Category: music

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #106: ALL THAT IS HOLY

Psycho and The Birds
All That is Holy
2006, The Fading Captain Series

I wouldn’t recommend All That is Holy as anyone’s first Pollard record, or even their tenth or their twentieth. I can say from experience though that if it’s your 106th, you might be weird enough at that point to get along with it.

The collaboration era between Robert Pollard and Todd Tobias is deep, deep waters. There should be a book about this period alone. Counting only the ones for which Tobias contributes writing, arrangements, or one-man-band work, it’s about three dozen LPs that sometimes have nothing in common on the surface except for that weird, free Ohio energy that those of us who know our Devo from our Dead Boys can hear. It’s music from a proud ancestry, generations in the making. The soot from old steel mills passed down.

They’re a pair of eccentrics who understood to not “typecast” the other.  Excitement happens in the left turn. I imagine that these two were constantly surprised by what the other did with his work.

In Circus Devils, the music by Todd and Tim Tobias is often unlike anything else in Pollard’s discography.

On the seventeen solo records that he made with Todd Tobias, Pollard hands over songs that don’t always call for a Circus Devils-style treatment. He wants to hear how Tobias handles other sounds. He wants to ask Dr. Moreau to go on Sesame Street and explain the science behind flowers and rain.

Then there’s Psycho and The Birds, a further twist on the Pollard-Tobias method.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #105: TURN TO RED

The Takeovers
Turn to Red
2006, The Fading Captain Series

I recommend making bold statements sometimes. I’ve heard that it’s good for your circulation.

My bold statement of the day is that Robert Pollard fans have more FUN than any other fans in rock music. What sets Pollard fandom apart is that it’s long-sustained fun. I’ve been on this ride for thirty years now and it’s still going.

Now I’m not saying that those of us who know our Mars Classroom from our Elephant Jokes are guaranteed to throw the craziest parties or be the most enthusiastic whitewater rafters, but when it comes to having over 100 albums of music to explore and re-explore as we follow an eccentric genius who won’t take a year off and is determined to use rock music to draw his own step-by-step map of the insights and calamities of aging, I think that us Pollard freaks have it pretty good. Things are always happening. We never get radio silence.

Had my formative influences been a little different, maybe I’d be a Juggalo today and I’d have no idea who Robert Pollard is and I’m glad that didn’t happen.

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Things I Will Keep #27: JULEE CRUISE, Floating Into the Night

Julee Cruise
Floating Into the Night
1989, Warner Bros.

February is a miserable month, maybe even the worst month. By this point, I’m not just over winter, but I’m actively offended by it. My Texan body chemistry craves warmth. Any weather that makes me put on gloves and a scarf is an insult and I take it very personally. In February, I blame the cold for all of my problems.

Why is this article late? February, goddammit. It fucks me up. I’d be happy to sleep through it.

Sure, winters here aren’t too bad compared to other places. It’s not unusual to get a week or so of T-shirt weather while northerners are seeing blizzards. However, in February the threat of an Arctic blast always looms. The 65-degree days will become 25-degree days again, often overnight, and I’ll not only be shivering but feel seriously jerked around.

While I’m bitching, the Super Bowl can go to hell and I don’t think that anyone likes Valentine’s Day. Even February’s special traditions suck.

The only nice thing I have to say about February is that Twin Peaks music sounds extra good during this time of year. Perhaps it means something that the series begins in February (see Agent Cooper’s famous “11:30 AM, February 24th” monologue in the pilot).

In even Angelo Badalamenti’s most beautiful pieces of music for David Lynch’s film and television projects–and most of them are stunningly beautiful–there’s a disturbance in between the notes, a demon hiding in the silk. You can’t see her, but she’s there giving an eerie edge to these hushed and pretty pop songs. It’s this tension that makes Floating Into the Night a good fit for the unrest of February.

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Things I Will Keep #26: PAUL MCCARTNEY, McCartney II

Paul McCartney
McCartney II
1980, Columbia Records

I love January. To me, it’s one of the best months. Even as a lifelong Texan who despises cold weather, I can still enjoy January.

What can I say? I like a nice Christmas tree tossed out on a curb. It’s a beautiful sight.

The holidays are over and now we can really relax. I can die now and not feel bad about ruining anyone’s festive plans. So can you. So can anybody. Isn’t that nice?

January to me is about appreciating normalcy. The humdrum becomes fresh air after Christmas and New Year’s. The stores are open at regular hours and fifteen people aren’t always offering me a bunch of fattening food.

Also, the worst music ever made is no longer playing absolutely everywhere.

What would Paul McCartney think of my bad attitude? From what I gather, he’s an old stoner and probably wouldn’t give a damn. He probably wouldn’t even care that I consider HIS Christmas song (“Wonderful Christmastime”) to be among the most wretched of the December canon.

