LOVE IS STRONGER THAN WITCHCRAFT

ON EDITING:

I did a lot of thinking at the show, many, many thoughts, much UNIVERSE. I'm going to try to just rattle and list things that happened or that I thought about.

I haven't been this excited for a show in I don't know how long, maybe the XIU XIU show I went to alone in LA, which was right near the end. And before that, I couldn't tell you. As described it came to me from the universe. I've been listening to GBV A LOT lately, and subjecting the people around me to it's constant presence in the background. It started with the KINGS inspiration and the sunny summer feelings and then led into wanting explore all the early albums before the "classic" era that the world and I, love so much. And that was so fun and interesting. I just went right in order, playing one after another, day after day, park trip after park trip listening and taking them in. It's funny how these things work, you own something or have something in your life for so long and really don't know it or spend time with it or haven't had a space to connect with it and then one day you.

That was such a success and I was at that point molting the KINGS subscription plans and I became fascinated by the "reunited classic" era of the band. I recall listening with great excitement to all those records as they came out, this was all while I was living in LA. And at the time what was so interesting and baffling about them was how much they just seemed to not give a fuck. It was the classic line-up reunited, big media attention, big era marking moments and instead of giving us remakes and hits packages and an attempt to make some statement that competed with the classic albums they just put out, well, some GBV stuff. I mean it's lovely and I love it and it sounds like classic GBV but like, weird classic GBV. Not swinging for the fences GBV. And I had to admire that. Admire just saying you know what, despite all the fanfare, fuck it, we're putting out what we're feeling. And then came another and another and another, 6 in all. More records than the classic lineup even recorded at the time they originally were around. And I guess what drew me to sitting and sitting with these is that they baffled me (am having a similar experience with Wowee Zowee, by Pavement). And at this point in my life, this far down the line with so many bands and albums and so much music, all these years, what I value almost more than anything else is music that baffles me, and, more than that, music that CONTINUES to baffle me after decades.

These records are grand but one wonders what exactly delineates them from other incarnations of GBV or other eras, and even moreso, what in Bob's mind delineates and designates one project or set of songs from another, what makes him think oh this is some GBV stuff, oh no this is some Robert Pollard solo stuff, this is some Boston Spaceships stuff etc... I mean obviously it's all him and all his projects and that's all that really matters. But one wonders about the internal organizing principles. I find it deep and fascinating.

So I set about to listen to each of those reunited records one after another, GBVPARK trip and GBVPARK trip. And I love them all and they sit by themselves as an era unto themselves. It's hard to really classify and talk about. Like all Robert's music there's a timelessness. And not as in forever classic never out of style, but as in, it sits OUTSIDE of time, and the world, in a way.

I sat and listened to all those records and, like all things Pollard, there's SO MUCH of it. And here's where we're getting back to KINGS and the kings subscription service. There's so much Robert, that you have to really sit with these things and spend repeated listens and time with them to be able to decode them and recognize them as individual albums and statements. You listen to a record and it goes by you and you try to remember the good songs and the songs that stood out to you and you want to come to the end of the thing and feel that yes, I've just listened to AN ALBUM. A single piece that went together and made some kind of sense. Even if it's not so singular or together. Some albums just flow as one thing and make total compact sense, The Sunset Tree for example, or Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, and some albums are all over the map but still somehow hang together and make sense as a messy collation, The White Album for example or Castaways and Cutouts. In listening to an album and reaching then end you strive to have the feeling of having eaten a meal, you say ok that began and ended and I ate a meal and it felt like it was a meal and made sense and I feel resolved and sated. But some days you don't do that, you snack, you have a beer, you have a handful of cashews, you have half a leftover sandwich or wrap, you eat a few grapes, you have a few bites of rice and at the end of it you aren't hungry any more but YOU DON"T FEEL AS THOUGH YOU ATE A MEAL. Follow me?

