Captain's Dead

With "Captain's Dead," Robert Pollard delivered his first true masterpiece, a two-minute slab of psych pop that is one big glorious hook.

After a strange foghorn that signals the start of the song, it takes off, all wrist-flicking guitar riffs
and drums that careen out of the speakers as they try to keep up. Then comes Pollard's double-tracked vocal, jumping right to the chorus:

Captains Dead
The war machine has fled
and People have gone home
Remember what he said
and you won't feel alone

You even get the requisite cliche lyric that would have qualified this for Rhino's Children of Nuggets boxed set a few years back, as Pollard sings "a pull of the lever and nothing's forever, we'll ride to the heart of the sun."

This is a template he followed for the next two decades and beyond, but he rarely did it better than on this prototype. Not even Pollard's rudimentary -- and completely unnecessary -- guitar solo toward the end can scar this track. He seems to sense this, running through the whole thing twice before letting it crash to a close.

Cyclops

Given Robert Pollard's tendency to write about real people, it's possible there is someone named Tom in his past who hurt his eye and had to wear an eye patch. Then again, he is just as likely to have seen someone with an eye patch and spun the rest from his imagination. Either way, "Cyclops" is a short, strange song with some clever lines.

Beginning with some mournful guitar from Pollard, joined by a martial drum beat from Kevin Fennell, the song is all set up for what is either the most sympathetic song in Pollard's catalog or the most dryly humorous.

The lyrics, in total:

Tom the happy pretender
One eye on the mend
One eye on his watch
His parents told him
Don't worry, Tom,
there's plenty of jobs in the big city,
but with one eye only
it gets so hard
No depth perception
Cyclops

Those last two lines are as close as we come to a chorus, repeated over and over as the song fades. There's not much here, really, but the lines "one eye on the mend, one eye on his watch" make it all worthwhile.

A Portrait Destroyed by Fire

"A Portrait Destroyed by Fire" is the longest song on Guided by Voices' debut album, Devil Between My Toes, by a considerable margin, clocking in at 5:10. As usual with songs from this era, it's a good benchmark to help chart just how far Robert Pollard has come as a songwriter since.

Here, the vocals don't begin until halfway through. And while the song does build musically over those first two-and-a-half minutes, it's a fairly minimal progression and one that does little to keep the listeners interest. Compare that to longer songs from the band's last decade, tracks that would build in instrumentation and intensity as if toward a worthy goal. Here, it's just a matter of Tobin Sprout's guitar line coming in to join Mitch Mitchell's bass thump while Peyton Eric starts his rudimentary 4/4 beat.

When the vocals do enter, the song coalesces around them. Pollard sings two rickety verses while Sprout sings "ooh" behind him, then leaps into the chorus, which is an enthusiastic repetition of the title until he is so out of control that it becomes and out-of-sync shouting. As a three-minute song, it would be interesting, as a five-minute song it's delayed gratification that isn't gratifying enough to justify the delay.

Hey Hey, Spaceman

One of the standouts on Devil Between My Toes, "Hey Hey, Spaceman" is an infectious pop song. From the steady beat to the jangly guitars to the rubberband bassline, the music is ultra-catchy, and Robert Pollard's vocal melody is a gas. The lyrics, meanwhile, start as simply as any of this era, but quickly devolve into absurd language poetry that finds Pollard referencing "vampires of the rocket" and "porpoise language." All along, the main hook is the simple repetition of "do do do..." If anything, the chorus is the least hooky part of the song, because in this case the verses are stronger. All of this transpires in less than 3 minutes, the perfect length for a pop song, though that runtime makes it the second-longest track on the album.

Old Battery

It's a thought that will be expressed over and over again in these write-ups, but I'm continually amazed at how far Guided by Voices traveled musically over its two-decade career. A song like "Old Battery," a decent little college rock song that sounds of a piece with the music being made by hundreds of similar bands all over the country during the mid-'80s, shows no hint of the odd, twisted, challenging and powerful music that would flow from Robert Pollard over the next 20+ years.

It's a simple song, equating a dying loved one with a car battery:

Old Friend in your room
With your ticker
Feeling thicker
You get sicker, but
Die Hard

Musically, it rumbles along on a steady drum beat, melodic bass and chiming guitars, sounding like an outtake from R.E.M.'s Chronic Town EP. While the melody is not unlike something Michael Stipe might have created, Pollard is nowhere near as obfuscating lyrically (or vocally) as Stipe was right from the start, or as Pollard himself would be a few years down the road.

What it does have is a strong hook that shows Pollard's skill with songcraft right from the start. The song's chorus and bridge really are one and the same, Pollard singing "to heal you we have love," alternating with dreamier repeated admonition of "I don't wanna..." And, as was the case for most of the GBV songs that followed, it was short, Pollard getting in and getting out in less than two minutes.