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Overview
Devoted fans have followed Guided by Voices for decades—and critics around the world have lauded the band’s brain trust, Robert Pollard, as a once-in-a-generation artist. Pollard has been compared by the New York Times to Mozart, Rossini, and Paul McCartney (in the same sentence) and everyone from P. J. Harvey, Radiohead, R.E.M., the Strokes, and U2 has sung his praises and cited his music as an influence.
But it all started rather prosaically when Pollard, a fourth-grade teacher in his early thirties, began recording songs with drinking buddies in his basement. In this book, James Greer, an acclaimed music writer and former Spin editor—who also played in the band for two years—provides unparalleled insight and complete access to the workings of Pollard’s muse.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555846411 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/24/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
FINALLY
"I don't know, if it was me I probably would have kept Guided by Voices and continued to do the other stuff on the side."
— Peter Buck, R.E.M.
Driving into Dayton, Ohio, on the night before Christmas Eve, 2004, all you could see was snow. The previous day had brought a twenty-inch fall to the area: historic, unprecedented, without recent parallel. Comparisons were already being drawn to the Great Flood of 1913, which had succeeded the invention of flight — by native Daytonians Orville and Wilbur Wright — by a mere decade, and was considered by some superstitious natives as karmic payback for that God-defying machine.
Three days later, word spread that an earthquake of historic proportions had taken place on the other side of the globe, followed by a tsunami that killed many more people than have been killed by quake-driven tsunamis in years past, at least since 1964, the birth date — coincidence? — of the British Invasion.
The confluence of near-apocalyptic events so close to one another must (you're thinking) have a unifying cause. How about this: the final Guided by Voices show, on New Year's Eve, in Chicago, at a club called the Metro, right across from Wrigley Field. The culmination of twenty-one years' hard labor served in the Prison of Rock. Sentence commuted by the warden, who, as happens in the best and the worst kinds of movies, is also the prisoner.
Our story begins, as all good stories must, at the end. On New Year's Day, 2005, in Chicago, at the Metro, where, at approximately four o'clock in the morning, after playing for three and a half hours before a thousand-plus lucky ticket-holders who'd paid upward of $750 on eBay for the privilege (though the asking price was a mere 75 clams), Bob Pollard stands surrounded by a wall of well-wishers and family and friends and the ghosts of band members both past and present. "Smothered in Hugs" is a fan-favorite song from the 1994 GBV album Bee Thousand. Its lyrical content has absolutely nothing to do with the scene backstage at the Metro, but you'd be forgiven for applying that title to this event. People are teary-eyed, people are smiling broadly, people are hugging profusely and indiscriminately, and we'd like to think this blizzard of hugs, this hug-storm, reflects in micro-view the macro-effect of Guided by Voices — its legacy, in the broadest sense. Because the word that best applies to the awe-inspiring breadth of the band's double-decade output is one of the best words you can say about anyone or anything: generous. Guided by Voices is the most generous band in the world.
Some would say too generous, and it's hard to argue the point with those who feel that a recorded output surpassing eight hundred songs and a standard-issue two-to-three-hour live show overmatches the average listener's attention span. But Guided by Voices fans are not average listeners, and Bob Pollard writes, records, and performs for himself first and for his fans second. The average listener comes in a distant third, with the music business and its attendant truisms — a band can only release one album a year, a band must tour said album for two years nonstop, a band certainly cannot change musicians like underwear and record on a Radio Shack microphone strategically placed between beer cans in a basement on a four-track cassette recorder — left sitting in a corner, feeling neglected.
Result: cult status and failure to sell millions of records. B-side of result: complete creative control and the primacy of the song over the medium. "At the end of the day, there are no bands, there are no labels, there's only 'Three Blind Mice' and 'Happy Birthday,'" Pollard opines late one drunken night (there are only late, drunken nights in the Guided by Voices universe) shortly before the final show. "I'd rather find a great song than a nice guy," he said another late, drunken night over ten years earlier. "John Lennon was not a nice guy. But he wrote great songs." Bob's opinions are usually appended with an insistent "Wouldn't you?" or "Don't you agree?" to which there is only one real answer, because the question is rhetorical and you — if he's even aware of your presence — are for the most part a rhetorical device, or at best an audience. Disagree, and he will accept your opinion with equanimity, but will hold it against you for the rest of your life, though you may never be aware of that fact. He will not respect you for speaking your mind. He will dismiss you as an idiot.
The National Guard arrived the day after Christmas to begin the process of snow removal from downtown Dayton that would occupy the better part of its next three days, by which time the band was scheduled to move on to Chicago and the last two shows. In the meantime, Bob somehow managed to fit in an expanded version of Monument Club (see the chapter entitled "Ghosts" for a complete explanation); a meeting of the Wing Committee (self-explanatory — you go to a bar and eat wings — in essence a pared-down version of Monument Club); a movie (The Aviator: mediocre); Margarita Night at a place that may or may not have had the word "Azteca" in its name; the Last Ever Guided by Voices rehearsal; a recording session for a forthcoming solo Bob EP; a recording session for the demos of an upcoming Bob project; a visit to Marion's Piazza, holy grail for pizza lovers and second home to Bob and his bestest pals (the taping of which meal may result in Monument Clubber Billy Dixon's first comedy album, At Marion's of All Places); dinner at the Pine Club, a restaurant both blessed and damned on separate GBV album sleeves; and an intensive scouring of Bob's personal collection of Guided by Voices–related memorabilia for the purpose of inclusion in this book.
