Category: music

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #57: CHASING HEATHER CRAZY

Guided by Voices
“Chasing Heather Crazy” b/w “On With the Show”
2001, TVT Records

The story goes that TVT Records didn’t “hear a single” on Isolation Drills, the second and final album that Guided by Voices would submit to those music industry gurus (note: TVT went bankrupt in 2008). Me, I hear at least five singles on it so I don’t know what to make of that. I’m no Do the Collapse hater, but Isolation Drills is a ferocious step up in confidence. It’s got anthems. It’s got pretty flowers. It’s got a melancholy heart, but it’s determined to rise up. It’s GBV’s one last hard push toward big-time success (produced by Rob Schnapf, known at the time for his work with Beck and Elliot Smith) and I think it’s as great as anything they could have made toward that goal.

More on that in the next entry.

Before it, we got this 7″ preview. To my memory, it came out a month or two ahead of the album.

SO, like I said, TVT heard the album and said “Where’s the single?”. “Glad Girls” somehow wasn’t enough. “Unspirited” wasn’t enough. “Fair Touching” wasn’t enough. According to Robert Pollard, they wanted a song about “girls and cars” (what year was this? 1965?). From there, Pollard went off and banged out a single. And it was lovely.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #56: SPEEDTRAPS FOR THE BEE KINGDOM

Howling Wolf Orchestra
Speedtraps for the Bee Kingdom
2000, The Fading Captain Series

2000 was a strange year for new music from Robert Pollard. The optimistic energy that defined 1999 was gone. Pollard would gain it back in time, but for now it was all used up.

And it happened so suddenly. Back then, I thought that maybe the tour had wiped him out. Or maybe Pollard’s moody dirges of 2000 were an escape from the music business bullshit, a retreat into non-commercial sounds after months of playing the major label game.

Those of us in the spectator seats didn’t know what was happening in Pollard’s personal life at the time, you see.

We didn’t know yet about the divorce.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #55: BIG TROUBLE

Hazzard Hotrods
Big Trouble
2000, The Fading Captain Series

I like bad music.

And by bad music I don’t mean the soulless junk that we all hear everyday piped into drug stores or issuing from other peoples’ cars. Those forgettable aural space-fillers. Those frat party soundtracks. That slickster stuff that they tell me is country music, but that sounds like the regular ol’ Top 40 except that the singer has something that resembles a twang underneath the electronic pitch correction.

No, I’m talking music that’s too lo-fi to live. I’m talking about noise. Total racket. Audio chaos that you can’t recommend to just anybody–or anybody at all most of the time. I’m talking about shit that’s fucked.

I don’t love every little thing that’s moaned or droned into a microphone, but if you like rock music and you’ve dug even slightly underground in an attempt to find other worlds, you probably like bad music, too. Maybe you’re a big trash-brain. Feedback is fine with you. So is tape hiss. Room noise. Accidents. Maybe you like the results of a cheap microphone and a simple 90s-era consumer-grade cassette recorder that strains to capture a room full of sound, only to come off like a hazy transmission from Pluto.

Some might call it garbage; you call it otherworldly. Or maybe it’s actually perfectly of this Earth. Gritty. Human. Raw. Blemished.

This weird space is where Hazzard Hotrods live. The original vinyl-only release was limited to 500 copies, which sounds right to me. That’s about how many people might like this.

So what the hell is it?

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Guided by Voices – Live at The Brightside, Dayton, Ohio 2020 (Also, on the Internet)

Some of my very best live show photography.

I enjoy writing my Robert Pollard-Mania! series, but due to its chronological nature, I’m always rummaging through Pollard’s past and I don’t get much chance to talk about his fascinating present. Right now, my modest li’l project is up to the year 2000. Yep, I’m here gabbin’ about twenty years ago while Pollard and maybe the most powerful line-up of Guided by Voices ever is putting out epic masterworks such as Zeppelin Over China, hyperactive tornados of song such as Warp and Woof and juicy cuts of Midwestern psych such as Surrender Your Poppy Field right NOW.

So let’s talk about the present for once, goddammit. This killer live show sent out to the internet in the Age of The Pandemic is a perfect excuse.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #54: HAPPY MOTHERFUCKERS AND SAD CLOWNS

King’s Ransom
Happy Motherfuckers and Sad Clowns
2000, no label

I have no idea why this top-notch Guided by Voices double live LP is credited to the name King’s Ransom. If you know Bob, ask him for me, please. Thanks.

The name “Guided by Voices” is nowhere to be found on the surface. Even in Pollard’s opening words to the crowd, he jokingly introduces the band as Sebadoh. Also, there’s no tracklist. No credits. Just some simple pasted-on sleeve art and two records of one fearsome show (plus a 7″ of three live rarities from two years earlier because GBV are allowed to be scattered and crazy like that).

