The Release: Same Place the Fly Got Smashed (LP—Rocket #9, 1990)
Nearly two weeks have passed since a rather disorienting Thursday morning at work. During the first class of the day—which happens to be my planning period—I was informed via group text that Bob Uecker had just passed away. I’m not a Milwaukee Brewers fan—in fact, I often specify that I am a Phillies fan, rather than a general baseball fan. That’s a bit of a cover though. I love baseball. I grew up dreaming of being the first left-handed second baseman in the modern era. From the ages of 9-14, I was a voracious collector of junk wax—Topps was my brand of choice before I graduated to Upper Deck in 1991. I’d read box scores every day in the morning paper; and for a brief time, I even called a 1-800 number to get real-time score updates, before ESPN’s ticker—and eventually the internet—made such things obsolete. Despite my present-day stubbornness, during my formative years as a baseball fan, none of my favorite active players—Cal Ripken Jr., Tony Gwynn, Nolan Ryan, and especially Ken Griffey Jr.—were Phillies. I just simply loved the sport.
Then 1993 happened. All of a sudden, the team that I had first rooted for while living in the Philadelphia exurbs for two years made a miracle run to the National League pennant. A kinda-lovable gang of schlubby dudes—Darren Daulton, Mickey Morandini, Lenny Dykstra, and especially John Kruk—made me wear my sweat-stained fitted Phillies hat with something actually resembling pride. And then, Joe Carter broke my fourteen-year-old heart. The players’ strike that spanned parts of the next two seasons—and cancelled the 1994 World Series—drove the knife a bit deeper. The hole that baseball’s absence left was ultimately filled by music. After that 1993 season, I would never play another organized game of baseball. My weathered Phillies cap was replaced by a succession of skate brand hats—generally worn backwards, more as a nod to Michael Stipe than to Ken Griffey. The money that I earned from working weekends with my dad shifted from baseball cards to CDs. I was a ‘music guy’ now, and in the unnecessarily-compartmentalized world of mid-nineties teendom, that meant that I was no longer a ‘baseball guy.’
By the end of the decade, and with the politics of high school left behind, I had reconciled my first love with my second—albeit now with a more intensely-targeted focus on my team. And in that capacity, a guy like Bob Uecker made a lot of sense to me. ‘Ueck’ had a deeply ingrained love of the sport, no doubt; but at the end of the day, he was first and foremost a diehard Brewers fan. I respect that kind of loyalty, especially to a team with a much more extensive history of losing than winning. And, with the Brewers rarely being much of a threat/rival to my Phillies—this gem notwithstanding—Bob Uecker was someone that I was willing to save a seat for, any day of the week.
About an hour after learning of Ueck’s passing, the same group text chain began to light up again—although now, I had a homeroom class of thirty high school juniors to supervise, and could only catch passing glances at the notifications on my watch. This second flurry of activity was prompted by something less expected (if that’s the right word) than the first one: David Lynch was dead. Now, for context, I’m far from a Lynch expert. I’ve only watched the two original seasons of Twin Peaks—a show that I’ve unfairly described as “dumb, but with immaculate vibes”—and even as I type this, I’ve still never watched a full David Lynch film. Nevertheless, his death hit me in a totally unexpected way: one that I’ve rarely felt upon a celebrity’s passing, aside from those whose work I’m intimately familiar with, like David Bowie or Gordon Downie.
One of the things that really struck me that morning was the thought that my text group of four—my younger brother, my best friend of nearly thirty years, and my twenty-two year old daughter—must have been amongst a tiny fraction of the population that would be impacted by the deaths of two seemingly very different public figures. However, as I read through remembrances of both men over the next few days—many of which focused on their shared sense of decency—I was heartened by the sheer number of anonymous online strangers who were part of the same overlapping section of that grief-themed Venn diagram. And, as death always has a way of doing, it got me to thinking.
On the surface, the self-deprecating “aww shucks” humor of Bob Uecker would seem to have little in common with the mysterious vibes that David Lynch made his signature—so much in fact, that the word “Lynchian” has actually become part of our cultural vernacular. However, at the core of both men’s work was an unflinchingly sincere love of Americana, and an unmistakable humanism. While that latter aspect of Lynch’s art was never lost on me, it became abundantly clear as I pored over tributes penned by those far more familiar with his work than myself—in particular, this lovely piece by Katie Rife for the A.V. Club.
