Category: music

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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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Robert Pollard-Mania! #61: GLAD GIRLS

Guided by Voices
“Glad Girls”
2001, TVT Records/Festival Mushroom

If “Glad Girls” went nuclear on the radio in 2001 that would have been cool with me.

“Hold on Hope“, by contrast, would’ve been a problem. Who wants to keep explaining that one?

“Hey Sugar Britches, who’s your favorite band?”, someone in an alternate universe might ask me.

“Guided by Voices,” I would say.

“Oh, those guys who did ‘Hold on Hope’! I love soft-rock bands like that. Are they still around? What other good songs did they do?”

I don’t have the patience for that conversation. I’m too much of a jerk.

“Glad Girls” is more like it, though. “Glad Girls” IS GBV.

It’s loud, slick and produced to throw down with any other rock song on the radio in 2001. It’s also one of Robert Pollard’s specialties, which is THE ANTHEM. It gets you going. It clubs you over the skull. It’s half-song, half-thunderbolt.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #60: STIFLED MAN CASINO

Airport 5
“Stifled Man Casino”
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Tobin Sprout brings the snap-crackle and Robert Pollard brings the pop for this second single from their Airport 5 project. “Total Exposure” is the quiet one and “Stifled Man Casino” is the loud one.

It’s the anthem. It’s the mic-swinger. On the surface, it could pass for power pop circa 1981 from a band of young new wavers in jeans and T-shirts. Maybe one guy in the group rocks the loose skinny tie look. Didn’t Airport 5 open for The Pretenders a few times way back when?

“Stifled Man Casino” kicks like that sorta thing. It’s surging and youthful–and then you tune in to the lyrics and you hear the truth.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #59: TOTAL EXPOSURE

Airport 5
“Total Exposure”
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Isolation Drills hadn’t yet cooled off in the new release racks back in the spring of 2001 when Robert Pollard was already promoting more records coming out over the next few months on his Fading Captain Series label.

The one that had us all buzzing was Airport 5, a new collaboration with Tobin Sprout.

Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout together again! OH MY GOD! Indie dorks like me fainted at the very thought.

The resulting album is a lovely piece of work, if not quite the tonic that some expected, but we’ll have plenty of time to talk about that later (the album will be #63 in this series). Preceding it were two 7″ singles of preview tracks (with non-album B-sides, of course) and the first one was a song that I like to call “Total Exposure”.

Because that’s what it’s called.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #58: ISOLATION DRILLS

Guided by Voices
Isolation Drills
2001, TVT Records

Robert Pollard gave the mainstream dream of fame and big money and an overplayed radio hit that eventually annoys everyone exactly as many chances as it deserves.

Two.

A restless artist like Pollard can’t beat his head against that wall for too long.

Two shots. That’s enough. In most cases, the first album is the best that the band can do at the time in this new place and with these new expectations. The second is for sharpening their blade and improving on whatever wasn’t quite perfect about the first.

Obviously, Robert Pollard, with his fifteen years of putting out good records at the time, didn’t need to “find himself” after Do the Collapse, but there are a few things about it that the band had to throw off before they could move on to this second grab at the golden apple.

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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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