Trampoline

This rather pedestrian rocker has average hooks, strange lyrics and no real hook or chorus. What it does have going for it is a reference to orgone, which allowed me, on a lazy Friday afternoon, to do a bit of Googling.

Turns out orgone is, according to orgone.org, "a pre-atomic (mass-free) energy. Its natural flow is vital to a healthy individual as well as life on earth." The description of the work of Dr. Wilhelm Reich puts me in the mind of Scientology and other quackery. Whatever, it's an interesting concept that is given little more than a glancing mention here.

Robert Pollard's lyrics at this point in his development seem willfully strange, a straight trying to come off as a weirdo. With the value of hindsight, it seems he was actually a weirdo straining against his straight-suit... who knew. So, we get:

The one in the jar at the foot of the bed
Get's weaker at heart but larger at head
Says I am the fool
Spat on and pushed aside
He gave something back just right before he died

Not much on offer, huh? It gets better in the second verse, at least conjuring an image of an odd old man (perhaps Dr. Reich?).

The man with the hair on top of his ears
Drove past me at eight with a cooler of beer
Got high on the hunt in camouflage green
A drop of precious oil in the orgone machine.

The orgone machine mentioned here is probably an orgone accumulator. Apparently, Dr. Reich believed you could sit in such a contraption and absorb orgone. It's also known as an orgone box, which is also the name of a decent pop band.

Navigating Flood Regions

It was suggested after my last post that I had missed one obvious flood-related song: "Navigating Flood Regions" from Guided by Voices' Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia album. As I admitted, I simply did a search for the term flood in the lyrics of Robert Pollard's songs, and came up with three. "Navigating Flood Regions" didn't come up because the word "flood" doesn't appear in the lyric. No surprise, as Pollard's titles are just as likely to refer to the lyric as not.

If I chose to look for a rallying cry in Pollard's lyric that would sum up the feeling around here as we continue to deal with flood damage and impact, it might be this line from early in the song: "The ship floats but it won't float away." Substitute "Our town" or even "our state" for "the ship" and you might have something worthy of a fundraising T-shirt (better by far than what has appeared to date).

Other key lyrics include "And you're doing a wonderful job shaping up this incompetent mob," as fitting a description of the way disparate groups came together to fill and deploy sandbags as any, and "It's as long as wide and just beginning," which accurately captures the sheer massive stretch of the water as it broke across river banks all across the state.

Beyond that, I've always gotten the feeling that this is Pollard's version of a sea shanty, telling a pirate tale. There's little to point to this in the lyric (though "cast your soul into the jagged sea" feels like it ought to be followed by a hearty "Arrrrgh!"), but I think it nonetheless. Beyond that, it's really among the early songs in the GBV catalog almost entirely carried by a fantastic yet terribly easy-to-play riff (see "Postal Blowfish" et al). Pollard wisely rescued the tune for the Electrifying Conclusion tour, thus allowing it to appear on live documents like Live From Austin, TX and the "Electrifying Conclusion" DVD. It's a perfect vehicle for the latter-day GBV as Nate Farley and Doug Gillard dig in heartily, matey.

The Great Blake Street Canoe Race

I've mentioned this a lot here, but I'm always struck by the sound and songs of Guided by Voices earliest albums because they sound like the kind of music being made by college bands here in Iowa City when I was a young'un. Of course, they sound like songs being cut by bands in every college town around that time because, it seems, all of these bands were influenced by the same things. When Guided by Voices cut Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia, I was a college freshman and, had I gone to school in Dayton instead of Iowa City, I would likely have been a fan several years earlier than was the case.

Songs like ""The Great Blake Street Canoe Race" would be the reason. It's a nice slice of college rock with decent verses and a solid chorus. It has the kind of superficial introspection common in songs of its era, as Robert Pollard sings "Jumping around, thinking about our daily lives, here on the ground, falling apart before our eyes."

He gets a bit deeper as the song progresses -- though admittedly, not much deeper -- as he looks beyond the personal and toward the political:

News is not news
Learn something old every day
Issues repressed
Morning's we fake our minds away

"Learn something old every day" is a good line, and Pollard must agree. It pops up on "7 Strokes to Heaven's Edge" on the Hardcore UFOs boxed set and in the title of a Howling Wolf Orchestra song.

For some reason he thinks the above verse is news to whoever he is singing to, because in the chorus he begs the listener: Oh, please don't misuse this information now. Oh, try not to swallow too much pain, it's only order." Life goes on, he seems to say, and there isn't much we can do about it but adapt.

In the second verse he seems a bit more defiant, as if he isn't ready to take his own advice. "I guess I'll go on with my sad and troubled ways, hands on my hips, questioning each and every face." But the chorus returns with no bridge to set up a different meaning, leaving the listener to assume that Pollard, despite the posturing -- literally, "hands on my hips" -- is ready to toe the line.