You don't have the feeling of resolve and the made-sense of a meal. You say well I'm not hungry but I really don't feel like I ate, I don't feel the same satisfaction. And this is where I've been sitting with the afore-mentioned Wowee Zowee and where I've been sitting with those 6 reunited GBV albums. There's so much material and it seems almost arbitrarily put together or put together in the not most satisfying way. It's like any collection of songs or a mix, when it's right you just know it, when it's wrong or put together weird you can feel it in some under-mind back of the head gut way. You say well ok, I liked that, and I got a feeling from it and some things stood out but at the end I don't know if I just heard an album, I think I just heard a pile of songs, randomly.

So there I sit with these albums, so many in so little time, 3 in one year 2 the next and then one more. I listen and I say ok, I love these but, WHY THESE SONGS IN THESE ORDERS?

What made Bobby say, yeah this is the track list, this makes sense. This is a STATEMENT. I know there has to be that logic at work, or why put out albums at all. And my fascination has been in sitting and sitting with those records and trying to ascertain what it is. What makes each album stand alone as THAT album? I still don't have answers but I love the process of it.

In looking back all of GBV history is filled with this conundrum. You can find online people that have documentation all of the different track listings that were tried out and thrown away. Bee Thousand alone went through at least 6 permutations before becoming the album we all know and love. And being the nerd I am after the show I went back and reconstructed them all and have been sitting with them playing the same game I have with the later albums, listening to each of these "versions" of bee thousand and seeing all the different ways it ALMOST went but didn't. And this is whats fascinating, all those other versions are lovely and wonderful and weird and none come within a million miles of what they finally achieved on the final track list for Bee Thousand.

People have often derided Robert and his massive output, saying he has no quality control and takes no care with things and that he's just pissing out songs constantly and just tossing them out there, flooding the market incredulously. And I would offer Bee Thousand as the lowest common denominator argument to the common man in rebuttal.

A few years back they put out a "director's cut" of Bee Thousand, featuring one of the original track lists, most of the permutations are around the same length and the length of the released one, however one version of it was planned as a double album twice as long and that's the version of the director's cut. And as someone remarked in a review of this release, it's remarkable because had GBV settled on that as the final track list, there's a good chance that that album would not have made them the indie rock stars that they are, would not have gone on to change the world of music and would not have become the canonical classic that it is. It might have "kept them in the basement" is the phrase the review uses. And I agree. It's a great and satisfying collection of songs and in a way it makes sense, sure. But it isn't Bee Thousand. You get to the end and feel like your hunger is satisfied but not that you've eaten. As opposed to the real final Bee Thousand, where you get to the end and feel you've had the greatest meal you've ever eaten.

And this is how music works and bands work, it's not unique to GBV, all records might have gone different ways and that fascinates me. Some people have whole websites dedicated to recreating albums in the ways that they almost went or were going to be, early on in the process. GBV themselves have tons of scrapped "albums" that can be researched onlone and sort of pieced together from all the songs that eventually turned up here or there and it's a really interesting exercise. To hear these alternate histories and wonder why at this or that time that that made sense to them and why later it didn't. Them or any other band.

Hail To The Thief sits in this same fistula for me. In a lot of ways it's my all time favorite Radiohead album, not because I think it's their best, but because it baffles me. It's hard to parse. It's weird, eliptical, hard to make sense of. It isn't a satisfying album at all. It's hard to deal with and all these years later it still doesn't hang together as "an album" for me. And that, for me, makes it the most interesting and valuable of all their albums. I know that there's some kind of actual historical part of that album and how it was sort of rushed out and they weren't happy with it and that there's an alternate track listing that Thom Yorke said was his preferred way that he thought it should have gone.

In more recent media the new Kanye record is the same thing but happening in real time in front of the whole world. I can say a lot about this record and how it relates to other things, music his career, Bruce Springsteen, my own endless still in process writing project, all of which are interesting but I'll try to keep it to what's relevant to this topic.

One can, again, online, find all the track lists that the album had at one time, from genesis to current and you can construct them and hear how he wanted the album to go at different times. And, of course, I have. And it's interesting because in his case with this album, it's like he reverse engineered it. He actually kind of started out with a Bee Thousand, it was short-ish and punchy and made sense as an album, it's gone through at least 6 iterations since, finally becoming what it is in the world now (though he assures us it might change again and all that is a fascinating topic for another time, about when is a piece of art done etc, this again leads back to my book and like, leaves of grass and so on but I digress...).

