Robert Pollard-Mania! #69: CALLING ZERO

Go Back Snowball
Calling Zero
2002, The Fading Captain Series

I was born in 1976, which puts me at the perfect age to have been an insufferable indie rock dork in the 90s.

When I wasn’t in rock clubs with my arms folded, I was getting into serious discussions about whether or not Sonic Youth still “matter” and other fascinating topics (zzzzzzzzz…) like that. I also constantly needed to flex my music “knowledge”. All that I did was spend a little too much time at the record store, but I acted like I’d walked on the goddamn moon. I was a ball of insecurities and I had no good reason to be arrogant about anything, so I filled that vacant space with my super-awesome music opinions. I thought that I had shocking and unique views. Now I’m cool and I have something to say. 

Why couldn’t I just be a human being? Why did I have something to prove all of the time?

Eh, youth. The only thing that I miss about it is being able to eat a whole pizza and not feel like shit for the rest of the day.

I’m not saying that everyone who was into indie rock at the time shared my malfunctions. I’m also not putting down the music itself. 90s indie rock was a good thing that revealed possibilities and expanded horizons. People had great times with that music.

Some of it even holds up, though there’s so much that I can’t listen to anymore without recalling what a Cringe Machine I was. It was a full-time job for me back then.  It kept me so occupied that I didn’t have any time to get into Superchunk.

Maybe I just haven’t heard the right songs. Maybe I haven’t given enough time to what I have heard. Maybe it’s because Superchunk never, to my battered memory, played North Texas during the peak of my live show-going (1996 to 2000), Maybe I’m a giant idiot (always and forever a possibility).

And this is how I approach this lovely record by Go Back Snowball, an album that follows Life Starts Here like spring follows winter.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #6: FRANK BLACK

Frank Black
Frank Black
1993, 4AD/Elektra

In the Pixies, Black Francis wrote fun, memorable songs about surrealism and aliens, but he didn’t get really weird until he flipped his stage name and became rock music’s top science nerd.

Why the change? The break-up of the old band was just that bitter, I guess. He had to wash it off. Treat it like something best forgotten. He wouldn’t even play Pixies songs live for five years.

There was also something punk rock about it in an old school way. It gave off street cred. In their early 80s heyday, the likes of Black Flag and Husker Du played live shows typically dominated by their new stuff even when it wasn’t yet out on a record. Leaning on your past is what tired old rock stars do. Real motherfuckers move forward.

So, on that note, meet Frank Black, 4AD’s newest pop sensation! Hear his hopelessly strange “debut” of brilliant songs that surf on waves of crisp, synthetic sounds. It was also his best and most eccentric work yet at the time.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #68: LIFE STARTS HERE

Airport 5
Life Starts Here
2002, The Fading Captain Series

My guess is that many deep-digging fans of Robert Pollard are White Album people.

It’s the old, dead-horse debate. Did The Beatles’ White Album need to be a 30-track double-LP? Do its detours and excesses hold up? Was it really necessary that we hear “Revolution 9” and “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” and “Wild Honey Pie”?

My answer to those questions is YES, YES, and YES. That’s my favorite Beatles album. It’s crazy and lively and packed with ideas and I would sooner chop off one of my fingers than lose any of it. The frosty clip collage “Revolution 9” is cool as shit. It makes the closing lullaby “Good Night” creepy.  On The White Album, the most famous rock band in the world deconstruct their sound in a fast-paced flurry of genres and the only way to end it is on an apocalyptic note. It’s as good as it gets.

Some disagree. Some would prefer a smoother, more conventional ride. They’ve got a whole list of Lennon-McCartney and Harrison songs that they wish they’d never heard. I think that these people are goofy, but, hey, it’s a big world. There’s room for all kinds.

What I’m trying to say is that Robert Pollard’s music has some of the same appeal and leads to similar division.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #67: THE TROPIC OF NIPPLES EP

Richard Meltzer, Robert Pollard, Smegma & Antler
The Tropic of Nipples EP
2002, Off Records

There’s a charm to music that doesn’t care about being liked. Music that farts right in your face and doesn’t even say “excuse me”.

