Tag: 1999

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Things I Will Keep #24: FLORALINE

Floraline
Floraline
1999. Minty Fresh

1999 may have been the peak of human life in the western world. At the very least, it was the last year that all of the tools and technology to achieve Utopia were laid out before us and we still felt good about it.

We had the internet, but it hadn’t eaten up most of our brains yet. We didn’t have it in our pocket yet. We weren’t distracted by it in traffic yet. There was no social media to scroll and raise your blood pressure at any time of day yet.

The soul of the internet was still weirdness. Regular people made the rules and corporations were still figuring out what to do with it.

Technology was in the WOW! stage, as opposed to the This is going to take away my job and leave me starving on the streets stage.

Also, the World Trade Center attacks hadn’t happened yet. We had a tragic school shooting in the US (Columbine), but that sort of thing was still an unheard-of crazy anomaly. You could be an adult who lived your whole life without hearing the word pandemic.

Crass sex comedies could still be box office hits. Every neighborhood had a bookstore and a music store and a video store (or two) nearby. New movies from Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch were coming out.

Growing up in the USA in the eighties, our vision for the turn of the century was Armageddon. We had the Cold War mentality. Me, I was also raised on Biblical prophecy (in the eighties, my mother really wanted me to know that the world was going to end soon and I probably wouldn’t live to be 25; thanks, mom). In 1999, the sky was gonna be all purple and people were gonna be running everywhere.

The switch-over to 2000 would not be smooth and half of your loved ones were sure to be trampled by one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Then 1999 actually happened and everything was… FINE. No apocalypse. Overall, 1999 was a chilled-out, frozen margarita of a year. Me, I was a young wreck, but my memories of that time are still pleasant. I’d go back for a day and cruise around.

My pick for the music would be the sole release by a group from Atlanta, Georgia called Floraline. It’s a little-known pop gem that’s endured as my own personal, private definitive album for that final, frivolous year of the last century.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #14: PISTOLERO

Frank Black and The Catholics
Pistolero
1999, SpinART Records

Every seasoned songwriter lifer has that thing that they can’t get away from. Maybe it doesn’t show up in everything that they do, but it will always call to them and they will return to it eventually.

For Jagger and Richards, it’s black American blues. For McCartney, it’s old escapist happy stuff that comforted people through past Depressions and wars. For Dylan, it’s the mystical side of traditional folk story-songs.

For Frank Black, it’s punk rock. No, he’s never been in a punk band, but that’s not important. Keith Richards didn’t hone his craft anywhere near the Mississippi Delta, either. What matters is that Black is clearly a punk product. Born in 1965, he’s the perfect age for the early wave to have made a life-altering impression on him. When he started his own band, he borrowed as much as he could. The Pixies were never a punk band, but there was a little taste of it in everything about them, from the surface details of their music to their aversion to all rock cliches of the time.

Punks move forward and Black continued his maverick ways on computer-assisted solo albums that still confound some people today.

When he left the big labels for humbler independents in his Catholics period, he approached things like he was on SST in 1984. Like The Minutemen before them, The Catholics threw themselves into the idea that rock is a blue collar job. A band doesn’t tour to promote a record; rather, they make a record to promote a tour. You don’t take a year off. You stay busy. You go out and play. Big cities, small towns, any place that will have you. You travel in a van that you load and unload yourself. You have no expectations of “hitting it big”. You get your kicks from just doing the work.

Black not only adapted well to this, but was inspired by it. See how prolific he got with the Catholics. This all seemed to appeal to his inner punk.

That’s why I say the Catholics era is Frank Black’s punkest period.

And Pistolero might be their punkest album because it just fucking rocks.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #48: PLUGS FOR THE PROGRAM

Guided by Voices
Plugs for the Program
1999, TVT Records

If I ran the music industry, there would have been a big, fancy 20th anniversary Do the Collapse reissue in 2019. Two discs. three discs. Whatever it takes to get in all of the B-sides and stray songs and BBC recordings and demos and anything else good from the time that may be laying around unloved somewhere. A live set. A couple of 2,000-word essays in the liner notes. Stickers, balloons. Whatever trinkets usually come with these sort of things would be in there. We’d do it up big. It would be the kind of thing that you spend all day going through.

Because Do the Collapse has major reputation problems these days. When people on the social media beehives talk about it, they often begin by saying “I know that everyone else on planet Earth hates this album, but I guess that I’m a crazy lunatic because I like it!”.

I’ve seen this several times. It’s a cliche by now.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #47: SPEAK KINDLY OF YOUR VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT

Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard
Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department
1999, The Fading Captain Series

At the heart of Robert Pollard’s crazy body of work is just a guy writing about his life and the world around him.

A real writer writes about his or her own life. The things that they see and experience and think about. It can be buried under the surface. It doesn’t have to be “Dear Diary” confessional bullshit. You can write about Space Wizards from the 9th Dimension and it can still be about your life in a way.

Even a Space Wizard from the 9th Dimension might have a few personal problems to talk about.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #46: TEENAGE FBI

Guided by Voices
“Teenage FBI” b/w “Fly Into Ashes” and “Tropical Robots”
1999, Creation Records

I’m the last person who should give advice about how to promote anything. This site’s view statistics are evidence of that. I couldn’t sell cocaine to Fleetwood Mac in 1975. 

I’m the opposite of a good salesman; I’m the dumbfuck who gets convinced to buy stupid shit.  

So maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about when I say that I don’t get why TVT Records didn’t pick ONE song on Do the Collapse and then pound their money hammer on that. They didn’t choose a single champion horse. They never figured out which new GBV song smelled most like teen spirit in 1999.