With each successive iteration it's become more and more weird and unwieldy and makes less and less sense. Except as a brilliant pile of things. Don't get me wrong I love it and I love the desire to pile on and pile on and make it longer and longer (GO FIGURE!) I identify with that aesthetic drive. But in listening to it and GBV and thinking a lot about my own writing and about KINGS I'm turning a corner in my life where I can finally really really appreciate brevity and the need to small easy pieces and the work that goes into not just throwing every fucking thing into something.

That's a lot of what I've been talking about with the KINGS subscription project and about the whole CD fascination thing. Robert Pollard isn't without quality control or vision. Yes he's throwing tons of stuff out there but not without purpose or plan. As we discover in listening to all those past almost version of Bee Thousand we see that that album is, as messy and lo-fi and all over the map as it is, STILL the product of a meticulous process. Rosie Ranauro once said something in a conversation that has lived in my head ever since, we were talking about music and a number of things I forget but in particular about Bitte Orca by Dirty Projectors. DP has a long and weird and winding and very difficult musical past prior to that album and she was saying to me that a lot of the reason that Bitte Orca is so good is that it's the product of very meticulous and purposeful EDITING. It's been worked over and whittled down and trimmed and designed and deployed with a lot of thought, care and intention. It sounds so good and makes so much sense because it was edited and edited until it found the form it was meant to be in. Were there other killer songs from that era that could have gone on it? Yes. Did they have other material that might have been better than the material that went on? Maybe. But did those things fit the album in a way that made sense? No.

You find this all the time in music and record making, bands have songs that are killer, hit singles or should be hit singles, songs that could have made an album sell a million copies, but that didn't get onto that record. Why? Because they didn't go. They didn't make sense. And making an album is about just that, making a thing, a piece, a statement that makes sense as a thing. Not about just throwing every little thing on there. It's about taste and editing and understanding how to best use and deploy something. Again, the reviewer of Bee Thousand The Director's Cut talks about how some of the songs that MAKE the album wouldn't have made old cuts or how some were relegated to weird places or the end of the record etc. It isn't enough to have a song as strong as Gold Star For Robot Boy or Tractor Rape Chain. You also have to know how and when to use them. If you bury them under 20 other songs and they just come and go somewhere in the last 5 minutes of a 60 minute album then you are going to lose them. Waste them. Water them down. You muddy the water with so many things so many ideas and you lose the potency and singularity of the individual pieces.

And that brings us back to KINGS and the subscription project and CDS. To pick a single tree out of the forest and sit with it all day and read a book under it all week and come to know that tree intimately. A thing that stands out from the thousands of other trees. It's important and it's important to know how to do it. It's important to know when to hold back. When to whittle it down. Hey let's not make every mix 3 hours long. Yeah that's 3 hours of great stuff but you lose so much of the punch of the individual pieces that way.

There's lots to be said for endlessly rolling out things and good stuff and throwing everything in there and that's still my overriding aesthetic, but I'm coming to appreciate the CRAFT of things. The care and intention of editing and working something until it makes the most sense even if that means killing your darlings and leaving things out and WAITING or being patient or having something you're so so excited to share or do or give but waiting on it, waiting until next time or next mix or next album or next KINGS subscription mailing. There is a lot to be said for holding back. I say as I, ironically, write this way too overlong dissertation.

Anyway

ON THE SHOW:

That kind of leads us back to some things. So there's a new GBV record, the latest of the "reunited" band or rather of the reignited band name. Because the "classic" lineup has now departed yet again. The new album was made entirely by Bob alone in his home studio. He played every instrument. At the show he was talking about that, he's like people always ask me why I change the lineup so much, don't ever ask me that! He then said yeah the new album I did everything on it, played every instrument, not very well, but fuck it, I just wanted to see if I could do it.