You can criticize it for being tuneless, I guess, but what does that mean if it doesn’t seek to be tuneful? You can call it trash, but how sharp is your blade when the music is happy to be damaged? You can say that it’s an insult, but how many megatons is your bomb when these sounds are intended to be an affront?

Tropic of Nipples is one of those records. It’s one of those outsider things. It’s proudly ugly, pointedly disheveled and wantonly fucked. A negative review is as much of a recommendation as a positive one. Its twelve tracks (it’s a stretch to call most of them songs) all crammed up on the original 7″ come and go too quickly to enjoy much on their own. They’re parts of a whole, individual scribbles of graffiti on the same brick wall.

Our two vandals are Richard Meltzer and Robert Pollard.

This isn’t really a Robert Pollard record. He’s the co-star. The title is Meltzer’s. Meltzer also gets the first and last tracks on the original release.

Pollard contributes cover art and six tracks (plus two more on the CD), but the real auteur here looks to be Off Records founder Chris Slusarenko.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #66: LIVE AT THE ATHENS TIME CHANGE RIOTS

The Cum Engines (Featuring The Cannot Changes)
Live at the Athens Time Change Riots
2001, F ‘n’ E

By the time this LP came out around the holidays, I believe that Guided by Voices were were officially indie rock again. After two albums, they broke up with TVT Records. I’ve had bigger surprises in life.

For most of the year, Robert Pollard was already talking in the press about his vision for the next GBV album. It was going to lean prog-rock and it was going to be called Heavy River. The title would change a few more times until it finally become Universal Truths and Cycles, but Heavy River was what he was calling it early in 2001 as the spring birds sang (the earliest reference I could find to it still online is this Denver Post article published on March 25, 2001, over a week before Isolation Drills was out).

The not-so-subtle message: He was done chasing hits and it was time to move on and he was ready to do that right NOW. Isolation Drills was new to us, but it was old to him. Even if “Glad Girls” became the new “Losing My Religion”, Heavy River was still the next move.

Before that march forward though came this flashback, GBV’s sixth vinyl-only, bootleg-style live release. The recording was from awhile ago. It was the night of January 22, 2000 at The 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia, in the middle of the southeastern US leg of a long tour, with Australia and Japan coming up, and then another month-and-change of scrambling across the US after that. It was the same show from which the Dayton, OH 19-Something-and-5 7″ A-side came.

In a strange, non-linear, collage artist way though, this nearly two-year-old show comes off like a statement of purpose for the band at the time.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #65: SOME DRINKING IMPLIED

Guided by Voices
Some Drinking Implied
2001, MVD Music Video

If you’re under 40 and outside of the US, you probably won’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but back in the 1980s and up to the early 90s, there was an amazing TV show called Night Flight. It came on after midnight on Saturdays and it was three hours of weird short films, music videos and random artifacts from pop culture’s junk pile.

In one night, you might see a Public Image Ltd. interview, an episode of Dynaman, some bizarre Church of the Subgenius short, a World War II-era Daffy Duck cartoon and what felt like about five hundred other things. Whether you were staggering in from an evening out in your cool 80s clothes or a kid like me up late and learning the ways of the night owl way too young, Night Flight was the perfect hallucinatory trip-out. Turn your brain on or off. Either is fine.

It was formative. It twisted me up pretty good. Looking back, I can see what it helped turn me into, which is a culture freak who will watch anything no matter how old or strange or low-budget or tossed aside. (See this site’s film section for the damage wrought.)

It made me the kind of goofball who enjoys the wrecked spectacle of Some Drinking Implied.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #64: RINGWORM INTERIORS

Circus Devils
Ringworm Interiors
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Sometimes on the internet, an innocent lamb who’s in the middle of discovering Robert Pollard’s body of work will step forward and ask where they should start with Circus Devils.

