beginning.

In the early 2000s, the new wave of internet music sites run by smug twentysomethings treated Pollard’s busy release schedule of multiple albums a year as a joke and took frequent shots at his seeming lack of judgement. Twenty years later, that same body of work is now often written about with awe.

Even Circus Devils, once one of the most disliked, lowest-selling projects in the catalog, found its audience over time. As I write this, Pollard and the Tobias brothers just broke their retirement promise with a thrilling new album, Squeeze the Needle, and fans are partying in the streets.

All of the above are good developments, but there IS one Pollard thing that I think will hold up as forever weird and confusing and that’s the Suitcase box sets.

These 4-CD, 100-song collections of previously unreleased tracks are too big, too crazy, too erratic. Not everyone gets them. Not everyone is SUPPOSED to get them.

I find them hard to recommend to just anyone who’s into Guided by Voices because that’s not enough. One needs to bring other things to it.

Esoteric things, such as a love for noise, up to and including the sound of a faulty CD burner. Noise and rock music should intertwine for you.

You should be curious about what lurks in junk drawers, basements, and small towns.

You should have it in you to be mesmerized by old photographs.

You should like fragments and mystery, back roads and deep lore. A taste for the absurd and ridiculous also helps.

You should get that Robert Pollard is not only a great songwriter, but also a true oddball with a free creative mind and adventurous tastes within the scope of rock. After all, only an eccentric would put out something like this.

What I’m trying to say is that the Suitcase sets are special. They’re packed with outtakes, early drafts, fuck-ups, and songs that didn’t fit anywhere except here, in a place of chaos. The tracks are not in chronological order. They dart back and forth through three decades of work. It all moves according to Pollard’s collage artist sense of record sequencing. Pop songs show up as casually as noise does. The ideal Suitcase listener should get a kick out of both.

They’re weird masterpieces if you come to them right. I don’t know of any other legacy artist who treats their old tapes like this, as wild splatters of paint on a canvas.

 

Suitcase 2 makes a weirder first impression than the first one. Its great interior art is pure Pollard. It’s a jam-packed catalog of fake record covers and band photos to go along with the fake band names that he assigns to each track. Each one is a convincing impression of indie/punk/DIY sleeve art of the past and the work of a true record fiend..

Meanwhile, the discs are labeled 5, 6, 7, and 8 and the tracks are numbered 101 to 200. They’re a piece with the original box set and are also meant to contrast it.

The first track is a bold choice. “This Ream” isn’t a song. I hesitate to even call it an instrumental. It sounds like something that was accidentally recorded. It’s nothing but a (bass?) guitar that seems to be searching for a groove and is backed up by some aggressive tape hiss. It’s an anti-opener. Some will be put off, but I hear it as the set-up for something free and wild. And that’s exactly what it is.

Here are my top 10 Suitcase 2 tracks, presented in the order that they appear. Not recommended to everyone. In fact, everyone’s list is probably different.

“Rocket Head”

You’ve heard this song before, but not like this. “Rocket Head” is “Teenage FBI” in a draft from 1988. Pollard’s got the verses, but not the chorus yet. At this time, he heard the song as arch post-punk. Its fate as radio-ready pop is a hundred miles away and I think I like this early version more.

“Your Charming Proposal”

A Pollard melody, a lo-fi recording from the 1996, and a run-time of barely over a minute is a magical combination. I love all eras of Guided by Voices, but songs this like this were the gateway drug. It’s a sound that will always resonate with me.

“Sinister Infrared Halo”

Robert Pollard’s sense of noise is earthy and unpretentious. It’s full of accidents and evokes the land-locked Midwest. It’s the music of flies that buzz around streetlights. It’s the music of staring out of windows and hearing sirens pass and wondering what’s going on. This 1998 track sounds like something that barely missed inclusion on a Nightwalker record. In my world, that’s a compliment.

“Telephone Town”

This Ohio jock named Robert Ellsworth Pollard has the craziest knack for a pretty ballad. This is a vintage 1987 heartbreaker. A good year.

