Author: Jason

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #6: PROPELLER

Guided by Voices
Propeller
1992, Rockathon Records
Reissue (via the vinyl version of the Box set): 1995, Scat Records

The final Guided by Voices album. The closing chapter. The grand exit. One last blast before Robert Pollard retires his mic, packs up his guitar, throws his songwriting notebooks in a drawer, never makes Bee Thousand,  never makes From a Compound Eye, never makes Space Gun, and kisses his dreams goodbye.

That was true for about five minutes in 1992, at least, when Pollard caved to pressure from his family who didn’t think that a 34-year-old man with a wife and kids should be wasting his time and money making records that nobody except Byron Coley hears.

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Dorothy Parker on Robert Benchley and Bookstores

My copy of The Portable Dorothy Parker never stays on the shelf. It travels from room to room in my home, picked up often and read and then moved again back and forth, mingling with anything else that I’m presently reading. I rarely look for it. I always just stumble upon it. One day, it’s on the bedside table. Maybe the next day, it’s on the floor by the living room couch.

Her theatre and book reviews for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Esquire that make up most of the last two hundred pages (pieces written from 1918 to 1962) are particularly good when I need a quick dose of wit. They’re the best reviews of anything that I’ve ever read and are a steady source of inspiration, including when I needed a name for this website. Her New Yorker book review column from 1927 to 1933 was called “The Constant Reader”, which I used about two brain cells to bend to my own purposes here. (Mrs. Parker would probably roll her eyes over it.)

Though I can be hard on my books, I don’t like to mark them with highlighters or pens, but I do like to remember and recognize great and/or interesting passages in what I’m presently reading, so why not do it here? What else have I got going on? Absolutely nothing.

So, haunting me at the moment is the opening paragraph of Parker’s May 1958 book column, in which she tells a brief anecdote about the dearest friend in her life Robert Benchley, before she celebrates a volume of Edmund Wilson’s Jazz Age essays, shrugs her shoulders at Jack Kerouac and smirks over Edna Ferber’s latest potboiler:

The late Robert Benchley, rest his soul, could scarcely bear to go into a bookshop. His was not a case of so widely shared an affliction as claustrophobia; his trouble came from a great and grueling compassion. It was no joy to him to see lines and tiers of shining volumes, for as he looked there would crash over him, like a mighty wave, a vision of every one of the authors of every one of those books saying to himself as he finished his opus, ‘There–I’ve done it! I have written THE book. Now it and I are famous forever.” Long after Mr. Benchley had rushed out of the shop, he would be racked with pity for poor human dreams. Eventually, he never went anywhere near a bookshop. If he wanted something to read, he either borrowed it or sent for it by mail.

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A Laurel and Hardy Party #4: “Perfect Day”

(1929; director: James Parrott)

To my knowledge, the famous Lou Reed song is NOT based on this 1929 comedy two-reeler in which Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy completely fuck up a picnic. They don’t even get to the picnic, actually. Just packing up the sandwiches and getting their Model T out of the driveway brings disaster. The slapstick between Stan and Ollie as they get in each others’ way dealing with flat tires, an uncooperative engine and a neighbor whose window they accidentally break is good stuff, but the funniest parts are how everyone pretends that the great day that their wives planned is still possible after all of this (see the cheerful, and repetitious, goodbyes to the neighbors). Also, comedy stalwart Edgar Kennedy as the cranky old brother forced to tag along even with a gout-riddled foot in a cast (do you think it’s going to get stepped on and knocked around throughout the film?) is reliably despairing.

It’s a good one. Also, as a man who feels like he pretty much bumbles his way through most days, Laurel and Hardy continue to resonate. If you see me at the ice cream shop, ask me about my several Oliver Hardy moments last week when my cat got stuck in a tree for a few hours.

