Shoals Vs. Polvo

Not only is Polvo my favorite band ever, they're also arguably the biggest sports fans in indie rock history. They're playing the Crocodile in Seattle tonight, and you should see them if you live in my city. Dave Brylawski has done a ton of press lately, but hopefully there's something new in here. Oh, and sorry for the shortage of pictures, I wanted to get this up before tonight!

Bethlehem Shoals: Okay, so I guess we're going to try and do this formal interview now. I'm having trouble not just asking all the random fan questions I've stored up over the years.

Dave Brylawski: Well, ask them.

BS: That would be totally unprofessional. Like, should I ask what the hell the songs were generally about? The Recluse tried to convince me they were all about girls.

DB: Some girls, some mature life stuff. I don't know. Probably a lot of them aren't about much. Abstract feelings. We're not a topical band, songwriting-wise.

BS: Let me try something more journalist-y. How do you feel about now being referred to as, among other things, one of the defining guitar bands of the indie era? No offense, but I never realized Polvo had so much influence.

DB: Actually, we're in this weird zone. A lot of the press that's written about us now is about how small we are, and how we sabotaged ourselves and never really capitalized on [our success]. We're in this netherworld where we're not big, but we're big enough that we're still playing 20 years later.

BS: Do you think you've gotten bigger in death than in life?

DB: I don't know if we've gotten bigger, but we've definitely had some staying power that I never would've predicted when we stopped playing in nineties. The funny thing is, we stopped playing in 1998, and for a couple years, it died a very quick death, and you didn't really hear much about Polvo. But then a few years later, it started to get back to me that people hadn't forgotten Polvo, which was nice, and unexpected, and a little strange, actually.

I don't know why some bands get lost in time and others stay on people's minds, and we're fortunate that we did. There were a lot of good ones from our era, and I don't know why someone would remember us as opposed to, say, Unwound.

BS: It might have something to do with the trouble people have always had figuring out your sound. I always got annoyed when Polvo was described as "math-y."

DB: There’s a lot of math rock bands I really like. I think our umbrage with that descriptor is more that we didn’t feel like we were completely worthy of it. Polvo definitely has a primitive-ness that’s antithetical to math-rock. I think it’s just more like our stopping and starting within a song. Most of our songs are 4/4. Sometimes we slip in some extra some stuff, but we’re pretty straightforward, time-signature wise. We get asked about it all the time, though. I think because it's on our Wikipedia page.

BS: And before that there were the Sonic Youth comparisons.

DB: If you read our very early interviews, early 90s, one of the questions is always "who are your influences?" And it’s like so obvious who are influences are that we would say, “We don’t have any influences.” But it’s so fucking obvious that Husker Du, Meat Puppets, and Sonic Youth are our influences. We became more comfortable later on acknowledging how important they were to us.

The main thing we share with Sonic Youth is that they’re very much a rock band. As experimental as they are, they’re still at the core a rock band that pushes whatever envelopes they push and I think we share that element too. We’re a rock band. It’s not more mystical than that, unfortunately; there’s no mysticism involved. Two guitars, bass, drums.

BS: At some point after Polvo had broken up, I put on "Dancing Days" and was struck by how much it reminded me of Today's Active Lifestyles.

DB: I always sort of felt like Polvo was sort of a classic rock band, even in the early nineties. That was always a touchstone. To me, it was a continuation of the mindset of bands from the sixties who still wanted to rock but feel like we had the freedom to do some other things, other than than writing standard bridges and choruses. I don't like calling it "experimental," but just kind of pushing it a little bit and playing with it. Psychedelic, I guess. But again, to me we are just a rock band, I don’t think we’re that left field. But people seem to think we are. I don't know where that comes from, really.

BS: Seriously?

DB: I think a band like Thinking Fellers or Sun City Girls, they're pretty left-field. Compared to them, Polvo's like a bar band.



BS: Okay, onto sports. So I hear you hate Roy Williams.

