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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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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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THE WORLD’S END at the AGFA Secret Screening #79 at the Richardson, Texas Alamo Drafthouse, 10/7/2020

Edgar Wright’s pub crawl comedy oddball was the first movie ever screened for the public at the opening of the Alamo Drafthouse location in Richardson back in 2013. As of October 7, 2020, it’s also the last movie that they’re going to show for awhile because all North Texas Alamo locations are closed up again. The announcement came that same day.

Hey, it’s 2020 and we can’t have nice things. Hollywood aren’t taking chances with their hyped releases in theaters during a pandemic and the crowds aren’t ready–or haven’t yet been convinced–to come back. Many Alamos in the US remain open, as of this writing, but in North Texas, they’ve decided to step back into indefinite hibernation. It’s just temporary, they say, but who knows?

So, host and local Alamo creative director James Wallace treated Secret Screening #79, the show’s seventh anniversary to the day, like it was the last.

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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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A Laurel and Hardy Party #10: BELOW ZERO and TIEMBLA Y TITUBEA

(1930; director: James Parrott)

Depression-era comedies such as this one feel freshly relevant in today’s Age of the Pandemic, when many of us are teetering on the edge of ruin. Who knows? Maybe this winter, I’ll be on the street with an instrument that I have no idea how to play, busking for pennies, and having snowballs thrown at me.

The opening title card explicitly sets this mean and funny little short in the winter of 1929. Money is scarce, but snow is plenty. It falls in harsh blankets on the city where Laurel and Hardy have set up shop as street musicians. They play one song over and over again (“In the Good Old Summertime”, hilariously). One suspects that it’s the only song that they know. Or at least Stan Laurel knows it, sorta kinda. He plays a hint of the main melody repeatedly on a portable organ while Oliver Hardy plucks random strings on a stand-up bass like it’s the first time he’s ever touched one, or any other musical instrument, in his life.

Everyone hates them, of course–and those instruments don’t have long to live.

That’s the first half.

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THE PRISONER #6: The General

(November 3, 1967; director: Peter Graham Scott)

To my memory, there aren’t any truly bad episodes of The Prisoner, but there are a few lesser lights here and there. Hey, it happens. Case in point, “The General”.

Is it well-written? Yes. Is it reliably eccentric? Yes. Is it good stuff with clever twists and turns? Yes.

So, what the hell is my problem? What am I, an idiot? Maybe, but let me explain.

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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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