Category: music

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #83: THE BEST OF JILL HIVES

Guided by Voices
The Best of Jill Hives
2003, Matador Records

When I play this CD single (no vinyl for this one), I ALWAYS get stuck on the Cheap Trick cover. I play it over and over again.

A) It’s just a great song. 1977. High school parking lot. Friday afternoon. The jeans are tight, the hair is long, the girls are pretty and the night beckons. I was in diapers and had a bottle in my mouth in ’77, but I’ve seen Dazed and Confused. I’ve seen The Pom Pom Girls. I know those old records. They were easy to find when I was a dedicated vinyl freak. Your Cheap Trick education could be had for a few bucks and a little extra dust in your lungs. Maybe I wasn’t there like the men of Guided by Voices circa 2003 were, but I felt the vibrations decades later and they felt pretty good. The song survives.

“Downed” passes one of the great rock ‘n’ roll tests.

I love it, but I have no idea what it’s about. Never thought about it. Still not thinking about it.

B) Guided by Voices do it right. They play “Downed” like they ARE Cheap Trick. 1977. High school parking lot. Friday afternoon. Their version goes for the flashback. Nobody’s young anymore, but songs live forever. We all need to do our part to keep old songs alive. It’s easy. You want to do it. You love to do it. Whether you’re sharing a mix or passing around a Youtube clip or writing on a stupid website, this is what music fans do. We can’t help it. We’re fucking crazy.

Also, “Downed” stands as one of the very rare examples of Guided by Voices taking a break from Robert Pollard’s avalance of songs to cover someone else’s song. Continue reading “Robert Pollard-Mania! #83: THE BEST OF JILL HIVES”

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #82: EARTHQUAKE GLUE

Guided by Voices
Earthquake Glue
2003, Matador Records

The back cover sums up Earthquake Glue for me.

On the surface, it’s a reluctant “band photo” for a group who prefer to not bother with those things on their records, but there’s more to it.

It’s a photo by Ana Luisa Morales in which the band are featureless stick figures far from the camera. What looks like a church-based charity storefront takes up much more space. An antique shop and a bingo hall sit under a sign that says “Horizon of Hope”. What we see of the parking lot is empty. The place is closed. Added color, drizzled on with the grace of blood stains, gives the impression on first glance that this is the middle of a desert. It looks like a dreamy nowhere.

It’s an image that says Why are we here?

Robert Pollard’s front cover collage has a similar effect, but the back cover is more blunt about it. It’s perfect for an album in which a band wrestles with their place in the universe.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #81: MY KIND OF SOLDIER

Guided by Voices
“My Kind of Soldier” b/w “Broken Brothers”
2003, The Fading Captain Series

At the start of 2003, Robert Pollard thought that the next Guided by Voices album, Earthquake Glue, was done.

It was recorded, nipped, tucked, polished and sequenced as a set of fourteen songs that starts quiet, ends with a rocker, and flies through a variety of moods in between. It was another one of those careful Pollard tracklists of hills and valleys and his ear for classic two-sided presentation. I don’t know what stage the sleeve art was in at this time, but the music at least was in the can. It was finished. Fin. Complete. The glue was dry.

And then Pollard wrote a new song afterward that he insisted had to go on it.

The band booked studio time in Chicago (I think they were in the city to play a show), banged out the song, and then Earthquake Glue had another track (and its first single) and it was called “My Kind of Soldier”.

Now the album was really done.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #14: PISTOLERO

Frank Black and The Catholics
Pistolero
1999, SpinART Records

Every seasoned songwriter lifer has that thing that they can’t get away from. Maybe it doesn’t show up in everything that they do, but it will always call to them and they will return to it eventually.

For Jagger and Richards, it’s black American blues. For McCartney, it’s old escapist happy stuff that comforted people through past Depressions and wars. For Dylan, it’s the mystical side of traditional folk story-songs.

