Tag: 2003

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #21: SHOW ME YOUR TEARS

Frank Black and the Catholics
Show Me Your Tears
2003, SpinART Records

There’s not much writing about the end of Frank Black and the Catholics. They weren’t the kind of group that anyone gossiped about.

When the Pixies got back together in 2004 some thought that the Catholics might merely go on hiatus. I remember seeing speculation that once this reunion played itself out, the Catholics would return.

Oh, how innocent we were!

That made some kind of sense at the time, though. Also, speculation was all that we had. Black talked to a million writers in 2004 who wanted to know how well he and Kim Deal were getting along and what he thought about Kurt Cobain. No one asked Catholics questions, so it took years for Black to confirm in the press that the Catholics fell apart all by themselves. It was over.

A 2021 interview with Independent.co.uk quotes him:

“[They] were totally burned out on me and burned out on my methodology,” following, he’s previously asserted, “10 years of hard touring and loading our own gear and not making a lotta money out of it”.

I don’t think I need more explanation than that.

From their strict live-in-the-studio recording method to their endless tours, the Catholics did everything the hard way. That was the point of the band. It’s a wonder that they lasted as long as they did.

To their vast credit, they never flinched. Rich Gilbert, Dave Phillips, David McCaffrey, and Scott Boutier were pros. If they were burning out, they never gave it away on record. Each album is a new show of confidence and Show Me Your Tears stands for me as their most beautiful Valentine’s candy box of sad songs.

Let’s cover them one by one. I love this album and I’ve got my coins ready for the jukebox.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #87: EAT

Robert Pollard
Eat
2003, Rockathon Records

I’m curious to know when Robert Pollard figured out that he was a serious collage artist. If you’ve looked at nearly any record he’s ever put out, you’ve seen his work (the TVT albums are among the few exceptions) and you’ve seen it evolve.

The earliest Guided by Voices LPs have collage elements. Found clippings are a part of albums such as Devil Between My Toes and Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia, but the compositions are primitive and the images tend to come off as truly random. They look like old punk rock show flyers. That’s a part of their charm, but as GBV got more famous, Pollard stepped up his art game.

By Bee Thousand he was playing with empty space, ultra-bright colors, and asymmetry. Throw in the lyric sheet on which each song is attached to a simple and memorable piece of imagery and the result is iconic and it doesn’t age almost thirty years later. If the rough, lo-fi music bothers someone, the artwork alone might persuade them to give it another chance. It both offsets and deepens the mystery.

Nine years later in 2003, Pollard launched an art magazine dedicated solely to his own work. He called it Eat and, as of this writing, there are seventeen issues of it, with more to come.

Collage art dominates most of them. Lots of poetry shows up in the early volumes. The presentation would get fancier over time (the latest issues of Eat are basically softcover books; they’re heavy with a thick spine). A few later installments come packaged with a 7″ record. Then there’s the oddball issue that’s all short, wry prose pieces by Pollard, telling stories from his past.

Eat is a full-color, psychedelic happening. It’s a place for the REAL deep-diggers. And it starts here.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #86: HARDCORE UFOS: REVELATIONS, EPIPHANIES AND FAST FOOD IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE

Guided by Voices
Hardcore UFOs: Revelations, Epiphanies and Fast Food in the Western Hemisphere
2003, Matador Records

Around 2001, a rumor blew in the wind that a new Guided by Voices box set was in the works from John Fahey’s Revenant Records. To my memory, the plan was to collect the elusive and out-of-print mid-90s 7″ EPs in one place (finally!) with some mysterious extras. Revenant had just made a big splash with a lavish 5-CD Captain Beefheart rarities set, Grow Fins, along with a vibrant catalog of lovingly reissued old blues, folk, and jazz. The prospect of them working with GBV and maybe presenting them in the context of weird Americana was exciting.

That box set never happened, but another box did happen on Matador Records a few years later. Were the Revenant rumors true? I don’t know, but I do wonder if Hardcore UFOs ascended from its ashes.

It’s a six-ring circus celebration of Guided by Voices, partly from a Matador perspective. It’s NOT a collection of the old EPs (that were released by a variety of labels, which makes gathering them in one place complicated legally), but it does neatly collect many non-album moments and a lot more.

In the big picture though, the five CDs, one DVD, and great liner notes of Hardcore UFOs take their own unique shot at telling one of the oddest success stories in American indie rock.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #85: THE BEST OF GUIDED BY VOICES: HUMAN AMUSEMENTS AT HOURLY RATES

Guided by Voices
The Best of Guided by Voices: Human Amusements at Hourly Rates
2003, Matador Records

With such an enormous body of work to ponder, a discussion breaks out every now and then among fans about whether or not Robert Pollard is a genius.

What inspires all of this stuff? And what keeps some of us so interested in it? Why am I buying five new albums a year from this guy?

It’s a big thing to wrap your head around, but, to me, genius is the least interesting answer to those questions. I much prefer to credit the work that lead up to the mad skills. The years of filling up notebooks and cassettes and singing to the void. Writing bad songs. Writing good songs. Writing bad songs that became good songs in their final versions, sometimes rewritten decades later. Being obsessed enough to independently press up six records from 1986 to 1992 even though no one was paying attention. Using his obscurity wisely.

Genius is abstract and intimidating, but hard work is concrete and inspiring.

