Tag: The Fading Captain Series

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #53: BRIEFCASE: DRINKS AND DELIVERIES

Guided by Voices
Briefcase: Drinks and Deliveries
2000, The Fading Captain Series

If you’ve heard every Guided by Voices album, you’re a fan.

If you’ve heard every EP and B-side, you’re obsessive.

If you’ve heard all of the solo albums and side projects, you’re far gone.

If you’ve listened to all of the Suitcase box sets, you’re dangerous.

If you have all of the Briefcase LPs, you’re in the scariest category of all: You’re a collector.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #52: SUITCASE: FAILED EXPERIMENTS AND TRASHED AIRCRAFT

Guided by Voices
Suitcase: Failed Experiments and Trashed Aircraft
2000, The Fading Captain Series

Guided by Voices had stacks of great songs when they became popular in the early 90s, but they had something else that was also unique.

They had a past.

They had a long past. A convoluted past. Most new indie sensations are young people. They don’t have pasts, yet. Robert Pollard’s real peers in 1994 weren’t Pavement and Superchunk, if you ask me. Rather, they were outsider oddballs like R. Stevie Moore and Billy Childish, seasoned DIY soldiers who’ve been at it forever and who produce so much music that they look half-crazy (or all-crazy) to the square world.

GBV’s subterranean self-released albums from the 1980s and early 90s (yanked from obscurity in 1995 on BOX) told some of that story, but there was more. There was a shitload more.

By the time that Guided by Voices made a blip on the cultural radar, Pollard had been writing and recording songs for about twenty years, maybe even longer. In interviews, he claimed to have thousands of unreleased songs at home. Years and years of songs. Songs that not many outside of Dayton, Ohio city limits had ever heard.

And he kept those tapes in a suitcase.

THE Suitcase.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #50: DAYTON, OHIO-19 SOMETHING AND 5

Guided by Voices
Dayton, Ohio-19 Something and 5
2000, The Fading Captain Series

On paper, this modest 7″ is one weird little insect of a record.

Then you listen to it and it’s still weird. And murky. And sad. The previous Fading Captain Series release, Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department, was warm and celebratory (for the most part) while this one is cold and defeated. The flowers are dead. The trees are bare. There’s no sun in the gray sky. Even good memories hurt.

This is a uniquely personal item in Pollard’s body of work. He’s written many personal songs, but this is a rare record devoted entirely to handing you a bucket full of fresh blood.

The quick description: The A-side is a recent live recording of a sleeper GBV gem; on the B-side are three songs that Pollard recorded all by his lonesome with only a guitar and a 4-track.

There’s something going on here, though. This record makes a statement. There’s meat on the bone.

Let’s break it down.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #47: SPEAK KINDLY OF YOUR VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT

Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard
Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department
1999, The Fading Captain Series

At the heart of Robert Pollard’s crazy body of work is just a guy writing about his life and the world around him.

A real writer writes about his or her own life. The things that they see and experience and think about. It can be buried under the surface. It doesn’t have to be “Dear Diary” confessional bullshit. You can write about Space Wizards from the 9th Dimension and it can still be about your life in a way.

Even a Space Wizard from the 9th Dimension might have a few personal problems to talk about.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #43: IN SHOP WE BUILD ELECTRIC CHAIRS: PROFESSIONAL MUSIC BY NIGHTWALKER 1984-93

Nightwalker
In Shop We Build Electric Chairs: Professional Music By Nightwalker 1984-93
1999, The Fading Captain Series

As a collage artist, Robert Pollard is crazy about contrasts. Whether he works with images clipped out of vintage issues of National Geographic or works with piles of his own songs, he’s always looking for those two pieces that make no rational sense when joined together, but the fit is somehow perfect nonetheless. He’s looking for those two bare wires that you can press together to make an interesting spark. Deconstruct and reconstruct. That’s his game. Or it’s one of them, at least.

Many of his albums at this time are patchworks of different types of songs and sounds. Lo-fi home recordings sit next to full-bodied studio bangers. Rockers rub up against slow and sparse moments. After a great pop melody, something weird usually follows.

Album sequencing is an obsession of Pollard’s. So is sleeve art, which he almost always designs himself–by hand, with an x-acto blade and some glue and a stack of old magazines–with an eye toward making them all look different and mysterious and interesting to flip through.

The ride through Pollard’s body of work is bumpy, but that’s intentional. You’re not supposed to relax.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #42: ASK THEM

Lexo and The Leapers
Ask Them
1999, The Fading Captain Series

“Time Machines” is a song that sounds like a door being suddenly kicked in. Or maybe a bomb going off. But, ya know… in a good way.

It’s the kind of explosive pop throwdown that Robert Pollard hadn’t put out in a spell. It’s a real gas pedal-pusher and it wouldn’t have fit on Kid Marine at all, but as the opener to an EP of lean, crunchy rock, it was perfecto.

I even love the lyrics. I think it’s a song about nostalgia and how you might enjoy living in it when you can, but present day reality will always intrude (“Time machines escape the fall/ But cannot climb the prison wall”). “Time Machines” doesn’t put down nostalgia, though. Pollard was 41 when he recorded it. That’s an age when nostalgia can hit you hard. I know from experience. It’s not necessarily about idealizing your past as glory days that can never be topped. Rather, it’s often a state of not feeling finished with your past.

There’s always something back there, too many decades ago, that you didn’t notice before. Something that you didn’t appreciate enough.

But now you think about it all the time.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #41: KID MARINE

Robert Pollard
Kid Marine
1999, The Fading Captain Series

Robert Pollard works fast, but the music industry works slow. Negotiations for the first Guided by Voices major label release–it was all`recorded and pretty much ready to go–took time. Meanwhile, the band played the odd show here and there in 1998 and early ’99, but without a new album out, maybe Pollard wasn’t feeling a full-fledged tour.

So that meant sitting around at home a lot.

(I love this vintage Dayton Daily News article about Pollard’s downtime in 1998. He rented 676 movies from Blockbuster that year! Wow! I wonder if he ever rented Shakma.)

For a guy like Pollard, who never stops writing, it also meant a fresh batch of songs. About sitting around at home a lot. Contemplating the ceiling (literally, in the song “Living Upside Down”). Watching TV. Observing the human parade. He also got into leafing through an acquaintance’s personal photo album–that guy would be mullet-sporting cover star Jeff “Kid Marine” Davis–and then wrote songs inspired by that.

Pollard settled on his perch in Dayton, Ohio, USA and took in the things around him.

And Kid Marine is the result.

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Robert Pollard-Mania #1: Introduction and FOREVER SINCE BREAKFAST

Let’s face it, Robert Pollard is a sick man.

He puts out more records in one year than a lot of bands release in ten years. He has one of the most insane legacies in rock and it continues to expand all of the time. At his age (born on October 31, 1957), he’s learned just about everything that there is to know about rock music, but he somehow missed the lesson that said that your body of work should be neat and clean and not confuse people.

Terrible iPhone photo shot by yours truly, taken from Guided by Voices playing in Austin, TX, September 2012.

Robert Pollard also never learned that lo-fi isn’t all right.

Nobody ever told him that a songwriter who can write a brilliant pop melody shouldn’t write far-out psychedelic stuff, too.

And he never listened to anyone who’s ever made the point that rock music is a business and not the place for a restless creative mind that comes up with more than twelve songs a year.

Yep, we’re talkin’ a real sick-o-rama.

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