Robert Pollard
EAT 3: Keep Your Christmas Lights Up Forever
2007, Rockathon Records
Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll?
No. Not at my age (just turned 49 this month). All three are fine on their own, I guess. Depends on the sex. Depends on the drugs. Depends on the rock ‘n’ roll. Put them together though, and people get stupid. People become monsters. People start dying young.
My mind is nowhere near that stuff anymore. Tell me the stories again about Kiss or Led Zeppelin’s party days and I’ll only reflect on how some of our flock become pathetic when they feel invincible. I don’t care about how many TVs Keith Moon tossed out of hotel windows. I don’t care about who slept with who in the back of the tour bus.
These days, I’m into people who make things and keep making things long after others give up, burn out, or overdose on their own mythology. I’ve heard all that I want to hear about how humans can flame out by age 27. What I want now are stories of endurance.
Thankfully, my favorite rock star is Robert Pollard and that’s his whole trip. He’s about to turn 68, as of this writing, and he keeps going and going.
Collage art, poetry, and rock ‘n’ roll.
And do it all until you drop, which we hope doesn’t happen for a long while.
Rock doesn’t have to use you up and kill you. It can keep you alive sometimes.
That I can get behind.
Yes, alcohol is a drug and it’s a part of Pollard’s story, but much like how his onstage imbibing dropped as he got older, I find myself thinking less and less of it over time. That’s because alcohol never took anything from him creatively. We don’t have a two-year blank space where Pollard went silent in favor of getting bombed on vodka day and night. His drink is Miller Lite, for Chrissakes. Miller Lite is what some guy in Mesquite, Texas drinks when he goes bowling every Friday night and is going to mow the lawn first thing the next day. It’s beer-flavored water.
Alcohol is only one decoration of many on the Pollard Christmas tree.
And some of us keep our Christmas lights up forever.
Next to me right now is Pollard’s third art magazine.
It brings paper cuts of poetry and mysterious imagery. You can smell glue and see X-acto blades slice through old issues of Life and National Geographic. You see abused notebooks and scribbled-up scraps of paper. It’s the work of a man clipping pieces out of culture and arranging them into something stranger and more poignant.
As I write this in 2025, there’s also a noise in my head and it’s coming from Pollard’s latest album, Blasphemy by Rip Van Winkle. I can’t stop listening to it.
The sound of the record is a free and funny chaos. A collaboration with members of the group Joseph Airport (who share songwriting credits for most of it), Blasphemy spins you dizzy with odd turns while it also rocks. It presents itself as a unified narrative (“concept, script, and lyrics by Robert Pollard”), though about seventy-five listens in, I’m still clueless about how any of it connects and I don’t care. Maybe it will matter someday. Right now it doesn’t. All I need to know right now is that it’s authentic Midwestern slop rock, noisy with attitude and inspired by big, strange record collections and big, strange ideas. It’s as much about shapes, textures, and colors as it is about songs.
EAT 3 is hopped up on similar juice. Shapes, textures, colors. Inscrutability.
They’re both in my head and talking to each other.
EAT 3 begins with a simple poem called “Shock Free System”, in which Pollard offers up that maybe it’s not pain that hurts us, but the “shock” of it. “Free of shock/ and the pain is/ Wonderful”. There’s a religious reading in arm’s reach, but Pollard’s language leans toward science (“Only pain/ And matter”). If we could somehow resist or get over the shock of pain, we could be productive with it and maybe be better for it, Dr. Pollard proposes. It’s the shock that kills you.
After a brief track of shortwave radio noise (a suggestion to hear the album as a found object or a thing that just happened in the air), Blasphemy also begins with one of its least psychedelic moments. File “Shit-Heel Man” under Pollard’s occasional pessimistic songs about drinking. In it, an alcoholic burnout looks into a mirror and gets sober about what he sees. Over a fist-pump chorus, he counts out his coins to pay for a “bottle of brown” and you know he’s going to finish every last drop. There’s no redemption, just a man who’s deep in a hole (“too far under to come up clean”) and all he can think to do next is apply more liquid lubrication. It helps him get over the shock.
In the six pages of poems that kick off EAT 3, Pollard is a reluctant social critic. He lets in enough optimism that you know that’s where his heart is, but he also knows that something’s wrong. His concerns are the Big Issues, the stuff that you can’t take to City Hall.
