Bob Pollard

To which I reply: You have more money than sense.

listening to isolation drills or do the collapse, guided by voices is just another indie rock band...dig deeper into their earlier stuff and you might be able to relate what i'm commenting on

That said, I've never understood the contant Pollard-lionizing: YES he's written some very snappy material and YES the shoddy rammed- through sound of the Golden Age GBV stuff can be both charming and thrilling but CHRIST NO the guy is not some sort of messiah -- he is just a guy with a good ear for quirky whipcrack pop/rock and an interesting aeshetic for patchwork album presentation.

1) who for you WOULD constitute the messiah, and why?

2) how, since bob writes and sings and plays guitar on most GBV releases, is he not really that involved in his brilliant albums' brilliance?

To be honest, I find it hard to think of any artists at all who deserve the kind of lionization that Pollard's traditionally received. Phil Elvrum, maybe, if he decided to focus a bit more? Takako Minekawa? Rob Crow? Rufus Wainwright? Scott Herren if he keeps getting better at the rate he has over the past five years? But please got not Pollard, about which see below.

how, since bob writes and sings and plays guitar on most GBV releases, is he not really that involved in his brilliant albums' brilliance?

Eek, scary: you're misreading me (plus in a way that has me calling GBV records "brilliant!"). What I said was that they've released some "great" records, "none of which seemed to be predicated on his being particularly brilliant," and I'll stand by this. I don't think Pollard in any way "brilliantly" devised the greatness of those records -- I just think he has an idiosyncratic way of going about conventional rock, a very particular set of quirks and slants that somewhat coincidentally happened to express themselves most strongly at just the right time to seem profound and important. But as time goes on and Pollard continues flogging those same idiosyncracies toward rote irrelevance, it becomes clearer and clearer that there was no particular vision or intelligence behind them; it's just what he does, and apparently will go on doing long after people get tired of it. Thus I think that handful of Pollard records that are great are great based not on some master plan of Pollard's, but great based on their emerging during a cultural moment where Pollard's limited palette of idiosyncracies seemed pretty fresh.

is there a surer sign that an album is unlistenably lame and an artist's career is irreversibly over than when people start calling it the "best thing he's done since..."? has any "best thing he has done since" album by ANYONE ever been good?

(i'm not saying TT is a bad album, but. . .)

Except no one would know what they were talking about.

So how do we view Neil Young, who has released records for 37 years and did in fact have a seven-year gap between great albums and has released some terrific ones since then?

he view him in the exact opposite way: "prairie wind is his worst album since greendale." or, say, "greendale is his worst album since are you passionate." for example.

You certainly have a point there, though I actually do like Greendale a lot -- his "best" lyrics since Freedom. Or perhaps they're the "only" good ones he's written since then.

Are You Passionate? is the absolute pits. Even Landing on Water has a few merits.

Neil Young
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere
After the Gold Rush
Harvest
Journey Through the Past
Time Fades Away
On the Beach
Tonight's the Night
Zuma
Long May You Run
American Stars and Bars
Decade
Comes a Time
Rust Never Sleeps
Live Rust
Hawks and Doves
Re*ac*Tor
Trans
Everybody's Rockin'
Old Ways
Landing on Water
Life
This Note's For You
Freedom
Ragged Glory
Weld/Arc
Harvest Moon
Unplugged
Lucky Thirteen
Sleeps With Angles
Mirror Ball
Dean Man soundtrack
Broken Arrow
Year of the Horse
Silver and Gold
Road Rock vol. 1
Are You Passionate?
Greendale
Prairie Wind

... and yes, that's completely obnoxious. :-)

Sorry, Pollard, for interjecting on this fine chance for ILMers to shit all over yo drunk ass ...

Anyways, From a Compound Eye is my favorite Pollard-related album since Waved Out. I wonder what people who've heard it think?

hahahahahahahahaha!

I've been on a project of working my way through as much of Pollard as I can. Between my collection and what's on Spotify I've got about 89 hours work to work through. I've got pretty much everything covered, minus stuff that's not on Spotify (Acid Ranch, Nightwalker and Cash Rivers being the only things I don't have either way). I'm up to the return to Matador years right now (Universal Truths, Price Whippet EP), which is an era I'm finding I really like quite a bit.

In terms of his side projects, I'm finding that I like Lexo and the Leapers and His Soft Rock Renegades way better than I remembered and that the Airport 5 stuff left me cold, compared to what I remember.

Nice. I was listening to the Hazzard Hotrods album a couple months back, I think the story is they were performing in a video store and improvising songs based on movie titles called out by audience members. A couple songs were on the first Suitcase box. It’s pretty lofi and ridiculous.

Yeah, even the lyrics for those Hazzard Hotrods songs riff on the movie titles too. I like that one just because of the bonkers genesis. One that hasn’t aged as well is that Richard Meltzer, Smegma and Pollard thing.

jesus man that sounds like a hell of a project. wouldn't you rather build a cabinet or something?

anyway "Circle of Trim" and "Stifled Man Casino" by Airport 5 were pretty good! impossible they could leave anyone cold. I'd definitely recommend re-listening after getting through the 89 hours of everything else

this is the best thing from that Crickets compilation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZCef3aAcJg

^ nice one

Hahaha, I’m doing a lot of tedious, repetitive archiving work from home right now, so I’m doing the vast majority of my listening then. Gotta keep it interesting somehow, and I’ve been meaning to do a Pollard deep dive for a few years now.

I do dig “Stifled Man Casino”, made my list of Airport 5 keepers. I just remembered liking those albums more than I did during this revisit.

Still working my way through all of the Pollard material, just finished listening to Suitcase 3 which takes me up to about the end of 2009. I know the acoustic demos recorded between Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes are what got all the Pollard geeks excited, but disc 3 of this is probably my favorite of the individual Suitcase discs so far - the demo of "Huffman Prairie Flying Parade"! "Piss Along You Bird"! "Trader Vic"! The 4-track version of "Smothered in Hugs"!

It's crazy to think that I still haven't gotten to the GbV reunion albums yet, nor have I touched ESP Ohio, Ricked Wicky or Teenage Guitar!

Also, I already knew how goddamn great Boston Spaceships was, but this journey has confirmed that they were easily Bob's second best band behind GBV.

have you spent much time with Circus Devils?

Oh I love Circus Devils too! But BS edges them out with an even higher hit-to-dud ratio. I need to spend some more time with the post 2010 Circus Devils records (soon!) but that run of Sgt. Disco > Ataxia > Gringo > Mother Skinny is absolutely great.

So many songs, so little time

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ec/86/58/ec8658695ee7d0830360bf0c7c7978d8.jpg

There's Bob with all the albums he's recorded so far this year.

Loool!

Holy shit, please tell me that's not his son!

I saw GBV on the tour they did with Cheap Trick in Fall '99 at the Electric Factory. After GBV's set, we went up to the balcony for drinks and ended up standing right behind Pollard and his then teenage son and Bob was air guitaring like a fool during all of Cheap Trick's hits.

Grandson.

I remember Bob bringing his son onstage to join him on vocals at Irving Plaza in the mid-90's

that's some collection

Who has time to listen to all that shit

Is he getting too old to be a music obsessive?

lol

the Pinterest caption said “helping uncle bob with his records” or something, should have dug deeper