Captain Black

Whenever "Captain Black" pops up on shuffle play, I have one of two fairly diametrically opposed thoughts: The first is that the song is one of those snippets Robert Pollard does so well -- a quick hook that is neither verse nor chorus, and then done. The second is that the song's lyric is much lengthier and more involved than it is. The truth is somewhere in between.

The hook is strong from the beginning. Though there is little there. It's simply Pollard singing a strong melody over a quiet trio backing. The lyric lasts less than two minutes, which gives rise to that first thought. But the song itself is three minutes long, meaning that quiet backing goes on for quite a while. In this case, it is joined by engineer John Shough's piano, a much too infrequent addition to the Guided by Voices/Pollard arsenal. Despite that length, the lyric is concise; it feels like the soundtrack to a short story, in part because of its brevity and in part because of the level of detail packed into that small space.

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.

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.

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.

My Son, My Secretary, My Country

Not many people can compete with Robert Pollard when it comes to writing songs that shift from the softest to loudest dynamics in the shortest amount of time. Few songs rival "A Crick Uphill" in this department, but "My Son, My Secretary, My Country" is certainly Top 5.

The song begins with a quiet, mournful horn section that sounds exactly like what it is: An eighth grade band, in this case, the Esther Dennis Middle School Eighth Grade Band from Dayton. After about 45 seconds of this, Pollard enters, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar.

with your mission wilting,
and your kids sulking,
happy birthday Mr. sink.
throw your flowers in the river and drink.

From there things build steadily. Pollard's guitar, still the only instrument, becomes clearer and more forceful. It is joined by a cacophonous guitar strum midway through the bridge/chorus (in a song where the lyric takes only a minute or so, it's sometimes hard to discern.

He rattles off some great rhyming lines as the song comes to a head:

for the sketch of explorers,
and the hot air annoyers,
good men destoyers,
future employers,
cowboys and lawyers,
and we all will be warriors.

Closing with a rousing, final, "Rahhhhhhhhh!"

The demo found on Edison's Demos doesn't include the horn section, instead starting when Pollard and his guitar do. Vocally, he escalates things a bit at the points during which the song's instrumental layers kick in on the finished version, though his ending "Rahhhh!" seems neutered when compared to the multi-track war cry that ends the song on Earthquake Glue, leading into the following track, "I'll Replace You With Machines."