He thinks about the loss of meaning as the world beats it out of you (“Finding ourselves trapped/ in careful spots/ like stir crazy candles/ dying for Christmas”). He thinks about the perversion of values (“Worriers/ Carriers/ of earth things/ no-worth things”). He thinks about how we’ve made a world that cares less and less about beauty (“Ugly boxes are in with us/ Housing fresh dreams and secrets”). He thinks about work and what it gets you (“Working and slaving/ For another man’s blood”).
He thinks about things that I think about everyday. What haunts you as you get older is that it sinks in that there is no solution for any of the above. There are no laws to pass and no one you can vote into office can help. This is up to us and the best plan we’ve got is to make things. This is where raising children comes in. This is where making art comes in. Even poems and collages can help. The most modest ideas can help. The underground feeds the mainstream, always has. Today’s Husker Du inspires tomorrow’s Nirvana.
(And pay no attention to the idiot who tells you that AI creations are better and more relevant than what humans do. Those people always have the worst tastes and the dullest interests. They are not and will never be the audience for anything cool. Art is space-filler for them and not something that you’re supposed to think about and live with. That’s all they want. Tell them that music and writing and visual art is about communication between people and not just a pizza that you order with extra cheese and no onions and they won’t understand what you’re even saying.
I know a guy who loves to talk about how AI music is great and all that he wants to listen to anymore. He was also really excited by the Blink 182 reunion a few years ago, so there you go.)
This stuff can turn you bitter, but Pollard doesn’t let that happen to him.
He’s free of shock and the pain is wonderful. It’s making him create art.
Blasphemy is not an album that a cranky old man could make. It’s too energetic and fun. After the sad portrait of the “Shit-Heel Man”, things get more blurry and strange. The colors get psychedelic, the words get more abstract, and the left turns get sharper and more sudden. It comes off like the product of a lot of messing around, nothing mapped out. It sounds like good guys making a mess and then seeing what happens. Pollard and Joseph Airport thrive in those conditions. Everything finds a melody or something that punches you in the face.
There’s so much life in the pounding garage-rock of “A Mirror Off”. The striking, mystical blip “Union” is one of the best ways you can spend a minute and ten seconds in 2025. Then there’s the catchy “By the Water”, in which Pollard seems to have gotten hooked on singing the title and so that’s about 90% of the song. It’s almost a nursery rhyme. There’s a lot in that other 10% though, including a dedicated Ohioan’s impression of the beach utopia. Sure, it’s a nice place to visit, but can you live there? People pay a lot of money for oceanfront property, but can you make art there? Can you make anything relatable to other human beings when majestic waves crash a few yards away from where you wash the dishes?
Pollard doesn’t think so. You can hear it in his voice.
Good rock music isn’t often made in paradise and rock music is Pollard’s bedrock influence. All of the work in EAT 3 is a product of rock music. The poems are all song lyrics waiting to happen (and some of them did happen). The imagery is all record sleeve art waiting to find its place (and some of it did).
This is explicit on page 8, which is devoted to Pollard’s always fun band names (he also did this in the first EAT). What’s the latest that he’s overheard, misheard, read, or dreamed up himself in his own word-loving brain and felt that it sounded like a band? Here ya go. Some of these concoctions come up later, sometimes MUCH later, in Pollard’s work (The Unfun Glitz, I Bet Hippy, Sexless Auto). Others sit in the shadows. I’d listen to a band called Ocean of Smoke and I’m suddenly now thinking about starting a group called Dinner With Sting.
The band name page is a breeze that blows us into the twenty-seven pages of collage art in the middle of EAT 3. It’s like The Wizard of Oz. Black-and-white turns into loud, dreamy color.
Pollard seems to have only two rules that I can discern for collage art:
1. Avoid symmetry.
2. Use as few pieces as possible. 3-5 is common. He’s not strict about the number, but he favors work that isn’t garish or busy. He can make haunting things with very little.
I love “Everything’s Baby”. June Cleaver takes a photo, at one with the camera, sending a bright flash into a world of muted colors. It’s nostalgic, but there’s something apocalyptic about that featureless background. I hear Doris Day singing and feel an atom bomb exploding.
“Dead Slow” suggests a magazine cover or maybe a movie poster. Its rough edges make it look like something that’s been through a lot to get to us. Maybe nobody liked it. Or it was ignored. Or suppressed. What it represents is a complete mystery, but I’d like to find out. Being mysterious is a lost art today. Film trailers are actually expected to give away the whole story. When did we stop liking surprises?
“Good Morning Mr. Bullet” may be Pollard’s scariest visual work. It makes me think of Charles Whitman. Its simple three pieces say an essay’s worth about how violence is the act of a child, too often a child in an adult body. Irrational. Inarticulate. Violence is scary because there is no reasoning with it. Attempts to do so may only escalate the tantrum.
