Sounds Grate, Wafflehead

It’s usually tacky when discussing an artist to trot out a half dozen other artists in an attempt to describe their sound, but it’s inevitable with Robyn. He’s not shy about flaunting his influences, so it’s just a matter of discussing what your first impression of him was/is likely to be. You’ll hear a hint of Syd Barrett in the vocals and melody lines (and here again at last is someone who knows all about writing songs), a bit of Dylan mixed with a more distinctly British surrealism in the lyrics, a twist of Lennon in the music, and odd touches reminiscent of everyone from Arthur Lee to the Incredible String Band. (I remember the first time I told a friend of mine about him, and he dismissed Robyn as “refried Syd Barrett”--as if there was something wrong with the idea. We don’t talk much anymore.)

He’s not shy about flaunting them, nor does he go out of his way to integrate them. It’s like a thick bowl of chowder containing recognizable hunks of potato and tomato and the inevitable shellfish. (“Oh look, Syd’s floating by again! Quick, wave to him, he’ll disappear after the next chorus.”) Perhaps this makes Robyn the thinking person’s Cheap Trick? No, that’s a cheap shot--Cheap Trick hasn’t made a decent album in nearly 20 years, and Robyn Hitchcock has only occasionally been less than brilliant. His albums are for listening, not for playing “Name That Tune.” He’s been making them for over twenty years and long ago found his own voice; if he’s also kind enough to lend occasional cameos to the dearly departed ones inside of his head, I say let him.

Robyn’s lyrics? I’m at a loss. It would be cheating, to merely sling some quotes together. Yet I don’t want to limit your perception of them by hanging my adjectives on them like so many Christmas ornaments. Suffice to say that his conscious and subconscious mind spend a lot more time playing ping-pong together than is the case with most of us. A psychiatrist once pointed out a couplet in “Kingdom of Love” to him, noting that it describes one of the classic schizophrenic delusions. (For Robyn it had been merely a way to get to the next verse.) Most of his lyrics aren’t so bleak as that, however; anything imaginable can show up in one of his songs. His humor tends to the surreal: he said once that “I can honestly write about Reagan and watermelons in the same line.” In fact, anybody can, but only Robyn can invest them with emotional significance as well. Perhaps his most famous quirk: a fascination with fish and especially crustaceans. Too much has been made of it. Sometimes he wonders if his lyrics might be messages from the future. No, he doesn’t use drugs. He wrote “Sounds Great When You’re Dead” after being told one of his songs “sounds great when you’re stoned.” He writes about death a lot. And sex. And fishies.

It’s sad how he seems to have faded of late; he used to be good for an album every year but there was a longer interval between his last and his latest, with only an indie EP to bridge the gap. Some of it was due to his periodic desire to step back and do nothing for a bit; one can only hope he’s fully returned to us. He’s written enough fine songs to bolster the careers of half a dozen lesser artists, yet there seems to be no chance for a boxed set anytime soon. This man is so prolific (and his discography so complicated) that there will be need of a Greatest “Hits” box and then a Collected Obscurities box. The latter would be the larger, since he has had more EPs, singles and compilation tracks than I can even keep track of. Yet the issue of just what would belong where becomes ever more complicated the deeper one delves.

This is one of the more frustrating things about devoting oneself to Robyn’s work--his very best stuff as often as not never makes it onto his albums! While he’s rarely released a bad one, he’s never released a perfect one either--yet if you look at the EPs he was putting out at the same time as any given disc, there’s always a tune or two (“Ghost Ship,” “Watch Your Intelligence,” “Tell Me About Your Drugs”) that better deserved to be included on the album than several tunes that were.

I asked him about this once during an online chat--more or less an online chat, since he doesn’t own a computer. Someone had him on the phone, relayed the questions to him and posted his replies. Why doesn’t he own a computer? Oh, the usual reasons people don’t own them, I’d imagine. His impression of the internet is that it would lead to a vast increase in the number of “lost souls.” As for the question of why he hides so many gems so far underground, he had only the cryptic comment that some songs belong on one side of the fence, and the rest go on the other side. I already knew that, but I was meant to feel that perhaps it’s better not to quibble over which ones--except for “Wafflehead,” since that doesn’t even qualify as a song, so who cares? And so I asked, “‘Wafflehead,’ for instance?” and he dropped the subject.

That particular track is...well, embarrassing. It’s bad rap, an a capella throwaway about how he’s so sexy his nickname is Wafflehead. Or something. It was the final track on his final album for A&M, so perhaps it was his way of flipping the bird at his label? The album was Respect, and he’d been saying in interviews that he was looking to get some for his songwriting, rather than continuing to be seen as “a freakshow for the intelligentsia.” More likely, then, the inclusion of “Wafflehead” was just the latest example of the “fear of success” mechanism that has him equally capable writing something as stark and haunting as “Sergery” and then throwing it away on a fanzine flexidisc.

Some of these obscuro supremo tracks have been ressurected as CD reissue extras or on this or that “Odds ’n’ Sods” disc, others (and not necessarily the best of them--a case of the former label taking its revenge, perhaps?) have surfaced on the new Greatest Hits disc. I hope nearly everything of his is enshrined eventually, which is not something one can hope for with very many artists anymore.

What else to say about Robyn? There’s the brittle magnificence of his acoustic offerings--every five years or so he makes an album all by himself, and it sets a benchmark for the remainder of his songwriting until the next one. There’s the fact that everything he does sounds even better live (making any decent-sounding bootleg tape well worth snatching--he only has one official live album, and that’s from 1985). There’s his phantasmagorial vision of sex. I can’t even begin to get into it without quoting the lyrics, and if I already promised myself I wasn’t going to do that. (You might get scared. If he’s going to affect you that way I’d rather it happened while you were listening to him.) For the English majors, there’s the fact that he’s one of those rare, cherished, desert-island artists whose printed interviews can be every bit as much fun as one of their albums. Even his liner notes reward your careful attention. The ones for Moss Elixir are capable of haunting you for months, and...oh, never mind. Start with Fegmania. Then get his new disc, whichever that may be. Continue to do so for as long as you both shall live.