Robert Pollard
Silverfish Trivia
2007, Prom Is Coming
In a 2014 interview conducted by John Valania for Magnet, Robert Pollard tells a story that has always stuck with me:
“One time I finished an album”, he says,”and I went to this bar and there’s a band playing. And there were all these middle-aged women up there dancing to it. I started kind of just daydreaming and gazing and second-guessing myself about what I just did. I was watching the dancers and was like, “Would they dance to my new record? Would they be dancing like that?” And the answer was yes. Yeah, they would dance to it. So, I got rid of the whole thing.”
Firstly, that’s funny as hell. Secondly, this small moment says so much about Pollard’s thinking at one point as an artist who’s wary of letting his music fall into certain traps as he ages. Thirdly, it illustrates how complex “influence” can be. What an artist doesn’t like, and seeks to avoid, can mean just as much as what they do like.
In the article, we get no further details about this lost album, but people who know Pollard have confirmed that he’s talking about an LP originally called The Killers and once intended as his solo follow-up to Normal Happiness.
He paced the floor over this record and revised it at least three times. If you’re curious about its evolution, the Shitcanned blog documents and reviews every known rough draft of the tracklist. Me, I don’t have much to say about those early versions except that the differences between how Silverfish Trivia started and what it ended up being are dramatic. Pollard didn’t get rid of “the whole thing”, but he cut out all of the rockers and anything that sounded like a single, chiseled fifteen tracks down to a mere seven, and made something that bears next to no resemblance to his initial vision.
It’s also Pollard’s most beautiful record of his busy 2007 and very close to being my favorite of the batch. Also, the fallout made for great B-sides that we’ll get to soon.
Silverfish Trivia is a hidden gem and, like all of his solo records for a time, seeks to be unique among his work and contrast what came before, but right now I want to go back to those dancing women at the bar.
I can see the scene in my head. I’m Martin Scorsese directing this moment and in my movie these women aren’t bad people, but it’s clear that it doesn’t take much to get their hips moving. The most middle-of-the-road music will do it if it brings a certain energy.
What I think Robert Pollard took from this is that he didn’t want his new record to be the kind of thing that gets cranked up in a bar. In this moment, that felt very uncool.
With the songs he was writing and the powerful, eccentric arrangements that Todd Tobias could give them, I think it hit Pollard that he should be making a headphones record. He should be making music that risks baffling some listeners. He should be making a record that you need to let sink in over a few listens.
He should be making Silverfish Trivia.
It’s the only Pollard record, as of this writing, that kicks off with the sound of chamber music. The dancing women at the bar are either going to leave or take a cigarette break when this starts up (people still smoked in 2007; I did). A simple cello and viola (arranged by Chris George of Invert, who also worked on Universal Truths and Cycles) run through a beautiful melody that might feel familiar. That’s because it’s “Lie to the Rainbow” from the latest Acid Ranch record. Pollard gives this instrumental version a different title, “Come Outside”, so he doesn’t seem to care if you notice the throwback or not, but it’s there when you’re ready for it.
“Circle Saw Boys Club” and “Wickerman Smile” beckon us further away from noisy bars and into quiet places where new worlds open up if you listen close enough.
As beautiful and uncommercial as those songs are, “Touched to Be Sure” manages to fling itself even further up into outer space. It may be the most perfectly executed, luscious Pollard moment of its year. Todd Tobias’s arrangement is instantly easy on the ears, yet packed with tension. It’s sexy even, in a shadowy, dreamy way, but I wouldn’t call it make-out music. The rocking closer might spoil the mood. I recommend it for late night walks or anything that involves listening closely in darkness. It’s best way to appreciate the sorcery of Pollard’s melody, an advanced-level art-rock ballad, one of those strange and gorgeous songs that makes you wonder how the hell he does it.
“Cats Love a Parade”, all nearly eight minutes of it, is the record’s weirdest moment and it belongs here. You can’t dance to this. As of this writing, it remains Pollard’s closest thing to “Supper’s Ready”, the famous 23-minute suite by Genesis. The main difference is that Pollard doesn’t have that English taste for theatre. He can come close to imitating it sometimes, but he’s always going to do something that reminds you that he’s from Ohio.
While “Supper’s Ready” conjures up curtains and spotlights, “Cats Love a Parade” starts up like it just bumped into you on the sidewalk and the light is from streetlamps and the 7-11 store around the corner.
“Supper’s Ready” climaxes with rocking. “Cats Love a Parade” climaxes with quiet.
“Supper’s Ready” at least seems like there’s some narrative or thematic unity to it all. “Cats Love a Parade” wanders from one dream to the next.
“Supper’s Ready” has instrumental sections that are designed to give the frontman time to change costumes during live performance. “Cats Love a Parade” has none of that.
If there’s any overall story to find in “Cats Love a Parade”, I don’t hear it, but I hope that someone out there does. “Cats Love a Parade” deserves crazy theories.
I’ll tell you what I do hear in it, though.
I hear a collage. Most of the sections of “Cats Love Parade” are new and improved versions of songs previously released by Pollard and Todd Tobias’s Psycho and the Birds project. I also hear mortality. I hear cats. I hear Pollard throwing a salute to his audience.
“Carry on mascots of absurdity”
That’s me. That’s us. We’re the ones who follow Pollard through tape hiss and Ric Ocasek and Circus Devils and breaking up his band (more than once) and a stack of records that I recommend that you lift with your legs, not your back.
As mysterious as Pollard can be to me, maybe I’m just as much of a mystery to him. Only he doesn’t (and shouldn’t) dwell on it. He moves on to the next song and that’s hard enough. It’s my job to think about why I’m here.
I love the whole last verse of “Cats Love a Parade”. Here it is.
And so
Because of love lost, bickering. and friction
You know
Eternal government
Will question our conviction
To the higher cause
How long have you known us?
Well, here at dicks and doughnuts
We’re fresh out of doughnutsSo light up
And just make something happen
Just motivate
And activate your captainCarry on mascots of absurdity
Carry on stillLike dogs barking
Basically, life is rough, but music can get you through it. It can also inspire you to “make something happen”.
On the surface, Pollard is referring to himself as your “captain” (and that’s certainly a valid interpretation), but you can be your own captain, too.
Take this music and DO something with it, Pollard says. It’s not background sounds in a bar. Whether you like it or you don’t like it (and not liking something can be a powerful motivator, as we talked about earlier), maybe this can propel you forward.
Anyone who puts out 112 records (and anyone who writes about those 112 records) didn’t come all of this way to tell you that nothing matters. We want to find the light. We want to find it so badly. And we do find it.
It’s right there, in that weird drive to make something.
I have no problem with those dancing middle-aged women at the bar. I love them for inspiring this record.
Truly trivial trivia: It’s worth noting that Robert Pollard’s Fading Captain Series label was finished at this point. Why? We’ll dive into that when we get to the label’s two-CD retrospective compilation, Crickets, coming up soon. What’s relevant now is that Pollard immediately sought to start up a new independent platform for him to do whatever he wanted and I think he was searching for the perfect record to kick it off. Something that, like Kid Marine, sounded uncompromising.
He would call the label Prom is Coming and Silverfish Trivia would be its first release. It would also be its only release because Pollard would change his mind the next year about how he wanted to present his independent ventures.
That’s cool. I will always allow Pollard to be crazy because after 112 articles about his work, I’m no saner.