The touring band is made up of a couple newer faces and a couple older cohorts. And again the reviews of the album roll in and question, ok why is this a GBV record. What designates this as GBV and not Pollard solo, esp considering it literally is solo. And I don't care in a critical way at all. I only care in a personal fascination way. Yes, what DOES make it GBV and why DID you decide to go that way with it. Is it because the songs sounds GBV-y to you? Is it because putting that band name on it gives it a heftier importance and weight than a side project or solo? Is it because you've finally decided that fuck it, whatever I do is me and my shit and it can all be GBV if I want it to be. It should be noted there's also a brand new Robert Pollard "solo" record out as well, haha.

Continuing this line of thinking of picking out little details and trying to individualize things to distinguish them from the forest or the muddy water, as they played, they played a bunch of songs from the new just out album and at one point Bob says "See, when you just pepper these new songs in with the old stuff here and there time to time you that these new songs KICK ASS" and THEY DO! The man was on stage basically saying back to me my own philosophy with the kings subscription project. It's like ok I know I've got a million songs and albums and it's hard to take it all in but if I single parts of them out and PRESENT them to you and spotlight them and make them stand out of the crowd then they don't just wash by you in a torrential down pour of stuff. If I make sure that Echos Myron is the 3rd from last song on a 40 song album then you see how good it is. If we take KINGS apart, one new mix every couple few weeks that we can take time to sit with as a single alone individual piece then it can become a part of you life and you can marinate with it. And if I pick out a personal choice for an older archival mix here or there based on some band song or era I'm thinking about at the time and I spot light it and I burn a disc of it and make a cover and send it to yall in the package and pepper these old or forgotten or lost or never heard mixes in then you can see that they KICK ASS. Thank you Bobby.

Later in the set he was saying that he counted and that, not including EPs and collections and shit like that, counting only actual all new album releases, that the new GBV album makes his 95th album. He's like how many fucking albums did Led Zeppelin have? 7? Not even? He then took a jab at the Rolling Stones, he's like yeah they said they're putting out a new album this year and it's gonna be "11 Blues numbers" oooh can you even wait?? It was hilarious and also illustrated these very interesting traits about Bob, a lot of which I know already from reading the GBV book, "Guided By Voices: A Brief History" by James Greer, which I will again recommend to everyone.

And this is one of the things I thought about as I watched him. He's a flawed man. I thought about myself and I thought about my dad. In the book he comes off as basically a genius and a drunk and also terminally worried about what people think of him and his band, I mean that's the GBV story, they had 5 or 6 albums before they ever played for a single person, because he was so worried about what people would think, he lives in the shadows of the greats and his heroes and wants to be that great and that here (AND IS) but he will forever feel not good enough or criticized or misunderstood. And so he comes off like this ego maniacal asshole, He surrounds himself with yes men and fans and hangers on, people that praise him and assure him how great he is. And it doesn't come from a place of Ego, but of insecurity and worry, can I measure-upness, he flaunts his achievements and pushes himself to do more and more and more and more endlessly to fill the hole and stop the tide of bullshit and self-medicate in a way. As I stood there watching I was moved beyond description thinking of all these things. Robert Pollard is a living KINGS tenet.

He's spent his whole life under the weight of all these things, worry, drinking, criticism, being misunderstood or not appreciated the way he thinks he should. The world is a curse.

And so Robert Pollard built a "Los Angeles"



And if you think you might come to California... I think you should (DISAPPEAR HERE).

I listened to him talking about putting out his 95th album and about the his 50 best songs he's hand picked for this set list and I saw myself. I saw KINGS. I saw a man building a Los Angeles. And it was like the UNIVERSE singled me out of the forest for a moment. Made me singular and spotlighted. I felt like Rolland standing across from Stephen King, the two of them facing one another, creator and creation.

Later in the set I was actually moved to tears but this was the first time it almost happened.

I stood there in the crowd as they played and I thought about Robert Pollard and I thought about David Bowie and I thought about Prince. All heroes of mine. All strange men, aliens on this planet. All with MASSIVE prolific catalogs of music. And I thought of myself and KINGS, the 307th mix, I thought of my endless book, which began as a poem and now will most likely be the thing I am writing until the day I die. I thought about men. And aliens. I thought about men building a Los Angeles. And I thought about my dad. And I wished that Prince hadn't died. And I wished that David Bowie hadn't died. And I prayed that Bruce Springsteen or Morrissey or David Lynch wouldn't be next.