Obviously there are certain blessings from the universe that all of the hard work in the world may never achieve. A compelling personality. Interesting tastes. A listenable singing voice.

But if Pollard is a genius, I think his genius is his rare energy that keeps him going even when everything else tells him to stop. Pollard’s work is full of lessons on creativity and inspiration and if I had to boil it down to a single idea, that’s it. Don’t stop. Get old doing it. Beat your head against the wall. Keep doing it even when your band falls apart. It’s not about success or failure; it’s about trying again and again. Keep going and maybe you’ll write your masterpiece eventually. How many great songs aren’t in our lives because some young artists couldn’t stand the world’s indifference and gave up?

That’s what I think about when I listen to this crazy Best of that attempts to gather the highlights of the strangest, messiest, and most improbable indie rock watershed band to rise to prominence in the 90s… and then refuse to stop.
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Robert Pollard-Mania! #83: THE BEST OF JILL HIVES

Guided by Voices
The Best of Jill Hives
2003, Matador Records

When I play this CD single (no vinyl for this one), I ALWAYS get stuck on the Cheap Trick cover. I play it over and over again.

A) It’s just a great song. 1977. High school parking lot. Friday afternoon. The jeans are tight, the hair is long, the girls are pretty and the night beckons. I was in diapers and had a bottle in my mouth in ’77, but I’ve seen Dazed and Confused. I’ve seen The Pom Pom Girls. I know those old records. They were easy to find when I was a dedicated vinyl freak. Your Cheap Trick education could be had for a few bucks and a little extra dust in your lungs. Maybe I wasn’t there like the men of Guided by Voices circa 2003 were, but I felt the vibrations decades later and they felt pretty good. The song survives.

“Downed” passes one of the great rock ‘n’ roll tests.

I love it, but I have no idea what it’s about. Never thought about it. Still not thinking about it.

B) Guided by Voices do it right. They play “Downed” like they ARE Cheap Trick. 1977. High school parking lot. Friday afternoon. Their version goes for the flashback. Nobody’s young anymore, but songs live forever. We all need to do our part to keep old songs alive. It’s easy. You want to do it. You love to do it. Whether you’re sharing a mix or passing around a Youtube clip or writing on a stupid website, this is what music fans do. We can’t help it. We’re fucking crazy.

Also, “Downed” stands as one of the very rare examples of Guided by Voices taking a break from Robert Pollard’s avalance of songs to cover someone else’s song. Continue reading “Robert Pollard-Mania! #83: THE BEST OF JILL HIVES”

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #82: EARTHQUAKE GLUE

Guided by Voices
Earthquake Glue
2003, Matador Records

The back cover sums up Earthquake Glue for me.

On the surface, it’s a reluctant “band photo” for a group who prefer to not bother with those things on their records, but there’s more to it.

It’s a photo by Ana Luisa Morales in which the band are featureless stick figures far from the camera. What looks like a church-based charity storefront takes up much more space. An antique shop and a bingo hall sit under a sign that says “Horizon of Hope”. What we see of the parking lot is empty. The place is closed. Added color, drizzled on with the grace of blood stains, gives the impression on first glance that this is the middle of a desert. It looks like a dreamy nowhere.

It’s an image that says Why are we here?

Robert Pollard’s front cover collage has a similar effect, but the back cover is more blunt about it. It’s perfect for an album in which a band wrestles with their place in the universe.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #81: MY KIND OF SOLDIER

Guided by Voices
“My Kind of Soldier” b/w “Broken Brothers”
2003, The Fading Captain Series

At the start of 2003, Robert Pollard thought that the next Guided by Voices album, Earthquake Glue, was done.

It was recorded, nipped, tucked, polished and sequenced as a set of fourteen songs that starts quiet, ends with a rocker, and flies through a variety of moods in between. It was another one of those careful Pollard tracklists of hills and valleys and his ear for classic two-sided presentation. I don’t know what stage the sleeve art was in at this time, but the music at least was in the can. It was finished. Fin. Complete. The glue was dry.

And then Pollard wrote a new song afterward that he insisted had to go on it.

The band booked studio time in Chicago (I think they were in the city to play a show), banged out the song, and then Earthquake Glue had another track (and its first single) and it was called “My Kind of Soldier”.

Now the album was really done.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #80: BEARD OF LIGHTNING

Phantom Tollbooth
Beard of Lightning
2003, Off Records

The Off Records label run by Chris Slusarenko out of Portland, Oregon worked with Robert Pollard on two releases that were on a mission to pair him with unlikely collaborators.

As Pollard fired out multiple LPs a year made mostly with people he knew, Off sought to show us how his singular energy works with other minds and other sounds that you didn’t see coming. They’re left turns. Rock ‘n’ roll non sequiturs. Robert Pollard is perfect for this not only for his work ethic, but also because his tastes include noise and fucked-up shit. He has one of those free and freaky minds that can go left or right at any time.

The first mutant from this experiment is The Tropic of Nipples, in which Pollard and writer Richard Meltzer trade the spotlight in a noise-rock poetry slam. It’s not for everybody.

The second one is a lot closer to a “regular” rock LP, but it manages to be an even stranger idea. In fact, I don’t know if anyone before or since has made an album with anything like the process of Beard of Lightning. 

Its story begins in New York City in the late 1980s.

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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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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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