Various Artists
Crickets: Best of the Fading Captain Series 1999-2007
2007, The Fading Captain Series
Your copy of Crickets should be beat up. The spine should be frayed on the edges. The digipak from 2007 should feel like it may come apart soon if you don’t decide to be more careful with it. Hopefully, you didn’t lose the booklet. It’s a nice one.
My copy looks pretty bad. If yours looks worse, I tip my hat to you. Maybe you should be writing your own series. You clearly have a story to tell.
If you own a pristine set, I don’t get you, unless you just don’t listen to CDs. Otherwise, this two-disc compilation has long been the perfect thing to pull off the shelf when you want to hear some Robert Pollard, but you don’t know which of his galaxy of records will hit the spot. So how about a little of everything?
He has a lot to be proud of when it comes to the Fading Captain Series. Flip through the Crickets insert that neatly lays out all forty-three (!) previous releases over eight years and remind yourself of how so many of these records neither look alike nor sound alike. If one album goes right, the next one swerves left. Obviously not everyone is built to enjoy it all, but those of us who do are hooked on how Pollard manages to find, and comfortably work with, so many different angles on his lifelong influences of pop, prog, psych, and punk.
The oddball moments allow us to appreciate the pop brilliance all the more. Meanwhile, his pop songs tend to be weird creatures themselves and you likely discovered him through the damaged, lo-fi, basement 90s records that remain his best-known work. Pollard’s most dedicated audience will have the kind of ears that are up for some strange trips.
His collaborators during the Fading Captain Series era often did things that you wouldn’t expect from them and when he worked with someone twice, they did something different the next time.
Doug Gillard composed and performed clever art-rock instrumentals for Lifeguards that sound nothing like Gem or his own fetching solo work or anything else he’s done when left to his own devices.
Tobin Sprout reunited with Pollard to make music that feels more like 1983 college radio than the 90s lo-fi flashback that many expected.
The same crew who made Kid Marine also made Choreographed Man of War, a record with a whole other mood, a few years later.
Then there’s Circus Devils, whose first album is the music equivalent to the shower scene in Psycho. The sound of Pollard jumping into the kaleidoscope of audio assaults by Todd and Tim Tobias made the Fading Captain Series feel more dynamic and unpredictable from that point on. After Ringworm Interiors, anything could happen here. A new album of Pollard singing over free jazz wouldn’t be out of the question. The Fading Captain Series was not going to be a lot of comfortable old shoes. It would take risks and go with an artist’s spirit of adventure. The first Circus Devils is still one of my favorite LPs in Pollard’s whole body of work, Guided by Voices or otherwise. Top ten.
The Fading Captain Series began merely as a way to put out Kid Marine, an album that Pollard made while he was waiting for the music business to figure out what to do with Do the Collapse (recorded about a year before it came out).
The name of the label was a joke. There were no plans for it as an ongoing thing, but that changed the moment that Pollard scored a deal with TVT Records for Guided by Voices that allowed him to do whatever he wanted on the side and fans like me have been partying ever since. He’d made records independently before, but the Fading Captain Series was where it got serious (and got crazy) and it paved the road to Pollard’s present state of complete freedom.
So why did the label end?
The basic answer is simple. It was the end of a business arrangement. While Pollard called the creative shots, the Fading Captain Series had two captains when it came to getting these records off the ground, pressed onto plastic, promoted, and in your hands. There was Matt Davis, who did the heavy lifting on the project management end. Then there was Todd Robinson, whose Indianapolis record store and label Luna Music handled distribution and mail order.
I won’t get too bogged down into the reasons why that changed, but from what I understand, one of our two captains felt that Bob should be growing The Fading Captain Series with albums like From a Compound Eye rather than signing to the likes of Merge Records and lost his enthusiasm for the venture.
I won’t say who that was, but Matt Davis is the one who still works closely with Pollard today, so it’s not much of a mystery.
A restructure was in order and that’s part of the craziness of 2007.
Also, from a fan’s point of the view at the time, NONE of that mattered because the change-up was seamless. By the time The Fading Captain Series took its final bow here, Pollard had TWO new labels already going, run by the industrious Rich Turiel. If you were on GBV fan forums back in the day, you know Rich. He was all over them. When some dork was talking nonsense (and I was that dork a few times probably), Rich would chime in with facts and you trusted him. Because he had just talked to Bob ten minutes ago. Also, some will say that the mail order side of things improved under Rich’s reign. It lasted a few years and scientists are still baffled by how he handled doing it all himself for even that long.
Record Company Records was supposed to put out side projects and the archival stuff. Its first and final release was The Great Houdini Wasn’t So Great by Acid Ranch.
Meanwhile, the Prom is Coming label would be the place for Pollard’s solo work that didn’t jive with the Merge Records deal that he had going at the time. Its first and final release was Silverfish Trivia.
In his manic creativity, Pollard sometimes presents us with rough drafts and Record Company Records and Prom is Coming turned out to be rough drafts for how he wanted to present his new music. Later, we’ll get into how they evolved.
Right now, we’re talking about a goodbye and a retrospective.
The Crickets compilation seems to exist for one major reason.
Robert Pollard is nostalgic and he likes the idea of wrapping up a project and then letting it sit for a spell to see how time treats it. The end of the Fading Captain Series isn’t the end of Pollard’s independent work, but it’s still an ending and Pollard couldn’t let that go without comment. It needs a finale.
