Tag: The Fading Captain Series

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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! #64: RINGWORM INTERIORS

Circus Devils
Ringworm Interiors
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Sometimes on the internet, an innocent lamb who’s in the middle of discovering Robert Pollard’s body of work will step forward and ask where they should start with Circus Devils.

It’s a fair question. At fourteen albums released over sixteen years, this collaboration with fellow Ohioan oddballs Todd and Tim Tobias is not only Pollard’s longest-running side project, but it’s also the strangest. Their sound is a kind of psychedelic rock birthed from a mutant strain. It’s a creature that rose up out of toxic waste. Lots of slime, lots of teeth.

There are quiet Circus Devils records and loud ones and ones that sound like they were created by lizard men from Jupiter. Sometimes they sound like a rock band, sometimes they sound like mad scientists performing sinister experiments in a backyard tool shed. Their records are as varied as dreams, and often as haunting.

Their music comes in a few different flavors, but it all has a demon inside of it. There’s an eeriness in every sound that they make (Pollard got into the spirit and timed most of their albums for a Halloween release). It hides somewhere in even the project’s gentlest moments.

It’s a demon that runs naked and free and howling at the moon on their unhinged first record.

So, where to start with Circus Devils?

I say start at the BEGINNING. Start with Ringworm Interiors. Meet the demon. Get the full Circus Devils experience. Be surprised and assaulted like we were back in 2001 with what’s still one of the most bugfuck albums in Pollard’s whole discography.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #63: TOWER IN THE FOUNTAIN OF SPARKS

Airport 5
Tower in the Fountain of Sparks
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout made three albums together as a duo and each one is its own odd creature that just barely gets along with the others.

Tonics & Twisted Chasers is the first one. Sprout created the instrumental tracks and then Pollard came up with songs to go on top and they called it Guided by Voices because why not? It was 1996 and Tonics sounded like the mutant brother of Alien Lanes. Lo-fi. Fucked up. Weird all over, but in a familiar way. Pollard’s voice and Sprout’s guitar were sounds we’d heard work together many times before.

Five years later, after Sprout had long left the band to raise his new baby and make beautiful solo records that expanded his range into perfect piano pop and organ-heavy psychedelic bubblegum (I’ve raved here about his first one, Carnival Boy, and it’s not even the best one) he and Pollard got together again for another album, made the same way as before.

Sprout’s music, Pollard’s songs and words. That’s it, except this time they called it Airport 5.

Also, they didn’t sound much like Guided by Voices anymore–at least not in the way that many expected.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #62: CHOREOGRAPHED MAN OF WAR

Robert Pollard and His Soft Rock Renegades
Choreographed Man of War
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Choreographed Man of War is a raw and yet weirdly theatrical rock ‘n’ roll album from a guy who’s (mostly) done talking about his divorce and wants to get happy again.

If Isolation Drills, which came out a mere three months earlier, confessed sins and left blood on the walls, this one just roars and makes your ears ring. Still, the two records sound to me like curious companions.

Both Guided by Voices albums on TVT Records have follow-ups on Pollard’s own Fading Captain Series label that feel deliberate in how they complement and contrast what came before. In the warm tones that issue from your speakers, they’re the sound of Pollard washing off the major label stink, scrubbing it away with tape hiss and homemade sleeve art. They’re albums free of the music business bullshit, the expensive studio time and the label heads and their opinions.

It goes deeper, though.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #60: STIFLED MAN CASINO

Airport 5
“Stifled Man Casino”
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Tobin Sprout brings the snap-crackle and Robert Pollard brings the pop for this second single from their Airport 5 project. “Total Exposure” is the quiet one and “Stifled Man Casino” is the loud one.

It’s the anthem. It’s the mic-swinger. On the surface, it could pass for power pop circa 1981 from a band of young new wavers in jeans and T-shirts. Maybe one guy in the group rocks the loose skinny tie look. Didn’t Airport 5 open for The Pretenders a few times way back when?

“Stifled Man Casino” kicks like that sorta thing. It’s surging and youthful–and then you tune in to the lyrics and you hear the truth.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #59: TOTAL EXPOSURE

Airport 5
“Total Exposure”
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Isolation Drills hadn’t yet cooled off in the new release racks back in the spring of 2001 when Robert Pollard was already promoting more records coming out over the next few months on his Fading Captain Series label.

The one that had us all buzzing was Airport 5, a new collaboration with Tobin Sprout.

Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout together again! OH MY GOD! Indie dorks like me fainted at the very thought.

The resulting album is a lovely piece of work, if not quite the tonic that some expected, but we’ll have plenty of time to talk about that later (the album will be #63 in this series). Preceding it were two 7″ singles of preview tracks (with non-album B-sides, of course) and the first one was a song that I like to call “Total Exposure”.

Because that’s what it’s called.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #56: SPEEDTRAPS FOR THE BEE KINGDOM

Howling Wolf Orchestra
Speedtraps for the Bee Kingdom
2000, The Fading Captain Series

2000 was a strange year for new music from Robert Pollard. The optimistic energy that defined 1999 was gone. Pollard would gain it back in time, but for now it was all used up.

And it happened so suddenly. Back then, I thought that maybe the tour had wiped him out. Or maybe Pollard’s moody dirges of 2000 were an escape from the music business bullshit, a retreat into non-commercial sounds after months of playing the major label game.

Those of us in the spectator seats didn’t know what was happening in Pollard’s personal life at the time, you see.

We didn’t know yet about the divorce.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #55: BIG TROUBLE

Hazzard Hotrods
Big Trouble
2000, The Fading Captain Series

I like bad music.

And by bad music I don’t mean the soulless junk that we all hear everyday piped into drug stores or issuing from other peoples’ cars. Those forgettable aural space-fillers. Those frat party soundtracks. That slickster stuff that they tell me is country music, but that sounds like the regular ol’ Top 40 except that the singer has something that resembles a twang underneath the electronic pitch correction.

No, I’m talking music that’s too lo-fi to live. I’m talking about noise. Total racket. Audio chaos that you can’t recommend to just anybody–or anybody at all most of the time. I’m talking about shit that’s fucked.

I don’t love every little thing that’s moaned or droned into a microphone, but if you like rock music and you’ve dug even slightly underground in an attempt to find other worlds, you probably like bad music, too. Maybe you’re a big trash-brain. Feedback is fine with you. So is tape hiss. Room noise. Accidents. Maybe you like the results of a cheap microphone and a simple 90s-era consumer-grade cassette recorder that strains to capture a room full of sound, only to come off like a hazy transmission from Pluto.

Some might call it garbage; you call it otherworldly. Or maybe it’s actually perfectly of this Earth. Gritty. Human. Raw. Blemished.

This weird space is where Hazzard Hotrods live. The original vinyl-only release was limited to 500 copies, which sounds right to me. That’s about how many people might like this.

So what the hell is it?

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