▼ Music Remastered Revelation Power-Pop legend Pollen’s forgotten second album finds new life on vinyl. BY ASHLEY NAFTULE T hey may have only had a handful of albums to their name but Pollen are nothing to sneeze at. Hailing originally from Pittsburgh, the quintet of Dan Hargest (vocals), Kevin Scanlon (guitars), Chris Serafini (bass), Mike Bennett (guitars), and Bob Hoag (drums) moved to Arizona in 1995. From there, they made a lasting impression with their unique blend of aggressive punk guitars, power-pop melodies, and emo lyrical sensibilities. While their third album, 1997’s Peach Tree, is widely regarded by both Pollen and their fans as the group’s high-water mark, their long-neglected sophomore album, 1995’s Crescent, is worth a closer listen. And now, thanks to a revelatory new vinyl remaster, you can hear it like it’s never been heard before. Remastered by Hoag and Jason Livermore, the rerelease of Crescent is a revelation: An album that once sounded quiet and muffled, as though it were playing through a veil of mud, now has a forceful and dynamic presence. Tracks like “Freshly Broken” and “Relics” sound dissonant and gorgeous, epitomizing Pollen at their best. These songs, once dusty flowers languishing in the dollar bin, are full of vibrant color and life once again. Hampered by issues with their label and by the band’s own ambivalent attitudes to the record (that they’ve often called their “forgotten album,” the “red- headed stepchild” of their short but robust discography), Crescent is primed to finally get its due. Speaking on the phone with Phoenix New Times, Pollen drummer and primary songwriter Hoag — himself a fixture in the local scene as the maestro behind Flying Blanket Recording — is candid about the band’s fascinating and tumultuous rela- tionship with Arizona, their old record label, and with Crescent itself. Phoenix New Times: I listened to the CD version before the remaster and I was struck by the dramatic difference in quality. Could you tell us about what happened with the original mastering on the album? Bob Hoag: We recorded it when I was 34 20. I was very obsessive about how things should sound despite having no real back- ground in engineering or recording at the time. I was obsessed with the record sounding really heavy, so I took our mixes and ran them through some fancy EQ and played it on my home stereo, which has tons of midrange for all the guitars on the record. My home stereo was not a good barometer for that stuff. I told the manu- facturer not to mess with it, to leave it as is because it sounded good on my stereo. But to everyone else’s stereos in the world it sounded super muddy, super thin on the low end, and just not very loud. When I pulled up the original mixes of Crescent, I was stunned at how fantastic it already sounded. It sounded great because Stephen Egerton is a fantastic engineer and producer, and he captured some really cool tones, very much in league with what we were hoping to accomplish. Stephen mixed the record in a marathon — 48 hours straight of mixing — up all day, all night. And then I ruined it. You’ve mentioned in past interviews that your songwriting at the time was your way of not going to therapy. That emotional, confes- sional quality to your lyrics — did it make it hard to revisit this material? Speaking as a guy in his 40s right now, listening to lyrics I wrote when I was 20 … some of them are really cringey to me. But I take some comfort knowing that it’s all incredibly sincere and genuine, and I’d much rather have a record like this where I’m like, “Oh my God, Bob, calm down, we get it, you’re sad and lonely, you don’t think you belong anywhere, I get it, please shut up.” I just kept telling my wife when I was listening to this that my heart is breaking for 19-year-old Bob. This is definitely the most emotionally needy and bitter of the Pollen albums. I started to write a lot more cryptically after this. It gave me a little pause about reis- suing this — how on the nose it is. And I finally said, “Man, this is who you were at the time. You can’t erase that.” four days a week. We were just super- focused and driven about music, which made us very tight. Did that feeling of being kind of outsiders in the local scene persist? There was always kind of a struggle while we were in Arizona. I feel like we were too aggressive and maybe demanded too much attention from the audience. We always did better at all-ages shows than at bars, where you become this thing in the background for people calmly sipping their drinks. I felt like we were the annoying hyper kid brother who your mom forces you to take with you when you’re hanging with your friends. We certainly had great shows and there Jim Steinfeldt Originally from Pittsburgh, the members of Pollen moved to Arizona in 1995. What was it like transitioning to a new community and musical scene after the band pulled up roots from Pittsburgh and relocated in Arizona? I was very disillusioned with Pittsburgh, especially with the weather. We were all born and raised there. And I just had it with the snow. Also, a lot of concert venues there started closing down around that time. When we played our final show, we ended up having to do it at a coffeehouse. We’re playing with Marshall stacks at a coffee shop because there were no real venues left for us to play at. My atti- tude is if we’re gonna be poor and in a band for the rest of our lives, at least we could live somewhere where it feels like we’re on vacation all the time. I saw Arizona in a movie and I thought it looked great. The movie was Gas Food Lodging. I didn’t realize until later that it was actually New Mexico in that film, but it looked better than having to deal with icy roads or having to heat up engine oil every day. We got a pretty icy reception when we started playing shows in Chandler. People thought our equipment was too nice and that we played too good. “These guys are too pro! Who are they trying to impress?” It wasn’t intentional: We had been playing with crappy gear for years and slowly got good stuff. And we had done work with the Descendants, which whipped us into shape musically. No one can record with those guys and not come out of it being a better band. I learned how to play to a click from them. We would rehearse maniacally were folks who supported us who ran great venues. But one of the interesting things that came out of doing these reissues is that I found an old sales report from Wind-up Records on Peach Tree where they were trying to figure out the best states for us to tour based on sales. And I remember that of all the states they were considering, we had by far the lowest sales and lowest airplay in Arizona. Phoenix and Tempe were by far our weakest markets. Around the time Peach Tree came out, Mike Bennett said in an interview that there was some sort of computer error that happened when Crescent was being pressed that made it instantly go out of print. What happened there? That was around the time Grass Records got purchased by some investors who wanted to turn it into a major label, so it became Wind-up Records. I think what happened is they immediately proclaimed that everything on the old label was out of print, even though Crescent had only been out for a short time. I was told at some point that there was an accident at the warehouse and they put a numerical code on our records that designated them as out of print. But I wonder if they just told us that because they were sunsetting everything else. A lot of the Grass Records acts had awkward to outright hostile relationships with Wind-up after the transition. Albums went out of print and stayed that way, acts were dropped wholesale. What was Pollen’s rela- tionship with Wind-up like? Working with Grass was great. [Label founder] Camille Sciara signed us person- ally. She seemed to only sign stuff she really liked and believed in. When she left and Wind-up took over, it became incredibly difficult to work with them after we put out Peach Tree. 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