Hope y’all had a great time. Stay tuned for a new look, music, and basically the most awexxome 2008 you never lived through before.
Hope y’all had a great time. Stay tuned for a new look, music, and basically the most awexxome 2008 you never lived through before.
What GBV show was that? I remember The Club IS Open sign from Ice Storm 2000(?) at the Nick! January 28th according to my ticket stub.
SR moolah and a surprise coming via snail mail. Should be there by Saturday.
It’s from the last show in Chicago, at The Metro.
It’s always struck me as strange why the highly educated GBV fanboys celebrate Pollard’s alcoholism. I love many of their records, but couldn’t abide his drunken rants at the shows.
I’m guessing you don’t buy the whole life as performance art thing; he was playing at all the conventions of being an AOR late 60s through mid 70s rock and roll star: kicks, helicopter microphone twirls, Who covers, a look like Tom Berenger playing Roger Daltry in a made for TV bio-pic, excessive drinking, utter machismo and stupid bravado if poignant really (“I’m playing all my hits tonight, nothing but hits” and why weren’t a few of those songs at least highly rated in CMJ): the difference being other 30-40 somethings play air guitar hidden in their bedrooms to a mirror not in a club t real folks. Putting aside the Satyricon that I hear the last 2 Metro shows were, I’d think it’s safe to say that from Isolation Drills
era tours forward the drinking was toned down a fair amount as opposed to say the show he did at the late lamented Barrister’s in Memphis on the Mag Earwhiog Tour, where he stood outside the club for almost an hour after the opening band was done until they delivered the iced down large bucket of beers to the stage or say the drunken nonevents that were Bottom of the Hill shows in mid 1990s in San Francisco.So he was being ironic? It always seemed to me he’s convinced of what he’s doing. I remember being embarrassed for him, hearing him drunkenly rant against the guy from Prisonshake who put out their early records. That said, glad to hear he cleaned things up some. Now if someone could just convince him to stop releasing every song he commits to tape. .
I don’t think he was being ironic. I think he was being gloriously, ridiculously sincere. I didn’t drink Budweiser until New Year’s Eve 2001, when I saw them in Athens. Then I did. Then I got fat. But it was ROCK FAT.
Alec Eiffel and I delineated that holy triumvirate of GBV: Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, Under the Bushes Under the Stars—with the middle record as the apex. I love certain songs from most of the records, but you gotta get those.
As to output . . . I often want certain songs revised or extended, revisited or reworked. But it ain’t gonna happen. Cud’n Pollard is a poet, and once he’s done, he’s done. Nobody’s mad that Bukowski kept writing, are they? Or that there’s yet another godawful Updike book!
Uh, is this guy like that writer we were all remembering a few weeks back? No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know how out of it I am.
Hm—you know, that comparison makes good sense. Pulp legend Emerson LaSalle and Guided by Voices frontman Bob Pollard might be spiritual cousins, or maybe quantum twins: both disciples of excess, both pop-cultural magpies, both insanely prolific (arguably to the point of obscuring their few truly great works, though could they have even created said works without all the other stuff?). Victor, are you involved in the LaSalle biopic at all? If so, I suggest you recommend hiring Pollard to write the soundtrack. And then chucking whatever he writes in favor of stuff from Gorjus/Alec’s “holy triumvirate” + Propeller. I can already hear “Motor Away” playing over a montage of LaSalle’s leaving once and for all the various families he accumulated during his bigamist phase in the Depression.
(Speaking of, during a channel-flipping session I heard “I Am a Scientist” used at the end of an episode of the Christina Applegate sitcom Samantah Who?, and I felt like my 20s were somehow being made retroactively lamer. And then I got over it.)