Tag: The Fading Captain Series

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #106: ALL THAT IS HOLY

Psycho and The Birds
All That is Holy
2006, The Fading Captain Series

I wouldn’t recommend All That is Holy as anyone’s first Pollard record, or even their tenth or their twentieth. I can say from experience though that if it’s your 106th, you might be weird enough at that point to get along with it.

The collaboration era between Robert Pollard and Todd Tobias is deep, deep waters. There should be a book about this period alone. Counting only the ones for which Tobias contributes writing, arrangements, or one-man-band work, it’s about three dozen LPs that sometimes have nothing in common on the surface except for that weird, free Ohio energy that those of us who know our Devo from our Dead Boys can hear. It’s music from a proud ancestry, generations in the making. The soot from old steel mills passed down.

They’re a pair of eccentrics who understood to not “typecast” the other.  Excitement happens in the left turn. I imagine that these two were constantly surprised by what the other did with his work.

In Circus Devils, the music by Todd and Tim Tobias is often unlike anything else in Pollard’s discography.

On the seventeen solo records that he made with Todd Tobias, Pollard hands over songs that don’t always call for a Circus Devils-style treatment. He wants to hear how Tobias handles other sounds. He wants to ask Dr. Moreau to go on Sesame Street and explain the science behind flowers and rain.

Then there’s Psycho and The Birds, a further twist on the Pollard-Tobias method.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #105: TURN TO RED

The Takeovers
Turn to Red
2006, The Fading Captain Series

I recommend making bold statements sometimes. I’ve heard that it’s good for your circulation.

My bold statement of the day is that Robert Pollard fans have more FUN than any other fans in rock music. What sets Pollard fandom apart is that it’s long-sustained fun. I’ve been on this ride for thirty years now and it’s still going.

Now I’m not saying that those of us who know our Mars Classroom from our Elephant Jokes are guaranteed to throw the craziest parties or be the most enthusiastic whitewater rafters, but when it comes to having over 100 albums of music to explore and re-explore as we follow an eccentric genius who won’t take a year off and is determined to use rock music to draw his own step-by-step map of the insights and calamities of aging, I think that us Pollard freaks have it pretty good. Things are always happening. We never get radio silence.

Had my formative influences been a little different, maybe I’d be a Juggalo today and I’d have no idea who Robert Pollard is and I’m glad that didn’t happen.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #104: LOVE IS STRONGER THAN WITCHCRAFT

 

 

Robert Pollard
“Love is Stronger Than Witchcraft b/w “Dolphins of Color (Live)” 
2006. The Fading Captain Series

“Love is stronger than witchcraft” is a line from the 1942 movie I Married a Witch. You can find it toward the end at the climax, spoken by Veronica Lake.

That’s not just trivia to me. I like to know things like that. It makes the song even better, in my view.

I like the idea that the whole world is talking to us, whether it’s the dirt on the ground or the sky above and everything that we notice in between, and all of this stuff that we see and hear each day is saying that it wants to be a song.

The artist snatches an overheard moment out of the great sideshow and now owns it to use for his or her own purposes.

Where do they go from there? Anywhere.

Robert Pollard’s song is not about Veronica Lake. At least I don’t think that it is. My take is that it’s about how love is the only way. Most of us will never be perfect according to the ancient rules of religion, but we’ll always be on the right path as long as we follow love. Anything that removes us from that is so much witchcraft.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #99: BRIEFCASE 2: THE RETURN OF MILKO WAIF

Guided by Voices
Briefcase 2: The Return of Milko Waif
2005, The Fading Captain Series

It’s nearly always a bad idea to emulate the perceived lifestyles of your rock ‘n’ roll heroes. You might could fill a cemetery with those who died too young trying to be Keith Richards.

But if you’re looking to cut and paste an artist’s personality onto some void within yourself, I guess that Robert Pollard isn’t so bad of a role model.

Let’s see, you’ll have to…

1. Drink light beer.

2. Wear regular dad clothes. A Who T-shirt and some khakis are as wild as it gets.

3. Be able to do a high kick in your 50s and 60s (this might be the most dangerous thing on the list).

4. Write a few thousand songs.

5. Collect vinyl records.

That last one influenced me for years. I bought my first turntable (late 1996) partly because of Robert Pollard. GBV had many vinyl-only releases that I needed. I also loved interviews where Pollard talked rock. Pollard’s knowledge and his enthusiasm for music, some of it unfashionable (namely prog-rock, deeply unhip in the 90s), made my record stacks a little bit larger. And it had to be vinyl. It was cooler. It was what Bob collected. It was also much cheaper than CDs back in the day, which helped a lot.

Meanwhile, Pollard’s own crazy body of work was, and is, a product of how collectors think. We’re into tunnels and secret passages. We don’t want to merely listen to our favorite bands. No, we want to put together puzzles and figure them out. We want to defend the difficult. We want to follow the secret histories of our favorite artists as told through B-sides and bootlegs.

We want madness on our shelves.

That’s where the Briefcase LPs come in. Does an abridged Suitcase on a single vinyl record serve any practical purpose in the world? Other than the obvious (the money made when the limited pressing sells quickly), probably not.

But who’s into rock because it’s practical? Briefcase 2 does exactly what it needs to do.

It brings madness.
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Robert Pollard-Mania! #97: MUSIC FOR “BUBBLE”

Robert Pollard
Music for “Bubble”
2005, The Fading Captain Series

My idea of a great movie double-feature is two films that have little in common on the surface, but that talk to each other in an interesting way when seen together. The more far apart the movies are, the better. Different genres, different eras, different countries.