For Frank Black, it’s punk rock. No, he’s never been in a punk band, but that’s not important. Keith Richards didn’t hone his craft anywhere near the Mississippi Delta, either. What matters is that Black is clearly a punk product. Born in 1965, he’s the perfect age for the early wave to have made a life-altering impression on him. When he started his own band, he borrowed as much as he could. The Pixies were never a punk band, but there was a little taste of it in everything about them, from the surface details of their music to their aversion to all rock cliches of the time.

Punks move forward and Black continued his maverick ways on computer-assisted solo albums that still confound some people today.

When he left the big labels for humbler independents in his Catholics period, he approached things like he was on SST in 1984. Like The Minutemen before them, The Catholics threw themselves into the idea that rock is a blue collar job. A band doesn’t tour to promote a record; rather, they make a record to promote a tour. You don’t take a year off. You stay busy. You go out and play. Big cities, small towns, any place that will have you. You travel in a van that you load and unload yourself. You have no expectations of “hitting it big”. You get your kicks from just doing the work.

Black not only adapted well to this, but was inspired by it. See how prolific he got with the Catholics. This all seemed to appeal to his inner punk.

That’s why I say the Catholics era is Frank Black’s punkest period.

And Pistolero might be their punkest album because it just fucking rocks.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #80: BEARD OF LIGHTNING

Phantom Tollbooth
Beard of Lightning
2003, Off Records

The Off Records label run by Chris Slusarenko out of Portland, Oregon worked with Robert Pollard on two releases that were on a mission to pair him with unlikely collaborators.

As Pollard fired out multiple LPs a year made mostly with people he knew, Off sought to show us how his singular energy works with other minds and other sounds that you didn’t see coming. They’re left turns. Rock ‘n’ roll non sequiturs. Robert Pollard is perfect for this not only for his work ethic, but also because his tastes include noise and fucked-up shit. He has one of those free and freaky minds that can go left or right at any time.

The first mutant from this experiment is The Tropic of Nipples, in which Pollard and writer Richard Meltzer trade the spotlight in a noise-rock poetry slam. It’s not for everybody.

The second one is a lot closer to a “regular” rock LP, but it manages to be an even stranger idea. In fact, I don’t know if anyone before or since has made an album with anything like the process of Beard of Lightning. 

Its story begins in New York City in the late 1980s.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #13: PIXIES AT THE BBC

Pixies
At the BBC
1998, 4AD/Elektra

Our walk through the story of Frank Black’s body of work will take side trips into these Pixies archival releases. That’s just how it goes in rock ‘n’ roll sometimes. If you saw a Frank Black live show at this time, you would have likely heard an old Pixies song here and there in the middle of a stretch of his new stuff. This release timeline will have to behave the same way. Old and new will mix. The past haunts the present and future.

The Death to The Pixies compilation moved some units, it seems, so 4AD gave us more flashbacks for our CD collections.

I bought ’em all. In 1998, I remember I even had Pixies at the BBC on the flipside of my dubbed cassette (for the car) of Frank Black and The Catholics. The past and present came together on a homemade Maxell C-90 in one poor boy’s 1987 Chevy Nova.

People argue about CDs vs. vinyl vs. digital when it comes to the best musical experience, but I think my preferred format is the shitty tape that you kept in your car back in the day and played until your stereo eventually ate it for breakfast. Rewind, fast forward, or just let it play straight through. That’s devotion. That’s how you need to hear the Pixies cover The Beatles.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #79: MIST KING URTH

Lifeguards
Mist King Urth
2003, The Fading Captain Series

Many of us who came of age with 90s American indie rock were told that pretty much the whole genre of progressive rock was complete garbage. If music journalists at the time mentioned the old prog dinosaurs at all, it was to run them down as the reason why punk needed to happen. Sid Vicious and Johnny Thunders died so that you don’t have to listen to incomprehensible concept albums and sidelong suites. Some outsider scenes in Germany and Canterbury in England were okay. King Crimson got respect as an influence on the “math-rock” bands. In general though, 1970s excesses were as cool to most 90s indie kids as a misspelling on a neck tattoo.

I know because I was there and I was one of those pipsqueaks. Young people need guidance when navigating decades of music history. Critics are always around for that, though cool family members or friends are even better. When your favorite songwriters and musicians have interesting tastes, that’s a great resource, too.

