Tag: 2006

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #103: FROM A COMPOUND EYE

Robert Pollard
From a Compound Eye
2006, Merge Records

I used to think that the kick of a double album was that it simply meant more music to enjoy, but no, that’s not it.

The secret of the best ones is that they’re all uniquely haunted.

Blonde on Blonde, The White Album, Exile on Main St., From a Compound Eye.

None of those were just another day at the office. Some unusual force made an epic absolutely necessary.

Bob Dylan was frustrated. Long sessions in New York yielded only one track that he deemed worthy. Eventually he got convinced to start over with a new group of players in Nashville, where everything came together in a series of white-hot all-night recording marathons. When it was time to go, he had a pile of gold, including one essential cut that was long enough to fill a whole LP side. There was no way that Blonde on Blonde could be a regular record. We needed to know what went down in Nashville and Dylan needed to take us on a journey.

The Beatles got back from India and were splintering apart. Each songwriter was on his own trip and the others were his backing band. The White Album is a batch of solo records crammed together. The songs are supposed to clash. Maybe only a fragmented group would or could make something like it and no mere single LP could paint the picture of how much this band, and their relationship with each other, had changed.

The Rolling Stones made dirty rock ‘n’ roll in what was probably a beautiful villa in the south of France. They were fleeing England’s tax laws and also brought along their producer, some recording equipment, a bunch of friends, and a mountain of drugs. Their music is a poisonous flower grown from decadence. The double length of Exile on Main St. gives you space to imagine that you’ve dropped in on the party, as well as appreciate how the Jagger-Richards craft manages to shine through.

Robert Pollard was a man starting a new era in his life and art. While Half Smiles of the Decomposed is the “final” Guided by Voices album, From a Compound Eye is the secret other half of the story. It was completed in mid-2004, before GBV even started their farewell tour, and if you turn it up loud enough you can all but hear Pollard’s will to upend everything snap into place over twenty-six songs. It’s a double-record set because Eye needs to be many different things at once: a new beginning, a climax, a summary, and an argument to his audience, and maybe even to himself, that this is the right move.

It’s Pollard’s best record of 2006, a contender for his most essential solo release, an explosion of many of his songwriting preoccupations, and is one of the top albums in the stack for a long walk or some serious headphone time laying back with your eyes closed. Continue reading “Robert Pollard-Mania! #103: FROM A COMPOUND EYE”

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Bob Armstrong’s VANILLA SLIM: AN IMPROBABLE PIMP IN THE EMPIRE OF LUST

Bob Armstrong
Vanilla Slim: An Improbable Pimp in the Empire of Lust
2006, Carroll & Graf Publishers

Bob Armstrong’s brief career as a pimp is not the wildest story ever told. It’s crazier than what most people do, but Vanilla Slim was no Iceberg Slim. He didn’t see violence. He didn’t commit violence. He was nice to his girls. He didn’t confront some truly dark side of himself. He didn’t make enough money to roll around in a show-off car. He wasn’t dangerous. That’s all according to him in this first-person account, at least.

When the law eventually came down on him and Armstrong went to jail (he begins the book pondering his holding cell and all its glorious sights and scents), even that wasn’t too bad. He didn’t do serious time. Even the law could see that this Vietnam vet who was closing in on 60 merely misbehaved a little, even with drugs out in the open.

Or that’s how the wind blows in San Francisco, at least.

So why the hell did I blaze through this book in a couple of days? Why did I get hooked? Why did I sit on the barstool next to this guy and take in every word he said?

I guess that’s because this is a bigger story than pimps and drugs and beautiful women and the men who pay $500 an hour for their company. This book is really about people who’ve missed the boat in life.

Continue reading “Bob Armstrong’s VANILLA SLIM: AN IMPROBABLE PIMP IN THE EMPIRE OF LUST”

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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. 

Continue reading “Cody McFadyen’s SHADOW MAN”

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Will Clarke’s THE WORTHY

Will Clarke
The Worthy
2006, Simon & Schuster

Gotta admit, I am very NOT curious about what goes on behind the closed doors of college frat houses. It’s a bunch of rich young douchebags being the best douchebags they can be, right? And everyone’s too incomplete, immature and dedicated to being conformists to be interesting.

I’m prejudiced. I admit it. My knowledge of fraternities comes entirely from Animal House and having worked in two restaurants near colleges where the frat menace was real.

They weren’t more rude than any other group in particular; they were just more demanding and they always came in packs. They’d order cheap drinks and then guzzle them down in ten seconds. Every time you walk past them, they need another. They’re also more likely to do stupid shit, such as the time I worked in a place that had an all-you-can-eat special and a band of brothers of the toga showed up and ate and ate and ate until one of them vomited at the table.

Also, they were always seperate checks and you could barely tell them apart, as they tend to look, talk and behave alike.

So, I gave this novel, which is set entirely within the Louisiana State University frat bro world, very little time to win me over. I aimed to be strict and I aimed to be harsh.

Continue reading “Will Clarke’s THE WORTHY”