One of my fondest rock memories: Guided by Voices opened for Cheap Trick at the 9:30 Club, and following a great set during which GBV lead singer and mastermind Robert Pollard drank what appeared to be a case of beer, he returned to the stage, bottle of tequila in hand, to join in on backing vocals on Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.” The audience went mad. It was cosmic.
I’ll never forget the first time I heard Dayton, Ohio’s Guided by Voices. I was in a long defunct restaurant-café on 14th Street—the kind of place, gone now unfortunately, where the staff were junkies and the customers were junkies and where your pet rat was definitely welcome—when I heard a great song on the jukebox. By the time the vocalist threw out the wonderful couplet, “I am a lost soul/I shoot myself with rock’n’roll,” I was hooked. The song turned out to be “I Am a Scientist” by Guided by Voices, and the next day I ran out and bought it. It was the beginning of a long romance.
At that time Pollard and Company were defiantly lo-fi, and specialized in writing catchy tunes with gnomic lyrics. Over the years the sound quality would become slicker—Ric Ocasek’s polished production of 1999’s Do the Collapse alienated lo-fi purists—but Pollard’s modus operandi never changed. He leaned towards the Anglophilic and was miraculously prolific; he breathed songs, thousands of songs, all of them with absurdist lyrics that made up for their lack of warmth and emotion with great lines and wonderful melodies. And while touring he drank prodigious amounts of beer on stage—even had his own bar—and over time he managed to establish a true cult of personality. Guided by Voices’ fans are some of the most fanatical in the world, and he could probably establish his own Jonestown if he wanted.
There was a time when I would have happily gone to that Jonestown, but I lost track of Guided by Voices before they broke up. And by the time they got back together again, I’d developed reservations—I’m a fickle bastard. Take 1992’s Propeller. I loved that LP. And listening to it all these years later reminds me why I so loved GBV, but also makes starkly apparent a GBV fan’s blasphemy—the album is seriously flawed. And believe me, nobody is more shocked than me.
But looking at the song credits, it becomes apparent why; the songs that Pollard wrote alone are for the most part excellent, while the songs on which he shares songwriting credits—with an exception or two—not so much. This is probably the reason why Propeller isn’t as good as 1994’s Bee Thousand or 1999’s Alien Lanes, to say nothing of the excellent Do the Collapse. The Pollard legend has him writing 900 songs a day, but on Propeller he had help, and the help didn’t help. Almost all of the songs I most dislike are collaborative efforts. I’m not certain whether he needed the help or was just trying to run the band as a democracy, but the songs he wrote with his band mates tend to lack important things, like melody and, er, melody.
Propeller opens with one of Pollard’s best songs ever: “Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox.” It opens with what sounds like a crowd at a live show repeating “G-B-V! G-B-V!” Then somebody says, “Is everybody ready to rock?” at which point Pollard says flatly, “This song does not rock.” It’s great and it’s all fake; that live crowd was just a crew of folks in the studio. But it established the “G-B-V!” chant that has greeted the band ever since. “Over the Neptune” opens with some cool guitars and moves along at a nice clip; Pollard sings, “Throw the switch/It’s rock and roll time” after which the guitars kick ass. Then the song segues into “Mesh Gear Fox” and Pollard sings, “I’m much greater than you think/I’m a swimmer in the drink” and the band breaks into a divinely beautiful chorus, with Pollard singing, “And if you do/I’ll come back and marry you” while the song climbs and climbs, deliriously lovely and getting lovelier still until a guitar comes in and plays a rough and tumble solo, only to be joined by another guitar as the song fades out. I’ve listened to it a million times and never tired of it, and I never will.
It’s followed by the excellent and anthemic “Weedking,” a slow and majestic number that opens with Pollard giving his record company a shout out (“Long live Rockathon”) before slowly building to a wall of guitars, with Pollard and Company repeating, “For the dreams of the weedking we all sing” as the guitars go mad behind them. Follow-up “Particular Damaged,” which he co-wrote with Tobin Sprout and Dan Toohey, is where the trouble starts; Pollard’s vocals are heavily distorted, and the song features a repeated guitar riff that is hugely annoying. What’s more there’s no melody, which is what Pollard does best, and in the end this song, to parrot Pollard himself, does not rock. And to add insult to injury it’s supposed to sound that way; unlike its predecessors, Guided by Voices did not start as a lo-fi band, and Propeller was their first LP recorded on 4-track. Meanwhile, Pollard went out of his way to fuck with songs by means of shitty tape edits, slowed down or sped-up vocals and instruments, etc. On this one, it backfires; there may have been a good song in there, but if so Pollard’s studio tinkering made sure it stayed hidden.
