By the yardstick of his earliest songs, "Barricade" from
Sandbox is Robert Pollard's early-stage epic, his "Stairway to Heaven." The song is 4:31, taking up nearly one-fifth of the 12-song album's running time. It's an interesting song that finds Pollard embracing some arena-rock grandeur, yet taking seeming glee at undercutting that pose with a raggedly rocking chorus that, in its juxtaposition with the verses, gives the song its biggest hook.
The tale being told here is of someone who has barricaded himself against the world and who pays the price when he ventures out. There is some numerology at play here, as Pollard sings of having "six guns alone" and "six bottles of rum" in one verse, and "60 vessels of the ocean" in another. But he takes a chance and leaves the barricade in the chorus: "I walked into the line of fire and took it on the chin again/ and I can't find my medication or my occupation."
Even so, there is some of the now-familiar defiance in Pollard's lyric, as he proclaims, "Takes a stronger wind to blow out this candle than the other fires I've made." Elsewhere, he sings, "Let me walk, I can stand on my own two feet."
Though it fits musically -- and with Pollard, that's often enough -- it's still a bit strange that he drops in the chorus to the Lennon/McCartney song "Little Child" as a bridge, of sorts, singing quietly, "Little child, little child, little child won't you dance with me?" before leading the band back in the squall as the guitar solo erupts and another run through the chorus begins.
As with other early Guided by Voices songs, I find many sonic similarities to the slew of regional bands that popped up to create great albums in the early '80s, including the Hollowmen from my own neck of the woods. As I wrote in the "
Land of Danger" post, it's easy to question why Guided by Voices broke out and persevered when so many of its peers did not. In
an interview with Pollard from 2006, we talked about that, and he chalked a lot of it up to luck, but also acknowledged that GBV had a strangeness that helped to -- in the words of the album that helped to do it -- propel the band: "Not only did we achieve some success, but it became kind of fanatical, in small circles. I’m not sure those same bands at that time could have reached that craziness, but they certainly were good enough to still be around today. I think it was just timing and luck, and we had a certain weirdness that other bands didn’t have."
As such, songs like "Barricade" are good, but I wonder if they would earn more than a passing listen if they weren't by the same band that so captivated listeners with later classics like
Propeller and
Bee Thousand. When I get a new disc from a band I've long loved, I try to listen to it as if I've never heard -- or heard of -- the band before. Would I like the music without that immediate connection?
Labels: Sandbox