He said that when he puts out his 100th album he's gonna do a coffee table book, 200 pages, oversized, the front and back covers of every album. (Incidentally at the show and on the GBV you can get these like, book/zines he's putting out that are just art books of his collage art, fucking killer).

A little later in the set he said that the next song was from one of his solo records called "The Crawling Distance" and he said do you guys know what the crawling distance is? Well when I lived in Titus Ave, when I was THE VAMPIRE ON TITUS, there was a stream that ran by the house, and I used to go to this bar on the other side of it and I always knew that when I left the bar if I could just make it to the stream that I could crawl the rest of the way home, that's the crawling distance, of course a lot of the time I didn't make it that far and my wife, my EX wife, would have to come and fish me out, One! Two! Three!" and right into the song, "Imaginary Queen Anne", which is too beautiful.

And I thought at that moment of myself, after GUSH. I thought of the nights at GUSH I got blackout drunk, usually accidentally, and the next day was so hungover and couldn't remember how I got home or what had happened the last hours of the night and thanked god I had made it home safe and with my keys and computer and wallet and all the rest, not unlike all those PILL days. It's a feeling I know well.
 

And there was one night after a GUSH where I ended up getting all the way to my front door and then passing out. Just blacking out right there on the patio. My wife, my EX wife, having to come out and find me there and get me inside. And I listened to him tell that story and I saw myself in it and I saw my ex-wife in it and I thought of my dad. Who is an actual alcoholic. Seeing him so many nights so drunk he literally was unable to form words or to get up off the floor or one night when he fell through our glass coffee table. I saw him struggling with depression and hopelessness and life as a touring musician and alcoholic and drug addict and I saw the disintegration of his marriage to my mom and then years later the disintegration of his marriage to my step mother. And I saw the disintegration of my own marriage and my ex-wife's insistence that I have a drinking problem and I saw the end of Robert Pollard's marriage. A few songs later he said that his wife, he's been remarried I think since 2008 or so, keeps asking him when he's gonna stop doing this stupid shit. And he said you know what I say to that, and the whole crowd boo-ed loudly. And he said when my wife finds out they you guys boo-ed her and that I coerced you to do it, I'm gonna be in deep shit. And it was funny of course but also very deeply hard to hear and watch. And hard to identify moments in my own life that were like that when I was married.

And what I came away from that with was not a feeling of negativity watching Bobby assassinate his wife's character in front of strangers and not a feeling of having a drinking problem because my marriage ended, and not a feeling of upset with own father and our past. I felt a feeling of sad identification and bond. I felt a deep understanding and appreciation and sympathy. I felt I understood Robert and his life, I felt I understood his ex-wife and why she needed to leave him and I felt I understood my own ex-wife and why she had to leave, I felt at peace with my dad and our past, I felt at peace with being left by my wife. At peace with myself, not as a victim or as the person at fault. I felt a relief in a sense. A relief in understanding. I see these men as what and who they are. Flawed broken people. Humans.

And if you think that I could be forgiven... I wish you would.

These aren't people that mean harm, they aren't people that don't love or care or are evil. They just are who they are and have to do what they have to do. Robert can't help or change who he is and what he's here to do. He's a songwriter and musician that likes to drink a lot. My dad isn't a bad man, not an absent father. He's just a person who had to do what he needed to do or felt he had to. We all have to follow our own paths wherever they go and do the best we can with what we have and who we are. We all have to do the best with what we're given. And sometimes we fail and sometimes we fall down and sometimes we hurt people around us and confuse people we love. Sometimes we drive people that we love and that love us away forever. Sometimes people can't deal with us and our shit and have to move on to not be dragged down by it. And that's ok. Some people aren't meant to be together, some people aren't meant to be with people, some people are only meant to do what they can and what they need to. And they want to share that and have others love them and love those people back.

