Bob’s Yer Uncle!

Robert Pollard – “Gratification to Concrete”
(from Robert Pollard Is Off To Business)

Boston Spaceships – “Ready to Pop”
(from Brown Submarine)

I went to see Bob Pollard, or Boston Spaceships (or whatever he’s calling himself these days), over the weekend. You can read what I wrote about it over here. The above photo was Bob’s reaction to the first draft of my review. The guy’s a tougher critic than his own critics. Sheesh. You can scope out some more photos of the evening where he wasn’t panning my prose over yonder link.

Honestly, I was a little nervous about going to the show. I’ve seen Guided By Voices on a number of occasions, each time ranking high on my Unofficial Greatest Concerts of All Time list, but the last time I saw Bob solo it was kind of depressing. I was afraid that I was just enabling the adolescent fantasies of a middle-aged, functioning alcoholic. You go to a show and every time he’s chugging from a bottle of tequila and draining a cooler full of beer (he’s got five cases of Miller Lite on his tour rider!), surrounded by other middle-aged men in the front rows who are egging him on to drink more in order to fulfill their vicarious visions of rock & roll excess. The problem, cirrhosis of the liver notwithstanding, is that the drinking ritual becomes a more central part of the show than the music itself.

If it’s slowing him down any, it’s not showing. I’ve picked up five new Pollard albums in the last two years alone, and I’m sure there have been plenty others that I’ve missed. But despite the best efforts of his marketing team to frame the albums in a different light, the songs are largely interchangeable from album to album, band to band. With Pollard, though, it’s like panning for gold: you’ve got to sift through all the filler to find the nuggets. For every uninspired Townshend knockoff, you get a knockout pop gem like “Gratification to Concrete” or “Ready to Pop” that makes it all worthwhile.

The show was good, and Bob was definitely back in his game, but I don’t know if I’ll rush out to get tickets next time he passes through town. Mostly I’m just glad that I finally got a chance to see openers the High Strung, whom Scotter has been raving about numerous times over, and they were thoroughly awesome.

Behold: