Chapter 2
Eight Spoonfuls of Mustard
(1972–1974)
I dare not say
The way I feel
About your inability to
Suck it up and win the game
—R. Pollard, “Some Drilling Implied”1
Bob Sr. had his sights set on professional sports for his eldest son, and for Jimmy too. Bobby saw where the wind was blowing—Senior said he had a “golden arm”—and let it catch his sail. If nothing else, playing sports under his father’s rules meant he didn’t have to get a job. So sports took up nearly all Bob’s free time while he attended Northridge High School.
Before he was a pitcher, in the summer league Bob played the other half of the battery—catcher. He was quick, known to pick off runners at first and third, but he had to dive out of the way when a runner barreled toward home plate—he wasn’t big enough. “I played outfield one time,” Pollard recalls. “Not one ball got hit to me the whole game.”
Once he moved to the mound, Bob manned it throughout his time at Northridge High School and later at Wright State University. Between the ages of ten and twenty he threw twelve no-hitters, nineteen one-hitters, and twenty-one two-hitters.2
A local boy named Kevin Fennell first encountered Bob in Little League baseball. Fennell had grown up in Augusta, Georgia, but moved back to Northridge with his family at age nine. He claims he hit a triple off Pollard the first time they faced each other on the diamond, and the older boy got so angry he cried. Pollard counters that Fennell fabricated the entire scene from his imagination. No matter the truth, the dispute perfectly encapsulates their relationship.
Fennell was two years behind Bob in school. He played in a band with Scott Bianca and a long-haired dude with the excellent rock name Mitch Mitchell—not that an interest in music was enough to offset Bob’s ire. Whenever he saw Mitch and Kevin around the neighborhood he’d shout, “There they are!” and make like he was about to chase them. He’d laugh when the younger kids took off at a dead run.3
In high school sports Bob presented a triple threat, like his father once had, and he was a star in all three. From sports Bob gained his determination to win—or at least a pronounced hatred of losing. In the end, nearly the same. He also honed his athleticism; these were not only the days of corporal punishment but also of coaching methods that would later be deemed excessive, such as running kids in the sun all day long without food or water, to “toughen” them, or screaming threats like, “If you lose this game for us, I’m gonna puke blood!” Sometimes Bob practiced all day long, he says, on “eight spoonfuls of mustard.”
Northridge teacher and basketball coach Dick Allen said of the Pollards, “They developed a voice inside them that pushed them to become successful.”4 Guidance counselor Bob Sheehan coached the football team, including when Bob played quarterback his freshman and sophomore years. Unfortunately, the offensive line had few stars of Bob’s caliber; he was pounded time and time again by enemy rushers. But Bob never stayed down. As a defensive back on the varsity team, he would break the school’s interception record with seven on October 16, 1974.5 “He was so resilient,” Sheehan said in later years. “It was unbelievable.”6
Although his parents, coaches, and peers envisioned Bob’s career in professional sports—and his abilities may very well have been up to the task—his early athletic career was as much a process of disillusionment as the collecting of accolades.*
The caption of a Northridge HS yearbook photo from the era, depicting an intent Bob in the dugout with baseball cap and uniform, contains an ironic typo: It notes that he “had the best itching [sic] record on the team.”7 Technically true, insofar as he was so often itching to be somewhere else.
AS HE PUBLICLY EXCELLED IN athletics and coasted through his classes, in private Bob’s musical obsessions only intensified. His record player was a singularly prized possession; any tampering with it on Jimmy’s part was sure to spark a brawl.
One day Bob and Jimmy were home alone. As usual they thought up insulting nicknames for each other, wrestled, and fought viciously over nothing. Bob drank a can of pop and pinned Jimmy on his bed, dangling a long thread of sugary spit close to the boy’s face and sucking it back up. Abruptly the spit broke—splat!—warm and nasty on Jimmy’s cheek and forehead.
“Get off me!” screamed Jimmy, enraged, and hurled Bob off him. Bob crashed onto his clothes drawer, laughing.
Jim stormed out of their bedroom, wiped his face, and flopped down on the couch. He could hear Bobby laughing—then silence. In the bedroom, Bob realized he’d landed on his record player and cracked the dust cover in half. His teeth gritted. One eye twitched.
