Acid Ranch - The Constant Bleeder

Image swiped from the indispensable gbvdb.com

Acid Ranch
As Forever: A Manifesto of Fractured Imagination and Reckless Living
2005, no label

The secret ingredient of this Robert Pollard-Mania! series is that it’s only half about Robert Pollard.

The other half is that it’s about being a fan of Robert Pollard, which means that it’s also about me and maybe you. Us nutcases.

I’m not a professional critic and these pieces aren’t “reviews”. I don’t have that kind of objectivity when it comes to Pollard. I would even say that my opinions about him are boring (because I like everything). What I offer instead are reflections, interpretations, and information in order to build a story that I wish more people told, which is the story of a body of work, but from the point of view of a regular person walking up to record store counters again and again.

I’d love to read about Bob Dylan or Miles Davis (or any artist with a convoluted history) from a passionate amateur who’s followed the music for decades and has maybe gone back and forth on some albums and can speak from first-hand knowledge about the time when they came out and how the music fit into it (or didn’t fit into it). Done well, from a human being who dives into their own memory and heart more than they look up facts on Wikipedia, that could be fascinating.

Continue reading “Robert Pollard-Mania! #101: AS FOREVER: A MANIFESTO OF FRACTURED IMAGINATION AND RECKLESS LIVING”

Acid Ranch
Some of the Magic Syrup Was Preserved
2002, The Fading Captain Series

No one else in rock makes more colorful use of their unreleased archives than Robert Pollard, but then most musicians don’t share his collage artist sensibility.

The vastness of it all–thousands of songs on decades’ worth of tapes–helps, too. Throw in a powerful nostalgia for his own past, the hard-earned independence that allows him to put out whatever he wants and a segment of his audience who are always up for a trip, no matter how strange, through Pollard’s famous suitcase full of old cassettes and you get Some of the Magic Syrup Was Preserved.

The conventional way to release an album like this, a double LP of lo-fi cries in the night from two decades previous, is to present it as a row of tagged and bagged corpses. Cold specimens to study for your advanced degree in Pollardology. Call it something like Guided by Voices: The Early 1980s Tapes for a straightforward approach. Or, more wisely, maybe call it Robert Pollard, Jim Pollard, and Mitch Mitchell: Archival Basement Improvisations to temper expectations for the ragged ride ahead.

It should sound useful and not confusing, right?

WRONG, Pollard says here. That shit’s boring. Art doesn’t have to be useful–what is it, a spatula?–and it’s okay if it’s confusing. His eye and ear for presentation—enigmatic sleeve art, crazy track-lists, impeccable song sequencing–won’t let him treat his old tapes like museum pieces. No, he has to put a unique band name on them. Build a mystique around them. Make a living thing out of them. Otherwise, why bother?

Enter Acid Ranch, where Pollard gives body and breath to a strange early phase of his music circa 1981-82.

Continue reading “Robert Pollard-Mania! #70: SOME OF THE MAGIC SYRUP WAS PRESERVED”