For an obvious example, when I lived in a college dorm circa 1997 or ’98, some of us got together and watched Taxi Driver and Manhattan back to back (and in that order) one night. They’re two very different movies with opposite visions of the same city set at around the same time. The main characters of each live on the same island, but not in the same world, and would hardly be able to function in the other’s world. Both films have a troubled male lead who has a very different relationship with a much younger girl. You can go deeper.

Robert Pollard’s two solo EPs of 2005 are a little like that. It’s all Robert Pollard music that reflects his psych-pop influences so they’re not night and day. They’re not Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. But they are companions in my mind that twist and tease the same form, which (speaking of movies) is soundtrack records.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #95: FIVE

Circus Devils
Five
2005, The Fading Captain Series

I listen to the fourth Circus Devils album, Five, only at night and never during the day.

Listening to Five with the sun in your face feels as wrong as watching Eraserhead at noon in your living room with the blinds open and the sound of kids playing outside.

Some things need darkness and nothing else going on around it. It’s about your attention and how it’s focused. Some things will never come alive for you if it’s not allowed to pummel your senses.

Speaking of Eraserhead, I saw it in a theater last May. I’d seen David Lynch’s 1978 landmark many times before, but this was my first big screen viewing. 35mm print. Beautiful analog image and sound. Respectful audience. Perfect mood. (Love ya, Texas Theatre.) What struck me most in that setting was how LOUD the movie is. The sound of Eraserhead–hums, hisses, squeaks, wind, industrial noises–hangs heavy in the room and envelops you. At moments, I found myself thinking more about the sounds I heard than what I saw on the screen.

There are many extraordinary things about Eraserhead and one is how much it builds its world on sound. Lynch is intense about that and it’s something that’s easy to lose outside of a darkened theater.

What I’m getting at is that when you listen to Five, I recommend shutting off the lights, Pick your favorite immersion method. Maybe it’s kicking back with headphones and your eyes closed or driving at night or going for a walk in the moonlight with a set of earbuds in your skull (all great ways to listen to music). Do whatever works for you to get into the cinema of this record. It’s my favorite Pollard release of 2005 and it deserves that.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #94: LIGHTNINGHEAD TO COFFEE POT

The Moping Swans
Lightninghead to Coffee Pot
2005, The Fading Captain Series

Every now and then, Robert Pollard gets together with some guys he knows and they form a band who last long enough to record an EP, usually in one day.

That was Lexo and the Leapers in 1999. That was The Howling Wolf Orchestra in 2000. That will be a project called The Sunflower Logic coming up in 2013.

In 2005, that was The Moping Swans and they made my favorite record in this little subgenre of Pollard music. All of them are different. Lightninghead to Coffee Pot is the post-punk blast of the batch, but with a classic rock kick.

It sounds like something that you’d find in a cool record store in 1979. I wish that I could visit a cool record store in 1979. but there are probably better things to do with a time machine. So I guess I’ll just listen to this.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #93: ZOOM

Robert Pollard
Zoom
2005, The Fading Captain Series

2005 is one of the weirdest years for Robert Pollard’s music. We spent most of it not knowing when his new solo double album, From A Compound Eye, completed around mid-2004, was coming out.

Meanwhile, Pollard kept a low profile (no tour, few interviews), but he continued to make things. He had something new out every few months, all of it strange. It was like a year full of B-sides and I mean that as a compliment. All real rock fans love B-sides.

Then there were the reports about how Bob’s music was about to potentially blow up in the movies.

Big shot director Steven Soderbergh was a fan. In 2002, he used the song “Do Something Real” (from Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department) in his film Full Frontal. He would go on to write the introduction to Jim Greer’s book Guided by Voices: A Brief History, out later in ’05. He had a film coming in the fall called Bubble that would feature new Pollard music (we’ll get to that in #97 of this series). Soderbergh was also developing a movie about Cleopatra, an audacious musical to star Catherine Zeta-Jones and built around Guided by Voices songs, screenplay by Jim Greer.

The Cleopatra thing never panned out, as of this writing eighteen years later, but we didn’t know that yet in ’05. It was exciting to think about.

And I wonder… I just wonder… if maybe the Zoom EP was inspired by all of this movie stuff happening.

Just look at that cover collage.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #89: FICTION MAN

Robert Pollard
Fiction Man
2004, The Fading Captain Series

April 24, 2004. Guided by Voices played The Bowery Ballroom in New York City.

Robert Pollard often gets chatty on stage and this night he spilled the news to the crowd that Guided by Voices were breaking up. It was the first public announcement. The people in that room got the scoop before any music journalist did.

One of the few bands out there that seemed incapable of ending without an act of God stopping them was closing up shop. It felt weird, but it made sense, too. Middle-aged people will understand.

Pollard went on to say that night that the final GBV album, Half Smiles of the Decomposed, was coming out in August with a farewell tour to follow. The last show would happen on New Year’s Eve and he promised that the band would go out grandly. Everyone was getting along. Past GBV lineups went down in drama, but this one would get a happy ending.

(If you want to hear that announcement, you can. A recording of it came out on Meet the King: Asshole 2, one of Pollard’s later “comedy” LPs composed of excerpts of his stage banter. The track is called “Blaze of Fire” and it still plays as a heavy moment today.)

A little over two weeks later on May 10, 2004, Pollard’s next solo album, Fiction Man, came out. The break-up news overshadowed it, but Fiction Man was the secret beginning of the post-GBV era.

One of the charms of Fiction Man in retrospect is that no one knew this at the time, including, I suspect, the two men who made it. Every Pollard solo record back then was different. They had different moods and different collaborators. In ’04, Fiction Man was merely more of that.

It was a batch of new Pollard songs, but this time played, arranged, and recorded by multi-instrumentalist oddball and fellow Ohioan Todd Tobias.

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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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