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.
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.
Continue reading “Robert Pollard-Mania #1: Introduction and FOREVER SINCE BREAKFAST”
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Tiny Tim
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?
Composer Angelo Badalamenti was the Great Missing Man For the first few hours of Twin Peaks season 3.
When you see Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass in a thrift store, you buy it. Just to have it. It’s like a membership card into the club of cheap-bin record hunters (all of us have it). This LP in your possession says that you’ve been there. You know the fluorescent lights. You know the dirt. You know the smell. You know the pain.
Sometimes I get to thinking that I’m a real mean guy. A hard ass, a walking scowl, one gruff customer, a storm system coming in from the south, a beer bottle that’s been pissed in, a bruised banana, a carcinogenic soul with an abortion clinic dumpster for a heart, a dead dandelion in a winter field, a tornado that carries away your kitten, a broken cookie jar, bad news in old blue jeans, a hair in your fettuccine alfredo, a spoonful of bitter medicine that doesn’t help, a straight-up jerk, a bad dream, a bus station restroom, a carton of curdled milk, a human skull that you find in the grass on your Easter picnic, a soiled towel, one foul fella.