Category: music

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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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Robert Pollard-Mania! #2: DEVIL BETWEEN MY TOES

Guided by Voices
Devil Between My Toes
1987, Schwa Records
Reissue (via the Box set): 1995, Scat Records

Box set reissue copy, ladies and germs. No, I don’t have an original. This is good enough for me.

When no one’s paying attention to me, I sit at home in pajama pants, drink Trader Joe’s wine and watch Youtube videos for nine hours.

When no one was paying attention to Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices, they wrote songs and made terrific, underrated records just for themselves pretty much.

Clearly, I have a lot to learn from Guided by Voices.

The one thing I do have in common with Guided by Voices circa 1987 is that neither of us get out much. At the time of this album’s release, they weren’t playing live. They weren’t seeking out a label or management. They weren’t auditioning for anyone or anything. They were working guys in Dayton, Ohio making music in basements and garages because that was how they got through the day. Pressing it onto vinyl, on their own dime, made it “real” and inducted them into the rock brotherhood, whether anyone heard it or not.  The songs are the message, the album is the bottle, the outside world is the ocean.

Splash.

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Robert Pollard-Mania #1: Introduction and FOREVER SINCE BREAKFAST

Let’s face it, Robert Pollard is a sick man.

He puts out more records in one year than a lot of bands release in ten years. He has one of the most insane legacies in rock and it continues to expand all of the time. At his age (born on October 31, 1957), he’s learned just about everything that there is to know about rock music, but he somehow missed the lesson that said that your body of work should be neat and clean and not confuse people.

Terrible iPhone photo shot by yours truly, taken from Guided by Voices playing in Austin, TX, September 2012.

Robert Pollard also never learned that lo-fi isn’t all right.

Nobody ever told him that a songwriter who can write a brilliant pop melody shouldn’t write far-out psychedelic stuff, too.

And he never listened to anyone who’s ever made the point that rock music is a business and not the place for a restless creative mind that comes up with more than twelve songs a year.

Yep, we’re talkin’ a real sick-o-rama.

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The Big Job of TINY IDOLS

Various
Tiny Idols: Transmissions from the Indie Underground 1991-1995
2005, Snowglobe Records

In my defense, I never wore horn-rim glasses nor did I own the “sunny-side up” Pavement T-shirt or the Sebadoh shirt with the heart on it, but 90s indie rock did its job on me all right. I was right in there, reading Puncture magazine in my dorm, folding my arms and nodding at club shows, taking Steve Albini’s opinions seriously, looking for an identity and finding one in lo-fi rock on stacks of 7″ records. It feels like so long ago. In the time since, I’m pretty sure that I’ve said that I hate 90s indie rock. I’ve also said that I love 90s indie rock. Call that a contradiction if you like. Me, I call it merely teasing an old friend.

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The Only Christmas Album That Matters

Tiny Tim
Tiny Tim’s Christmas Album
1995, Rounder Records

Lesser singers, such as Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Barbra Streisand have tried.

They’ve tried to conjure up a joyous holiday spirit while they wrap their pristine voices around some of the worst songs ever written. They’ve tried to make us feel good. They’ve tried to make us hold our loved ones a little closer. They’ve tried to make us think about Jesus while we’re on our fifth brandy eggnog.

They’ve tried and failed. At least for dirtbags like me who only like Christmas because it’s a day off from work—and shouldn’t us assholes be the REAL judge of what makes great Christmas music?

I think so. And you can trust me. I’ve only had three martinis tonight.

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Twin Peaks Season 3 Soundtrack Albums Part II: Screaming on Your Knees at the Roadhouse

One of many refreshing left turns in the Twin Peaks revival is its disinterest in traditional television cliffhangers. Episodes end with dangling questions galore and turning points left up in the air, but David Lynch never gives us a hard cut to credits after a gunshot in the night. Instead he often goes out on a song, a “live” performance on stage in the long-standing Roadhouse. Like Mr. Rogers changing his shoes and jacket, the moment the neon bar sign hits the screen, you know the show is almost over. What young band in Lynch’s iTunes is playing this week?

Far from superfluous though, these scenes have two powerful effects on the series:

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Twin Peaks Season 3 Soundtrack Albums Part I: Angelo & Friends

Composer Angelo Badalamenti was the Great Missing Man For the first few hours of Twin Peaks season 3.

It began almost eerily quiet. There was the typically meticulous David Lynch sound design, but there was nothing like the nearly wall-to-wall jazzy snap and shuffle of the old series. Still, it made sense. This was a world slipping back into its skin and feeling its way through the dark. Characters we hadn’t seen in twenty-six years were in no rush to open up to us about where they’d been all this time (except for Lucy and Andy). It was mystery on top of mystery on top of mystery, right from the first scene.

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