In this hypothetical scenario though in which Paul McCartney and I are hanging out and talking about Christmas, I might try to swing the discussion to McCartney II and why I consider it to be perfect January music.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #104: LOVE IS STRONGER THAN WITCHCRAFT

 

 

Robert Pollard
“Love is Stronger Than Witchcraft b/w “Dolphins of Color (Live)” 
2006. The Fading Captain Series

“Love is stronger than witchcraft” is a line from the 1942 movie I Married a Witch. You can find it toward the end at the climax, spoken by Veronica Lake.

That’s not just trivia to me. I like to know things like that. It makes the song even better, in my view.

I like the idea that the whole world is talking to us, whether it’s the dirt on the ground or the sky above and everything that we notice in between, and all of this stuff that we see and hear each day is saying that it wants to be a song.

The artist snatches an overheard moment out of the great sideshow and now owns it to use for his or her own purposes.

Where do they go from there? Anywhere.

Robert Pollard’s song is not about Veronica Lake. At least I don’t think that it is. My take is that it’s about how love is the only way. Most of us will never be perfect according to the ancient rules of religion, but we’ll always be on the right path as long as we follow love. Anything that removes us from that is so much witchcraft.

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GUIDED BY VOICES at Ferris Wheelers, Dallas, TX, 10/26/2024

I was not in Chicago on December 31, 2004 for what was once intended to be the final Guided by Voices live show. However, I was in Dallas on October 26, 2024 for what might REALLY be the final show.

That’s not official information. In fact, Robert Pollard didn’t say a thing about it on stage and he was mouthing off all night. He joked with affection about his hometown, offered advice to fledgling Guided by Voices cover bands, and did plenty of well-earned chest-beating (with a smirk) about the greatness of his songs. Pollard’s got the comic timing of a seasoned shit-talker and I laughed more this night than I’ve laughed at some comedy shows.

The word around the jungle gym though is that Pollard, who turns 67 on October 31, will no longer tour. He’s been saying this to people. The 2024 tour, which was mostly a lot of scattered weekends, is the last one and Dallas was the last date. Guided by Voices will continue as a recording act (you won’t be shocked to learn that they have new album finished and set for release in 2025), but their days of hitting the highway are done.

I took ONE photo of the band and it’s pretty bad. Sorry.

Everyone I spoke to as we milled about before the noise started knew about it and had something to say and none of us were sure of what to think. Pollard’s family was there, I heard. This was a heavy night even if nothing on the surface of it told you that. The show wasn’t even sold out. To the casual observer, this was just a rock band on a Saturday night plugging in, turning up the knobs, and doing their thing.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #103: FROM A COMPOUND EYE

Robert Pollard
From a Compound Eye
2006, Merge Records

I used to think that the kick of a double album was that it simply meant more music to enjoy, but no, that’s not it.

The secret of the best ones is that they’re all uniquely haunted.

Blonde on Blonde, The White Album, Exile on Main St., From a Compound Eye.

None of those were just another day at the office. Some unusual force made an epic absolutely necessary.

Bob Dylan was frustrated. Long sessions in New York yielded only one track that he deemed worthy. Eventually he got convinced to start over with a new group of players in Nashville, where everything came together in a series of white-hot all-night recording marathons. When it was time to go, he had a pile of gold, including one essential cut that was long enough to fill a whole LP side. There was no way that Blonde on Blonde could be a regular record. We needed to know what went down in Nashville and Dylan needed to take us on a journey.

The Beatles got back from India and were splintering apart. Each songwriter was on his own trip and the others were his backing band. The White Album is a batch of solo records crammed together. The songs are supposed to clash. Maybe only a fragmented group would or could make something like it and no mere single LP could paint the picture of how much this band, and their relationship with each other, had changed.

The Rolling Stones made dirty rock ‘n’ roll in what was probably a beautiful villa in the south of France. They were fleeing England’s tax laws and also brought along their producer, some recording equipment, a bunch of friends, and a mountain of drugs. Their music is a poisonous flower grown from decadence. The double length of Exile on Main St. gives you space to imagine that you’ve dropped in on the party, as well as appreciate how the Jagger-Richards craft manages to shine through.

Robert Pollard was a man starting a new era in his life and art. While Half Smiles of the Decomposed is the “final” Guided by Voices album, From a Compound Eye is the secret other half of the story. It was completed in mid-2004, before GBV even started their farewell tour, and if you turn it up loud enough you can all but hear Pollard’s will to upend everything snap into place over twenty-six songs. It’s a double-record set because Eye needs to be many different things at once: a new beginning, a climax, a summary, and an argument to his audience, and maybe even to himself, that this is the right move.