The album gave them two obvious singles that were groomed for radio. There was “Hold on Hope” if they wanted to go ballad and there was “Teenage FBI” if they wanted to go bubblegum catchy. WHICH TO CHOOSE?

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #45: DO THE COLLAPSE

Guided by Voices
Do the Collapse
1999, TVT Records

Mainstream American rock radio in 1999 was the shittiest thing ever. It was the frat party of your dullest nightmares. There were no “artists”, just warm and breathing piles of tattoos. It was the land of Lit and Smash Mouth and Korn. Bad facial hair was everywhere. Whiny singers. The worst production ever. Nothing sounds like human hands made it. Guitars and drums have such little personality that they come off like they’re on a programmed loop (and they probably were). The singers sound electronically pitch-corrected (and they probably were). And all of this nonsense is turned up WAY too loud and compressed to death.

There were few real songwriters there anymore. Bombast was all they had.

It was bad bad bad, is what I’m trying to say. It was terrible. It was awful.

You’re probably still wondering how bad it was.

It was so bad that when The Strokes debuted two years later, people actually thought that they were GOOD.

How anyone thought that Guided by Voices stood a chance at fitting in among that crowd, I’m not sure, but from Robert Pollard’s perspective, I think he needed to at least TRY.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #44: SURGICAL FOCUS

Guided by Voices
“Surgical Focus” b/w “Fly Into Ashes”
1999, TVT Records

Summer of 1999 was the last time that the music industry was truly comfortable. They were the last few months of business as usual.

Napster was brand new, but the controversy over it didn’t kick in until autumn when college kids went back to school and had access to their university’s high-speed internet connection. For the average schmoe like me, it was still a dial-up world, and in a dial-up world an album could take hours to download via your 56k modem–and that’s IF your fragile connection didn’t crap out on you every ten minutes.

It was also a world without portable digital music players. CD burners were around, but they were expensive and only a niche saw the need for one. Meanwhile, it was normal for cars on the road to still have cassette decks in them, even some new cars.

In 1999, the future of music as an intangible digital experience was here… and it was free and illegal. And it also kinda sucked unless your favorite place to listen to music was at your computer through speakers that were probably shitty.

Things were in transition. The rules were changing. We were all mixed up.

And this was the world in which Guided by Voices went major label.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #43: IN SHOP WE BUILD ELECTRIC CHAIRS: PROFESSIONAL MUSIC BY NIGHTWALKER 1984-93

Nightwalker
In Shop We Build Electric Chairs: Professional Music By Nightwalker 1984-93
1999, The Fading Captain Series

As a collage artist, Robert Pollard is crazy about contrasts. Whether he works with images clipped out of vintage issues of National Geographic or works with piles of his own songs, he’s always looking for those two pieces that make no rational sense when joined together, but the fit is somehow perfect nonetheless. He’s looking for those two bare wires that you can press together to make an interesting spark. Deconstruct and reconstruct. That’s his game. Or it’s one of them, at least.

Many of his albums at this time are patchworks of different types of songs and sounds. Lo-fi home recordings sit next to full-bodied studio bangers. Rockers rub up against slow and sparse moments. After a great pop melody, something weird usually follows.

Album sequencing is an obsession of Pollard’s. So is sleeve art, which he almost always designs himself–by hand, with an x-acto blade and some glue and a stack of old magazines–with an eye toward making them all look different and mysterious and interesting to flip through.

The ride through Pollard’s body of work is bumpy, but that’s intentional. You’re not supposed to relax.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #42: ASK THEM

Lexo and The Leapers
Ask Them
1999, The Fading Captain Series

“Time Machines” is a song that sounds like a door being suddenly kicked in. Or maybe a bomb going off. But, ya know… in a good way.

It’s the kind of explosive pop throwdown that Robert Pollard hadn’t put out in a spell. It’s a real gas pedal-pusher and it wouldn’t have fit on Kid Marine at all, but as the opener to an EP of lean, crunchy rock, it was perfecto.

I even love the lyrics. I think it’s a song about nostalgia and how you might enjoy living in it when you can, but present day reality will always intrude (“Time machines escape the fall/ But cannot climb the prison wall”). “Time Machines” doesn’t put down nostalgia, though. Pollard was 41 when he recorded it. That’s an age when nostalgia can hit you hard. I know from experience. It’s not necessarily about idealizing your past as glory days that can never be topped. Rather, it’s often a state of not feeling finished with your past.

There’s always something back there, too many decades ago, that you didn’t notice before. Something that you didn’t appreciate enough.

But now you think about it all the time.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #41: KID MARINE

Robert Pollard
Kid Marine
1999, The Fading Captain Series

Robert Pollard works fast, but the music industry works slow. Negotiations for the first Guided by Voices major label release–it was all`recorded and pretty much ready to go–took time. Meanwhile, the band played the odd show here and there in 1998 and early ’99, but without a new album out, maybe Pollard wasn’t feeling a full-fledged tour.

So that meant sitting around at home a lot.

(I love this vintage Dayton Daily News article about Pollard’s downtime in 1998. He rented 676 movies from Blockbuster that year! Wow! I wonder if he ever rented Shakma.)

For a guy like Pollard, who never stops writing, it also meant a fresh batch of songs. About sitting around at home a lot. Contemplating the ceiling (literally, in the song “Living Upside Down”). Watching TV. Observing the human parade. He also got into leafing through an acquaintance’s personal photo album–that guy would be mullet-sporting cover star Jeff “Kid Marine” Davis–and then wrote songs inspired by that.

Pollard settled on his perch in Dayton, Ohio, USA and took in the things around him.

And Kid Marine is the result.

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