Tag: Robert Pollard

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #74: UNIVERSAL TRUTHS AND CYCLES (the single)

Guided by Voices
“Universal Truths and Cycles” b/w “Beg for a Wheelbarrow”
2002, The Fading Captain Series

This is the fourth and final* 7″ teaser single released before the Universal Truths and Cycles album would hit the racks of your local Camelot Music in the summer of 2002 and it’s got the best B-side of the batch.

(*There were some European CD singles with repeated A-sides and that offered even more non-album tracks, but those can wait for a compilation EP that’s coming up soon.)

The flip here is called “Beg for a Wheelbarrow” and it’s a sinister beast meant for a band who can summon real thunder. It builds tension in an insistent post-punk march and then releases it in a haunting acapella section. Pollard’s words are about being broke, in debt and under the boot heel.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #73: EVERYWHERE WITH HELICOPTER

Guided by Voices
“Everywhere With Helicopter” b/w “Action Speaks Volumes”
2002, The Fading Captain Series

Rock is the word and the word is rock for this third 7″ on the ramp up to GBV’s indie rock homecoming album, Universal Truths and Cycles.

“Everywhere With Helicopter” is as commercial a single as Guided by Voices ever put out. Your average radio call-in contestant for Foo Fighters tickets in 2002 could easily get into its Nirvana-like kick. Meanwhile, Pollard’s melody ascends, descends, spins and attacks like an expertly flown Air Force jet maneuver. Every verse is a rocket that takes out a target.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #72: CHEYENNE

Guided by Voices
“Cheyenne” b/w “Visit This Place”
2002, The Fading Captain Series

“Cheyenne” is a song that only Robert Pollard would write. In the world of 2002, at least. That’s why it’s my favorite of the four Universal Truths and Cycles 7″ singles.

That said, it’s not any kind of left turn.

It’s made up of familiar pieces. It works on classic pop song machinery perfected long before Guided by Voices existed. “Cheyenne” is a product of the 1960s and of wearing out needles spinning piles of records by The Beatles and The Bee Gees (60s-era albums such as Idea and Odessa) and The Who over years and years.

It’s not the parts of “Cheyenne” that are so unique; no, it’s the way that they’re handled.

It’s like an artist’s line. You see an illustration and you instantly know who drew it. Only one person makes curves and crosshatches like that.

“Cheyenne” is about the mix of total pop with a curious dash of Pollard’s art-rock influences.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #71: BACK TO THE LAKE

Guided by Voices
“Back to the Lake” b/w “Dig Through My Window”
2002, The Fading Captain Series

The least controversial music news of 2002 was that Guided by Voices were back on Matador Records.

Everyone who cared was happy about it. Everyone knew that it was better this way. The prospect of a more free and spontaneous approach from the band was a welcome thing. The world needed a Guided by Voices who were under no pressure to achieve heavy radio rotation next to Puddle of Mudd.

The hits didn’t happen, but they got through the TVT era without becoming sellout jerks, which counts as a victory to me. Dignity was intact. Inspiration was running at a high. The band seemed to hardly take a breath between labels as they got to work on what I consider one of the very best albums to carry the Guided by Voices name, Universal Truths and Cycles.

But we can’t talk about that yet.

First we have to get into the whopping FOUR 7″ singles of preview tracks, released on The Fading Captain Series, because, hey, maybe the best way to hype an album is to make a big show of confidence like that rather than… whatever the hell TVT did.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #70: SOME OF THE MAGIC SYRUP WAS PRESERVED

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.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #69: CALLING ZERO

Go Back Snowball
Calling Zero
2002, The Fading Captain Series

I was born in 1976, which puts me at the perfect age to have been an insufferable indie rock dork in the 90s.

When I wasn’t in rock clubs with my arms folded, I was getting into serious discussions about whether or not Sonic Youth still “matter” and other fascinating topics (zzzzzzzzz…) like that. I also constantly needed to flex my music “knowledge”. All that I did was spend a little too much time at the record store, but I acted like I’d walked on the goddamn moon. I was a ball of insecurities and I had no good reason to be arrogant about anything, so I filled that vacant space with my super-awesome music opinions. I thought that I had shocking and unique views. Now I’m cool and I have something to say. 

Why couldn’t I just be a human being? Why did I have something to prove all of the time?

Eh, youth. The only thing that I miss about it is being able to eat a whole pizza and not feel like shit for the rest of the day.

I’m not saying that everyone who was into indie rock at the time shared my malfunctions. I’m also not putting down the music itself. 90s indie rock was a good thing that revealed possibilities and expanded horizons. People had great times with that music.

Some of it even holds up, though there’s so much that I can’t listen to anymore without recalling what a Cringe Machine I was. It was a full-time job for me back then.  It kept me so occupied that I didn’t have any time to get into Superchunk.

Maybe I just haven’t heard the right songs. Maybe I haven’t given enough time to what I have heard. Maybe it’s because Superchunk never, to my battered memory, played North Texas during the peak of my live show-going (1996 to 2000), Maybe I’m a giant idiot (always and forever a possibility).

