Category: music

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #45: DO THE COLLAPSE

Guided by Voices
Do the Collapse
1999, TVT Records

Mainstream American rock radio in 1999 was the shittiest thing ever. It was the frat party of your dullest nightmares. There were no “artists”, just warm and breathing piles of tattoos. It was the land of Lit and Smash Mouth and Korn. Bad facial hair was everywhere. Whiny singers. The worst production ever. Nothing sounds like human hands made it. Guitars and drums have such little personality that they come off like they’re on a programmed loop (and they probably were). The singers sound electronically pitch-corrected (and they probably were). And all of this nonsense is turned up WAY too loud and compressed to death.

There were few real songwriters there anymore. Bombast was all they had.

It was bad bad bad, is what I’m trying to say. It was terrible. It was awful.

You’re probably still wondering how bad it was.

It was so bad that when The Strokes debuted two years later, people actually thought that they were GOOD.

How anyone thought that Guided by Voices stood a chance at fitting in among that crowd, I’m not sure, but from Robert Pollard’s perspective, I think he needed to at least TRY.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #1: Introduction and COME ON PILGRIM

I still call him Frank Black.

Maybe you call him Black Francis, the stage name under which he made his most famous music. It was the name he began his career with, then changed, and then later assumed again.

Maybe you’re one of those weirdos who call him by his real name, Charles. I’ve seen people do this. It’s fine if you know him personally, but kinda creepy if you don’t. Just sayin’.

Whatever name you use, you know who I’m talking about. The Pixies guy. Aloof. Likes to cultivate an air of mystery. Never looks like he’s happy to see you, not that you can tell since he often hides his eyes behind a swanky pair of shades. Sings about surrealism and UFOs, space girls and the apocalypse, Ray Bradbury and Pong, Los Angeles and lost love.

Blessed with a loud and versatile voice, he can scream a door off its hinges, but he almost never speaks to the audience when he performs. Over time, the ol’ waistline expanded and he went bald, but he wore it well and it only enhanced his status as an unconventional rock icon. If your songs are good, you don’t need to be a pin-up. If your songs are really, really fuckin’ good, whatever you look like becomes cool.

Cool is not a thing to which you conform; it’s a thing that you create.

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Things I Will Keep #19: JIMMY SCOTT, The Source

Jimmy Scott
The Source
1970, Atlantic Records

You ever get lonely? I’m talking about that big, dark feeling where no one cares about you and the serpent is about to strike. That bleak silence. That cold wind that blows through your soul.

Nothing seems important anymore. Nothing matters. The daytime sun hurts your eyes. The night is too dark. Nothing is satisfying. You don’t belong.

It’s a big, big world, but somehow there’s no room in it for you.

Maybe in the past you had some ideas about how this life could all work out, but that fell apart somewhere along the way. Maybe you know exactly when that happened. Or maybe you have no idea. It just happened. 

A million dollars couldn’t solve it. You don’t even know how to talk about it.

You’re broken, baby. And nobody knows how to put you back together. Not even you know how to do it.

I can’t think of a single singer on Earth who conjures up that feeling better than Jimmy Scott.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #44: SURGICAL FOCUS

Guided by Voices
“Surgical Focus” b/w “Fly Into Ashes”
1999, TVT Records

Summer of 1999 was the last time that the music industry was truly comfortable. They were the last few months of business as usual.

Napster was brand new, but the controversy over it didn’t kick in until autumn when college kids went back to school and had access to their university’s high-speed internet connection. For the average schmoe like me, it was still a dial-up world, and in a dial-up world an album could take hours to download via your 56k modem–and that’s IF your fragile connection didn’t crap out on you every ten minutes.

It was also a world without portable digital music players. CD burners were around, but they were expensive and only a niche saw the need for one. Meanwhile, it was normal for cars on the road to still have cassette decks in them, even some new cars.

In 1999, the future of music as an intangible digital experience was here… and it was free and illegal. And it also kinda sucked unless your favorite place to listen to music was at your computer through speakers that were probably shitty.

Things were in transition. The rules were changing. We were all mixed up.

And this was the world in which Guided by Voices went major label.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #43: IN SHOP WE BUILD ELECTRIC CHAIRS: PROFESSIONAL MUSIC BY NIGHTWALKER 1984-93

Nightwalker
In Shop We Build Electric Chairs: Professional Music By Nightwalker 1984-93
1999, The Fading Captain Series

As a collage artist, Robert Pollard is crazy about contrasts. Whether he works with images clipped out of vintage issues of National Geographic or works with piles of his own songs, he’s always looking for those two pieces that make no rational sense when joined together, but the fit is somehow perfect nonetheless. He’s looking for those two bare wires that you can press together to make an interesting spark. Deconstruct and reconstruct. That’s his game. Or it’s one of them, at least.

Many of his albums at this time are patchworks of different types of songs and sounds. Lo-fi home recordings sit next to full-bodied studio bangers. Rockers rub up against slow and sparse moments. After a great pop melody, something weird usually follows.

Album sequencing is an obsession of Pollard’s. So is sleeve art, which he almost always designs himself–by hand, with an x-acto blade and some glue and a stack of old magazines–with an eye toward making them all look different and mysterious and interesting to flip through.

The ride through Pollard’s body of work is bumpy, but that’s intentional. You’re not supposed to relax.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #42: ASK THEM

Lexo and The Leapers
Ask Them
1999, The Fading Captain Series

“Time Machines” is a song that sounds like a door being suddenly kicked in. Or maybe a bomb going off. But, ya know… in a good way.

It’s the kind of explosive pop throwdown that Robert Pollard hadn’t put out in a spell. It’s a real gas pedal-pusher and it wouldn’t have fit on Kid Marine at all, but as the opener to an EP of lean, crunchy rock, it was perfecto.

