Category: music

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #89: FICTION MAN

Robert Pollard
Fiction Man
2004, The Fading Captain Series

April 24, 2004. Guided by Voices played The Bowery Ballroom in New York City.

Robert Pollard often gets chatty on stage and this night he spilled the news to the crowd that Guided by Voices were breaking up. It was the first public announcement. The people in that room got the scoop before any music journalist did.

One of the few bands out there that seemed incapable of ending without an act of God stopping them was closing up shop. It felt weird, but it made sense, too. Middle-aged people will understand.

Pollard went on to say that night that the final GBV album, Half Smiles of the Decomposed, was coming out in August with a farewell tour to follow. The last show would happen on New Year’s Eve and he promised that the band would go out grandly. Everyone was getting along. Past GBV lineups went down in drama, but this one would get a happy ending.

(If you want to hear that announcement, you can. A recording of it came out on Meet the King: Asshole 2, one of Pollard’s later “comedy” LPs composed of excerpts of his stage banter. The track is called “Blaze of Fire” and it still plays as a heavy moment today.)

A little over two weeks later on May 10, 2004, Pollard’s next solo album, Fiction Man, came out. The break-up news overshadowed it, but Fiction Man was the secret beginning of the post-GBV era.

One of the charms of Fiction Man in retrospect is that no one knew this at the time, including, I suspect, the two men who made it. Every Pollard solo record back then was different. They had different moods and different collaborators. In ’04, Fiction Man was merely more of that.

It was a batch of new Pollard songs, but this time played, arranged, and recorded by multi-instrumentalist oddball and fellow Ohioan Todd Tobias.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #19: BLACK LETTER DAYS

Frank Black and The Catholics
Black Letter Days
2002, SpinART Records

Frank Black’s music is always annoying somebody.

When an artist makes Surfer Rosa and Teenager of the Year and Black Letter Days in a fourteen-year span, they might leave a few fans figuratively stranded at a few train stations. Not everyone follows.

Today, the brief Frank Black and the Catholics period (1998-2003) is well-loved among the deep-diggers. A new vinyl box set of their six formal studio albums is out and the reappraisals are glowing.

Twenty years ago though, when, for all that anyone knew, Black might make Catholics records forever, some people were over it after three albums. They weren’t into this classic rock sound. Maybe they were tired of the broken-heart songs. Others resented that the guy who launched his solo career with expansive studio visions not long ago was now hooked on recording everything live in the studio to 2-track tape like it’s 1963.

On the flipside though, plenty of us enjoyed it. For me, Black was my mutant Bob Dylan. The songs were stunners, but I also got engrossed in how he was building a body of work that would someday look like a bottomless well, full of phases and stages that sometimes conflict and that people argue over.

In 2002, Black and the Catholics moved at the pace of a band signed to Elektra/Asylum in 1975. A new album (or two) each year nearly. Then a lot of long road trips. They sounded like a classic rock band ready to launch their own Rolling Thunder Revue, yet they also had the discipline of a great 80s punk band who take a blue collar approach to the work. They’re ambitious, but not in a way that has anything to do with breaking big in the mainstream. They’re not even thinking about that. It’s more about honing a vision.

After four years of getting better at it, the eighteen-track lost highway of Black Letter Days sounds like what naturally emerges.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #88: EDISON’S DEMOS

Robert Pollard
Edison’s Demos
2004, no label

When I wrote about Earthquake Glue six entries ago, I chose to not yet say a word about this limited vinyl-only LP of Robert Pollard’s solo demos of most its songs.

As sweet as it is, Edison’s Demos doesn’t add anything to my take on the album.

Also, the release of it came as a surprise the following winter. It got no advance announcement. It’s not a part of Pollard’s Fading Captain Series label (or any other label). Its artwork, which is almost as stark as a Jandek LP, makes it look like something that’s been sneaked out to the world in secret. In the tradition of past Guided by Voices live records, it presents itself as a bootleg.

So I decided to treat it that way, too. Edison’s Demos is something under the radar and from out of the blue. It’s something that you might miss if you aren’t paying attention. It’s something that no one was thinking about or knew was coming until it appeared one day in a puff of smoke.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #18: PIXIES

Pixies
2002, SpinART Records

Almost nobody ever refers to it as their debut, but the first Pixies record is technically a self-released, small-press cassette nicknamed The Purple Tape. Whether copies made it to the racks of any cool Boston record stores back in the day or were sold at shows, I can’t say for sure, but this ambitious young band did send out stacks of them to record labels. (As of this writing, original copies of the tape command over $1,000 on Discogs.)