And this is how I approach this lovely record by Go Back Snowball, an album that follows Life Starts Here like spring follows winter.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #68: LIFE STARTS HERE

Airport 5
Life Starts Here
2002, The Fading Captain Series

My guess is that many deep-digging fans of Robert Pollard are White Album people.

It’s the old, dead-horse debate. Did The Beatles’ White Album need to be a 30-track double-LP? Do its detours and excesses hold up? Was it really necessary that we hear “Revolution 9” and “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” and “Wild Honey Pie”?

My answer to those questions is YES, YES, and YES. That’s my favorite Beatles album. It’s crazy and lively and packed with ideas and I would sooner chop off one of my fingers than lose any of it. The frosty clip collage “Revolution 9” is cool as shit. It makes the closing lullaby “Good Night” creepy.  On The White Album, the most famous rock band in the world deconstruct their sound in a fast-paced flurry of genres and the only way to end it is on an apocalyptic note. It’s as good as it gets.

Some disagree. Some would prefer a smoother, more conventional ride. They’ve got a whole list of Lennon-McCartney and Harrison songs that they wish they’d never heard. I think that these people are goofy, but, hey, it’s a big world. There’s room for all kinds.

What I’m trying to say is that Robert Pollard’s music has some of the same appeal and leads to similar division.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #67: THE TROPIC OF NIPPLES EP

Richard Meltzer, Robert Pollard, Smegma & Antler
The Tropic of Nipples EP
2002, Off Records

There’s a charm to music that doesn’t care about being liked. Music that farts right in your face and doesn’t even say “excuse me”.

You can criticize it for being tuneless, I guess, but what does that mean if it doesn’t seek to be tuneful? You can call it trash, but how sharp is your blade when the music is happy to be damaged? You can say that it’s an insult, but how many megatons is your bomb when these sounds are intended to be an affront?

Tropic of Nipples is one of those records. It’s one of those outsider things. It’s proudly ugly, pointedly disheveled and wantonly fucked. A negative review is as much of a recommendation as a positive one. Its twelve tracks (it’s a stretch to call most of them songs) all crammed up on the original 7″ come and go too quickly to enjoy much on their own. They’re parts of a whole, individual scribbles of graffiti on the same brick wall.

Our two vandals are Richard Meltzer and Robert Pollard.

This isn’t really a Robert Pollard record. He’s the co-star. The title is Meltzer’s. Meltzer also gets the first and last tracks on the original release.

Pollard contributes cover art and six tracks (plus two more on the CD), but the real auteur here looks to be Off Records founder Chris Slusarenko.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #66: LIVE AT THE ATHENS TIME CHANGE RIOTS

The Cum Engines (Featuring The Cannot Changes)
Live at the Athens Time Change Riots
2001, F ‘n’ E

By the time this LP came out around the holidays, I believe that Guided by Voices were were officially indie rock again. After two albums, they broke up with TVT Records. I’ve had bigger surprises in life.

For most of the year, Robert Pollard was already talking in the press about his vision for the next GBV album. It was going to lean prog-rock and it was going to be called Heavy River. The title would change a few more times until it finally become Universal Truths and Cycles, but Heavy River was what he was calling it early in 2001 as the spring birds sang (the earliest reference I could find to it still online is this Denver Post article published on March 25, 2001, over a week before Isolation Drills was out).

The not-so-subtle message: He was done chasing hits and it was time to move on and he was ready to do that right NOW. Isolation Drills was new to us, but it was old to him. Even if “Glad Girls” became the new “Losing My Religion”, Heavy River was still the next move.

Before that march forward though came this flashback, GBV’s sixth vinyl-only, bootleg-style live release. The recording was from awhile ago. It was the night of January 22, 2000 at The 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia, in the middle of the southeastern US leg of a long tour, with Australia and Japan coming up, and then another month-and-change of scrambling across the US after that. It was the same show from which the Dayton, OH 19-Something-and-5 7″ A-side came.

In a strange, non-linear, collage artist way though, this nearly two-year-old show comes off like a statement of purpose for the band at the time.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #65: SOME DRINKING IMPLIED

Guided by Voices
Some Drinking Implied
2001, MVD Music Video

If you’re under 40 and outside of the US, you probably won’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but back in the 1980s and up to the early 90s, there was an amazing TV show called Night Flight. It came on after midnight on Saturdays and it was three hours of weird short films, music videos and random artifacts from pop culture’s junk pile.

In one night, you might see a Public Image Ltd. interview, an episode of Dynaman, some bizarre Church of the Subgenius short, a World War II-era Daffy Duck cartoon and what felt like about five hundred other things. Whether you were staggering in from an evening out in your cool 80s clothes or a kid like me up late and learning the ways of the night owl way too young, Night Flight was the perfect hallucinatory trip-out. Turn your brain on or off. Either is fine.

It was formative. It twisted me up pretty good. Looking back, I can see what it helped turn me into, which is a culture freak who will watch anything no matter how old or strange or low-budget or tossed aside. (See this site’s film section for the damage wrought.)

It made me the kind of goofball who enjoys the wrecked spectacle of Some Drinking Implied.

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