It’s Pollard’s best record of 2006, a contender for his most essential solo release, an explosion of many of his songwriting preoccupations, and is one of the top albums in the stack for a long walk or some serious headphone time laying back with your eyes closed. Continue reading “Robert Pollard-Mania! #103: FROM A COMPOUND EYE”

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Steven Hyden’s TWILIGHT OF THE GODS: A JOURNEY TO THE END OF CLASSIC ROCK

Steven Hyden
Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock
2018, Dey St.

In this addictively readable book, Steven Hyden opens with a story that most music nerds our age (Hyden, born in 1977, and me, born in 1976) know well.

It’s the story of having your head cracked open like an egg by classic rock radio back in the day. Where did I hear “Baba O’Riley” and “Stairway to Heaven” for the first time? I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I’m fine with giving the credit to KZPS, the classic rock station in Dallas when I was a teenager. My sources at Google tell me that it’s a country station now, but once upon a time it was the spot in my city for Jethro Tull and Lynyrd Skynyrd and Peter Frampton all splattered together on the same canvas each day. Everything that Hyden writes here about his hometown station WAPL applies to KZPS. He was in Wisconsin and I was in Texas, but we were both listening to same damn thing.

Hyden captures youthful discovery and how something as simple as a standard radio playlist of classic hits (that are new to a kid) can inspire lifelong curiosity. When music becomes more than mere audio wallpaper for you and becomes a place to go, a location as real to you as anything on a map, you eventually get interested in other places to go. When you like Pink Floyd’s radio standards, you might graduate to their albums. From there, the real freaks will dig into Floyd’s roots and contemporaries and maybe even explore later bands who picked up the baton. This can get messy, but when you’re a music nerd, you enjoy that.

Still, this book’s meat is its examination of the present day. When Hyden expends several pages on appreciation for the likes of Led Zeppelin, The Grateful Dead, AC/DC, and Black Sabbath (and a lot more), his impressions simultaneously reflect the young man’s awe and the seasoned culture critic’s head for analysis. When he writes about the past, the present always burns at the edges.

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Things I Will Keep #25: HANK WILLIAMS, Rare Demos: First to Last

Hank Williams
Rare Demos: First to Last
1990, The Country Music Foundation

Hank Williams died of heart failure when he was only 29 and deaths like that freak you out when you get old. That’s a painfully young age to go, but too many pills and too much booze can snuff out the brightest candle.

It happened in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1953. Williams rode in the backseat of a Cadillac, on his way from Knoxville, Tennessee to play a show in Canton, Ohio. Sometime around 5 AM, his driver stopped for gas in Oak Hill, West Virginia and then discovered that the great songwriter, who’d been silent for many miles, wasn’t merely sleeping off his latest bender.

No, he was even more pale than usual. Not breathing. Gone.

The story goes that Hank Williams died with these four things in his pockets: a loaded gun, a pint of vodka, tablets of chloral hydrate (a sedative), and a rough draft of lyrics for a new song written on a piece of paper.

All are symbols of what killed him and when I write about his death it’s not to romanticize it. No, it was pathetic and it shouldn’t have happened.

However, I can’t listen to Hank Williams songs without thinking about his death and that’s because they both reveal the same thing, which is the fragile soap bubble of human life. Our very hearts (in both the literal and figurative sense) sometimes try to kill us and often succeed.

Sometimes death is so close that it’s in your pocket.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #102: I’M A STRONG LION

Robert Pollard
I’m a Strong Lion
2005, Must Destroy!!

“The label in the UK wanted to put out a single for From a Compound Eye and THAT was the song they picked. They wanted to put out a single that was one minute and five seconds long, And that’s why they were a GOOD LABEL! I agree with that!”

–Robert Pollard in Dallas, Texas, June 2018, as remembered by me, after Guided by Voices played “I’m a Strong Lion”

“I’m a Strong Lion”, the shortest track on an epic double album, is definitive Pollard.

The melody? Bubblegum-worthy. The tempo? In a rush! The lyrics? Straightforward for him, as well as personal and cutting. It’s like an Archies song except from an artist with something to get off his chest.

Here, he addresses his reputation, among some critics, as a tyrant who can’t keep a band together. His words offer no apologies. “Sure as I’m dyin’ here/ The problem is solved/ And it hurts to know/ You won’t be involved/ But I can beat you to the strong side/ Right away/ I’ll meet you today”. 

Pollard refuses to keep a band going that isn’t working out (or that he feels has run its course). Life is too short for that. He’s too old for that. Interpersonal drama within a band rarely makes the music better anyway. If you don’t like that, he doesn’t care. His lyrics might be directed toward an ex-bandmate or even to a fan who can’t hang with the latest change. Either interpretation fits.

The brief run-time is part of the statement. A little over one minute. That’s all the time that he’s going to spend talking about this. Pollard moves on and so does this song.

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