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Frank Black-O-Rama! #18: PIXIES

Pixies
2002, SpinART Records

Almost nobody ever refers to it as their debut, but the first Pixies record is technically a self-released, small-press cassette nicknamed The Purple Tape. Whether copies made it to the racks of any cool Boston record stores back in the day or were sold at shows, I can’t say for sure, but this ambitious young band did send out stacks of them to record labels. (As of this writing, original copies of the tape command over $1,000 on Discogs.)

Its seventeen tracks represent everything in their arsenal circa early 1987. It’s all of the songs that they had finished, polished, and were playing in clubs. Sixteen originals and one cover of “In Heaven” from Eraserhead.

The 22-year-old Black Francis didn’t call these recordings demos. He wasn’t married to this cassette as a finished album, but the tracks themselves were ready for prime time. The band made them in a real studio (financed with a loan from Francis’s father) and, though they bashed them out in three days, they worked hard on them.

That’s when the 4AD label out of England enters the story and they liked the cassette, but they thought that an EP would be the best way to introduce the Pixies to the wider world. So, 4AD co-founder Ivo Watts-Russell selected eight highlights and that became Come On Pilgrim, the group’s really real debut.

That left nine unreleased tracks that became well-bootlegged over the years until they finally saw official release in 2002 on this starkly presented disc.

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FOR LOVE OF IMABELLE (aka A RAGE IN HARLEM) by Chester Himes

Chester Himes
For Love of Imabelle
1957 (1971 reprint, Dell Publishing Co.)

I’m convinced that most crime fiction stories could be re-written as comedies with little to no change to the plot. Both forms find their meat in irony, bad judgement, mismatched lovers, human weakness, and people who go to extremes to get out of trouble. Perhaps most obvious though is that both crime and comedy often involve an unholy mix of two types of characters: idiots and villains.

Put an idiot and a villain together and a powder keg can result. Maybe the villain manipulates the idiot. Maybe the idiot takes on the villain despite being outclassed in craftiness. Maybe the villain IS an idiot, but he’s still smarter than this other lowlife. What happens next might be funny. Or deadly. Or both.

That’s my theory, at least. Don’t test me too hard on it. I haven’t been thinking on it for twenty years. In fact, I didn’t think about it much at all until I read this brilliant, sleazy, violent, and often laugh-out-loud pulp novel from Chester Himes. It’s all about dangerous men, one shady woman, a city full of predators, and one hopeless fool at the center of it all.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #87: EAT

Robert Pollard
Eat
2003, Rockathon Records

I’m curious to know when Robert Pollard figured out that he was a serious collage artist. If you’ve looked at nearly any record he’s ever put out, you’ve seen his work (the TVT albums are among the few exceptions) and you’ve seen it evolve.

The earliest Guided by Voices LPs have collage elements. Found clippings are a part of albums such as Devil Between My Toes and Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia, but the compositions are primitive and the images tend to come off as truly random. They look like old punk rock show flyers. That’s a part of their charm, but as GBV got more famous, Pollard stepped up his art game.

By Bee Thousand he was playing with empty space, ultra-bright colors, and asymmetry. Throw in the lyric sheet on which each song is attached to a simple and memorable piece of imagery and the result is iconic and it doesn’t age almost thirty years later. If the rough, lo-fi music bothers someone, the artwork alone might persuade them to give it another chance. It both offsets and deepens the mystery.

Nine years later in 2003, Pollard launched an art magazine dedicated solely to his own work. He called it Eat and, as of this writing, there are seventeen issues of it, with more to come.

Collage art dominates most of them. Lots of poetry shows up in the early volumes. The presentation would get fancier over time (the latest issues of Eat are basically softcover books; they’re heavy with a thick spine). A few later installments come packaged with a 7″ record. Then there’s the oddball issue that’s all short, wry prose pieces by Pollard, telling stories from his past.

Eat is a full-color, psychedelic happening. It’s a place for the REAL deep-diggers. And it starts here.

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #17: (PIXIES) COMPLETE ‘B’ SIDES

Pixies
Complete ‘B’ Sides
2001, 4AD

I have a special respect for bands who put out good B-sides.

In fact, some days (every other Tuesday and the odd Sunday) I’d even say that the mark of a great band is the coolness of their throwaway tracks. The stuff that didn’t make the album. The stuff that they have laying around. The stuff that they cough up when the record company needs them to simply fill up some space.

B-sides are one of those fascinating aberrations of the old music industry. Ever since records started being pressed and sold, they’ve had two sides and even if one side was a surefire hit, you had to put something, anything, on the other side or you looked like an asshole. B-sides were space-fillers, but they were also sometimes a way to “share the wealth”.

For example, let’s say it’s 1961 and a group records a great song that the radio is sure to love. What about the B-side? Well, in many cases, the producer would hack out a goofy instrumental that nobody would ever care about (sometimes not even involving the A-side’s performers). The result was that if the A-side became a hit and sold a bajillion copies, the credited writer of the B-side benefited from that, too. in terms of royalties. They got a free ride into some big money. (See the likes of Phil Spector and Kazenetz-Katz, who were particularly brazen about it.)

That’s the seedy side of it all, but there are other sides. Like any good record, there’s always another side.

