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Robert Pollard-Mania! #79: MIST KING URTH

Lifeguards
Mist King Urth
2003, The Fading Captain Series

Many of us who came of age with 90s American indie rock were told that pretty much the whole genre of progressive rock was complete garbage. If music journalists at the time mentioned the old prog dinosaurs at all, it was to run them down as the reason why punk needed to happen. Sid Vicious and Johnny Thunders died so that you don’t have to listen to incomprehensible concept albums and sidelong suites. Some outsider scenes in Germany and Canterbury in England were okay. King Crimson got respect as an influence on the “math-rock” bands. In general though, 1970s excesses were as cool to most 90s indie kids as a misspelling on a neck tattoo.

I know because I was there and I was one of those pipsqueaks. Young people need guidance when navigating decades of music history. Critics are always around for that, though cool family members or friends are even better. When your favorite songwriters and musicians have interesting tastes, that’s a great resource, too.

What I’m trying to say is that it was about 1998 when I finally stopped automatically flipping past old prog-rock LPs in the bins and I started to give them a chance and I did that PURELY because of Robert Pollard. He was my guru. When he talked in interviews about bands he liked or made the occasional list of favorites (The Beatles, Wire, Genesis, The Who, and Devo were always at the top), I paid close attention.

In the little indie rock island that I lived on at the time, he was the only one who talked about this rejected old shit. He was the only one mentioning The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. He got me curious.

So I dug in and I dug what I heard. And prog’s influence on Pollard’s music was plain as day. It was like a secret passage opening up.

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The Constant Bleeder Doesn’t Know Anime From Aunt May #7: BUBBLEGUM CRISIS episode 7, “Double Vision”

Since I started this series years ago, the world has changed, but you know what hasn’t changed?

I am still a massive 80s wimp.

I’m an old ripped pair of parachute pants. I’m a worn-out Rick Springfield cassette. I’m Eddie Deezen guest-starring on Punky Brewster. I’m Pac-Man cereal. I’m the last hour of Night Flight. I’m a Frogger machine in a movie theater that’s showing Losin’ It. I’m a foam McDLT container owned by some weirdo who collects old fast food packaging.

It’s my cozy place. When I need escape, I head in the direction of vintage neon and synthesizers like the zombies toward the mall in Dawn of the Dead. This is just how it is. Don’t tell me to get a life. I tried that already.

Yes, I’ve been slow in covering Bubblegum Crisis, but I like to think that’s because I’ve been savoring it.

Because this shit is mega-80s. It’s deliciously 80s. It’s beautifully 80s. And I took a long time to get to it, so why rush now?

Either that or I’m lazy.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #78: MOTEL OF FOOLS

Robert Pollard
Motel of Fools
2003, The Fading Captain Series

By 2003, it was clear that Robert Pollard had no interest in listening to his critics.

Those who couldn’t keep up with his 4-5 albums a year were just going to have to catch up later maybe.

Those who didn’t know what to make of projects such as Circus Devils were just going to have to remain confused.

Those who wanted only pop from Pollard and had no ear for his weird, personal Midwestern psychedelia were just going to have to miss out.

In the meantime, he continued to move forward, like any real artist would do, and make strange and wonderful things like Motel of Fools.

As Guided by Voices settled into a sound–a muscled classic rock kick made for the stage–Pollard’s other projects became the place where he did his searching. Much like how early Guided by Voices albums were always different from each other, Pollard solo releases at this time always took a turn that the previous ones didn’t.

Motel of Fools went for home-brewed, shoestring prog-rock. It has only seven tracks, which is normal for prog records, but this one blazes through ’em in just over thirty minutes. It’s modest and ambitious at the same time. It’s also weird and funny and another melodic marvel.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #12: FRANK BLACK AND THE CATHOLICS

Frank Black and The Catholics
Frank Black and The Catholics
1998, Play It Again Sam

I think it was autumn of 1997 when I read the news and got annoyed.

I even wrote to Frank Black’s record label at the time, American Recordings, which isn’t normally my style, but it was easy to heat me up back then. My message, sent from my old college e-mail account, is long lost, but I recall that it went something like this:

Dear American Recordings dickheads,

Hey, quit being jerks and put out Frank Black’s new album. I read the news on Addicted to Noise. They said you won’t release it. Why, you creeps? It sounds cool. So what if it’s a little rough around the edges? Did you know that he was in the Pixies? You ever heard of that band, dummies? 

Get fucked,
Jason

American somehow resisted my persuasive powers and did not offer us Frank Black and The Catholics, but we eventually got it about a year later via independent labels.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #77: THE HAROLD PIG MEMORIAL

Circus Devils
The Harold Pig Memorial
2002, The Fading Captain Series

Night. Stars shine and shadows crawl over the fresh grave of Harold Pig. The other bikers who knew him gather and talk. Stories about dangerous days and deadly nights fill the air like exhaust fumes. Some of those stories might even be true.

Harold Pig is an abstract presence here, a collage of stitched-together skin and mismatched eyes and limbs belonging to Sonny Barger and Peter Fonda and the hairy Hell’s Angels goons at Altamont, as seen in the great Rolling Stones concert documentary Gimme Shelter. He’s the loser and outlaw that defines the classic vision of the freedom-loving icon on two wheels.

Some say that the world is better off without him, but Robert Pollard refuses to keep it that simple. He had an idea for a story about a dead biker. His wrote a batch of songs that circled around it and approached it from the weirdest angles. Like most good rock concept albums, The Harold Pig Memorial is flummoxing. It doesn’t have a plot, but it does have a mood.