What I’m trying to say is that it was about 1998 when I finally stopped automatically flipping past old prog-rock LPs in the bins and I started to give them a chance and I did that PURELY because of Robert Pollard. He was my guru. When he talked in interviews about bands he liked or made the occasional list of favorites (The Beatles, Wire, Genesis, The Who, and Devo were always at the top), I paid close attention.

In the little indie rock island that I lived on at the time, he was the only one who talked about this rejected old shit. He was the only one mentioning The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. He got me curious.

So I dug in and I dug what I heard. And prog’s influence on Pollard’s music was plain as day. It was like a secret passage opening up.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #78: MOTEL OF FOOLS

Robert Pollard
Motel of Fools
2003, The Fading Captain Series

By 2003, it was clear that Robert Pollard had no interest in listening to his critics.

Those who couldn’t keep up with his 4-5 albums a year were just going to have to catch up later maybe.

Those who didn’t know what to make of projects such as Circus Devils were just going to have to remain confused.

Those who wanted only pop from Pollard and had no ear for his weird, personal Midwestern psychedelia were just going to have to miss out.

In the meantime, he continued to move forward, like any real artist would do, and make strange and wonderful things like Motel of Fools.

As Guided by Voices settled into a sound–a muscled classic rock kick made for the stage–Pollard’s other projects became the place where he did his searching. Much like how early Guided by Voices albums were always different from each other, Pollard solo releases at this time always took a turn that the previous ones didn’t.

Motel of Fools went for home-brewed, shoestring prog-rock. It has only seven tracks, which is normal for prog records, but this one blazes through ’em in just over thirty minutes. It’s modest and ambitious at the same time. It’s also weird and funny and another melodic marvel.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #12: FRANK BLACK AND THE CATHOLICS

Frank Black and The Catholics
Frank Black and The Catholics
1998, Play It Again Sam

I think it was autumn of 1997 when I read the news and got annoyed.

I even wrote to Frank Black’s record label at the time, American Recordings, which isn’t normally my style, but it was easy to heat me up back then. My message, sent from my old college e-mail account, is long lost, but I recall that it went something like this:

Dear American Recordings dickheads,

Hey, quit being jerks and put out Frank Black’s new album. I read the news on Addicted to Noise. They said you won’t release it. Why, you creeps? It sounds cool. So what if it’s a little rough around the edges? Did you know that he was in the Pixies? You ever heard of that band, dummies? 

Get fucked,
Jason

American somehow resisted my persuasive powers and did not offer us Frank Black and The Catholics, but we eventually got it about a year later via independent labels.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #77: THE HAROLD PIG MEMORIAL

Circus Devils
The Harold Pig Memorial
2002, The Fading Captain Series

Night. Stars shine and shadows crawl over the fresh grave of Harold Pig. The other bikers who knew him gather and talk. Stories about dangerous days and deadly nights fill the air like exhaust fumes. Some of those stories might even be true.

Harold Pig is an abstract presence here, a collage of stitched-together skin and mismatched eyes and limbs belonging to Sonny Barger and Peter Fonda and the hairy Hell’s Angels goons at Altamont, as seen in the great Rolling Stones concert documentary Gimme Shelter. He’s the loser and outlaw that defines the classic vision of the freedom-loving icon on two wheels.

Some say that the world is better off without him, but Robert Pollard refuses to keep it that simple. He had an idea for a story about a dead biker. His wrote a batch of songs that circled around it and approached it from the weirdest angles. Like most good rock concept albums, The Harold Pig Memorial is flummoxing. It doesn’t have a plot, but it does have a mood.

Roll me a fat joint at 2 AM and give me a lighter and turn off everything except for the stereo and I might be able to connect some dots between tracks such as “Dirty World News” and “Exoskeleton Motorcade”, but I don’t have those things now.

I turned 45 last week (Pollard’s age when this album came out on Halloween, his birthday, in 2002) and all I have is this old body and some sparkling water and The Harold Pig Memorial sounds to me like an album about saying goodbye.

By your mid-40s, you’ve said goodbye to so many things.

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