We all try our best to be who we must be and to also have that not hurt others and to have them be a part of that self, that life. And if they can or of they can for awhile or up to a point then that's beautiful and when it's no longer possible or they can't go down your rabbit hole anymore or be swallowed by your black hole anymore then they have to go on. And that's ok. It isn't wrong or bad or evil. It needs to be forgiven. His wife left him, because she had to. She couldn't take his actions any more and that's ok. He did things or made choices or mistakes that he felt he had to and that's ok. It's ok for people to part and go their separate ways and make new lives. My dad didn't mean any harm to me or my mom he was just locked into his addictions and his world in his head. It hurt and it was hard but what can you do? That's what he felt he had to do. Another woman came along and loved him and thought it would work or change and it did for 12 years until it couldn't work anymore and she had to leave him to his rabbit hole too. When my wife left I was heartbroken and hurt and angry but I understood it and why. I was more hurt by how it happened and how it was handled and carried out than by the leaving itself. I understood her reasons. And I respected them. I just didn't respect the way it was handled. But I'm sure she didn't respect anything about me at all by then so, oh well. I'm sorry to her, I really am. As much as going through that hurts and makes me hate and resent and feel heartbreak. I never meant to hurt anyone, I had the best intentions and I felt love. I loved her. Tell my wife I loved her very much. Some things just don't mix. Some things just don't work. Some people aren't meant to be together. And I'm sorry to her for that. And I'm sorry to my dad for being so angry or silent for so many years. And I'm sorry to my mom that she had to go through that with him. And I'm sorry that he had to have his heart broken when she had to leave. And I'm sorry to my step-mother for having to inherit such a broken man. And I'm sorry to Robert for all the pain and frustration and anxiety in his life. And I'm sorry to his wife for what she went through. I'm sorry to the people I've hurt with the things I've done and haven't done. I'm sorry to all the alien men and alien women and to all the hardcore UFOs, I'm sorry that the world can be so strange and hurtful and confusing. Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing we can do. I never meant to cause you any sorrow. I never meant to cause you any pain. I'm sorry for all the things I did wrong and I feel overwhelmed and sad and I wish that the people I love never had to hurt and I wish that Amy hadn't had to die and I wish that Prince hadn't died and I wish that David Bowie hadn't died and I wish I knew why you all had to go.

I'm sorry for all the things I did or didn't do when I didn't believe that anything could be saved or changed.

And the band played on.

And I stood in the crowd and thought of all these things.

The fact that one of my two best friends from high school in Atlanta lives here was a big part of making this move possible. Having his presence in my life is anchoring and a source of much unconditional happiness and comfort. Had he not texted me out of the blue to say hey lets hang out this week and then come to my home and had some beers and talked for hours about music, like we always do, well GBV wouldn't have come up and I wouldn't have started telling him all about things I've told yall just about how much I'm living with them all the time right now, had none of that happened then he wouldn't have happened to notice they were playing the next day and let me know and then we wouldn't have been standing there together singing along and throwing our hand up and being drenched in beer. It was random but meaningful. It brought together all these parts of myself and my life and my present. Sometimes you want to where everybody knows your name.

A good friend of mine in Boston, Brendan, someone I love dearly, someone I share a lot of history and experiences with and most of my beginning GBV history with, he was a resident of Nashua with me and worked at Newbury with me and we spent many nights at many shows and many days in many record stores. Planned many trips on to get records on many release days. Spent many hours talking about many bands. Someone that I met at a formative age and that changed my life. I was writing to him that GBV release day same as you guys, all about wanting to go the day the record came out and get it. Right before the show he texted me a picture, its a newspaper clipping from Dayton years ago, all about a teenage Bobby Pollard, who was a pitcher for the HS team, pitching a No-hitter. Which, if you aren't aware, is almost impossible to do. It's a charming throwback to Roberts sports past and who he is as a town fixture/legend, well an hour later when GBV took the stage they had one guy off to the right of the stage and his job was like the ball boy in tennis, he would just watch and sing along and have cold beers and a bottle of tequila ready, so that between songs he could run out on stage and bring one to anyone that needed one. As it turned out he was wearing a t-shirt with the image that Brendan had just sent me screen printed on it. I've got some pics of him and it's hard to see but you can tell, I'll be sure to include those. UNIVERSE.