Roll me a fat joint at 2 AM and give me a lighter and turn off everything except for the stereo and I might be able to connect some dots between tracks such as “Dirty World News” and “Exoskeleton Motorcade”, but I don’t have those things now.

I turned 45 last week (Pollard’s age when this album came out on Halloween, his birthday, in 2002) and all I have is this old body and some sparkling water and The Harold Pig Memorial sounds to me like an album about saying goodbye.

By your mid-40s, you’ve said goodbye to so many things.

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Things I Will Keep #23: FLEETWOOD MAC, Future Games

Fleetwood Mac
Future Games
1971, Reprise Records

I was born in October 1976, which makes me too young to have any firsthand nostalgia for the 1970s, but I do have some simple, dreamy images in my head that don’t really mean anything.

The dark hallway of the house where we lived at the time. Patterns on bedsheets. Green shag carpet.

I don’t remember people. I don’t remember words. I recall nothing that happened. All I have are these surface details, these scattered dinosaur bones buried in my memory.

I’m interested in that. Why do we remember what we remember? What story did I want to keep alive somehow by remembering bedding and carpets? Is the answer so complicated that I’ll never understand it? Or is it so simple that I’ll always overlook it?

I doubt that I’ll ever know, but the first time that I heard Future Games (about twenty years ago), it sounded like a witness in my investigation. It was sooooooo 1970s and sooooooo dreamy and sooooooo removed from the present world that it touched a nerve and I had an irrational love for it right away.

According to the price sticker on my ragged old vinyl copy, I paid fifty cents for it. Sometimes that’s all that it costs to blow your mind.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #11: DEATH TO THE PIXIES

Pixies
Death to the Pixies
1997, 4AD/Elektra

Just ahead of the start of my favorite era of Frank Black’s music (the hard-touring, prolific years of Frank Black and the Catholics) came this Pixies retrospective.

It’s worth talking about because it accompanied a change in the narrative. Time brings new thoughts and new angles on old events and the story of the Pixies was a little different after this.

That band had been done for five years at this point and 4AD deemed it a good time to give them a nice headstone in the form of a double CD that offered something for the newbies (a “best of” collection on disc 1) and something for the old fans (a vintage live set on disc 2).

To promote it, Frank Black hit the press circuit and, for the first time in years, talked about his old band as something beyond a bad memory. After all, a collection like this calls for writers to go on about a group’s legacy and their history and how their music holds up.

That meant that the Pixies’ break-up drama was no longer the main topic.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #76: THE PIPE DREAMS OF INSTANT PRINCE WHIPPET

Guided by Voices
The Pipe Dreams of Instant Prince Whippet
2002, The Fading Captain Series

Were the nineteen songs of Universal Truths and Cycles not enough for you? Do you want more universal truths? Might you be interested in further cycles?

If so, Merry Christmas because this ten-song set of B-sides and castaways shortly followed the album. The band recorded a pile of songs while trying to figure out what the hell Universal Truths and Cycles was supposed to be. Going by this collection, they ruthlessly left off some punchy pop that didn’t fit on the LP’s sprawling trip.

Robert Pollard loves his contrasts and this record is less of a whirlwind than the album. It’s more blunt. It just rocks.

Even the title is a contrast.

Universal Truths and Cycles sounds big and important.

The Pipe Dreams of Instant Prince Whippet conjures up a guy who’s having too much fun with cans of whipped cream. He has big thoughts himself though, and they’ll get even bigger with his next hit of nitrous oxide.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #10: THE CULT OF RAY

Frank Black
The Cult of Ray
1996, American Recordings

I don’t know why Frank Black parted ways with his longtime label, 4AD. If he’s ever commented on it, I haven’t seen it. All I can say is that his first album for Rick Rubin’s American Recordings–home at the time to the likes of The Black Crowes, Johnny Cash, and Slayer–feels like (and was) his last-ditch effort at a solo hit in the dying days of “Alternative Rock”. The mood is punchy and aggressive and Black leans hard into his sci-fi guy persona.

As weird as they are, his previous two solo albums are all about pop. They come in candy-colored packages and boast bright production with several tracks ready for radio. They never caught on in a big way, but they have their cult (count me among them) and they’ve aged well.

They also come off like their own little era that burned itself out quick.

Or, to put it another way, how do you follow up Teenager of the Year, a double-length oddball epic that starts with Pong and ends with apocalypse?

The best way is to not even try. Answer that album’s layered, synthetic production with more simple, raw production. Answer its twenty-two tracks with a tight thirteen. Answer its complex maze of topics with a batch of songs that roughly break it all down to kids and UFOs and one mother of a lead guitar.

That’s The Cult of Ray.

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Cody McFadyen’s SHADOW MAN

Cody McFadyen, Shadow Man (2006, Bantam)

I was looking for a good “summer book”. Something brisk and entertaining and who cares if it’s a little light on logical sense?

I picked this one and in my first few sittings I thought I’d made a mistake because it’s so damn bleak. After every chapter, I needed a hug just to feel better about being alive. 

As you keep going though, the silly things begin to pile up and up and then they start to come at you fast until the whole shebang takes the shape of an ultra-commercial thriller obviously intended to kick off a series (and if Hollywood is interested, it’s ready). Yes, it has harsh violence and grotesque crime scenes, but what’s more commercial than that these days? Who in the 21st century wants to read about someone getting beaned with a candlestick in a billiard room? No, we want serial killers raping and murdering as told in unsettling detail. 

THAT’S what we want to read on the beach–and I’m not kidding. 

I kept turning these pages, at least, though I’m not on a beach. 

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