A night with the Captain Emeritus.

Last evening was the first night of Robert Pollard's tour to support his new Normal Happiness album. Captain and I made the trip to Bloomington to take in the show and spend the evening with our friend who just got back from Iraq.

I hadn't seen Pollard since Guided by Voices' Do The Collapse tour, some 5 or 6 years ago, so I was very excited to see my Rock Hero #1 live and in person again. Pollard didn't disappoint, mixing songs from his recent solo work with some more obscure GbV tunes that were probably about the last ones I would have ever expected to see live ("Drag Days," "Ghosts of a Different Dream") before encoring with a set of old GbV "hits" ("Motor Away," "Game of Pricks," etc.).

For me, the highlight from Pollard's more recent work were my two favorite songs off Normal Happiness - "Rhoda Rhoda" (which really stoked the Captain's embers also) and "Supernatural Car Lover," a song that evokes genuine feelings of happiness in me, moreso than any other tune in Pollard's oeuvre.

There weren't really any clunkers in last night's 2-hour set. Pollard has surrounded himself with an able supporting cast that he calls the Ascended Masters (though I made the joke at one point that we were seeing Robert Pollard and the Interns). Deeper theories, I suppose, could abound about the impetus for dissolving GbV yet continuing to make music with an entirely new cast of characters; why not continue to make music under the GbV name, since the band was really Pollard and a mostly-interchangeable group behind him (not unlike his current setup)?

At the end of the day, The Old Grunt just likes to make music. Whether it's Guided by Voices, or Robert Pollard and the Ascended Masters, or Robert Pollard and The Assistants to the Deputy Shit-Scrapers, Pollard still has a compulsion to Rock. One can hardly fault him for that.