Bob charged out of the room, furious but still laughing, and leapt into the air. Both feet, right into Jimmy’s stomach. Bob landed on the living room carpet while Jimmy doubled over, the wind knocked from him. “It hurt a little,” Jim deadpans. “Just a little.”
Bob had to duct-tape the crack in his record player’s cover. “You don’t get another one!” he says with a laugh, recounting what his father told him. “You don’t get a new one.”
His allowance was $20 a week, but “Every new album that came out—Black Sabbath, the Who, Genesis—I had to have it,” Pollard recalls. “But I had no money. What do you do?”
Clyde Baxla didn’t have a lot of money either, but when they went to see him on Fridays he always slipped Bob another $20 so he could go down to Second Time Around Records and pick up some new vinyl. “You don’t have to do that!” Bob chided his grandfather, even as the cash-strapped kid within thought, Yeah, you do!
He scraped together cash by skipping lunch and eating spoonfuls of (free) mustard so he could spend the money on records instead. Even then, Bob Sr. barked at him, “Why are you buying so many damn records all the time?!” Often, he wasn’t actually buying them. In the days before surveillance cameras, Bob bought records and saved the bag with the store’s logo on it. The next week he brought it back and refilled it on the sly.
Other times Bob filched money from Carol’s purse. When she caught him she tried to ground him, but the punishment only stood up against his nonstop pestering for half a day.
“Is it really worth it to you to keep me in this house with you?”
“That’s enough, Bobby.”
“Is it? Is it, Mom? Are you sure?”
Carol shook her head, fatigued. “Get the hell out of here. Now.”
Bob and his friends pioneered new methods of lifting vinyl. Sometime-accomplice Billy P had a specialty of 45s. He’d put them down his pants and stick his dick through the hole. Billy was well-enough endowed to suspend nine or ten records on his dong.
The spree came to an end when Bob finally got busted stealing albums at Ontario’s department store. The woman who owned the place was in a bad mood even before she caught Bob trying to pinch Jethro Tull’s Living in the Past. Furious, she called Bob’s house and spoke to Carol, demanding she drive downtown to retrieve the red-handed shoplifter.
By the time she got to the store, Carol had worked her outrage into indignation. Led to the back room, where Bob sat hanging his curly head, she yelled at the owner, “What the hell is this? You let all these other punks steal shit every day!”
The owner, incredulous, asked, “Do you want him to go to jail?”
Bob begged his mom to just let the lady yell at him so they could get out of there. In the end, an agreement for Bobby to pay for the record ended the dispute. Carol spent the entirety of the fifteen-minute drive home chewing him out. And although she warned the boy several times about what was going to happen if he kept talking back, Bob knew the truth: his mom liked a good argument now and then.
NO MATTER HOW MUCH MUSIC Bob bought, it wasn’t enough. Out of sheer boredom, he scratched the itch by creating his own album covers. They were wholly invented, without a single note of music to back them up, yet complete in conception. They included liner notes, track listings, and in most cases lyrics.
He started out filling notebooks with album covers and band names. He’d draw the covers and design the layout, making up names for the band members, producers, and contributing musicians. The first one he created was Ricked Wicky’s Jar of Jam, Ton of Bricks—a title Bob discovered when he held his tongue and said, “Goddamn son of a bitch.” He drew 3-D letters for the title and band name. The Stella, another invented band, was responsible for eighteen distinct yet imaginary releases.
Bob would buy poster board when he could, or ask Carol to get it for him. She obliged, not particularly supportive of her son’s embryonic collages but not opposed, either. He traced the outline of an album onto the poster board, then pieced together a collage inside the lines. Once Bob found a copy of Story of Life magazine, which Carol bought for him. It provided unique fodder for his imagery, which was liberally mixed with popular magazines of the time like LIFE and The Saturday Evening Post.
Unlike his mom, Bob’s father deemed the entire enterprise a waste of time, not to mention reading material. He stopped short once when he caught Bobby at the kitchen table piecing together a rock album. “Why are you still doing that stupid shit?!” he asked, eyes alight with disappointment. But he didn’t stop Bob from doing it, or tear it up. Perhaps he already sensed the futility of such attempts.
For his part, Bob became ever more secretive about the LP cover collages. He says, “I don’t blame my dad. He didn’t teach it to me.” But until he had a real band, it was all he could do.