The cast of characters that forms and informs the Guided by Voices multiverse, you see, is not limited to Bob Pollard and band members, whether past or present (though even the present are past, now), which is partly why we will spend so much time detailing that cast of characters, because without context you will not understand the wellspring of Pollard's singular genius. Not that such a thing is ever clearly understood, but one of the purposes of this book is to explain, and not merely relate, the story of Guided by Voices. To do that, in a very large measure, is to explain and not merely relate the story of Robert Ellsworth Pollard Jr., Northridge, Dayton, Ohio, United States of America, the World, the Universe. Et emphatically cetera.
* * *
If you are merely a casual fan of the band, or not even a fan but you have heard of them, you probably know a few rudimentary things about Guided by Voices: that Bob was a schoolteacher for fourteen years before his band was "discovered." That he was consequently considered, at age thirty-six, an unlikely prospect for rock stardom. That the band made most of its records on a cheap Tascam four-track in the basement, spending very little time and even less money, which method became known as "lo-fi," shorthand for "low fidelity," of which the band was considered if not the inventor then certainly one of its leading practitioners. That its live shows range from borderline disastrous to exhilarating raw rock power of a kind rarely seen in the unfortunately labeled genre "indie rock." And that Guided by Voices drinks a lot of beer. A ridiculous amount of beer. An inhuman amount of beer.
If you have never heard of the band at all, that's a pretty fair introductory summation. All of these things are true, to a point, but what is perhaps less well understood is the history behind those four or five truths — the reasons, if you will, that GBV has been unfairly reduced to a few misleading bullet points, and that, for instance, the band has not been "lo-fi" for well over ten years, half of its existence, during which period Bob's songwriting improved exponentially and the band learned how to translate its unique sound into the context of real recording studios, sometimes helped by producers with famous names, sometimes on its own, and that once GBV had outgrown the superficial bounds of its self-inflicted mythology, it became, to many discerning listeners, one of the greatest bands in the world. Bob Pollard has left behind, with the help of his bandmates, a legacy that will likely continue to grow in influence and renown long after today's fame puppets are forgotten. He has been called in the press — before the press got overwhelmed by his unending output and turned off by his fanatical self-belief, mistaken for arrogance — "this millennium's William Shakespeare," and compared by The New York Times to Mozart, Rossini, and Paul McCartney in the same sentence. It's likely that Bob's familiar with only the last person on that august list, and likelier still that he'd be angry not to be compared to his idol, John Lennon, rather than McCartney, whom he considers a "square."
The initial adulation that greeted GBV's ascendancy ignited the chip on Bob's shoulder that had been built up over the years of negativity he'd endured from his family and even some friends who simply couldn't understand a) why he was even bothering; and b) why he was bothering when he clearly didn't have any talent. In order to understand the extent of his suppressed (and sometimes expressed) fury, you need to understand the history not only of the years of obscurity but of Bob's entire youth.
There was a lot of debate in its initial stages about what would and would not go into "The Book," as Bob kept calling it. Late into one night at Marion's, he banged his beer glass on the table with some force. "Fuck it," he declared, and it's entirely beside the point to say that he was, at this point, not entirely sober. "It's going in the book. This is the bible, goddammit. I'm not gonna puss out. I'm going to tell what happened, and I'm sorry if anyone gets offended. But it's called Hunting Accidents, and the way I understand it, when there's a hunting accident someone gets hurt." (This is a paraphrase. He could not possibly have been that articulate at that stage.) The funny thing is we cannot for the life of us remember what particular story he was trying to decide to use or not, and just then the tape cut out, probably because someone spilled beer or pizza on it or a ghost wandered into the room and its ghostly viscera coated the magnetic particles of the tape, rendering them inaudible. Which would be appropriate, in a way, because — again, in a way, albeit from a marvelously oblique angle of perception — the story of Guided by Voices is a ghost story. Even funnier is the fact that Bob's drunken promise of complete fidelity was tempered in subsequent sessions by his desire not to hurt anyone's feelings. Which is not the same as a disclaimer that any significant lacunae in Hunting Accidents are at Bob's request, but, at the same time, yeah.