The thing that I love most about Crickets is that the sequencing is clearly Pollard’s work. You can tell because it’s mental in every way and very him. In between giving us plenty of pop and songs that made the Guided by Voices live set for a time, some albums are represented by their most bizarre tracks.
“Vault of Moons”, “Correcto”, and “Trial of Affliction and Light Sleeping” are here while more friendly moments from their respective LPs aren’t.
Then there are the two moments where Crickets simply duplicates the original record sequencing. “Time Machines” and “Alone, Stinking and Unafraid” crash into each other exactly like they do on the great Ask Them EP. Later on disc 2, the retrospective closes (before the bonus tracks) with the final three songs from Kid Marine in the exact same order. “Town of Mirrors”, “Powerblessings”, and “Island Crimes”. Three perfect hills and valleys. Why separate them? Pollard is obsessive about record sequencing and these little moments show off flourishes for which he’s particularly proud. And he can do whatever he wants here.
I’m all for it.
I am a Pollard freak after all. I like his craziness because it matches my own. I see nothing wrong with the perfect pop of “Death of the Party” by Pollard and Tommy Keene colliding into the nightmare of “Festival of Death” by Circus Devils. Two songs with “death” in the title. I’ve been listening to Crickets for almost twenty years and I still wonder if there are weird jokes and connections that I’ve yet to notice in the sequence.
On the two discs of Crickets, an opening track becomes a closing track (“All Men are Freezing”) and a closing track becomes an opening track (“Zoom (It Happens All Over the World)”).
We are flipping things over and re-examining. Making new frictions and new connections. It’s the old mixtape spirit, where you make bold choices that sound good to you, and crazy at the same time. Emmylou Harris into XTC into Otis Redding into The Minutemen.
I used to do things like that every week in my vinyl fiend days onto Type II Maxells, before streaming music and before I had a computer with a CD burner and cassettes were how you made your crazy private world portable.
Crickets is nothing less than a mixtape from Robert Pollard of the Fading Captain Series and he goes weird with it. As he should. It’s a proud tradition.
I must get deep into the bonus tracks because they’re as strange and scattered as the rest of it. They grab from all eras and tilt the camera a little to find a new angle on how we understand these points in time.
The spare demo of “Sister I Need Wine” sounds as much like a Fading Captain Series artifact than it does a blueprint for a track on a major label would-be hit album, Isolation Drills. “Sister I Need Wine” (a beautiful song, by the way) comes from the same brain that also wrote “Tight Globes” and “7th Level Shutdown”. There’s no separating this Fading Captain stuff from the ever-changing (for a time) Guided by Voices. Some writers do it, but I can’t myself. I find the big picture story too interesting. When I write about Pollard, I insist on shooting in widescreen.
“I’m Gonna Miss My Horse” is an outtake from the complicated maze of revisions that led to Silverfish Trivia. It wants to be a country song except that it also wants to be power pop. This track is a tug of war between styles because Pollard can’t decide which one most fits his feelings of nostalgia for Guided by Voices, which is what I think the song is about. After all, one thing that country music and power pop have in common is that they’re both fixated on songs about loss.
“Butcherman” is from about the same era, but still in its primal stage, where it sounds like something lost in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s notes for The Threepenny Opera. Todd Tobias and Pollard would soon hang psychedelic lights on it, but not too many, for the Standard Gargoyle Decisions album.
Those three are at the end of disc 1.
The end of disc 2 pours us another glass of unreleased hits.
I don’t think anyone has pinpointed where “Lugnut Blues” comes from. It could be Acid Ranch era, it could be from 2007. It could come from anytime when Pollard had a guitar, a cheap tape recorder, and half a song in his head. It belongs here because Pollard never likes to make things too easy to figure out.
“You’ve Taken Me In” comes in to soothe your nerves. You previously heard this in instrumental form on Silverfish Trivia as “Speak in Many Colors”. Here it is with vocals and it stands as one of those pretty ballads that Pollard seems to be able to pluck out of the air whenever he wants.
Closing track “The Power of Suck” MUST be from the early 90s, but don’t quote me on that. Deep-digging fans will recognize the title from an early version of what eventually became Under the Bushes Under the Stars, back when it was going to be a concept double LP about an underdog rock band who makes it big. Now it’s a piece of shrapnel unearthed for a compilation. It’s got a nice stomp and it somehow evaded two 100-song Suitcase collections, but this is a perfectly good place for it, too.
And I guess that’s an ending, but it’s not really the end of anything.
If you were a fan at the time, Crickets was released during a flood of Pollard news. A new Takeovers album, a 7″ singles series, a Circus Devils double LP, TWO new solo records out simultaneously on Merge in October. In May of 2007 we knew about all of that. There was no sense of anything lost or changing much.
If this is your introduction to this side of Pollard’s work, it’s an invitation to dig deeper. I recommend chronological order and an open mind about how the next album you explore might be on a whole other trip than the last one.
If you’re like me, Crickets is an old road companion. On almost every long drive I’ve taken over the past few years, Crickets has been there, acquiring more wear and tear. When I play it again, I’ve typically forgotten what’s on it. I don’t remember the weirdness of “Her Noise” leading into “Dumbluck Systems Stormfront” and then “The Frequent Weaver Who Burns”. I don’t remember when the bonus tracks start.
It’s all fresh friction and strangeness. A new conversation about where we were between 1999 and 2007 and where we are now.