IN NORTHRIDGE IN THE EARLY 1970s, entering high school also meant entrance to the drinking world. For many, it was an all-or-nothing proposition. To Pollard, “There is no option in drinking. You fucking drink.”8
After Wilder’s Fruit Farm was busted for selling alcohol to minors, Bob and his friends patronized Maggie’s. They brought empty half-gallon milk jugs, and the clerk filled them with beer for $3 each. Slinging them over their shoulders, they’d saunter down the street. They didn’t mind if the beer got warm. Or at Marion’s, when all they had was enough money to get a pitcher of beer, they’d hang out and wait as other diners left. Bob and his buddies would swoop in and snag any pizza left behind.
Bob met lifelong friend Forrester Hickman—known as the “Great White Pelt Finder”—when Bob was a sophomore and “Hick” was a senior. They played basketball together, a sport at which Hick excelled. On the bench, out of nowhere he would sing the first line of Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung” as “Sit-ting on a pork bench!” which always got a belly laugh from Bob.
Speaking of pork…
One Sunday morning Bob and his friends were shooting hoops in his backyard, smoking cigarettes and drinking a few beers on the sly. The Pollards’ property abutted a creek and some trees, and beyond them was Shirl’s Beer Garden.*
Bob flung a chest pass across the court, then caught movement in the corner of his eye. Something staggered to its feet in the creek bed, maybe the boggy creek monster.
Bob pointed. “What the fuck is that?!”
A shadow emerged into the light: Hick, soaked to the skin and dressed in his softball uniform from the night before. His stirrup socks were still pulled tight enough to play a bassline on them. He shuffled to the edge of the court and gazed blankly at Bob.
“What the hell you doing in there, Hick?”
“Dunno,” Hick grunted. “I was drinking at Shirl’s after the game.” They quickly surmised he’d passed out in the creek and spent the night there.
“Hey, gimme a beer,” Hick said, and sparked a cigarette to go with it.
Seconds later, Hick lurched forward with a sound like Blurrrrgghh bubbling from him, along with a stream of chunky white vomit. Clots piled into a miniature mountain at his feet.
Hick regarded what he’d spit up. “Ugh,” he said. “Pork and milk.” He took one last hit off his cigarette and placed it delicately atop the puke like a birthday candle.
BOB MET KIM DOWLER THE summer between his sophomore and junior years, just before he learned to drive.9 She had been a flag girl for the Northridge football team when Bob was quarterback.10 “I started going with her when I was fifteen, and our parents would have to take us out to the movies and stuff,” Pollard recalls.11
Their first “date” was when Bob and three of his friends went to the drive-in with Kim and three of her girlfriends. They saw The Exorcist, in the classic young man’s ploy to coax frightened girls into cuddling with them. Kim remained one of the few constants through Pollard’s high school and college years, and for many years after.
Bob’s first car was an aqua-blue Ford Torino, with a front bench seat that wobbled as he drove. One day his friend and football teammate Randy Campbell offered to fix it: “All you need to do is tighten that bolt, Bobby.” Randy wedged his linesman’s body under the bench, monkey wrench in hand, to twist the bolt snug. After three turns it snapped off. So whenever Bob stepped on the gas too hard the entire bench tilted into the backseat.
But a broken bolt in the Torino was pleasant compared to Bob’s dreams. Gone was the Goat Man, but a recurring phantasm that sometimes felt more like a nightmare plagued him. It was always the same setup. He got in his car and drove to Cincinnati. Downtown, he parked and went to the record store, which had no staff or customers. From that point the dream changed subtly every time, as he was confronted with hundreds of bands, LPs, singles—tantalizingly familiar yet wholly imaginary. Their unreality tortured him.
With no band of his own, no ability to play an instrument, and no solid ideas on how to make either of them a reality, Bob kept cranking out album covers to satisfy the dream. By the time he stopped doing it, in college, he’d amassed close to a hundred.
Adding to powerhouse the Stella, Bob created LP covers for Fat Chance, the Medics, and scads more. He created an album called An Axe In The Head Is Worth Two In The Back. They all had liner notes and lyrics. Some folded out like triple albums, others were concept albums, a few had stories written in them. One was called Eat 6.
Giving more credence to Bob Sr.’s criticism than he probably should have, Bob threw the whole box away. “I was thinking I’d be revealed as some kind of lunatic,” he explains. “Which I was anyway. So I wish I’d kept them.”