I felt more re-tied and connected to NH and to that time in my life when Pavement and GBV were my whole world. Those things and that time in my life have been on my mind a lot lately and much of the inspiration for the new KINGS mixes, and to have him there with me, tied back in, with Andrew, and all the while I'm live texting to you two about the day and sending the packages finally and then about going to the show. UNIVERSE. Everything all together. One thing. It's all one thing. Everything is the same thing. All things serve the beam. And the papers want to know whose shirt you wear?

Speaking of beer drenched. There was so much beer on the floor at the end you could barely walk. It looked like the club had gotten an inch of rain while they played. It must by like a GBV/Grateful Dead super fan following the band thing that people do and know to do, or like rocky horror, like people in the front row literally had 6 packs of miller light and they were just opening them and flinging them around when major songs kicked in. We were all soaked in beer by the end. And somehow no matter how much beer flew or how long the set when on, every time I looked up at the raised hands everyone had brand new full ice cold beers. It was like some kind of drinking magic.

The show may have actually ended up selling out. When we got there it was sparse and what I expected, like low key, LOTS of old rock and indie rock dudes, all wearing GBV t-shirts from various vintages. Very few females. It was what you expect. But as GBV started the room had packed out and with plenty of young and hip and female individuals, and I watched Bobby on stage singing with SO MUCH conviction and dancing and high fiving and thinking to myself this man is in his 60s, I'm a relatively older person by some standards but this guy is older than me and one of the people I'm with combined. Earlier in the night I was asked "Is this show going to get rough?" and I laughed because I was caught off guard by the notion. I said of course not, it's going to be all old music nerds and aging rock guys. Mellow but good energy. Boy was I wrong. As the night progressed and drinking continued it got rowdier and rowdier and more and more high energy. The fist pumping, the beer can and bottle flinging, the arms raised singing along, the dancing, and yes eventually the pushing, shoving and something VERY close to a fight between two large men right next to me. I stand corrected.

I guess that's most of what I have to say and recount about the show. It was the first show of the tour, the first show of this new incarnation. It was the guinea pig show, trying everything out to see if it worked or not. It was amazing and moving and it changed my life in ways I've tried to describe and many I haven't been able to. There is a thing, a weird fascinating thing that happens with music or art or TV, where something that at first blush seems light, silly, it seems fun, it seems well, universally light, without the heft and weight of important heavy things. It can be hard to decipher the emotions when a band or an album or something doesn't seem to carry the kind of sincerity and soul and "importance" that some do, Ween is a good example, or The Mountain Goats, up to a point in their career, Smog in some lyrical ways, Pavement, Of Montreal for sure, hell, even Coldplay's "Viva la Vida..."  could fall into this zone of weird divorce albums, our silly old friends Reggie & The Full Effect made one of the most devastating divorce records of all time and, certainly some of Ryan Adams' bleakest saddest work is the series of "joke" internet albums he put out one on top of another on top of another in cookie cutter formats like "hip hop" or "metal" or "country" when he was at one of the darkest places in his life. Break up records disguised as regular old sunny fun normal albums by otherwise happy go lucky artists can be the most complicated to interpret and hardest to decipher and, eventually, hardest to listen to. Fleetwood Mac's "Rumors" doesn't, at first blush play like the transcription of inner band and inner relationship crisis that it actually is. Coming back to it with some understanding of what situations it's the product of can really shake you up. And, of course, to bring it home to our boys, "Isolation Drills" is hard to hear, at first, as a divorce record, which in the end makes it all the more devastating.

