Author: Jason

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Getting CLOSER to Robert Pollard

Matthew Cutter
Closer You Are: The Story of Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices
2018, Da Capo Press

The rock star fantasy rests on the myth that none of it is hard work. Maybe a musician’s early starving-artist days provide some strife to talk about, but even that’s often told as a romantic story of young, untethered bohemians who can afford to scrape by on disposable dayjobs and stay up all night in pursuit of their art and/or fortune.

If you can make it to the next level, life becomes a permanent vacation. Go on tour to applause every night. Tell your life story to journalists. Be on magazine covers. The kids all think you’re cool. When you’re feeling exhausted, take a year off. Play golf with The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Take up a drug habit, even. Some of these big rock bands nowadays go three, four, five years or more between their next album of twelve measly songs. Hell, anybody could do that… some regular schmoe like me might think while we punch the time clock, straighten our tie for the office or put on our hardhat.

The refreshing thing about the story of Robert Pollard is that it’s the opposite of all of that. It steps square on the myth’s head.

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Twin Peaks Season 3 is God, Pretty Much (Or Thoughts After My Fifth Re-Watch)

Life is full of unanswered questions, unsolved mysteries, curious encounters and stories that end abruptly. If you step outside at all, people appear and disappear in your life all of the time. We overhear the conversations of strangers. We see scenes of other peoples’ dramas. We hear gossip about people we’ve never met and never will meet. It happens so often that we don’t even think about it.

By contrast, movies and television are full of mysteries that are solved. Pieces that fall perfectly into place. Smooth trails that lead to neat resolutions. All ambiguity extinguished and explained.

Movies and television have got it all wrong, so says David Lynch.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #12: CLOWN PRINCE OF THE MENTHOL TRAILER

Guided by Voices
Clown Prince of the Menthol Trailer
1994, Domino

The most fucked-up of the early ’90s 7″ EPs. I bet this one is STILL controversial, but I love it. I’m all about it. I’d get it tattooed on me, but the title is a little too long and I’ve never gotten a tattoo before and I’m a little jittery about the idea and I’d rather stay home and make tacos.

Nevertheless, this record’s rickety madness speaks to my soul.

Now, I don’t know where exactly this fits chronologically into Robert Pollard’s EP freak-out of 1993-94, but my sixth sense (which is wrong six out of seven times) places it toward the end because it sounds like a band who are tired of selling themselves.

They’re tired of proving that a lo-fi band can still rock and deliver songs that should be singles. They’re also, for the moment, tired of building weird fuzzed-out worlds. All they want to do now is rant directly into the tape recorder, everything laid bare and raw. You can hear fingers hit the guitar and bass strings. You can see the sticks hit the drums. You can hear Robert Pollard pop his “p”‘s on a cheap microphone.

On this EP, it’s way past midnight and everyone’s too drunk to give a fuck. And that’s a place where Guided by Voices thrive.

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Things I Will Keep #5: JILL CUNNIFF, City Beach

Jill Cunniff
City Beach
2007, The Militia Group/Vinyl Films

Here in the steamy state of Texas, August is fucking brutal. It’s my least favorite month. When you’re a kid, late summer is the melancholy time when school is about to start.  When you’re an adult, late summer is the time when you and everyone you know has already gone away and come back from their big summer vacation plans. Nobody’s looking forward to anything. Everyone is just kind of existing and that’s it. There’s no such thing as a “beautiful day” this time of year. The grass and trees are all bleached by the sun. We’re mostly all about the end of the heat wave, that first taste of autumn. It should be here in about a month or so IF we’re lucky.

(Important note: In Texas, summer often keeps kicking the shit out of us into October. I once road-tripped through rural Missouri in mid-September and was awestruck by how the whole landscape was already covered in beautiful autumn yellows and oranges. Where I come from–only about six hundred miles south–a sight like that is still a month off).

The only nice thing about late summer is that I think Jill Cunniff captured it perfectly and made it lovely on her first (and hopefully not her last) solo album.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #11: GET OUT OF MY STATIONS

Dora says, “Get out of my sleeping station”

Guided by Voices
Get Out of My Stations
1993, Siltbreeze

We’re still in the early 90s in this survey–and we will be for about fifty more entries because this was a busy time–so that means another EP. This was a period in which Guided by Voices were determined to claw their way up in the underground, seven inches at a time.

The difference here is that this record came out on Siltbreeze, the far-out Philadelphia label who also worked with the likes of The Dead C, V-3 and Harry Pussy. Serious, lo-fi, noise-rock stuff. Bands who don’t give a fuck. Bands who make you feel stupid for having a Monkees album in your collection. Bands who make music that you listen to alone at 3 AM while planning either a suicide or a homicide.

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Things I Will Keep #4: THE NEGRO PROBLEM, Post-Minstrel Syndrome

Cat toy and CD

The Negro Problem
Post-Minstrel Syndrome
1997, Aerial Flipout

One of the reasons why I stopped collecting records is because music, for the most part, stopped contributing anything to my life that I needed.

That’s not a criticism of music. That doesn’t mean that I dislike music now. Music didn’t fail me. I just stopped needing it.

I still hear things, new and old, that I like all of the time. I’m still married to a few longtime favorites (see my Robert Pollard series, for example). I’m also not an old crank who jerks off to the bands he loved twenty years ago and shuns anything new. (A lot of the new indie rock I hear is just as good, maybe even better, than what I came up with in the 90s; I like that they often embrace the synthesizer sounds of the 80s, which 90s indie bands naturally tended to avoid.)

We all follow our own paths and on mine these days I rarely put on music as a voice that I need to hear. Looking back, music was often a balm for my daily depressions. It got me through problems with relationships and jobs and self-loathing. It calmed my nerves and provided comfort, as well as a very real endorphin rush when I’d spend a little too much money on it at a record store counter.

These days, I still get the daily depressions, but now I consider it my responsibility alone to get myself out of it. I need to move and think and write and crack jokes. Other people’s music can’t help anymore. Other people usually can’t even help anymore. It’s all on me.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #10: FAST JAPANESE SPIN CYCLE

Guided by Voices
Fast Japanese Spin Cycle
1994, Engine Records

Okay, I know that I said before that I’m undecided about my favorite Guided by Voices 1993-94 EP and I meant that, BUT…

If someone ever holds a gun to my head and demands an answer (by the way, I hope that nobody ever does that), I would stake my reputation in City Hall on this one.

You can’t go wrong with Fast Japanese Spin Cycle. If you like Guided by Voices, you’d have to be certifiably insane to not like this. You’d have to have mashed potatoes for brains to not like “My Impression Now”. You’d have to have bees in your ass to not like “Indian Fables”. This is another overachiever EP in which Robert Pollard sticks as many songs as he can onto a little 33 rpm 7″ (he managed eight this time). If this was the first Guided by Voices record you ever heard, it would tell you everything that you need to know.

There are two things that stand out here:

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ALLIGATOR and CRUEL JAWS at Tuesday Night Trash at the Texas Theatre (7/3/18)

 I have no 4th of July plans this year, so Tuesday Night Trash was sort of my unofficial barbecue pool party minus the barbecue and the pool.

Instead, I got a double-feature of low-budget Jaws rip-off films, a full bar and a good crowd at the best movie theater in Dallas. And that’s better, if you ask me.

I don’t want to hang out by a swimming pool anyway until I’ve lost about fifteen (okay, twenty) pounds. What I need is a nice, dark room.

In any case, this show put me right in the Independence Day spirit.

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