DB: No, I don't hate Roy Williams! I have a complicated relationship with Roy Williams. I definitely appreciate what he’s brought to Carolina. The whole Kansas thing two years ago was sort of tough. Like our friends who think about this stuff, we think having to play Kansas, Roy didn’t know how to deal with that. It got into the kids’ heads a little bit. There was a lot of leading up to that, Roy saying he didn’t know how to coach against Kansas, Roy saying, "Half my heart’s still in Kansas." You don’t want to hear that shit as a Heels fan. That game was crazy. That ruined Billy Packer’s career, I think. When Billy Packer said, "it’s over" like four minutes into the game when Kansas got up by like 26 (Carolina did get back in that game). But that left a bad taste in my mouth which was finally sort of cleaned out by last year, of course. I like Roy. There is something John Edwards-y about him though. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it's that "aw-shucks"-ness about them that feels kind of forced.

I miss Dean, is what it comes down to. There will never be another coach like Dean. Dean was a god growing up. I was 13 when they won in 1982, but I remember way before that, when they had Walter Davis and Tommy LaGarde and lost to Al Maguire and Marquette. I went to Carmichael to welcome the team home and everything. When you're young and a Carolina fan, those are the best years, even though they didn't win a championship. That's when I used to cry every time they lost. They'd lose to State and I would cry. God, Norm Sloan and those plaid pants.

BS: It was really hard for me to accept that UNC players didn't all go on to become All-Stars.

DB: Well, I'm older than you, so Walter Davis, Bob McAdoo, Phil Ford . . . they had amazing pros.

BS: But see, I thought Chapel Hill was the center of the basketball universe. If I saw Pete Chillcut on the street, I thought I'd had an important life-experience. Then to see guys turn into non-entities at the next level . . . it just didn't make sense to me.

DB: But maybe it's like Polvo. You get these mixed messages. There's Pete Chillcut . . . but there's Phil Ford. There's Pete Butko. . but there's James Worthy. There's always enough reinforcement there. I. When I was a young kid growing up at Carolina, they had the best basketball player to ever play the game and the best defensive football player to ever play the game. Carolina and athletics have always been sort of magical to me. [Polvo's bass player Steve Popson] is going to kill me, because he's a huge State fan and hates Carolina. He's a weird guy, though. His dad played for the Redskins and the Redskins are his least favorite team in the NFL.

I don't know why I'm linking this to Polvo, but it's that same kind of netherworld where there's just enough information to confirm your fantasy that Polvo is special and magical. I'm not saying Polvo is special and magical, but to me I can sit here and say "oh, we're just a rock band," but maybe there's just enough that . . . I'm not going to say transcends that, but lifts it out of it. We're not a bar band, even if I sometimes say we are.

BS: What would say was Polvo's most bar band-y show?

DB: Like our third show, I don’t know how, but we got $300 to play this club in Wilmington, North Carolina. Three hundred dollars at the time was exorbitant. After Cor-Crane Secret came out we would play shows and make $50 a night. I don’t know what they were expecting. We only had five songs and had to play everything twice. It was awful. They didn’t get their money’s worth.

I do have a lot of respect for bar bands. It's just as valid as anything Thinking Fellers does.

BS: Back to what you just said about Polvo and UNC: I'm beginning to think you don't have any perspective on Polvo whatsoever.

DB: I probably don't, because it’s a progression of what I’ve been doing since I was 13 years old, playing in my bedroom. I don’t have that perspective that it’s anything but expressing myself through my guitar and expressing myself with my friends. That’s another thing about Polvo too, is that we were friends for a long time before we played together. I hope that shows.

BS: The music has always been a lot less self-conscious than one would expect. Especially live.

DB: That's the thing about "experimental" that makes me bristle a little bit. I don’t think we see ourselves as wizards concocting magic spells. We really do just get in the van and play. We’re more in that lineages and that’s maybe because I read too many rock bios. But we’re friends that just started playing rock music and have fun.

BS: I've got to say, though, it did kind of creep me out that you were playing this fucked-up music but weren't particularly artsy or eccentric.

DB: I think people do sort of freak out on the fact that we're just normal, sports-loving guys. We're not frat boys, or conservative computer programmers, but I think it is a little head-scratching for some people that we're so normal.

BS: Well, that's why I found you a lot more disturbing than I did Ash. At least he seemed to fit the part.

DB: I think that's probably somewhat conscious. I never bought into the whole art vs. sports dichotomy, like that you can’t be into both because I really think sports is art, sort of. It’s personal expression and it’s very pure. I’ve always been a sports fan and have been able to see the transcendence of sports. How is that different than art? I’m not equating the two necessarily; I'm not saying LeBron James is equal to Michelangelo. But it’s personal expression and there’s a purity to it. I think my experiences with sports are more playing them. I always sort of fancy myself a decent athlete. The two times I’ve felt the freest is playing basketball and playing guitar. That element of mindfulness, that you’re in your head but you’re not actually in your head, analytically.

