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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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Nostalgia Shit Fuck #1: BATMAN (1989)

Look, we’re all dealing with 2020’s global pandemic and the economic collapse and the chaos in the streets and the grim future and the disintegration of everything that was once normal in our own ways.

Some turn to social media to share with the world their cute quarantine projects. Their home-baked bread. Their living room workout routines. Their macaroni art. Or some shit like that. I don’t know. I don’t pay attention to those people.

Still others become more politically active. Or maybe they turn to religion or escape into video games or Netflix or alcohol abuse. I personally know one suicide.

Me, I’ve been hiding out as best I can in a nostalgic bubble. When the curtains are drawn and the pants come off, I live in the 1980s. Movies bring the best high, particularly when I haven’t seen them in some decades. I also dig into vintage TV here and there, too. Some music. Some comics. Junk that I grew up with .

I ordered Cobra on Blu-ray this week. That’s how nutty I’ve gotten.

And in my travels down Nostalgia River, I reached a point when I needed to rewatch the 1989 Batman movie. THIS stupid old thing was somehow going to help save me–and, in a way, it did.

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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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Joe R. Lansdale’s PARADISE SKY

Joe R. Lansdale
Paradise Sky
2015, Mulholland Books

Joe R. Lansdale is one of my comfort food writers, even if he pretty much never writes about anything comfortable. For over forty years now, he’s shown us dark, seedy underworlds, mostly around East Texas, but he can find ’em in other places, too. He gives us villains who freeze your veins. He tells us about the frightening outcome of real and sudden violence. He’s never flinches when it comes to exploring racism at its most hideous. He makes you look at it close so that you can’t ignore it.

He’s also got one of those great Texan voices that I love so much. It’s perfectly smoked barbecue. It comes off as simple with smartass quips galore, but it’s also wise. Paradise Sky pulls off that Mark Twain trick in which our first-person narrator is from a humble place and his grammar maybe ain’t perfect, but he’s a brilliant observer and a natural wit. He’s got the kind of smarts that can’t be taught in a classroom.

Paradise Sky is big and epic and the product of a writer who’s read exhaustively about its Old West setting. He knows exactly how you cooked food when you camped out for the night in the middle of Missouri in the 1800s. He knows all about the guns of the time and what each designs’ strengths and weaknesses were–and he makes you care about that because it’s all vital to our narrator, a black sharpshooter, the son of former slaves (and a slave of himself when he was very young), from the horse-and-saloon days.

Lansdale loves the Old West too much to lie about it. He also tells you about the ugly truths. In fact, he can’t stop talking about that. Lansdale breaks your nose and blackens your eye with it.

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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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