Fortunately, “Quality of Armor” is a straight up classic, opening with some acapella, “Oh yeah I’m going to drive my car/Oh yeah I’m going to go real far” before the guitars come in at warp speed to play a hook any pirate captain would love to have for a hand. It’s a rip-roaring number, and if it doesn’t convert you to the cult of Pollard I honestly think there’s something wrong with you. Like maybe you have rickets. Follow-up “Metal Mothers” is a another success; it opens on an anthemic note, with Pollard singing, “You find time to get laid/You find ways to get paid,” and while the verses don’t hook me the choruses certainly do, as does the ending when the guitars come in, making a delirious din as they wrap around one another and finally bring the song’s melody into focus.
As for “Lethargy,” I’m not a fan. A pounding drum dominates, along with a buzzsaw guitar that comes and goes. Pollard wants to know if your facemask is on, and wishes he “could give a shit, just a little bit,” but he and his trio of collaborators’ fail to provide the song with a melody makes it plain he doesn’t, give a shit that is. The co-written follow-up “Unleashed! The Large-Hearted Boy” doesn’t move me either. Its melody is deliberately amateurish and undistinguished, and it always seems on the brink of falling apart, and overall the song sounds half-baked, and probably was. Pollard has never been big on rehearsing songs to death.
I like the acoustic guitar that accompanies Pollard on the very short and pretty “Red Gas Circle,” just as I like the vocalists who join him for the song’s repeated closing phrase, “Hey are you coming?/Please don’t be late.” I also like “Exit Flagger,” which makes a lo-fi din and features some great guitars after Pollard sings his piece. On “14 Cheerleader Coldfront” Tobin Sprout joins Pollard on vocals, and it’s a delight. Acoustic guitars, wonderful vocals, and a lovely melody have kept me coming back to this one for years, and it remains one of my favorite GBV songs. As for “Back to Saturn X Radio Report” I don’t know what to say. It smushes together snippets of nine different songs in 1:33, yet somehow manages to be captivating. All of the songs would appear, in one form or another, on other GBV albums, and while captivating the damn thing is also frustrating, as the band will play something really cool, something you’d kill to hear in its entirety, only to quickly move on to the next song snippet.
“Ergo Space Pig” is a propulsive drum and guitar meet, and the latter is seriously distorted. Throw in some mightily fucked with vocals by Pollard, and a strange jam that defies all description, and I’m not sure what you’re left with; all I know is that this is one of those rare tunes that I’m not certain whether I like or dislike. “Circus World” is a slow number in which Pollard sings “shit gets old” and “all we do we do for you” before the song establishes a tres catchy melody that saves it temporarily from formlessness. But overall the song is nothing special; a humdrum placeholder with one brief moment of sublimity embedded in it. But I give it bonus points for the lines, “The human fly gets smashed again/He mixes his blood with tonic and gin,” and the groovy guitar solo that is here and gone before you know it.
“Some Drilling Implied” features lots of crashing cymbals and some great lines, but it’s totally lacking in the melody department and is, I hate to say, a crashing bore. As for album closer “On the Tundra” it takes a while to develop but it’s worth the wait, or maybe it isn’t. The melody that appears, disappears, then reappears to close the album is great, but the rest of the song is lukewarm at best.
Over the next several albums guitarist Tobin Sprout emerged as a decent collaborator and excellent songwriter in his own right; “It’s Like Soul Man” is a great song, one of GBV’s very best. But he left in 1997 along with the rest of the “classic” GBV line-up, and by the time 1999’s great Do the Collapse was released, Pollard’s was the only name on the LP’s credits, and it’s impossible not to wonder why—with the exception of Sprout—he ever condescended to co-write songs to begin with. The answer may be out there, but as for Pollard, he’s not leaving any clues; as he sings in “I Am a Scientist,” “I am an incurable and nothing else behaves like me.” We can all be grateful for that; so long as Pollard is out there shooting himself for rock’n’roll, the world will be a more interesting place.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B Thousand