I do have insight into why that split happened because I think that a lot of people who are into art had bad experiences when they were young with sports. That’s why being from Carolina is so important. They’re basing that on elementary school or middle school being thrown in with a bunch of angry, misanthropic jocks and not being good at sports, having that imprinted like, “Sports is dumb and inelegant”. But growing up in Carolina, all the cool rock bands grew up loving Carolina sports. It was sort of more just something you did, like playing guitar.

BS: I wonder if there's any other general explanation for sports/indie rock crossover, or if it's sometimes just a function of the individual.

DB: There are so many similarities to music. It's personal expression if you're playing it, but there's also the social function of rooting for a team and going to games. Why wouldn’t you like both? In Chapel Hill, it's not like that. Even the music geeks like Carolina basketball because it's just what you do. But yeah, there is community aspect to it, just like the indie rock thing. You go to the Cradle and hang out and see all your friends, or you watch a Carolina basketball game and see all your friends. It’s like chocolate and peanut butter. They go together.

Shoals says: Also read my Bobcats preview and my chat with Jalen Rose, a preview of Blogs with Balls 2.0.

BONUS: Really old live footage:

FreeDarko X-Files #Ur-0000000001

No need for much introduction here. If you're a Polvo fan, and like the NBA, you probably read this site; you've also probably heard rumors that Shaq once attended one of their shows. Today, we can say with certainty that this did in fact happen; what follows is a description of that night's events, based on stuff Dave Brylawski told myself and, in a separate conversation, my pal Wingo. Sometimes, urban legends simply must come true.

It's 1994, and Polvo's playing in Orlando. The venue is on the main strip of bars where everyone's nightlife is. Dave can't recall if he started talking smack about Zo's superiority before or after he realized Shaq was in the place. This happened when a bunch of audience members started murmuring and craning their neck to get a look at "the silhouette of a 7'1'' man in a Kangol standing in the back, arms crossed." Anyway, as anyone who saw Polvo back in the day knows, Dave's sports banter from the stage was an important feature of their live shows; he was a big Hornets fan, and Orlando and Charlotte "were rivals in the way only struggling Southern expansion teams can be," so it was only natural he'd mouth off about O'Neal/Mourning. It's also worth pointing out that one saw athletes around Chapel Hill all the time, so to Dave the situation didn't (relatively speaking) seem that weird, or potentially awkward, at the time.



Turns out it was Shaq's 23rd birthday, and he was celebrating by wandering the strip with only Brian Shaw in tow. No entourage whatsoever. The two of them ended up staying for all of Polvo's set; Dave was kind of embarassed, and felt bad for giving Shaq a hard time on his birthday, so afterwards he went up to O'Neal and apologized. Shaq was super-friendly and cool with the whole thing. When the band's tour manager asked O'Neal what he thought of the show, Shaq "looked at Brian Shaw and said something like 'they were slam dancing, but I think I scared 'em.'" It remains a mystery exactly what he meant by "slam dancing," since Dave says none took place.

Dave calls this "one of my favorite Polvo memories," and I think it's safe to say that, for the rest of us, it's absolutely mind-blowing to find out this is true. Now, if only someone could get Shaq's account of the evening. . .

In case you don't know what Polvo sounded like around this time:

Show me something round and I'll analyze the form

If you want to read about the playoffs, see the good Doctor.

However, today marks an event of much greater importance to FreeDarko's history than any playoff game: Polvo is playing their first show in a decade tonight in D.C. at the Black Cat. Polvo's connection to basketball is tenuous at best, but guitarist Dave Brylawski did write a song about UNC's loss in the 1995 Final Four and once wore a satin Charlotte Hornets jacket in a promo picture (see below). Although no one knew it at the time, FreeDarko was born from the same Chapel Hill soil that birthed Polvo, when much younger and sprier versions of Shoals and the Recluse met through a mutual friend, playing basketball on the hoop that used to hang behind Cat's Cradle. Their shared obsession with Polvo is one of the many extra-basketballular interests that informs the unique worldview that is FreeDarko.