“Every Man”

Three songs on Suitcase 2 are credited to Stumpy in the Ocean and they’re all killer live tracks from 1985 that always remind me of classic British Invasion stuff in the sense of young guys excited as all hell to play catchy hooks. “Every Man”, in particular, is an explosive stuck-in-your-head-all-day song. Crazy that it took twenty years to come out.

“Color Coat Drawing”

A stunning Isolation Drills outtake that stands with that era’s best melancholy moments. The song was never developed past this raw demo, as far as I know, and I see no problem here. It’s brilliant as is. This is someone’s favorite Pollard song.

“I’d Choose You”

My pick of the several tracks here that Pollard would rework after 2005. In 2019, an anthem called “Heavy Like the World” appeared on the Sweating the Plague album by Guided by Voices, but Pollard had its beautiful melody mostly intact way back in 1984. Here it is. He just needed to throw out the flamingly cliched lyrics (“If I had one girl to choose/ Don’t you know that I’d choose you?”) .

“Lonely Town”

One of GBV’s best pieces of small town blues and some of their top 1980s jangle.

“Scare Me No. 3”

A lost Syd Barrett song that Robert Pollard found on his guitar. It’s from 2004 and you can almost hear the fuller arrangement that’s in his head while he bashes out the song solo. As far as I know, no such fuller arrangement exists, but that’s okay. I have an imagination and I don’t mind using it.

“Bye Bye Song”

First off, it’s credited to my favorite band name in this set, The Fun Punk 5, and it sounds like exactly how I want that band to sound. Manic, unhinged, and too proud to practice. “Bye Bye Song” is a true train wreck. Nobody is in tune. Nobody wrote a song. Tobin Sprout is on drums. Mitch Mitchell is on bass. Jim Pollard is strangling a guitar. Robert Pollard is yelling out beer breath on the mic. The year is 1991 and everybody’s getting too old for this shit.

The Fun Punk 5 don’t care about silly things like that, though. They will make noise for its own sake. They will make noise that the sensible people around them will say that they shouldn’t be making. They will make noise that nobody thought would be heard let alone be the final track of a box set in 2005.

There’s more lore that I could mention.

Okay’s let’s do it.

“I Am Decided” and “Are You Faster?”

Kim Deal put out a great album called Pacer under the name The Amps in 1995 and one of its highlights is “I Am Decided”, a song that nobody knew was written by Robert Pollard. The Pacer sleeve notes don’t credit him, but you can hear Pollard’s original on Suitcase 2. Kim Deal’s take on “I Am Decided” is actually a blended arrangement of the above two songs with some different lyrics.

“Tainted Angels with Butter Knives”

Jason Lowenstein, remarked in an interview in the 90s that he didn’t like Pollard’s British-influenced vocal style. In response, Pollard recorded a throwaway track in which he sings in an exaggerated accent (“Jason Lowenstein’s a wanker/ He thinks me mum’s not cool”). Back in the day, it circulated on bootleg cassette and CD-R compilations, where it was usually titled “Jason Lowenstein is a Wanker” or “Trophy Mules”.

“Invisible Train to Earth” and “Headache Revolution”

The old Isolation Drills CD came with CD-ROM content (does anyone under 40 know what a CD-ROM is?). You put the disc in your computer and it unlocked a link to an exclusive track on the TVT website each week. It lasted about two months. There were a few live tracks, a B-side or two, and a pair of new songs that weren’t on any physical format at the time. “Invisible Train to Earth” is a fun rocker with the band. “Headache Revolution” is the audio from a video of Pollard on acoustic guitar in his post-divorce apartment (may as well mention that Boston Spaceships reworked it to fine effect a few years later).

In conclusion, when I talk about Suitcase box sets, I’m talking about treasures, trash, and trivia. I’m talking about the stuff that the freaks love. I’m talking about digging deep and getting absorbed into the journey and coming away with your own take on what this epic means to you.

I’m not talking to everybody.

But if you get into Suitcase 2, you’re one of the crazy people.

As I get near my 100th Pollard article, I’m obviously crazy, too.