Category: music

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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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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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