Note: ...in a perfect world was on break for longer than I originally had planned, but the reasoning was simple...since the holidays spun out over a pair of extended weekends, I realized that most folks would be occupied elsewhere and even fewer people than usual would be clicking in. But now I'm back. Hope you are, too. Let's listen to some music.
Guided by Voices has broken up. Again.
I am devastated. Again.
On the surface, it’s difficult to ascertain why a band like Guided by Voices (GBV) instills such devotion in their fans. They’re hardly household names. They formed in 1983. The lead singer is 57 years old. They are decidedly uncool in their appearance. Their highest charting album landed at a whopping 160 on the Billboard Top 200. They’re from the delightful postindustrial dystopia of Dayton, Ohio. Why am I so distraught about this trivial event?
I submit that the answer is that they are unequivocally the greatest independent rock band of all time.
By Ryan Hickey
 |
| Guided By Voices |
But Robert Pollard must be there. He is Guided By Voices.
By day, Pollard was a fourth grade teacher, but at night he took to the stage...early on, he was in a heavy metal cover band called Anacrusis. And in the time between the classroom and the stage, he was writing songs and recording demos on a four-track cassette deck in his basement. A lot of songs. Very good songs. The ridiculously prolific musician has written something in the neighborhood of 2,000 songs and still going.
Here's more from a Rolling Stone bio:
Thirty-six years old before anyone outside a tiny circle of high school friends and drinking buddies discovered his gifts, Dayton's Robert Pollard became one of the most unlikely cult figures of the Nineties and a hero to countless indie-rockers. He led a revolving cast of players under the moniker Guided By Voices, pumping out music at an unparalleled pace, sometimes to his detriment. (GBV released nine albums and 11 EPs in the Nineties alone.) Pollard's best songs — many of them elliptical, oblique and highly catchy — resulted from his obsessive attention to songwriting, and his lo-fi production aesthetic set a new standard for the possibilities of home recording.
Pollard was still teaching fourth grade when he started spending his summers on musical experiments with drummer Kevin Fennell and guitarist Mitch Mitchell, mainly as a hobby. After playing a few early shows in front of mostly confused Dayton locals, Guided by Voices stopped performing live for six years and instead concentrated on making records. Small-time recording engineers had no idea what to make of the band, and early releases like 1987's Devil Between My Toes sank without a trace. By 1992's Propeller (on the band's own Rockathon label), the group had essentially broken up. Determined to go out on his own terms, Pollard revised the track order for the last-gasp Propeller many times over, discarding studio takes for four-track and boom-box recordings that he felt better represented his vision.From the beginning, Guided By Voices was more or less defined by a decidedly lo-fi ethos, recording on Pollard's four-track cassette deck in his basement. That's a format with which I am intimately familiar.
Against all odds, copies of Propeller managed to find their way to significant tastemakers, and Guided by Voices signed to the Cleveland-based Scat Records. In 1994, aided by a strong lineup with guitarist and second songwriter Tobin Sprout, Pollard delivered Bee Thousand, still considered the definitive Guided by Voices record. Critics, musicians and fans quickly heaped praised on the group, some going as far to call Pollard an undiscovered genius. The band reached an even larger audience after it signed to Matador, which released 1995's 28-track Alien Lanes. The accompanying "Auditorium/Motor Away" video hit MTV, and GBV's legend continued to grow.
My own home multi-track recording adventures began when I was in my mid-teens, first with a pair of stereo cassette decks. Bouncing tracks as you build up layers of overdubbed guitar, bass, drums and vocals could make for a very noisy finished product, with tons of tape hiss and degraded signals, which actually was part of the charm (this also was a part of R. Stevie Moore's approach...more on him later). But it was a fantastic learning experience, and it prepared me for the Robert Pollard approach...a four-track cassette deck. I bought my first one when I was 20, a Teac 144 Portastudio, one of the very first models available. I had to take out a bank loan for that machine, four microphones and four mic stands (ah, minimum wage jobs). You can get a 32 track digital Portastudio now for less than $500.