This is the return to the mock bootleg style of For All Good Kids and Jellyfish Reflector. It wasn’t announced. It wasn’t promoted. Nobody talked about it. It just fell out of the sky and into the bins at your better, vinyl-friendly record stores one day in autumn of 2000.

It had been about four years since one of these came out and things were different. In fact, the whole band was now different.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #53: BRIEFCASE: DRINKS AND DELIVERIES

Guided by Voices
Briefcase: Drinks and Deliveries
2000, The Fading Captain Series

If you’ve heard every Guided by Voices album, you’re a fan.

If you’ve heard every EP and B-side, you’re obsessive.

If you’ve heard all of the solo albums and side projects, you’re far gone.

If you’ve listened to all of the Suitcase box sets, you’re dangerous.

If you have all of the Briefcase LPs, you’re in the scariest category of all: You’re a collector.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #52: SUITCASE: FAILED EXPERIMENTS AND TRASHED AIRCRAFT

Guided by Voices
Suitcase: Failed Experiments and Trashed Aircraft
2000, The Fading Captain Series

Guided by Voices had stacks of great songs when they became popular in the early 90s, but they had something else that was also unique.

They had a past.

They had a long past. A convoluted past. Most new indie sensations are young people. They don’t have pasts, yet. Robert Pollard’s real peers in 1994 weren’t Pavement and Superchunk, if you ask me. Rather, they were outsider oddballs like R. Stevie Moore and Billy Childish, seasoned DIY soldiers who’ve been at it forever and who produce so much music that they look half-crazy (or all-crazy) to the square world.

GBV’s subterranean self-released albums from the 1980s and early 90s (yanked from obscurity in 1995 on BOX) told some of that story, but there was more. There was a shitload more.

By the time that Guided by Voices made a blip on the cultural radar, Pollard had been writing and recording songs for about twenty years, maybe even longer. In interviews, he claimed to have thousands of unreleased songs at home. Years and years of songs. Songs that not many outside of Dayton, Ohio city limits had ever heard.

And he kept those tapes in a suitcase.

THE Suitcase.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #5: TROMPE LE MONDE

Pixies
Trompe le Monde
1991, 4AD/Elektra

The Pixies’ break-up is not an interesting story.

There are MUCH more juicy rock music scandals out there. There are bands who ended because of murder. Or suicide. Or murder-suicides. Some bands ended because someone in it was certifiably insane. There are bands who ended with shotgun blasts, overdoses, plane crashes and prison sentences. Some performers died on stage. Other bands went down in a flurry of lawsuits. Sex, violence, money, drugs and mental illness have all collided in some combination or another throughout music history to result in some real harrowing soap operas.

How did the Pixies end?

With a fax.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #51: THE WHO WENT HOME AND CRIED

Guided by Voices
The Who Went Home and Cried
2000, MVD Music Video

“So Jason, are you going to write about the GBV DVDs?”

“Dear Sir or Madam, will the DVDs count in your Robert Pollard-Mania! series?”

“What’s up, Sexy Pants? Hey, I’m just curious, will items such as The Who Went Home and Cried  and The Electrifying Conclusion rate a mention in your survey of Robert Pollard’s ouevre?”

Absolutely no one has asked me any of those questions, but the answer is YES.

Yes, we will talk about the Guided by Voices video releases. It’s not a giant pile. It’s a modest amount, but it’s more than most indie bands have put out. Also, there’s good stuff in there. Some of ’em are on the oddball side, not typical concert discs or documentaries, but pieces of madness that complement Pollard’s vision.

Pollard’s body of work is Route 66 and in this series we intend to drive as much of it as we can. We’re gonna spend a night in every old motel. We’re gonna peruse every bottlecap museum in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico. We’re gonna sample the fudge at every truck stop. It’s not going to be perfect, but we are going to TRY.

What I’m saying is that we’re a little odd and so is The Who Went Home and Cried.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #4: BOSSANOVA

Pixies
Bossanova
1990, 4AD/Elektra

Mainstream opinion puts the first two Pixies albums on a pedestal and then treats the next two as lesser lights. There’s always somebody around who insists that Doolittle is their best. It was definitive, they might say. It’s the perfect snapshot of the band’s personality. The peak of their screaming surrealism and pulverizing pop. Doolittle was the album on which the band sharpened their blade as good as it was ever gonna get.

There are some cuddly songs on Bossanova and Trompe le Monde, sure, but the shine was off the chrome–or maybe it was TOO shiny as the band got more comfortable in bed with producer Gil Norton, who had a real ear for how to make these strange songs sound like sugar.

Now, I disagree. I disagree so much that I declare Bossanova my favorite of the original Pixies albums. I think it’s great. If the previous records are played-out to the max in my world, this one is still breezy and fun to me. It’s a perfect pop album. It makes me bounce off the walls.

Still, I do understand the detractors to a degree. While Bossanova isn’t a total departure–it’s still no-nonsense screamy rock music–there ARE differences from what came before.

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