Robert Pollard
Meet the King: Asshole 2
2007, Yuk Yuk Motherfucker
Don’t ask me for my favorite Robert Pollard album. There are too many. I don’t have a good answer. I may never have a good answer.
Here’s a juicier question for the deep-digging Pollard freaks in your life: What is your favorite year of his music?
Now that’s something to think about. As I revisit these old records, I find a curious coherence in Pollard’s path. Even when he puts out five albums that explode in several different directions in a year, he will circle around the same topics and there’s meaning in the contrasts.
1996. Pollard gets comfortable with his respected place in indie rock just before he starts to fly against it.
1999. A year of strange, new freedom, as well as excitement for a future that was wide open at the time.
2000. An oddball year that’s one of my favorites for illustrating my point. Pollard was going through a divorce that he didn’t yet talk about in the press. Instead, he put out two short, pensive new records that dealt in dark moods (and that confessed more than most of us understood at the time). He also put out Suitcase and the Hazzard Hotrods LP. Old tapes. Nostalgic retreats for a guy whose life just flipped upside-down. In retrospect, these disparate things all work together to paint a psychological picture.
2003. A uniquely prog-influenced year, as well as a year in which Pollard acknowledges that rock music is done as a force in the culture and there’s nothing that he can do about it. However, that won’t stop him from continuing on. That’s my interpretation of Earthquake Glue, at least, and there’s a clean route from that to the “end’ of Guided by Voices the next year.
My big, ridiculous, never-gonna-happen vision for how to reissue Robert Pollard’s work is a series of box sets for each year. A box set of nothing but Pollard’s entire output in 1994. Then another one for 1995. Another for 1996 and so on and so on until your music shelves do the collapse.
Each set is a chapter in a novel or an episode of a TV series. It should dive deep into the moment and make you rabid for the next one. Great liner notes will be essential.
Some sets will be bigger than others. That’s cool. The journey should be weird. Only one album came out in 1998. My fantasy box set will add on the live recording of the Guided by Voices show in Columbus, Ohio on March 28 that debuted nineteen new songs and sent dubbed Type II cassettes flying all over the world as fans shared it with each other. If you’re conducting a serious study of Pollardology, you need to hear that show. It was MAJOR. Throw in some writing that explains how quietly crazy that time was and you’ve got a vital episode in our story.
I’m not thinking about the legal hurdles. I’m brainstorming here as a fan who thinks that Pollard’s work, the totality of it, hasn’t gotten the 70mm IMAX treatment that it deserves. People write books about Pollard’s records and ignore three quarters of the story.
This is an epic. This is one of the strangest bodies of work in rock and any chronicle of it that only covers Guided by Voices albums CAN’T tell the whole story. It just can’t. It’s Lawrence of Arabia with half the screen chopped off on a small, black-and-white TV.
Some people have enjoyed it that way, no doubt, but they’re not having the party that those of us who let this stuff wallop us properly (by taking it ALL in) are having.
So, 2007. It was a frantic year, like many in the catalog.
A Circus Devils double album is coming up, as well as Pollard’s attempt at another solo double set that he (wisely) dismantled into several other records. A yearlong 7″ singles series starts up. A label ends, another begins. We get the thrilling conclusion to the Acid Ranch trilogy. More Chris Slusarenko music gets all up in your face. Two art magazines come out along with two opportunities to meditate further on the end of Guided by Voices.
The 2007 box set will be bonkers. What does it all mean? Where was Pollard going? What was he saying, both on the surface and in the friction between these records?
We’ll figure it out together. We’ll try, at least.
All I know now is that 2007 is nuts from the start.
It begins with a record called Meet the King: Asshole 2.
It begins with cover art of Pollard drinking beer in an empty bathtub with one leg of his pants concerningly wet. (We’ll see the source of this photo–it’s a still from a video–a few years later on the Devil Went Home and Puked DVD.)
It begins with Pollard’s second “comedy” LP comprised solely of clipped-out stage banter from live rock shows, something that he was only doing sporadically at this point (he played a total of TWO shows in 2007).
It begins with Pollard saying this:
“I served my country. I’m a rock ‘n’ roll soldier. It’s a source of great pride to have been in Guided by Voices”.
When bands break up badly, the main players tend to distance themselves from it. They don’t play the old songs live. They don’t want to talk about it. The old band (your Pixies and Pavements) never happened.
Guided by Voices didn’t end that way in 2004, though. They ended on a positive note and I think that it didn’t take Pollard long to miss it.
I keep talking about trilogies lately and Meet the King: Asshole 2 has become, in my own head, over time, the conclusion to a trilogy about the end of Guided by Voices.
The first part is Half Smiles of the Decomposed. The final album. No, it’s not really the final album, but it was still the end of something.
The second part is the Electrifying Conclusion DVD. The four-hour blow-out party.
The third part is Meet the King: Asshole 2, which plays like a bootlegger’s weird memorial to their favorite band.
The majority of it is taken from the Electrifying Conclusion tour and is fixated on Pollard talking about the band’s legacy. His first public announcement of the end of GBV is even here, the track “Blaze of Fire”–told to an audibly stunned New York City crowd in April of 2004–and it’s still a moving moment today.
Also, the back cover of the LP is a photo of a trashed stage after a show. Amps, instruments, empty bottles, and garbage. It’s an elegiac image in context.
This is how we begin Pollard’s 2007. Rough, raw, and still working on the right way to say goodbye to something that once meant the world.
And now we explode in several different directions.