This is the fourth film on the massive Laurel and Hardy: The Essential Collection DVD box set and the first one to have a bonus feature, which is simply an alternate soundtrack. Like most films in 1929, the original release of “Perfect Day” has no music beyond the opening titles. When Hal Roach put it back into circulation in 1937, it came with a score of jaunty studio library music newly added for your pleasure. The DVD offers both versions. Party like it’s 1929. Or 1937. Your choice. They’re both good.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #5: SAME PLACE THE FLY GOT SMASHED

Guided by Voices
Same Place the Fly Got Smashed
1990, Rocket #9
Reissue (via the Box set): 1995, Scat Records

Robert Pollard’s music is optimistic. He’s not going to tell you that life is all merry-go-rounds and back rubs, but if you put in some work that’s worth doing and aren’t an idiot, you might enjoy being a living, breathing person on our ruined planet of shit and misery.

There are sad songs and melancholy moments and horror stories in his music, but little that I would call depressing. Or angry. Pollard is so great at anthems because he likes to write about human triumph over things big and small. His way with melody belies an artist who wants to make the world a prettier place. The volume of his work reveals an artist who’s not tired of life and gonna fight the grave for as long as he can.

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Things I Will Keep #1: Introduction and THE SWEET

Portrait of the Record Collector as a Young Man (Photo circa 2010)

One of the worst things about collecting records is that there are rarely any great stories to go along with it these days. It’s not like those accounts that you read from the 1960s and 70s when record collectors would knock on doors and ask befogged senior citizens if they had any old 78s laying around and then go inside and maybe meet a schizophrenic or a former Nazi in hiding or a woman who once gave Robert Johnson a handjob.

That’s not how it works anymore. If you did that today, it would be creepy. Now we have Ebay and Discogs and you can sit at home at 2 AM and hunt for records with one hand on a computer keyboard and one hand playing with your balls like a normal person. Leave the elderly ALONE. They don’t have obscure rockabilly 45s anymore. Lux Interior and Poison Ivy already found ‘em all by 1972.

Besides, I personally started collecting records because I DIDN’T want to talk to people. It was a hideaway, a great retreat from life. A lot of my collection came from thrift stores where there are few signs of life anyway beyond the decades of microbes on everything.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #4: SELF-INFLICTED AERIAL NOSTALGIA

Guided by Voices
Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia
1989, Halo Records
Reissue (via the Box set): 1995, Scat Records

This is the first Guided by Voices record that sounds like Guided by Voices. It took ’em four tries, but they did it. This psych-pop treat from 1989 walks and talks exactly like the band that I’ve been stuck on for twenty-three years now.

Hey, it takes time to find yourself. Sometimes in life you think you’ve found yourself, but nope, it’s only some jerk-off who happens to look like you and has worse taste in clothes. There’s still more work to do.  More trial and error in your future. More tearing down and rebuilding. It helps if there’s no one around telling you that you’re hot stuff all of the time. We all get big ideas about ourselves. Some of those ideas could stand to be kicked into the dirt. Being humbled makes you a better person and obscurity is the most fertile soil there is for creating something new.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #3: SANDBOX

Guided by Voices
Sandbox
1987, Halo
Reissue (via the Box set): 1995, Scat Records

A review of Sandbox strikes me as a perfect place to tell you about the absolute, numero uno, most misunderstood thing about Guided by Voices.

I’m real sick of seeing this. I’m ready to rumble over it tonight in the alley behind the closed Burger King. It’s time we start busting heads. Let’s put an end to it here and now.

It’s simple: There are some GBV fans out there, walking among decent people like you and me, who think that they’re a power pop band.

They think that Guided by Voices are The Beatle Boots Band Explosion Revival and that Robert Pollard is a pop melody maker who just keeps forgetting to wear his skinny tie. These are the same people who think that Robert Pollard “needs an editor”. These are the people who might love sweet melodies like “I Am a Scientist” and “My Valuable Hunting Knife” and then not understand why that same guy is involved with Circus Devils or writes stuff like “A Hair in Every Square Inch of the House”.  These are the people who say that life would be so much better if Robert Pollard would stop releasing five albums a year and prune everything down to a neat and tidy twelve songs that might sound good piped into Whole Foods while you browse the organic kumquats.

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