Only one of these early LP covers remains: a gatefold release by Dash Riprock and the Hairspray Boys called 11 Original Classics.12 The cover featured Bob’s favorite colors—blood red and mustard yellow—and depicted two smooth, 1970s lotharios beneath the caption, “Featuring Captain Bizarre on lead guitar.” A man in a necktie and eye patch stood in front of a Trans Am on the reverse side, where the band members were listed: James-Bruce Greenwald (guitars and vocals), Captain Bizarre (lead guitar), Mark Greenwald (drums and vocals), Mitch Mitchell (bass and vocals), and Dash Riprock (lead vocals).
Although Pollard insists, “It would be copyright infringement if I tried to do anything with them,” the Dash Riprock cover was emblematic of a steadily accreting style. The concept album—for which no music ever existed outside Bob’s head—was at turns straight-faced, humorous, and winking with self-awareness. A “plus more” note on the cover signaled that 11 Original Classics contained twelve songs. Cars and girls received top billing in imagery and lyrics.
At times the words telegraphed Pollard’s later, mythic sensibilities. “(No More) Boys On The Beach” included the stanza:
It’s alright! It’s alright!
There’s a light shining in the dark
We shall see the ghosts of our elders
Light the new foundation
On which we shall embark
And it shall be forevermore
And once again the lords of leather
Shall reign supreme
IN THE 1950S, “HOODS” DWELLED at the outskirts of high school culture, drinking and driving hot rods. In the ’60s, the hoods’ younger brothers came along—the freaks—smoking dope and digging rock music. Jocks, hoods, and freaks did not mix.
As much as Bob may have secretly yearned to join the freaky ranks, he stayed the course and remained a jock throughout high school and into his college years. He hadn’t yet divorced himself from his parents’ disdain for the world of psychedelia and dope.
By high school Kevin Fennell—he of Little League clashes—was virtually the king of the freaks. Mitch Mitchell, a friend of Kevin’s since third grade, would come around to play bass. “I always liked Mitch,” says Fennell. “He was kind of a quirky guy, even back then.” They played Little League baseball together, but discovered deeper bonds in middle school. “Come to find out he liked to play bass, and he also collected records. So, kindred spirits.” With guitarist Scott Bianca they started a band called Ambush, which eventually became Blue Mist, banging out tunes in the Fennells’ garage.
Bob envied the band a little, but not enough to put aside his dislike of freaks. A decade would pass before Kevin and Mitch became Bob’s musical collaborators. Mitch, for his part, would eventually attain the honor of being Bob’s “longest-standing partner in rock.”
As high school went on, Bob played sports and drank with his teammates but could never quite adopt the dull-eyed physicality required to fit in among stereotypical jocks. He was no ladies’ man. And as Jimmy’s sports ascendance began, Bob was in some ways relegated from older brother to sidekick—Jimmy was “God” and Bob called himself “God’s Brother.”
Too introspective for the jocks, Bob was also a little too straitlaced for the freaks. They were more benign than hoods but still mean. “They might stab you in the leg or something,” Bob says. But they accepted Bob, despite his jock status, because he wrote “Platter Chatter,” a record review column, for the school newspaper.*
It wasn’t an unpopular feature among the student body. Even a teacher who’d previously gotten into it with Bob called out to him in the hallway with a snappy, “Hey, Bobby, I like that ‘Platter Chatter’! Keep it up!”
For Bob, the biggest draw of writing the column was panning nearly every album. “I’d rip shit,” he recalls. Once he’d witnessed the reaction a properly executed slam could garner, he made a point of annihilating at least one LP in every column. When he took the first Kiss album down a few pegs, a girl—solidly in the “freak” category among his classmates—wrote in to complain: “This Robert Pollard must have been born with Q-tips in his ears.”
Next time Bob saw her in the hallway he stopped her. “Thank you,” he gushed. “Thank you for reading my shit!” She thought that was pretty weird. Given Bob’s thirst, any reinforcement of his musical pursuits—positive or negative—was like a cool glass of water.
After seeing Kiss play live, Bob wrote a “Platter Chatter” retracting his prior Kiss opinions. He’d seen the light.
A HAZE OF POT AND gunpowder smoke filled Hara Arena, obscuring the debauchery. Sharp cracks of cherry bombs and M-80s echoed through the cavernous hall. “There might have been people lying there dead,” Bob says. “It was like Sodom and Gomorrah.” And it was a blast.
