Robert Pollard-Mania! #90: HALF SMILES OF THE DECOMPOSED

Guided by Voices
Half Smiles of the Decomposed
2004, Matador Records

And now an ending.

As you may know, this was the grand finale of Guided by Voices at the time. No more Guided by Voices after this. They were going out with an amicable break-up. Robert Pollard needed to move on. The news was everywhere. Maybe you read about it in Rolling Stone. Maybe you read it on some music news website or a message board.  Maybe you went to a record store in the autumn of 2004 and saw Half Smiles of the Decomposed snuggled in the new release racks with a sticker on the shrinkwrap straight from Matador Records that touted it as The Final Album.

If you were a fan, you likely felt an urgency to not miss out on The Electrifying Conclusion tour, which was a shorter tour than usual. No Europe. No Canada even. It officially began in August, wound its way through about two dozen reliable stops in the US, and had a hard ending. New Year’s Eve in Chicago.

The band whose show was always a party would end on the biggest party night of the year.

And then lights out. That would be it. So long, Guided by Voices.

Or maybe not.

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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”

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! #75: UNIVERSAL TRUTHS AND CYCLES (the album)

Guided by Voices
Universal Truths and Cycles
2002, Matador Records

This album came out in June of 2002 and it ruled my summer. I spent the whole sweaty season thinking about these nineteen songs again and again. In 2021, I still do.

The only good thing about my depressing new office job back then was that you could live in your headphones all day. It was a lifeless setting in which I craved lively music. Singer-songwriters and slow stuff never lasted long in my portable tape deck (before download codes and cheap digital players came later in the decade, dubbed cassettes were the least fussy way to listen to your vinyl away from home).

I needed music that rocked and made bold leaps between moods. I wanted albums that you could live with and ponder and have a different favorite song every time you played it. More than ever, I needed music that sounded like a world to explore, a place to go when you’re lost.

Man, it was as if Universal Truths and Cycles was made just for me.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #40: WAVED OUT

Robert Pollard
Waved Out
1998, Matador Records

In 1998, Robert Pollard was 40 years old and his plan for Guided by Voices was that he was gonna at least take a stab at selling out Budokan while he was still spry. It was cool with me. I was rooting for him. A slick, Ric Ocasek-produced GBV album was something that I was curious to hear.

One might have wondered though if maybe we were losing the fucked-up psychedelic pop genius that we’d been following. Part of GBV’s character was a curious freedom on record. Noise. Accidents that sounded cool. Albums in which weird, misfit songs found a comfortable home next to killer hooks. A very uncommercial sort of beauty. It wasn’t mere indie/lo-fi snobbery. Robert Pollard found his voice (and his audience) embracing rough edges and home recording. It was how his songs sounded good. It was why he didn’t sign with Warner Brothers in 1994 and remake Alien Lanes for radio like the suits wanted.

How was any of Ocasek’s studio magic gonna compete with that?

If you were paying attention though, you didn’t worry about that much. Robert Pollard is a song machine. His does his job each day and new songs are not a problem. He was still writing little oddballs and making low-budget recordings. Pollard had stacks of fresh goodness that didn’t fit on Guided by Voices albums anymore. Great songs, haunting songs, shadowy moods, alien vibes and psychedelic nutcase stuff that the deep-diggers want to hear.

Sounds like a great idea for a solo album, to me.

Sounds like Waved Out. 

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #39: I AM A TREE

Guided by Voices
I Am a Tree
1997, Matador Records

Robert Pollard writes tons of anthems on his own so it was a major endorsement of GBV’s new lead guitarist Doug Gillard when Pollard not only recorded Gillard’s “I Am a Tree” for Guided by Voices, but also consented to it as the second and final single from Mag Earwhig!. Until Tobin Sprout scored a few A-sides about fifteen years later when the old line-up reunited, “I Am a Tree” was the only GBV single not written by King Shit himself.

Pollard still sings it like it’s his own, though. He thinks it’s a great song. You can tell. Meanwhile, Cobra Verde summon thunder and the song itself is powerful and yet unpretentious. It’s total pop with Godzilla guitars. In 1975, it might have been a hit. In 1997, it was the sound of a band known for lo-fi brevity taking its boldest step yet in shedding its old skin.

“I Am a Tree” is almost five minutes long and recorded to fill a stadium.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #38: MAG EARWHIG!

Guided by Voices
Mag Earwhig!
1997, Matador Records

For indie rocker kids, there was an uncomfortable truth about Guided by Voices and in 1997 they finally had to face it.

Robert Pollard likes and is very much influenced by prog-rock.

And not in a “math rock” way, which was cool back then. Bands who were into crazy time signatures and got compared to King Crimson and their LP was out on Touch & Go. That was okay.

Pollard probably digs that stuff, too, but he’s more into Peter Gabriel’s Genesis. He likes concept albums and all of that mystical, pastoral British junk. Fantasy imagery and songs that might kick in with the good part after about four minutes of build-up because kids in 1973 (a year when Pollard turned 16) had the attention span for that. Or at least they were stoned enough to go with it.

Yep, the guy known for recording songs that barely last a minute in his basement was influenced by the most long-winded and indulgent rock genre around.

Artists. They’re complicated.

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