But I totally understand Pollard's passion for the home studio. Since there was very little room at my folk's house, I set up shop in the back bedroom of my grandmother's home. She lived alone, and she essentially only used three rooms: the living room (where she also slept...I don't ever remember her sleeping in a bed), the kitchen and the bathroom. I essentially had the back half of the house to myself: the bedroom studio and a family room with its own door that opened onto a small back porch. I virtually lived with her for about five years, disappearing in the studio after work on Friday evening (or Saturday afternoon, depending on my schedule), not to emerge until late Sunday night.
And grandma didn't mind. I think she liked having me around. Being solitary creatures by nature and by habit, we mostly stayed clear of each other, but we were comfortable with that. It was a great arrangement, and I wrote and recorded a lot of music. I miss those days.
So I get Pollard's dedication to a lo-fi, DIY approach.
Out of the studio, Pollard and Guided By Voices performances were a thing of somewhat sloppy rock and roll legend. Plagued by stage fright for his entire career, his solution was to have a cooler of beer (at one point he referred to it as "backbone juice") onstage for every performance.
From the 1999 A.V.Club piece Guided By Voices by Jeff Stratton:
O: ...it's hard to imagine Genesis sitting around on stage with a cooler full of beer.After more than 20 critically-acclaimed albums and EPs and over 30 years together as a band, Guided By Voices broke up for a second time last year (their first breakup was in 2004). But never say never. They may return, since there's a precedent for it. And I'm sure that Pollard is writing away.
RP: No, no, no, no. That's us. That's totally original. That's the Guided By Voices thing, the whole beer thing. That's why we're great. We get comparisons to The Grateful Dead because of our fanatic following, but their following was about acid, and ours is all about beer.
O: But you don't drink as much as you used to.
RP: I've toned it down. When we first started, it was ridiculous. At that time, I'd start drinking when I woke up in the morning for that night's show, and by the time I came on, I'd be completely blind. Now, I start drinking maybe an hour or two before the show, so I've timed it perfectly. I have a perfect buzz when I get on stage. The people see me drink a lot of beer on stage, and we do have a cooler on stage; we do get up there and have a party. It's actually part of our stage thing. We drink beer and we like to party, but we're not ridiculous, you know? I also like to run and play basketball. And I drink Bud Light, which is basically water. Of course, we get drunk, and it is alcohol and everything, but it's not as bad as people would say. It's part of the image: "Look at those guys pounding those beers, man! They're gonna be dead of alcohol poisoning soon, so get 'em while you can!" Everybody's going to be dead from something eventually. I'm not that bad. I don't drink on my day off. But I like to drink beer. Here in the Midwest, you drink beer and you eat pizza.
O: The beer reportedly gave you the courage to play live when you first started the band.
RP: At first it was like liquid stage-fright reducer; I called it backbone juice. And so we relied on that. Now, people expect to see us do it. If I don't get up there and spit beer on people, I think they're disappointed.
O: And you don't even sleep the hangovers away.
RP: Yeah, I don't sleep late; I usually get up about 8:30 or so. That's when I write songs, in the morning. I don't like to stay on the road too long, because I can't write on the road. I need to get back for a few weeks and write songs. In the morning, my wife goes to work or goes shopping and my kids go off to school, so it's a good time for me to be alone, drink some coffee, and write.
Perhaps that the way it should be. After all, Guided By Voices is Robert Pollard, and Robert Pollard is Guided by Voices.
Sometimes it only takes one.
"I have an addiction to songwriting. You know, there are people who like to play softball all the time, or basketball, or darts, or whatever. I like to write songs, so when I'm here at home, I get up in the morning and make myself some coffee, and I just get my guitar and turn on my tape recorder. I really love to write songs. Another reason is that I'm bored with music for some reason. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's because we've become part of "rock" now, but when I was just a fan, I was an avid, enthusiastic record buyer and listener. Now I'm just bored, because I've found everything, I think. When I go into record stores, I don't look at the new-music section too much. It's pretty pathetic. There are some good underground bands coming from the same place we are, bands we've known for a long time that are still doing good stuff. Bands like Superchunk, Pavement, Sebadoh, and The Grifters are still doing good stuff. But if you look for good new music, it's just not there, so I'm always looking for old '60s and '70s compilations. If you're looking for a particular type of song that's not around or that doesn't exist anymore, the only thing you can really do is try to write it yourself, and try to find it in your own mind. So that's why I write, 'cause I'm addicted."
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