Boston Spaceships

Further proving that Robert Pollard, while uber-prolific, doesn't like throwing anything away, we offer the first incarnation of Boston Spaceships. In this case, it's an odd little tune recorded by Guided by Voices in 1991. It finds Tobin Sprout on drums, Jim Pollard on guitar and Mitch Mitchell on bass. It's essentially an instrumental, with Pollard babbling underneath in some sort of approximation of dub. It's about as close as this bunch came to an actual groove, though it's about as stilted as can be. Given that all four are credited as songwriters, one assumes it was an improvised bit put to tape and then discarded... until Pollard needed 100 songs to fill his second Suitcase boxed set.

As for the name, it's actually the name of the song, itself credited to the "band" Academy of Crowsfeet. Pollard obviously liked it enough to repurpose, taking it as the name for his new collaboration with Chris Slusarenko and Decemberists drummer John Moen. Not being terrible observant all the time, I had missed a couple of obvious references. First is the actual Boston spaceship, the guitar-shaped craft that graces the cover of the band Boston's albums. Next is the scatological play of Pollard's wit, with the initials for his new band being B.S. (as well as that of the band's debut album, Brown Submarine, itself a fairly obvious scatological reference).

None of that is brought to bear on this track, however, for it sounds nothing like Boston or the Boston Spaceships. It's just a curiosity given a name that made it stick out when perusing the tracklisting to Suitcase 2 the other day. Funny how that works sometimes.