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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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THE PRISONER #8: Dance of the Dead

(November 17, 1967; director: Don Chaffey)

This episode confused me the first time I saw it, to be honest. There’s a character who shows up at the very beginning who becomes pivotal later, but I somehow forgot him and ended up scratching my head over a few twists here.

I blame my public school education.

In my defense though, this IS a particularly odd installment. It begins with a scene that feels like it’s from the middle of an episode, as a mad scientist (Duncan MacCrae) gets stopped in the midst of an experiment on Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six that pushes the limits of The Village’s strict rule to get information from him without hurting him. From there, the plot walks us into a trap door every five minutes or so until we’re not quite sure where we are. Everything that happens is strange and so many details feel like non-sequiturs that the whole thing can feel like a non-sequitur.

Until the bleakness of it sticks to your ribs.

It’s not the tightest plotted hour of British televison of 1967, but it did come together for me on a second viewing and emerge as another nicely creepy psychological attack on McGoohan’s stoic former secret agent and his seemingly unbreakable resolve to not reveal a word of his secrets.

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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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Frank Black-O-Rama! #16: DOG IN THE SAND

Frank Black and the Catholics
Dog in the Sand
2001, What Are Records?

As I crumble and stumble through old age, I’ve learned that the musicians who mean the most to me have two things in common.

1) They never go away. They’re always there. Even after their band breaks up, their album bombs, their label drops them, or they fall out of fashion, they keep going. They have a new record out next year. They don’t hide away for a decade. Bad reviews bounce off of them. I find this life-affirming.

2) They’re ambitious. However, I’m NOT talking about the sort of ambition that drives a person to do anything for success. Stab their collaborators in the back. Bow to the big entertainment shit machine. Con their way to the top of mountain. No, I’m talking about an ambition that means challenging yourself and putting out work that reflects a vision and a variety of interests. People change. They go through phases. I like when musicians do the same. If a band or solo act has ten albums out, I’m most impressed when album #10 is on a different trip from album #1.

Now, there are great bands who don’t fit into one or either of the above descriptions.

The reckless types who burned bright and flamed out early, like Robert Johnson or Syd Barrett, are perpetually fascinating.

There’s also something to be said for bands like Motorhead or the Ramones, who found their one sound and then worked it until they dropped.

That’s all fine, but I’m not hooked on them like I am on guys like Frank Black, who dare to evolve, even if they lose some people along the way.

And I really get sold on them when they quietly put out masterpieces such as Dog in the Sand.

So much comes together here. Its sound is a step up in sophistication from what came before. Its twelve songs touch on where Black had been and where he was interested in going at the time. Its subjects are outer space, California, sadness, death, and the beautiful thing that occurs when pedal steel guitar and piano collide with rock ‘n’ roll.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #84: PINBALL MARS

Circus Devils
Pinball Mars
2003, The Fading Captain Series

If someone puts out five albums in a year, one of them really should be a weird, druggy rock opera.

For the third Halloween in a row, the Circus Devils brought a madness that stood out next to everything else that Robert Pollard was doing. The sounds of Todd and Tim Tobias continue to be never quite of this world. You can hear their influences, sure. Devo looms large, as always. I also detect Chrome and Alice Cooper maybe blowing around in this album’s storm. The echoes come from far away, though. The signal is distorted.

Pinball Mars paints the clearest picture yet of them as 70s hard rock kids who later got warped by punk and other 80s fringe sounds and now here they are trying different ways to make it fit together. What makes them great is that they never slide into too much respect for it all. Everything is a perversion in some way. They don’t imitate their esteemed forebears. Rather, the Tobias brothers treat their influences like a mad scientist might treat a stolen corpse. Try not to slip on the blood.

Their work inspires Pollard to get extra free and absurd with his songs and the results are often crazy and amazing.

Now you might have questions.

Okay, so Pinball Mars is a rock opera. Does that mean it’s a bunch of pretentious horseshit?

NO. Pinball Mars is trashy and strange. It sounds like 70s riff rock tripping over punk on its way to prog and then getting abducted by a UFO. It’s great Ohio outsider stuff.

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FREEWAY 2: CONFESSIONS OF A TRICKBABY (1999)

Director: Matthew Bright

This bizarre hidden gem has all of the odds stacked against it.

It’s an uncalled-for sequel to an offbeat cult film.

It’s got a different cast from the original, with its most established name at the time being David Alan Grier (who’s very funny as a lascivious lawyer).

It was released straight to video.

Like most straight-to-video movies in 1999, you likely didn’t know that this existed until you saw it on a shelf. Holding the VHS or DVD box in your hand, this looked like a cynical waste of time. Probably a bad imitation. Something watered-down. Very possibly a money-laundering front. Or at least the product of a bad deal made by somebody.

Writer/director Matthew Bright, returning from the original film, seems to know this and as if to make up for it he coughs up one of the craziest, sleaziest midnight movie freakouts of the final years of the 20th century. Freeway 2 does NOT want to be obscure. It’s a scream in the night. It’s a film full of left turns, uncomfortable laughs, and characters who most normal people would find repulsive. If Freeway 2 is heading straight toward a dead end, Bright works to crash it at top speed.

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