Any number of club and dance songs, or really, most of the "club" genre itself is, at bedrock level, based on the notion of love and loss and then going out and dancing the pain away and drinking or doing drugs until you can't feel anymore. Xiu Xiu, as a band and a project was born one sad Christmas Eve night based on this exact notion. A very sad and despondent Jamie was alone and decided to go somewhere, a dark dance club, to try to negate all of that. I think in the stroy he tells he actually fails, haha, but the notion is correct, and he then goes home and begins writing and recording what will be the first Xiu Xiu material, as a balm, a salve, a SPELL. Prince's "1999" is a great example of this same notion. Partying and dancing as an ANTI-OBLIVION, and ANTI-APOCALYPSE, the world is going to end and we're all going to die and the only way yo fight that is TO REFUSE IT. To deny DISCORDIA. To live in the face of sadness and death and the end of all things. ANTI-SADNESS. To rally with friends and loved ones and party-goers and drinks and music and love and laughter and refuse NOTHINGNESS, to refuse death, to refuse destruction, to look at the face of oblivion and say NO. To say I turned aside from Dis, I repudiate Dis.

It can be hard to understand what it is that people see in these bands or albums or why they feel so emotionally tied to them or, rather, why they evoke so much emotion in them. And that always fascinates me, to hear a band that you can't immediately understand the emotions of, that you can't at first see the depth of or complexity of. Some bands wear their hearts on their sleeves, others hide it and mask it under miles of jokes and puns and references and red herrings and misleading directions. A band like GBV is a good example. A band many people, us included, love and love dearly and live with and have memories and stories and bonding experiences with but isn't always really the kind of band that you might cry over or have moments of heavy emotional heft listening to. Not to say there aren't some in there and certainly it's a story for another time to get into Robert's nonsense or whimsical or vague or obtuse lyrics and trying to find him in there, trying to connect to when he's talking about himself and his feelings and life, to listen to "Isolation Drills" and hear his divorce in there, to listen to "From A Compound Eye" and hear all this heavy sadness and emotion amidst songs about well, elves and weed kings etc... But it's in there. And mining for it is fascinating and rewarding and can be more moving than "moving" music.

As I've spent so much so so much time with them lately, just all the time foreground, background, carpeting my life and the lives of those around me they've started to TRANSCEND the whimsy and the weirdness and the opaqueness and take on a great deal of emotional meaning for me, that's almost weird or eerie to feel and impossible to translate to another person. Hard to make you feel the emotions in this music that I do. And I wouldn't expect that.

As the set neared the middle Bobby was really feeling saying hell we aren't even half way there yet, and let me tell you, it gets better and better as we go, and as we approached the final quarter Robert was so fired up and he reminded me so much of myself, doing a mix, he kept saying see I told you it gets better and better as we go. He then said the next song is "Love Is Stronger Than Witchcfraft" a song I wasn't familiar with but a title that was immediately UNIVERSE for myself and someone very important. And we looked at each other with a sort of silent understanding and excitement and UNIVERSE feeling. The song is killer on record, it's on a Robert Pollard album, the aforementioned "From a Compound Eye", but hearing him channel it live, I'm not exaggerarting,

I was moved to tears. I cried.

The song is mammoth and brutal and beautiful and weird and mystical and is house to an emotional weight you don't associate much with Robert and there is a moment, about 1:58 in, that it just,

blew my house down

it just shook my foundations and disintegrated all of the scaffolding and skeletons I had holding me up, and I cried right there in the crowd of singing drinking super fans, strangers and friends alike. I felt surprised and caught off guard and just, amazed, and I think we both looked at each other and felt the same things, like the universe was sending us a very important, tiny, private message/moment. Something meant to be shared in this way by us. And I don't know about her, but I teared up, I cried.

Not sad tears. The tears and emotions you only feel very rarely, the feeling you will sometimes if you are lucky get from hearing a piece of music for the first time, I can think of four or five experiences like this in my life. A time when something just launched upon you from out of nowhere and it felt like your heart was just going to come uncontrollably up your throat or out of your chest. And you have to suck in a deep breath very quickly and the hair on your neck stands up and you feel chills and you feel your eyes get red and start to water and you want to laugh and smile and start crying all at the same time because of the beauty of something. The unreal impossible hugeness of the thing, of everything.


The stars look very different today.


We're here. Everything Is okay. Everything can be forgiven.

It is 4:52 p.m.

Love is stronger than witchcraft.
















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