The center spread is devoted to “Visitors”. There are so many visitors in life. People, cockroaches, viruses. I never thought about it before, but the word visitor is menacing. It doesn’t imply a connection. It’s just a thing that shows up. It might be a friend or maybe not. The dark colors and damage of Pollard’s piece suggest the worst case scenario.
The collage sensibility has always extended into Pollard’s music, too. Sometimes he likes the pieces to blend seamlessly, but Blasphemy is one of those records, like Motel of Fools, where he wants you to see the stitches on the Frankenstein monster. He wants you to hear the different air around the microphones. Pollard is into that slapped-together sound here.
Take my favorite track on the record, “Quiver and Quill”, which opens with a seven-line poetry recital delivered by the whole band before we jump dimensions into the song proper. I hear it as a song about analog art in our digital world. It’s not a rant though; it’s a portrait, a period piece of a time now gone. “He writes it all down/ Every word inked/ Smudges his comics/ On Poe Avenue”.
And someone in the world is annoyed by the less-than-dextrous piano break (played by Pollard) applied with Scotch tape into the middle of the great Halloween party groove of “This Is My Thriller”. I know because I was annoyed at first, but it’s grown on me. Its confidence in its madness is inspiring.
EAT 3 is the last issue to showcase much poetry. EAT 4 would be touted as a special “all-collage” issue and then the series would pretty much stick to that (the all-prose EAT 5 excepted).
Pollard the poet goes out in nine pages of words.
I like “The New Killer” because it’s timeless. “Imagine the thrills/ Imagine the schemes/ of this new killer of dreams”. That could be anything. That could be love gone wrong. That could be the wrath of new technology. That could be a person making excuses. However you read it, it’s a little taste of noir.
Meanwhile, page 39 is devoted to a single sentence. “Elvis was impersonating you”. No punctuation, a little off-center on the page. There’s less room above it than below it. Words can be a visual art, too.
Pollard leaves us with something personal. To understand “3,500 Yards from the Moon”, you have to know that he grew up groomed to be an athlete. He was good at it. It’s what his father wanted for him. It’s what he wanted for himself at one point. Instead, he had to settle for a future in being one of the greatest, strangest rock ‘n’ roll songwriters and performers of all-time.
Once upon a time, this was a sensitive issue, but as he comes up to age 50 in 2007, Pollard makes peace with it in this poem (“I am no future hall of famer/ Just 3,500 yards from the moon/ With many career threatening injuries”) and in the song “Youth Leagues” from later this same year.
That athletic hopeful stuff can be heavy shit. I grew up with an uncle who lived a sad life and died in his mid-40s (cancer). The story on him when I was growing up is that he played high school football and had potential to take it to the next level, but somehow it didn’t come together. I don’t know how or why. I’m almost afraid to ask others in the family. People get dark when they talk about him. It’s bad memories. The word on him when I was a kid was that he was someone you shouldn’t trust. He was seedy. He drank too much, he sold drugs. And I bought that for a long time, but I don’t know a single thing about his pain. He and I didn’t have many deep conversations about that when I was ten years old. Truly, I know nothing about him beyond hearsay from 1990.
I thought about him when I read “3,500 Yards from the Moon”. Pollard had a great thing going, but he was still haunted, decades later, by that fucking baseball career that never happened.
Through writing, he lays it to rest. Or at least he tries.
That’s what art is sometimes. It’s a letting go. It’s a tombstone for something that you don’t need anymore. You conquered it with words, or music, or imagery and now you can move on.
The fascination with Pollard’s legendary productivity goes beyond wondering how he does it. It’s about hope and good feelings and enjoying being alive. Something’s always happening.
Each new thing is followed by another new thing coming soon and I take it for granted after thirty years of following Pollard that it’s going to be brilliant and/or insane. At the very least it will show me something interesting about what we become and what we’re capable of doing in our 60s. It’s going to be stuffed full of things worth thinking about and maybe some things that will confuse you. You will jump into his latest work and might have no idea what to make of it for a while. This is normal with Pollard. I’m used to it.
And then one day, it hits you hard and you might feel like you’re the only person who gets it. I’ve been there many times and it’s not a bad feeling. I actually like that. The outside world doesn’t matter. These are conversations.
I don’t know how to write about Robert Pollard’s work without being crazy and covering every little thing. I am far gone into some place way out there. A desert highway. One of Saturn’s moons. I keep my Christmas lights up forever because it seems right even if it looks crazy.
It’s the only way that I know how to do this.