Its seventeen tracks represent everything in their arsenal circa early 1987. It’s all of the songs that they had finished, polished, and were playing in clubs. Sixteen originals and one cover of “In Heaven” from Eraserhead.

The 22-year-old Black Francis didn’t call these recordings demos. He wasn’t married to this cassette as a finished album, but the tracks themselves were ready for prime time. The band made them in a real studio (financed with a loan from Francis’s father) and, though they bashed them out in three days, they worked hard on them.

That’s when the 4AD label out of England enters the story and they liked the cassette, but they thought that an EP would be the best way to introduce the Pixies to the wider world. So, 4AD co-founder Ivo Watts-Russell selected eight highlights and that became Come On Pilgrim, the group’s really real debut.

That left nine unreleased tracks that became well-bootlegged over the years until they finally saw official release in 2002 on this starkly presented disc.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #17: (PIXIES) COMPLETE ‘B’ SIDES

Pixies
Complete ‘B’ Sides
2001, 4AD

I have a special respect for bands who put out good B-sides.

In fact, some days (every other Tuesday and the odd Sunday) I’d even say that the mark of a great band is the coolness of their throwaway tracks. The stuff that didn’t make the album. The stuff that they have laying around. The stuff that they cough up when the record company needs them to simply fill up some space.

B-sides are one of those fascinating aberrations of the old music industry. Ever since records started being pressed and sold, they’ve had two sides and even if one side was a surefire hit, you had to put something, anything, on the other side or you looked like an asshole. B-sides were space-fillers, but they were also sometimes a way to “share the wealth”.

For example, let’s say it’s 1961 and a group records a great song that the radio is sure to love. What about the B-side? Well, in many cases, the producer would hack out a goofy instrumental that nobody would ever care about (sometimes not even involving the A-side’s performers). The result was that if the A-side became a hit and sold a bajillion copies, the credited writer of the B-side benefited from that, too. in terms of royalties. They got a free ride into some big money. (See the likes of Phil Spector and Kazenetz-Katz, who were particularly brazen about it.)

That’s the seedy side of it all, but there are other sides. Like any good record, there’s always another side.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #86: HARDCORE UFOS: REVELATIONS, EPIPHANIES AND FAST FOOD IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE

Guided by Voices
Hardcore UFOs: Revelations, Epiphanies and Fast Food in the Western Hemisphere
2003, Matador Records

Around 2001, a rumor blew in the wind that a new Guided by Voices box set was in the works from John Fahey’s Revenant Records. To my memory, the plan was to collect the elusive and out-of-print mid-90s 7″ EPs in one place (finally!) with some mysterious extras. Revenant had just made a big splash with a lavish 5-CD Captain Beefheart rarities set, Grow Fins, along with a vibrant catalog of lovingly reissued old blues, folk, and jazz. The prospect of them working with GBV and maybe presenting them in the context of weird Americana was exciting.

That box set never happened, but another box did happen on Matador Records a few years later. Were the Revenant rumors true? I don’t know, but I do wonder if Hardcore UFOs ascended from its ashes.

It’s a six-ring circus celebration of Guided by Voices, partly from a Matador perspective. It’s NOT a collection of the old EPs (that were released by a variety of labels, which makes gathering them in one place complicated legally), but it does neatly collect many non-album moments and a lot more.

In the big picture though, the five CDs, one DVD, and great liner notes of Hardcore UFOs take their own unique shot at telling one of the oddest success stories in American indie rock.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #85: THE BEST OF GUIDED BY VOICES: HUMAN AMUSEMENTS AT HOURLY RATES

Guided by Voices
The Best of Guided by Voices: Human Amusements at Hourly Rates
2003, Matador Records

With such an enormous body of work to ponder, a discussion breaks out every now and then among fans about whether or not Robert Pollard is a genius.

What inspires all of this stuff? And what keeps some of us so interested in it? Why am I buying five new albums a year from this guy?

It’s a big thing to wrap your head around, but, to me, genius is the least interesting answer to those questions. I much prefer to credit the work that lead up to the mad skills. The years of filling up notebooks and cassettes and singing to the void. Writing bad songs. Writing good songs. Writing bad songs that became good songs in their final versions, sometimes rewritten decades later. Being obsessed enough to independently press up six records from 1986 to 1992 even though no one was paying attention. Using his obscurity wisely.

Genius is abstract and intimidating, but hard work is concrete and inspiring.

Obviously there are certain blessings from the universe that all of the hard work in the world may never achieve. A compelling personality. Interesting tastes. A listenable singing voice.