What also became abundantly clear as I pondered the passing of Uecker and Lynch was that Robert Pollard was almost certainly part of the same Venn overlap that included the members of my group chat. Granted, it’s starting to seem like everything I experience this year will be filtered through GBV-tinted shades, but—at least in this case—I don’t think it’s merely my imagination, nor a desperate search for an ‘angle’ to this week’s entry in an ongoing project. Like Uecker, Pollard is an unabashed, sports-loving, beer-drinking midwesterner. A three-sport star athlete in high school, and a pitcher at Wright State University—where he semi-famously hurled a no-hitter—Pollard seems more than likely to have (metaphorically) poured one out for “Mr. Baseball.” Likewise, there’s little chance that the author of “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory” wouldn’t also have a sincere affinity for modern America’s foremost practitioner of the surreal. Yes, once again, Robert Pollard seems to be one of us.
And this all seemed particularly relevant as Guided by Voices’ fourth album—1990’s Same Place the Fly Got Smashed—dominated my listening over this past week. After all, this is where the mostly-affable nature of the band’s first three records takes a sharp turn into the dark. But before we get there, perhaps I should expand on why I’ve never actually seen a full David Lynch movie. As this year-long project has demonstrated, I deeply enjoy the act of studying an artist’s career in chronological order. And, in the case of David Lynch, if I want to become truly literate of his oeuvre, it means that I must start with 1977’s Eraserhead.
Now, I’m not actually scared to watch Eraserhead. In fact, I’ve long been fascinated by it, and—as something of a Pixies-obsessed teenager—I acquired more than a passing knowledge of Lynch’s directorial debut. I’ve read plenty of critical analyses of it. I’ve seen the “Lady in the Radiator” sequence; and naturally, that eventually led me to also view several of the film’s most famous scenes. I’ve just never pieced it all together in a single sitting. The problem is that Eraserhead—or at least the idea of it—has always struck me as both deeply immersive and intensely bleak; and, in the five or so years since I first watched Twin Peaks, I’ve had very little interest in engaging with bleak.
Perhaps this is one of those less-discussed aspects of our post-pandemic/post-pre-post-Trump world, but I find it hard to believe that I’m the only one who has developed a mild aversion to dreary media. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time that I listened to Closer—even though I finally bought a copy of it on vinyl a couple of years ago. My desire to ever read Lolita has gone from ‘tepid’ to ‘non-existent.’ Most of the discs in the Stanley Kubrick boxset that I bought a decade ago—A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and the film adaptation of the aforementioned Nabokov novel—have remained untouched. These days, I prefer to engage with things that are funny, comforting, and familiar; not dark, violent, or bleak. Seriously, in the past five years, I’ve probably watched every Seinfeld episode at least half-a-dozen times, while The Sopranos and The Wire—neither of which I’ve seen—remain buried in the deep recesses of a virtual queue.
But all this week, I’ve had to engage with what is easily the bleakest album in the Guided by Voices catalog. And yeah, most of it isn’t comfortable—at least when compared to virtually everything else in Robert Pollard’s extensive discography. Beyond the fact that it opens with a track (“Airshow ’88”) that could reasonably be described as an ‘auditory hellscape,’ these fourteen songs are rife with references to addiction, betrayal, and murder. It’s a record whose best-known track is a plea from an alcoholic that begins with the line “At times I wish I were dead.” It’s a concept album, wherein the main character is executed—via electric chair—at the end of the second act.
But Same Place the Fly Got Smashed is also considered by many fans to be the best pre-Propeller GBV album; in fact, even I declared it so in my 2021 Catalog Crawl article. It’s a record full of soaring melodies and animated performances. It’s an album that stops to take a moment to pontificate on the simple joys of listening to a mostly-forgotten Sub Pop band named Cat Butt. Like Bob Dylan once said—you know, via some other guy—this album contains multitudes.
But perhaps because—like Bob Uecker—I love to root for the underdog, I think Devil Between My Toes is gonna retain its recently-anointed position as my favorite “early GBV” release. However—as David Lynch strove to prove with his life’s work—Same Place reminds me that beauty and humanity can still be found amongst the disturbing, the monstrous, and the darkest of subject matter. And—despite the fact that after a dozen years of living in the Pacific Northwest, I think I may have finally caught Seasonal Affective Disorder—Same Place the Fly Got Smashed has convinced me that the next time I’m at Music Millennium, I’m finally going to pick up a copy of Eraserhead. I just might have to wait until pitchers and catchers report before I get around to watching it.
Rating: 7.8
Bob-ism of the Week: “My life is dirt but you seem to make it cleaner / Reduce my felony to a misdemeanor / When I feel sick you’re an antibiotic / Organize my world that was pointless and chaotic” (“Drinker’s Peace”)
Next Week: Robert Pollard plans Guided by Voices’ grand farewell with one final album. And, at long last, the world takes notice.
