The Lodger Carried a Gun

Robert Pollard's music in the late 1980s was decidedly different from what it would be just a few years later. It was much more conventional, but still had the hallmarks we associate most with his work, hooks being most prominent among them.

He was also prolific, though he hadn't figured out how to get all of that music out to his fanbase at that point (nor, really, had he figured out how to have a fanbase). A song like "The Lodger Carried a Gun" proves the point. It's a solid song from the Devil Between My Toes/Sandbox era that sounds like it never made it past the four-track demo phase.

It begins with an acoustic guitar strum the likes of which launched a million songs by thousands of college bands. Pollard creates a nice vocal melody that offers the main hook. It stumbles a bit on the chorus, which functions here more like a bridge. Pollard's vocal is flat, and he clearly hasn't figured out the best way to drive the song forward. Had it made it past the demo stage, he likely would have fixed those issues.

As it is, however, it's still a decent track, one that offers further evidence of Pollard's early prowess.

I Can't Help But Noticing

This short track recorded in 1989 and not released until 2005's Suitcase 2 boxed set feels more like an exercise than a song. The bulk of it is Robert Pollard playing an interesting arpeggiated guitar line, occasionally punctuated by a short verse and a chorus that simply repeats the song's title. It's fine for what it is, but there is a reason it was left on a cassette in his suitcase for 16 years. At best its the demo for an unrealized song that wouldn't have fit with the harder-edged stuff that made its way onto Guided by Voices' next album, Same Place the Fly Got Smashed.

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.

The Issue Presents Itself

Some songs in Robert Pollard's back catalog seem to time travel. There are a few lo-fi gems from the past few years that sound as if they come from some long-lost early '90s 7" single, and a few epic tracks that belie their early provenance. "The Issue Presents Itself" is among the latter. Recorded in 1987, which puts it around the time of Sandbox, the song has a sophistication that makes one assume on first listen that it comes much later in Guided by Voices' career.

Written by Pollard, his brother, Jim, and Mitch Mitchell (who was holding down bass duties at this point), the song was recorded by Bob, Mitchell and drummer Peyton Eric. It's a bit crackly, but the root of a solid song is there. Given a bit more polish, it certainly would have been at home on Sandbox, and were it not forgotten for more than a decade, it could have popped up on many subsequent releases. As it is, we're graced with its presence on Pollard's second closet-clearing boxed set, a standout amid the castoffs and also rans.

I Am Decided

Another in the continuing series of posts about the great songs left on the cutting room floor as Robert Pollard endlessly reconfigured albums. "I Am Decided" was cut around the time of the material that eventually made up the Under the Bushes, Under the Stars album. Along the way, various incarnations of those songs were called The Power of Suck (not to be confused with other, earlier projects with that name) and Mustard Man & Mother Monkey. Why it fell away while other tracks survived is unknown; suffice to say that it's inclusion on UTBUTS would have made a great album just a little bit better.

Perhaps the song was jettisoned because it sounds like a real transition between Alien Lanes and its successor. It's more lo-fi than much of UTBUTS, though it doesn't suffer from that presentation. Soundwise, its all one big hook. Lyrically, it almost harks back to Pollard's pre-Vampire on Titus work, with lines like "Grab yourself and stop from flying, you'll break my heart with all that crying" sounding fairly pedestrian when compared to what followed.

But the chorus is something else:

We will not begin another sin
Without you, rest assured
These aren't obligations, but I want to
Rub my fingers through your mangy mane
Your fingers 'round my belly
I am decided - the blind shall be lead
to the fire tonight

It's a friend indeed (or attentive lover) that assure you that no sin will be commenced without your involvement. Then again, I've had few friends who express the desire to rub their fingers through my mangy mane. What exactly do they do in that Monument Club, anyway?

Pack of Rolling Papers

When you talk about short songs and Robert Pollard, the word "short" is relative. He's a master of brevity, so when he crafts something interesting from 26 seconds, it's no surprise. In the case of "Pack of Rolling Papers," however, rather than create an actual song, he's really penned a fragment. Actually, penned isn't even the right word, for it sounds as if he hit record, cleared his throat, and then sang whatever came to mind while picking out a figure on his acoustic guitar. The lyrics, in their entirety:

Pack of rolling papers laying on the floor
The weight belt you said was mine
The money belt that we took behind

I know Pollard was an athlete, but I don't see him as the weight-lifting variety. Still wherever he was at the time, there must have been some rolling papers, a weight belt and a money belt laying around. For most of us, that means it's time to straighten up. For Pollard, it's time to write and record a song.

Rocket Head

Robert Pollard is a well-known recycler. When he finds a bit he likes -- be it musical, lyrical or visual -- he isn't afraid to use it more than once. But he also can be seen as someone who, in the parlance of the business world, makes value-added products when he does so.

"Rocket Head" is a case in point. The song was cut in 1988 by an early Guided by Voices lineup of Pollard, Jim Pollard, Mitch Mitchell and Kevin Fennell. It is notable for including a lot of the melody and lyric of what would eventually become "Teenage FBI," one of his best, catchiest songs. The similarity isn't obvious at first; the opening guitar line is somewhat reminiscent, though not a carbon copy of the later song. But then Pollard begins to sing: "Someone tell me why I do the things that I don't care to do. When you're around me, I'm somebody else." It starts with the same melody as the later song, but there's the word swap of "care" and "want," and the "when you're around me..." part is sung with a different melody. It continues with "someone tell me why I act like a fool when things don't go my way..." but when you expect the chorus of "There is good reason I guess..." he instead sings "Rocket Man" twice before the band spends the last 1:30 of the song jamming on a bland riff of the song, providing an aural placeholder for what Pollard would eventually construct.

The song could have continued from there and ended up pretty much where it is: A noble experiment that never really went anywhere, buried on a boxed set years later. But Pollard knew he had something worth keeping, eventually finding a way to rework it into something remarkable.