[Landline] Hot Freaks
Sleeze Lake, Kinetic Sculpture Race, Beatle Bob, Guided By Voices
Acting swiftly on an offhand tip from a trusted source I’ve never met1, we screened the documentary Sleeze Lake recently. The film’s only an hour long, and it’s been a couple of months, but this lovingly told story of a mid-’70s midwestern blue collar temporary autonomous zone (shall we use that term? we shall!) made an impression — such is its power that I’ve found myself looping back to it regularly.
The filmmakers’ set-up is perfect:
It’s 1977 and the idealistic message of the hippie counterculture has played a decade-long game of telephone with America’s youth. Still searching for freedom and community in a post-Vietnam world, groups of young people took to the open roads in shag-carpeted custom vans. They called themselves “vanners” and their culture was a strange cocktail of irreverence and hedonism.
On the south side of Chicago, the van proved the perfect escape vehicle from the smog of the steel mills and refineries. It was here that a van club called Midwest Vans Ltd. was born. On Memorial Day weekend in 1977, these blue collar outcasts set out to build their own personal utopia, free of rules and restrictions. They erected a ramshackle resort town around a small pond and called it “Sleeze Lake”. When over 20,000 people showed up to the party, all bets were off! Set among the foggy memories and ephemera of subculture lost to time, Sleeze Lake tells the story of Midwest Vans Ltd. and the biggest party you’ve never heard of.
No media, no professional promoters, no celebrities, no tech bros, etc. Just everyday working class people with union day jobs getting outside and seriously goofing off, being creative and blowing each others’ minds. You know these were good people to do stuff with with when you hear the phrase “fast ‘n’ bulbous” bandied about a couple of times on camera. What a time they had, for a while. Sleeze Lake! Beautiful and inspirational. Hakim Bey is laughing ecstatically in his grave.
This basic human good humor and weirdness, always there but often smothered or dismissed, reminded me of the Great Arcata-to-Ferndale Kinetic Sculpture Race epically chronicled by writer-photographer Daniel Chamberlin 19 (!) years ago in one of my favorite features we ever got to publish in the old Arthur Magazine.
From Dan’s introductory paragraphs:
People who live up in northernmost California like being away from it all: there’s time to develop interesting ideas, and enough of a community for those ideas to take root. Hobart Brown, a tiny, impish, 69-year-old man who lives in Humboldt, at the southern end of what could’ve been Jefferson State, is one of those people. He’s an aircraft mechanic, astrologer and wild pig hunter. He’s also the self-styled “Glorious Founder” of an event called The Great Arcata-to-Ferndale Kinetic Sculpture Race (KSR), an event has run every year since 1969.
The KSR is a vigorous all-terrain art parade held over the course of Memorial Day Weekend. Participants take three days to travel 38 miles in vehicles known as kinetic sculptures—usually recumbent bicycles frames mounted with some sort of sculptural art that’s often conspicuously wacky: poop-filled toilet, braying donkey, KISS Army Camaro, etc. For the 2003 race, the least noteworthy of the entries appearing on the starting line in Arcata is a gray-haired, bearded guy wearing a suit and riding a bicycle. The most imposing sculpture-vehicle is the 2,000-pound “Surf & Turf,” a dramatically psychedelic Day-Glo lobster. A bull’s head that bears a close resemblance to the distressed animal in Picasso’s “Guernica” is grafted on to the back of its abdomen. Six pilots sit inside dressed as chefs, complete with poofy white hats.
In order to complete the full race course in accordance with all of the rules—to “Ace” the course, in KSR terminology—the machines must maneuver over city streets and sand dunes, navigate across a mile of open water in Humboldt Bay and slog through the murky depths of a backwoods bog. They do all of this at an average speed somewhere around 2-3 mph, meaning the race never gets much faster than the wheelchair-bound vets in the Memorial Day Parade that precedes them at the finish line in Ferndale. The KSR combines the tedious pace and muddy wallowing of a tractor pull with the budget-minded engineering of a demolition derby and the physical punishment of an Iron Man triathlon…
I haven’t looked into what’s happened with the KSR in the intervening decades since Dan wrote those words. I hope it hasn’t lost its way — that is, been overrun by wealth, media, celebrities and lookie-loos like (say) Burning Man has since (say) 1996. Homemade, handmade weirdo events that become institutions are tricky things to manage in America2…
…but — I think? — it’s still worth attempting. There are different ways.