It’s a fair question. At fourteen albums released over sixteen years, this collaboration with fellow Ohioan oddballs Todd and Tim Tobias is not only Pollard’s longest-running side project, but it’s also the strangest. Their sound is a kind of psychedelic rock birthed from a mutant strain. It’s a creature that rose up out of toxic waste. Lots of slime, lots of teeth.

There are quiet Circus Devils records and loud ones and ones that sound like they were created by lizard men from Jupiter. Sometimes they sound like a rock band, sometimes they sound like mad scientists performing sinister experiments in a backyard tool shed. Their records are as varied as dreams, and often as haunting.

Their music comes in a few different flavors, but it all has a demon inside of it. There’s an eeriness in every sound that they make (Pollard got into the spirit and timed most of their albums for a Halloween release). It hides somewhere in even the project’s gentlest moments.

It’s a demon that runs naked and free and howling at the moon on their unhinged first record.

So, where to start with Circus Devils?

I say start at the BEGINNING. Start with Ringworm Interiors. Meet the demon. Get the full Circus Devils experience. Be surprised and assaulted like we were back in 2001 with what’s still one of the most bugfuck albums in Pollard’s whole discography.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #63: TOWER IN THE FOUNTAIN OF SPARKS

Airport 5
Tower in the Fountain of Sparks
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout made three albums together as a duo and each one is its own odd creature that just barely gets along with the others.

Tonics & Twisted Chasers is the first one. Sprout created the instrumental tracks and then Pollard came up with songs to go on top and they called it Guided by Voices because why not? It was 1996 and Tonics sounded like the mutant brother of Alien Lanes. Lo-fi. Fucked up. Weird all over, but in a familiar way. Pollard’s voice and Sprout’s guitar were sounds we’d heard work together many times before.

Five years later, after Sprout had long left the band to raise his new baby and make beautiful solo records that expanded his range into perfect piano pop and organ-heavy psychedelic bubblegum (I’ve raved here about his first one, Carnival Boy, and it’s not even the best one) he and Pollard got together again for another album, made the same way as before.

Sprout’s music, Pollard’s songs and words. That’s it, except this time they called it Airport 5.

Also, they didn’t sound much like Guided by Voices anymore–at least not in the way that many expected.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #62: CHOREOGRAPHED MAN OF WAR

Robert Pollard and His Soft Rock Renegades
Choreographed Man of War
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Choreographed Man of War is a raw and yet weirdly theatrical rock ‘n’ roll album from a guy who’s (mostly) done talking about his divorce and wants to get happy again.

If Isolation Drills, which came out a mere three months earlier, confessed sins and left blood on the walls, this one just roars and makes your ears ring. Still, the two records sound to me like curious companions.

Both Guided by Voices albums on TVT Records have follow-ups on Pollard’s own Fading Captain Series label that feel deliberate in how they complement and contrast what came before. In the warm tones that issue from your speakers, they’re the sound of Pollard washing off the major label stink, scrubbing it away with tape hiss and homemade sleeve art. They’re albums free of the music business bullshit, the expensive studio time and the label heads and their opinions.

It goes deeper, though.

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Things I Will Keep #21: THE MURMAIDS, “Popsicles and Icicles”

The Murmaids
“Popsicles and Icicles” b/w “Huntington Flats”
1963, Chattahoochee Records

Everyone talks shit about vanilla, but it’s my favorite flavor.

The word itself is often used as a synonym for boring or bland. You can lead a vanilla lifestyle with vanilla interests and have vanilla sex–and no one who describes it that way means it as a compliment.

Vanilla is also typically white, like a politician’s shirt or the plain walls of an unfurnished living room or Pat Sajak–and that’s supposed to be bad, too, I guess.

You hear these slanders about vanilla all of the time, but you won’t hear ’em from me because I LOVE IT. I’m crazy about it. Vanilla is refreshing and cozy. I’m even nuts about the scent of it. Furthermore, vanilla, like me, may look very white, but it has Mexican roots (all real vanilla is derived from an edible orchid plant indigenous to Mexico; the Aztecs of old were way into it).

In that sense, I am vanilla. I identify.

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