Robyn Hitchcock is trying to free your mind. Along with Oklahoma's Flaming Lips, Massachusetts' Sebadoh, Japan's Cornelius and France's Kid Loco, the British singer/songwriter is a charter member of "The 1999 International Music Against Brain Degeneration Revue," a travelling circus of modern-day maestros and musical misfits.|

So far, the adventure has come off without a hitch. "It's quite a feat to get the whole caravan to go around without us all either getting killed or killing each other," Hitchcock said from his Memphis hotel room. "Everyone gets up at an insanely early hour of the morning and then trundles across a patch of America in the baking heat with all this equipment. Considering this is the digital age, it's all amazingly medieval."

The caravan's mission: To drive from town to town and rejuvenate our gray matter.

Why have our brains degenerated? Bad music, of course. Hitchcock blames capitalism for the current state of music, which he describes as "increasingly pappy." As record companies merge into one another and drop the less commercially viable artists, Hitchcock laments that the lowest common denominator is sinking to new depths.

"This thing of trying to please everybody just puts everybody down in the dirt," he said. "Fewer and fewer demands are made on people. You would never get a songwriter like Cole Porter today, or even a musical like High Society. It would all be too literate, too witty."

Hitchcock has long suffered for his wittiness, as his songs about balloon men and wasp women are just not the stuff of pop radio. "Sometimes I feel as though I have to translate myself into another language in order to communicate with people," he said. "I like words, and I guess most people don't. It seems the barrel of words is getting drained and there's sort of fewer and fewer to pick out. Sometimes it feels like we're scraping the barrel of words altogether. I realize that this is a really unorthodox attitude for a rock musician, but there I am."

Hitchcock's new communication opus is Jewels for Sophia, a rather straight-up batch of melodic pop, featuring guests likes R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, Grant Lee Buffalo's Grant Lee Phillips and the Young Fresh Fellows' Scott McCaughey and Tim Keegan. "These days I'm very keen to base [the albums] around my own voice and guitar and not get lost in too much fiddle faddle," Hitchcock says. Still, despite the album's sparse sound, songs like "Antwoman," "Cheese Alarm" and "Dark Princess" prove there's plenty of lyrical fiddle faddle to go around.

The sardonic Seattle tribute "Viva! Sea-Tac"(complete with references to Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and coffee) may be Jewels for Sophia's crowning jewel. "We did a couple of shows called 'Viva! Sea-Tac' in Seattle, the Young Fresh Fellows and I," Hitchcock said of the song's origin. "For the last one Peter Buck and [former Hitchcock/Blue Aeroplanes sideman] Tim Keegan were there. We recorded that song the night before playing at Viva! Sea-Tac. We thought, "Let's do a show and call it 'Viva Sea Tac.' As inevitably happens, once the title's there, the song sort of grows down from it."

Then Hitchcock stops translating and reverts back to his own language. "It's rather like as if people's heads existed first and then their bodies grew down from them. It starts off with all these heads wandering around six feet above the ground like gourds gliding slightly unevenly above the pavement. And then the body grows down. I liken songwriting to that."

Hitchcock is comfortable with the fact that Jewels for Sophia may be his last outing for Warner Bros., knowing that his limited record sales may no longer fit in the brave new music world. "I'm a 'prestige' artist, rather than something that makes any money. But, on the other hand, I haven't cost them that much either. The promotional machine hasn't whipped itself up into a frenzy over shifting Robyn Hitchcock units; I've been left to sort of hang out my own lines in the water and see if anything bites. A label is a temporary accommodation; it's a hotel. I don't expect to be in a hotel forever, but it's a roof for a while."

The remaining 1999 International Music Against Brain Degeneration Revue dates are as follows:

8/17: New York, Tramps
8/18: New York, Tramps
8/20: Boston, Roxy
8/21: Philadelphia, Electric Factory
8/22: Cleveland, Agora Theatre

BILL CRANDALL
(August 16, 1999)