One of them is the way of Guided By Voices, a permanently autonomous band who I’ve been getting into again over the last couple of years. For those who need a refresher: GBV entered “120 Minutes”-level MTV consciousness in the early ‘90s on the strength of low-budget, barely distributed records that were extraordinary in their melodicism, early ‘70s arena rock gestures and inscrutable lyrics.
They were led by a gifted singer-songwriter — Robert Pollard — a family man and 3 who taught fourth grade for 14 years. In the ‘90s and early ‘00s, GBV “took their shot” (Bob’s words) at being on a major label, quitting their dayjobs and touring, recording in higher fidelity in bigger studios with pros (Ric Ocasek! Rob Schnapf!), showing up on late night network TV, etc. But through all of that, this was their scene, too…
…rehearsing Bob’s pop-psych-punk-prog tunes on the porch, hanging out with drinking buddies and neighbors, arranging with the Miami Valley Chimney guy to get the chimney topped so the bats don’t get in.
And this was their scene, too — devoting an entire gorgeous music video in 2003 to saluting another weirdo institution — Beatle Bob4 of St. Louis…
Last weekend 5 in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio, supported by bands like Dinosaur Jr and Built to Spill, GBV celebrated their 40th anniversary. But this wasn’t a reunion show. After calling it quits in 2004, GBV have existed in some form or other since the extremely prolific Pollard resumed using the name in 2012. If I’m counting right there’s been 22 GBV albums in the last 11 years, which is probably too much but whatever. Bob follows his weirdo bliss, enough people follow for it to be sustained, and for whatever reason, the power came back on. GBV have been on what seems to me to be a fantastic run in the last couple of years, so much so that I decided to explore what I’d missed since getting off the GBV bus in the early ‘00s6.
So. Here’s an absurd playlist7 of 67 personal favorites from post-2000 GBV, in more-or-less order-of-release. I concentrated on immediacy — songs heavy on hooks and/or rockage, with an emphasis on the early ‘00s trio of albums on Matador, and the four (!) albums released since March 20228. Obviously it’s almost all Robert Pollard tunes, but there's a few numbers by occasional GBV singer-songwriter Tobin Sprout too, cuz they’re great. The photo of Bob is from Rich Tarbell via facebook.
Acquire GBV stuff: www.guidedbyvoices.com
That’s it for now.
Oh wait, one more thing. For those who want more Landline-type stuff more often, I am still somewhat overactive on various social media, all of which suck tremendously but it’s what we have to work with. Links at the footnote9
More weirdos soon,
Jay Babcock
Arizona
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Peter Vermeren of Coco’s Variety in Los Angeles
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Very good hometown newspaper article on the band’s 40th: Don Thrasher in Dayton Daily News
Something I regret deeply, as well as the rather mean-spirited und uncharitable review of a 2002 GBV performance at the House of Blues that I wrote for the LAWeekly, which I will not link to here. Shame on me!
Sorry this is on spotify. Using the master’s tools, etc. Bandcamp links below. A lot of stuff is on youtube too, for what that’s worth (different master’s tool!).
Bandcamp links: Crystal Nuns Cathedral (2022), Tremblers And Goggles By Rank (2022), La La Land (2023), Welshpool Frillies (2023)
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Yes, GBV's been on a roll lately! Whole bunch of solid albums in the last few years.
Love the way these guys operate! "Secretive Society Keeps Watch Over Arizona’s Holy Grail of Cactus: Members of the Crested Saguaro Society guard the location of rare specimens in the Sonoran Desert, a task made more urgent by population growth" https://archive.ph/3kokQ#selection-101.5-105.143