Brown Recluse, Esq.: I think you and I might have actually met for the first time at WXYC one night. I seem to remember being impressed by your Gear Ink Dolphy t-shirt.

Bethlehem Shoals: I had a bunch of those jazz tees at one point. I'm not ashamed. Remember, that was around the time every indie rocker decided he liked his dad's Monk records, so I was at once violated and ahead of the curve. If I remember correctly, Polvo always insisted they they could give a fuck less about jazz, which made my life very confusing. Though like I said, I don't think they cared much about improv, and you know what--there's something a lot more powerful about a fully-orchestrated pop song that's full of clanging and drones and shifts than the way that Sonic Youth or MBV have that drift off into the great unknown of FREEDOM. Polvo were incredibly neurotic almost, like the way "Be My Baby" can somehow still be a plaintive pop song despite the whole world ending in the background. Of course, when that overwhelmed them, the second half of their career happened, and they sucked. Same with "River Deep, Mountain High."

Recluse: I can't argue with any of that.

Shoals: One other thing I've been thinking about this morning: how raw and concrete their best stuff is, both emotionally and musically. That's why I never got the "math rock" thing, since all that shit is based on gee-whiz musicianship. Or the Sonic Youth comparison, since in an all truth, even the best SY is one big affectation. And while Sonic Youth returned to the riff as if to mock it, or smugly reconstruct it from drone and atmosphere, Polvo is just some incredibly fucked-up and disjointed rock music. Even Corcrane Secret—I'd never call that record vague or self-indulgent. It's what drug music should sound like, if there were no such thing as drug culture (yes, I know, the band refused to ever talk about drugs and truthfully just looked to really like beer).

Yesterday when I frantically busted out Celebrate the New Dark Age in the car, my girl tried to ruin my day by telling me it sounded like the first Modest Mouse. I mean, I guess, but there the music is totally at the mercy of emotion. Which turns emotion into a handicap, neuters the power of song, and is what's wrong with so many kids today. Polvo was like "on some level we are all very dark, eerie, and weird people, but that's sublimated into this armada of gnarled songcraft for all of you to enjoy—or be terrified by." I can't tell if it's a superior form of communication or even more stand-offish. Still, there's no vulnerability, or the need for adjectives like "haunting" or "evocative". Nor any division of blood and steel, as there totally was from This Eclipse on.

And not to bring this too full circle, but it's strange that Polvo was one of the least pretentious indie bands of its era, and yet made the most ridiculously out-there music. Or that the guys in the band were almost disdainful of the scenester aspect of, well, that scene, and just looked like they wanted to party and watch tv. A friend of mine can attest to Dave's encyclopedic knowledge of Texas high school football. Shaq (supposedly) once went to one of their shows. That was the big question: How did these guys end up making this music? If you look at their post-Polvo projects. . . it's hard to figure out exactly how the band happened.

Recluse: I don't know, if you add Black Taj ("classic" guitar rock), Idyll Swords (mostly acoustic music informed by a variety of ethnic folk music), and Libraness (creepy, weirdly tuned guitar stuff) together, the result is not too far off from Polvo. But, you're right that it was the unlikely combination of these disparate sounds that made them so unique and so great.

Shoals: I sold my copy of Libraness long ago, but there are about 3 songs on there that belong in canon. Some might be from the same era, but have really bad lyrics--actually, the main thing for me that makes This Eclipse the cut-off point.

Recluse: Polvo's lyrics are amazingly inconsistent. Some of them are actually pretty good, but a lot of them are embarrassingly bad. "Fast Canoe," a song I think is brilliant musically, has the worst lyrics ever. I saw them play twice right before Exploded Drawing came out and thought at the time that that song was an instant classic.

Shoals: I was just watching a video for that. Brought back memories of throwing on Exploded Drawing for the first time, and being ecstatic that they'd returned to form. . . until the vocals came in.

It's really hard to know what to make of the first two records' lyrics. Corcrane has a ton of really goofy, straightforward-seeming stuff that actually makes no sense. Like a robot tried to pen a rock anthem. Or the devil is pushing a power-pop song uphill. I have no idea if Today's Active Lifestyles is deliberately obscured--it's certainly the one with the most buried vocals--but everything about album is so cryptic, I don't think I'd be able to judge the lyrics any better if I could make them all out. As is, it's a bunch of random words that in my mind connect to the (completely impenetrable) titles. At least Loveless is all about feeling good and love and sleep. I have absolutely no idea what the topical reference point for any Polvo is—like what world do they even write about—so when you can't even understand the abstract words, it's kind of a lost cause.

