Robert Pollard cares about you. He's never met you, and likely never will, unless your idea of a vacation is Dayton Ohio, and you have a spare case of Old Milwaukee to share. Over thirteen albums as ringleader for his band of malleable malcontents, Guided By Voices, the prolific songwriter left a magnanimous gift of great songs, enveloping and hopeful, like a freshly-opened beer. Like a rock and roll Easter Bunny, Pollard is a songwriter that, once embraced, will feature heavily in life's mythology, giving texture and purpose through a medium that amazingly maintains the ability to be meaningful decades after it was introduced as a force for social change.
Before he was a rock and roller full-time, he was an elementary school teacher. Songs like 'Gold Star for Robot Boy' and 'Echos Myron' are about that experience, albeit obliquely. He would have been an interesting instructor. One of Pollard's greatest strengths as a lyricist is how his wordplay teeters on the brink of meaningless, while conveying truths that require repeated listening to uncover. You feel the words before you understand them. This is not an easy thing to do for a writer, especially in rock, which can manage to retread the hoariest of cliches in an endless loop of creative dereliction.
Pollard's lyrics succeed because they're genuine. They come from a real place, and get appealingly twisted from heart to pen, and stuffed with attitude and pomp from pen to microphone. So much of Pollard's music is touchingly human, and admirably supportive, the result of a man who believes to the letter rock and roll's redemptive power over the human spirit, and from a man for whom acclaim didn't arrive until his early 30s. His father once asked him when he was going to 'give up on that songwriting shit,' when Bob was struggling to get noticed in the early 90s. I believe those struggles formative in Bob's lyrical approach, giving his best songs an indomitably tenacious, workmanlike positivity.
Echos Myron has a line that goes 'We're finally here, and shit-yeah, it's cool,' which sums up Pollards vindication as rock-God. To see him in concert, as I couldn't believe I did, last fall, was to witness a man in the throes of living a dream, of being fully aware of his fortunes, and the physical acumen (leg kicks and microphone twirls) that would make bands half his age flush with envy. Pollard believes in rock, and goddamn it, so will you. Three encores later, each of us left, suffused in our born-again baptism at Rock's fertile fount. We were 'good kids,' he had told us. Spread the gospel, man.
Fans have long held that Pollard's first few albums, the lo-fi recordings, are his best, but the lo-fi versus hi-fi debate shouldn't be parameters for evaluation. GBV's earliest efforts sound the way they do because they were recorded cheaply, on four-track, in a garage. It wasn't an artistic statement, it was an economic one. I understand the argument, even if I don't endorse it, because the tape hiss, accidental background noise and curious mixing decisions lend the recordings a warmth and primacy often stripped by modern studio enhancement. Pollard was always ambitious about wanting a bigger, fuller sound, which he eventually achieved, so his output will always be divided, along with his fans, over the best way to hear their sound. As Pollard's budget improved, so did his songwriting abilities; the result is that, while you don't get thirty-second ideas committed to tape anymore, his concepts are more fully developed, the songs longer, and his lyrics greater opportunity to explore.
'Motor Away' is the best kiss-off song ever written, threatening to throw its white-hot pistons with lyrics of soaring abandon, pushing forward with every grand guitar assault, like a V8 engine hiccuping decorously on nitrous surges, of confetti cannons blasting in tightly-enclosed spaces. It starts like a tale: When you motor away/when you free yourself from the chance of a lifetime/the time will come when you add up the numbers. In other words, everything will have its way, and something greater than us is keeping score. Belittle every voice that told you so, advises Pollard, digging against the naysayers and detractors. Fifty-five seconds in, it no longer matters the location of a finish line, or even its existence. The guitars spark, and add crunchy crutches to prop up the corners of your mouth into participating in the song's sardonic smile.
But this isn't all Kumbaya, happy-happy-joy-joy. Pollard is sometimes a man down but never out. Even as 'Watch Me Jumpstart' embraces his new self, it's with aspersions cast towards the pessimists and party-poopers. And shoot me down/And bring me down/But I won't be around/As you run through the places you love/I remember the faces that cry/And they're pulling me back so I have to die. Avoiding stagnation is a recurring theme in the best Guided by Voices songs, by keeping enemies closer. Love, when it occasionally appears, is less about mutuality than in elevating the other, as on 'Chasing Heather Crazy.' Trailing off the likes of it/she likes it when it grows/Sending out a candidate/she's sinking her foes/peaking out then leveling wherever it goes.' Life goes up, down, all around, and if he's not a part of it, he'll at least send a postcard and flowers.
Elsewhere, Pollard's tender 'The Best of Jill Hives' might as well be autobiographical, and describes the singer mesmerized by the heroine's unquenchable spirit. I don't know where you find your nerve/I don't know how you choose your words/speak that ones that suit you worst/keep you drowned and sad and cursed/savor the ones that come alive/save them for the best of Jill Hives. Pollard's is a triumph of the human spirit over adversity, as it recognizes linguistic limitations in our quest for togetherness. Regardless of what Steven Pinker or Noam Chomsky would say about language, its distillation into three minute tunes is a remarkable achievement, and to communicate something, anything, about our lives is more so. In an era when the simplest of words can be interpreted, misconstrued, and leveraged, to get anything from a pop song is stunning.
Bee Thousand, from 1994, was lauded the greatest alternative rock album of the nineties, by Spin Magazine, ahead of Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted, and Radiohead's OK Computer; high praise, indeed, and richly deserved. Like Pavement's Steven Malkmus, Pollard tends towards lyrical abstraction, but different in the scope of his band's ambitions, not treating fame like something in the sink, but as a natural extension of making music that touches others and encourages better living through Marshall stacks. Bee Thousand featured 'I am a Scientist', Pollard's manifesto. I am a scientist/I seek to understand me/All of my impurities and evils yet unknown/I am a journalist/I write to you to show you/I am an incurable/And nothing else behaves like me. Pollard is the everyman, just like his audience. He is his own man, and he's not going to compromise anything, for anybody. 'Watch Me Jumpstart,' from the equally supreme 1995 album, Alien Lanes, is another statement of purposeful individuality, and as 'his old skin is peeled', he 'sees an opening and busts into the field.' The optimism extends outward on later albums, on numbers like 'Official Iron Man Rally Song', which encourages downtrodden workers not to take themselves too seriously, and to 'stop crawling on their knees,' a resolution he revisits for the anti-authoritarian anthem, 'Captain's Dead.'
Guided by Voices disbanded in 2004, but not before Pollard had briefly dated Kim Deal of Breeders and Pixies fame, played Lollapalooza, gotten some MTV play, and brought showmanship back to rock concerts. While the band is defunct, he continues to record at a torrid pace behind his other bands, most notably the Boston Spaceships. Being a devotee is remains time-consuming, but ineffably worthwhile. You may never meet Pollard in the flesh, unless you drink heavily in seedy Dayton bars, but you can know him through his music, and you'll be much better for it. The band always leaves me with ringing ears and a full heart, and for someone who sometimes counts as a number, those are things that I will keep. I, too, am a scientist, searching for clues to unlock my mind, forever on the run from the teenage FBI, flying everywhere with helicopter, seeking to finish, front to end.
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