But if Pollard is a genius, I think his genius is his rare energy that keeps him going even when everything else tells him to stop. Pollard’s work is full of lessons on creativity and inspiration and if I had to boil it down to a single idea, that’s it. Don’t stop. Get old doing it. Beat your head against the wall. Keep doing it even when your band falls apart. It’s not about success or failure; it’s about trying again and again. Keep going and maybe you’ll write your masterpiece eventually. How many great songs aren’t in our lives because some young artists couldn’t stand the world’s indifference and gave up?

That’s what I think about when I listen to this crazy Best of that attempts to gather the highlights of the strangest, messiest, and most improbable indie rock watershed band to rise to prominence in the 90s… and then refuse to stop.
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Frank Black-O-Rama! #16: DOG IN THE SAND

Frank Black and the Catholics
Dog in the Sand
2001, What Are Records?

As I crumble and stumble through old age, I’ve learned that the musicians who mean the most to me have two things in common.

1) They never go away. They’re always there. Even after their band breaks up, their album bombs, their label drops them, or they fall out of fashion, they keep going. They have a new record out next year. They don’t hide away for a decade. Bad reviews bounce off of them. I find this life-affirming.

2) They’re ambitious. However, I’m NOT talking about the sort of ambition that drives a person to do anything for success. Stab their collaborators in the back. Bow to the big entertainment shit machine. Con their way to the top of mountain. No, I’m talking about an ambition that means challenging yourself and putting out work that reflects a vision and a variety of interests. People change. They go through phases. I like when musicians do the same. If a band or solo act has ten albums out, I’m most impressed when album #10 is on a different trip from album #1.

Now, there are great bands who don’t fit into one or either of the above descriptions.

The reckless types who burned bright and flamed out early, like Robert Johnson or Syd Barrett, are perpetually fascinating.

There’s also something to be said for bands like Motorhead or the Ramones, who found their one sound and then worked it until they dropped.

That’s all fine, but I’m not hooked on them like I am on guys like Frank Black, who dare to evolve, even if they lose some people along the way.

And I really get sold on them when they quietly put out masterpieces such as Dog in the Sand.

So much comes together here. Its sound is a step up in sophistication from what came before. Its twelve songs touch on where Black had been and where he was interested in going at the time. Its subjects are outer space, California, sadness, death, and the beautiful thing that occurs when pedal steel guitar and piano collide with rock ‘n’ roll.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #84: PINBALL MARS

Circus Devils
Pinball Mars
2003, The Fading Captain Series

If someone puts out five albums in a year, one of them really should be a weird, druggy rock opera.

For the third Halloween in a row, the Circus Devils brought a madness that stood out next to everything else that Robert Pollard was doing. The sounds of Todd and Tim Tobias continue to be never quite of this world. You can hear their influences, sure. Devo looms large, as always. I also detect Chrome and Alice Cooper maybe blowing around in this album’s storm. The echoes come from far away, though. The signal is distorted.

Pinball Mars paints the clearest picture yet of them as 70s hard rock kids who later got warped by punk and other 80s fringe sounds and now here they are trying different ways to make it fit together. What makes them great is that they never slide into too much respect for it all. Everything is a perversion in some way. They don’t imitate their esteemed forebears. Rather, the Tobias brothers treat their influences like a mad scientist might treat a stolen corpse. Try not to slip on the blood.

Their work inspires Pollard to get extra free and absurd with his songs and the results are often crazy and amazing.

Now you might have questions.

Okay, so Pinball Mars is a rock opera. Does that mean it’s a bunch of pretentious horseshit?

NO. Pinball Mars is trashy and strange. It sounds like 70s riff rock tripping over punk on its way to prog and then getting abducted by a UFO. It’s great Ohio outsider stuff.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #15: ODDBALLS

Frank Black
Oddballs
2000, no label

Oddballs has some of my favorite inner sleeve notes of any album. They’re simple, but strangely touching.

It begins with a brief explanation written by Frank Black himself that the disc in your hands is a collection of B-sides and other off-road trips from his early solo years (1994 to 1997). Below that is the tracklist and for every entry Black adds a quick note about who he was “trying to be” on that particular song.

Opening track “Pray a Little Faster”? “Trying to be Dylan”, Black says.

Second track “Oddball”? “Trying to be Stones”.

He goes on to namecheck Springsteen, Bowie, Daltrey, Strummer, (Doug) Sahm, Lou (Reed) and even himself.

It may not seem like much, but for a rocker like Black, who prefers a veil of mystery about him, these tidbits felt like a rare moment of opening up. It was Black saying that behind his aloof stage persona is just a dude who likes rock music. The Stones, The Who, The Clash. He’s not that weird. He’s perfectly normal even. He’s so normal that he sometimes even has to “try to be” Frank Black.

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