One day, as a thought experiment, I tried to listen to Polvo pretending these were all songs about relationships. It was a really harrowing experience.

Recluse: I don't want to freak you out, but I think most of their lyrics are about relationships.



Shoals: I just realized that I only saw Polvo twice. Right after Active Lifestyles came out. I think they were opening for Superchunk or Archers. I was 16 and had never heard them before. My whole life stopped right there. I SHOULD HAVE been at the big Celebrate show at the Cradle--which, oddly, had a David Murray concert at the ArtCenter earlier in the evening--but I was grounded because I took too much acid and had to go to the emergency room.

Then, I saw them right before This Eclipse came out, and it sucked. That was when my friend Ben started yelling my slogan "Stop the Homeless" at stages, mostly to see how it would be interpreted. Dave flipped out on him.

Recluse: I probably saw them 7 or 8 times when I was in college. Even though Ash was probably most responsible for their sound, Dave was really the focal point live, making goofy guitar god faces and doing almost all of the stage banter, which often included references to UNC basketball and the Lakers.

That This Eclipse show was the second time I saw them and was definitely disappointing and widely (and controversially) panned.

The first time I saw them, I got to interview them before the show for the DTH with two other people, but I only asked one question. If I remember it right, they were pretty awesome that night. All of the times I saw them were post-Celebrate, so the band could be kind of hit or miss. When they were on, though, they were one of the best live bands in the world. But, I like This Eclipse and Exploded Drawing more than you do.

So, you didn't go to their Mergefest show in 1994? When they played "Fly Like an Eagle"? I have friends that talked about that show for years afterwards.

Shoals: That Mergefest show was the one I missed. I'm trying to remember if I somehow talked my parents into letting me go to the David Murray thing, saw the crowds outside and wept, or just drove by on my way back from someone's house or something? Actually, I was grounded 4 life, so I have no idea why I was out. Also I can't imagine that, if I'd been there, I wouldn't have just defied everything and snuck in. Maybe I was returning a movie at VisArt?

I think part of the reason Polvo guts me so is that, for a variety of reasons, I have very little memory of anything that's happened to me, ever. So--like some weird patient in a movie about disabilities and revelation—they're just a stand-in for several formative years of my life. Though I'm not quite sure how I can say Polvo's music itself was "formative." What kind of person would that make? Then again.. . .

Looking over YouTube, there are some 1996 clips, including a "Holy Shroud" with a Dave guitar solo. That's pretty much how I feel about that band from This Eclipse on. However, there's a 1993 “Kalgon/Bend or Break” that is positively unreal. Like some dude with a Polvo review site says, it's amazing how perfectly they recreated all the records' chaos live. When you go to see Sonic Youth, they definitely see lots of their songs as open-ended, come-what-may noise. Nope, not Polvo. [Insert Asian music analogy here]

Recluse: Have you ever considered how perfect Ash Bowie's physical appearance is for Polvo? He looks vaguely Asian and also drugged out and creepy. When you talk about them looking like beer-drinking sports fans, that's really just Dave and to some extent Steve Popson. Ash looked like a tortured artist.

Shoals: I was wondering earlier if you didn't like Polvo a lot because of the Dave/Ash duo. Like if you combined the two of them, you'd get you or something.

I think that because of Ash's looks, and him being the mysterious singer, he was sort of their figurehead. But they also always insisted that Dave, not Ash, was responsible for the Asian influence.

It's also weird that, for me, this band is totally bound up in high school introspection. I used to think that if I wanted to destroy the world through sheer aesthetics, Polvo would be the perfect weapon. Whereas since you were in college, I'd imagine you were more attuned to the fact that they were just really fucking rad. Maybe I'm also thinking about the fact that Ted T. took me and Jacob C. to that first show. I can barely remember. Anyway, afterward, Jacob and I were both completely reeling, and Ted said something like "yeah, they're pretty cool."

Recluse: You know, this post has almost nothing to the NBA, but it cuts to the very heart of FreeDarko-ness. And now hopefully Dr. LIC will understand why POLVO IS NOT A MATH ROCK BAND.