In the 1970s, no one searched attendees at the door of Dayton’s Hara Arena, so everything from booze to weed to pills made it inside from the parking lot. The crowd shoved its way in, elbowing to the front. As soon as kids navigated the door’s bottleneck they took off as though running for the roller-coaster line at an amusement park.
Nobody bought beer inside, because it cost too much; partying happened in the parking lot. “We’d smoke, drink a little, maybe take some pills,” Bob recalls. Black beauties were popular, as were sopors, or quaaludes. Taking one was equivalent to drinking roughly twelve beers; a concertgoer could remain hammered throughout the show without having to piss once.
During his high school years, Bob saw Jethro Tull two or three times at Hara. “They put on an amazing marathon performance. They played for, like, three hours.”
Moreover, Jethro Tull did “cool shit” onstage, which Bob carefully filed away in his mind. Once someone threw a beer can from the audience and hit Ian Anderson, who stopped playing and waved his arms for the band to halt. In the crushing silence, Anderson bent to the microphone and uttered in a Scottish burr, “Whoever fucking did that, come up here and I’ll personally kick your fucking arse.”
“No?” Anderson grinned coldly. “Chickenshit, eh?”
Pollard marveled at Anderson’s showmanship. Later, though, he saw Tull do the same thing, so he knew it was staged. At that point it entered the Pollard brothers’ catalog of skits and in-jokes—“Chickenshit, eh?”
They made up a new dish and guffawed over the name. “You want some chicken shittay?” Jimmy would ask.
“Oh yeah.” Bob giggled. “The chicken shittay here is fuckin’ awesome.”
ON JANUARY 15, 1973, BOB was sixteen and driving home with his mom. They rolled past 2020 Arthur Avenue and saw the house bathed in the red-and-blue lights of police cruisers. Earlier that day, a neighbor had found the door ajar and inside discovered Gloria Buck, her brother Scott Buck, and her six-year-old daughter, Tracy, all shot and stabbed to death, lying in pooled blood. It brought to mind Charles Manson’s spree of a few years earlier.
The prime suspect was Patty Brown, the babysitter. At six-foot-two and a few hundred pounds, she was an easy target. Perhaps too easy. People grumbled about her certain guilt—she was “simple,” they said—and she inspired sheer terror in the neighborhood children. One day she rode her bicycle up to the Pollard house; Bob’s sisters ran to their rooms shouting, “Oh no! Here comes Patty!”
For months afterward, everyone in the neighborhood kept their lights on all night. Whatever unease he may have felt with a murderer on the loose, Bob wrote a song called “I Wouldn’t.” The refrain went:
What would you do
If you loved Patty Brown?
The title was also Bob’s crooned answer: “I wouldn’t!”
They put Brown on trial for the murders and she was acquitted; the killer was never found. In Dayton the old-timers still talk about the Arthur Avenue murders over Budweisers and shots at Wings Sports Bar. Some swear Patty’s guilty, others whisper darkly that the killer’s still out there, biding his or her time.
Bob, for his part, did not and does not believe she was guilty of the crime. Despite his song, he kind of liked Patty.
NEAR THE END OF HIGH school, Bob knew some guys who lived down by the river. Sometimes they played acoustic guitars and passed around a joint or two. Watching even moderately accomplished musicians jam together blew Bob’s mind. One of them was Hank, who had brachydactyly on one hand but didn’t let it stop him from rocking out.* He’d strap a pick to his wrist with rubber bands and play anyway.
Ringing acoustic guitars echoed across the Great Miami’s placid surface. Bob sat there stoned, his mind alternating between fantasies of gnawing on Hank’s little fingers and pushing away the growing anxiety of graduation, with its implicit promises of a nine-to-five job, IRS-whittled paychecks, screaming kids, car in the shop, Pop in Ma’s doghouse again, and settling into an easy chair watching the Reds and drinking a Schlitz for season after season until none of the kids could be sure where the chair ended and Pop began. And so on until death.
Bob thought, If that guy can do it, I can. I’m going to learn to play the guitar.
* Robert and Jimmy Pollard were inducted into the Northridge High School Athletic Hall of Fame in 2010.
* Now Whisky Barn.
* Pollard appropriated the title from an often uncredited department in Hit Parader magazine.
* Brachydactyly is a physiological condition characterized by abnormally small fingers.