Later that week the band drove up for the Last Soundcheck Ever, before the penultimate show, the first of two at the Metro, which is a very nice club and had always treated the band well and as such served as a fitting site for the farewell shows. The band ran through a few of the songs it had decided to add to the set, then retired to the rock room, which is Guided by Voices' slang for the dressing room. The opening band that night, appropriately, was Tobin Sprout, longtime GBV member, who has recently begun touring again, playing a mix of songs off his solo albums and songs he wrote or cowrote while in the band. Toby's always been an affable, lowkey guy, and his music reflects his personality, which is not an insult. His set that night was an appropriate aperitif for the second-tolast supper. Most of the rest of that night was a typical riotous, joyful blur. Afterward, Bob went straight from the stage to the van and back to the hotel, as has been his habit, increasingly, in the last couple of years. Much as he feeds off the energy from talking to fans and friends after shows, he's lately discovered that the harm to his voice and energy is a potential disservice to those who pay to hear him sing. Also, he's old.
Next day, the day of the last show, the band members mostly stayed in the hotel for the day, recovering from the previous night's exertions, but by showtime there was a celebratory air in the rock room that had little to do with New Year's Eve. Though only Pollard and his brother Jimmy remained from the small group of Northridge friends who started Guided by Voices twenty-one years earlier, wilting fronds of connection to his distant past were present and accounted for: Billy Dixon, his high school football team center; Daryl "Dink" Deaton, his high school baseball team catcher; Tony Conley, guitarist for Anacrusis, Bob's first band (albeit a heavy metal cover band); Bruce Horner, another longtime friend, famous for his malapropisms, which will be addressed later; and others too complicated to mention. All these guys are still close friends with Bob, and were before he started playing music, and still are now that he's a "world-famous" (in quotes because it's funny, not because it's not true) rock guy. Many of them have obscurely derived nicknames; and the preponderance of middle-aged, graying, grizzled men dressed in sweat suits — and at least in one case in shorts, despite the subzero temperature outside — in the rock room made this scene unlike probably any other dressing room preshow gathering ever. Some of Bob's friends looked a little uncomfortable, even out of place. They're still not used to seeing Bob treated with this degree of adulation outside the playing fields of Northridge when they were growing up and Bob was a three-sport standout. "There's two different people. There's Bobby, and then there's Robert Pollard. Sometimes I forget," says close friend Mike Lipps. He's standing to the side, holding a beer, watching Bob surrounded by longtime, hard-core fans to whom he always allows access to the rock room.
"I just can't understand," continues Mike, "how a guy who can make you laugh until it fucking hurts, who talks about nothing but sports and shit when we're home, just like us, can write songs so beautiful they make you cry."
For the most part Bob Pollard is a genuinely nice guy — the exception to his own rule — who also happens to write genuinely great songs, and though his refusal to self-edit (despite that he does so far more than many are aware) rankles even some of his most ardent admirers, the ratio of quality to crap over the course of the twenty-one years of his band's existence remains surprisingly high, and there are those — Bob among them — who value the crap more than the quality. You can understand why — why a guy who can layer a heartbreaking melody over an intricate chordal arrangement without seeming effort might find such a thing unchallenging after a while, and resort to wilder sonic pastures — without agreeing, but even if you disallow Pollard's cherished experimental side, he'd still have more truly great songs in his catalog than any ten of his more widely known contemporaries lumped together.
Many of those songs he played tonight, on New Year's Eve, at the final show of a tour Pollard dubbed "The Electrifying Conclusion," complete with T-shirts featuring a clearly silhouetted leaping Bob, captioned "Mission Accomplished." The set list contained some sixty-odd songs, augmented throughout by ex tempore surprises like "14 Cheerleader Cold-front," a chestnut he dredged up without hesitation when he turned to see Tobin Sprout, who had wandered onstage looking for champagne (we'll explain soon) and who cowrote the song.
Bob had meticulously dotted the list with songs designed for guest spots from every former band member who was willing to participate; the band's lineup has changed more frequently than that of most minor league baseball teams, so these guest appearances were frequent, and brought appreciative roars of nostalgia from the crowd. As has been his wont over the past few years, Bob engaged in frequent lengthy monologues, often studded with actual wit and insight, albeit slurred wit and beery insight — often trash-talking bands (an extension of his sports-heavy upbringing), including his own, sometimes when members of those bands by chance are in the audience — between songs. So popular have these bits of between-song banter become among the faithful that a comedy record comprising a few choice morsels has been assembled and released, called The Relaxation of the Asshole, featuring a photo of Bob passed out on a couch, but that's not the true origin of the phrase. The true origin of the phrase is that when you are driving around the streets of Northridge drinking beer (also known as "Freedom Cruising") and listening at full blast to whatever songs Bob has just recorded, and he has to piss, you pull over to the curb and he swings his legs out the passenger door and pisses on the sidewalk, sitting down. "The secret to pissing sitting down," he will tell you, "is you have to relax your asshole." Thus: and so.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Guided By Voices"
by .
Copyright © 2005 James Greer.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface,
In Lieu of an Actual Introduction,
Finally,
Sports,
Ghosts,
Walk,
Time,
Science,
Hope,
Love,
Loss,
What I've Learned,
Again,
Appendix I: Guided by Voices Selected Discography 1983–2004,
Appendix II: Solo and Side Projects of Guided by Voices Selected Discography 1983–2004,
Appendix III: Guided by Voices Family Tree,
Appendix IV: Gigography and Selected Set Lists 1984–2004,