I even love the lyrics. I think it’s a song about nostalgia and how you might enjoy living in it when you can, but present day reality will always intrude (“Time machines escape the fall/ But cannot climb the prison wall”). “Time Machines” doesn’t put down nostalgia, though. Pollard was 41 when he recorded it. That’s an age when nostalgia can hit you hard. I know from experience. It’s not necessarily about idealizing your past as glory days that can never be topped. Rather, it’s often a state of not feeling finished with your past.

There’s always something back there, too many decades ago, that you didn’t notice before. Something that you didn’t appreciate enough.

But now you think about it all the time.

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Things I Will Keep #18: THE ROLLING STONES, Their Satanic Majesties Request

The Rolling Stones
Their Satanic Majesties Request
1967, London Records

I guess that I can understand why the longtime members of the Rolling Stones look back on this album with all the fondness that one might remember a case of food-poisoning. Despite their history of drugs and decadence and how the mere mention of their name conjures up fleshy images of the over-the-top rock star lifestyle, they ARE professionals. At least today, when they’ve cleaned up, fart through silk, blow their noses with $100 bills and play for huge crowds at the Palmolive Dish Soap Arena and the Speed Stick Deodorant Ampitheatre, where people pay three-figure sums (or more) for tickets to NOT hear shambling, lysergic drug-bombs such as “Sing This All Together” or “Gomper”.

With the exception of hit “She’s a Rainbow”, Mick ‘n’ Keith no doubt don’t want to bother with these songs today, either. Beyond a few moments, this album isn’t really them. It was a product of 1967 and if you were an English rock band then maybe you HAD to react to psychedelia in some way. Like the smell of strong pot from a fat joint, it was in the air.

You could ignore it and instead change with the times by indulging in concept albums like The Kinks and The Who did (and ignoring something is a reaction in its own way).

Or you could follow the purple flashing lights and trail of flower petals and embrace the acid and that’s what The Stones did. For one lost, crazy half a year or so, at least.

The result was out of character, strange and controversial. Decades later, Mick Jagger called it “nonsense”. Keith Richards called it “a load of crap”. It’s one of the few Stones albums of the time from which Martin Scorsese hasn’t licensed songs for his movies.

But, fuck me, it’s my favorite. I love it. As far as I’m concerned, any happy home needs a copy of Their Satanic Majesties Request. 

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #41: KID MARINE

Robert Pollard
Kid Marine
1999, The Fading Captain Series

Robert Pollard works fast, but the music industry works slow. Negotiations for the first Guided by Voices major label release–it was all`recorded and pretty much ready to go–took time. Meanwhile, the band played the odd show here and there in 1998 and early ’99, but without a new album out, maybe Pollard wasn’t feeling a full-fledged tour.

So that meant sitting around at home a lot.

(I love this vintage Dayton Daily News article about Pollard’s downtime in 1998. He rented 676 movies from Blockbuster that year! Wow! I wonder if he ever rented Shakma.)

For a guy like Pollard, who never stops writing, it also meant a fresh batch of songs. About sitting around at home a lot. Contemplating the ceiling (literally, in the song “Living Upside Down”). Watching TV. Observing the human parade. He also got into leafing through an acquaintance’s personal photo album–that guy would be mullet-sporting cover star Jeff “Kid Marine” Davis–and then wrote songs inspired by that.

Pollard settled on his perch in Dayton, Ohio, USA and took in the things around him.

And Kid Marine is the result.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #40: WAVED OUT

Robert Pollard
Waved Out
1998, Matador Records

In 1998, Robert Pollard was 40 years old and his plan for Guided by Voices was that he was gonna at least take a stab at mainstream success while he was still spry. It was cool with me. I was rooting for him. A slick, Ric Ocasek-produced GBV album was something that I was curious to hear.

One might have wondered though if maybe we were losing the eccentric psychedelic genius that we’d been following. Part of GBV’s character was a curious freedom on record. Noise. Accidents that sounded cool. Albums in which strange, misfit songs found a comfortable home next to killer hooks. A very uncommercial sort of beauty. It wasn’t mere indie/lo-fi snobbery. Robert Pollard found his voice (and his audience) embracing rough edges and home recording. It was how his songs sounded good. It was why he didn’t sign with Warner Brothers in 1994 and remake Alien Lanes for radio like the suits wanted.

How was any of Ocasek’s studio magic gonna compete with that?

If you were paying attention though, you didn’t worry about that much. Robert Pollard does his job each day and new songs are not a problem. He was still writing little oddballs and making low-budget recordings. Pollard had stacks of fresh goodness that didn’t fit on Guided by Voices albums anymore. Great songs, haunting songs, shadowy moods, alien vibes and psychedelic nutcase stuff that the deep-diggers want to hear.

Sounds like a great idea for a solo album, to me.

Sounds like Waved Out. 

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Things I Will Keep #17: THE MUFFS, Happy Birthday to Me

The Muffs
Happy Birthday to Me
1997, Reprise Records (original vinyl on Telster Records)

The news of Kim Shattuck’s sad and unfair death at age 56, due to ALS complications, knocked all of the wind out of me last week.

I first saw it on Twitter and I couldn’t believe it (“Huh, Kim Shattuck is trending? I wonder wh–OH, FUCK!”). Total punch in the gut. Her illness was kept private. It was a complete surprise to us in the peanut gallery. At the moment, other people were around me and I had to walk away from them and find a quiet place to sit and think.

The deaths of musicians rarely get to me like that. Even if I liked them. For the most part, I tend to figure that they made their mark and will live on through their work. I might get a little wistful and misty, but I don’t feel hurt.

But Kim Shattuck’s passing hurt. 

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