Penetrating Silent Lives: Guided By Voices

'Count the days that we have wasted from the start

Eat the words, build a playground in your head

Turn and run the angel's calling

You say when and I say I'm falling

Up and down from broken down buildings

Back and forth but you know why I left you for so long' -R. Pollard

In the last days of the West, prophesying the inevitable taming force of civilisation, Robert Ford reckoned he had publicly reenacted Jesse James's murder some 800 times. Ford eventually settled down, opened a bar, and got himself shot by Edward O'Kelly in 1892. O'Kelly was pardoned for the killing and went on to die in his own shootout with the police in 1904. The railroad came, the suburbs built, the common land seized, and life moved on.

    In 1983, at the age of 26, a 4th grade school teacher in Dayton, Ohio, switches to part time and makes one last serious go at forming a rock and roll band. That band would settle on the name 'Guided By Voices' and, after numerous lineup changes, would self-publish their debut album, Devil Between My Toes, in February 1987. That school teacher, Robert 'Bob' Pollard, although already 30 and married with children, would insist upon continuing to self-produce and finance his music, recording much of it with whoever happened to be around at the time. 7 Years and 6 albums later, Pollard, on the brink of disbanding the band for good, would cobble together Bee Thousand (1994) from whatever he had lying around. He had, accidentally, birthed an indie-rock masterpiece. The perfect outsiders, marching to the beat of Beatles bootlegs played through state fair stereo systems and chanting from their collaged and cut up hymnals. Guided By Voices had emerged.

    As of August 2021, Guided By Voices have released: 33 studio albums, 27 compilations, 21 EPs, and 9 live albums. Studio album #34 releases on the 22nd of October and marks their 8th album in 2 years. This isn't counting the some 56 albums Pollard has released either solo or with side-projects. But, why should you care about a band with only 13 thousand Instagram followers despite releasing more than 500 songs over a 35 year period without ever making a serious dent into the music landscape? 
  

    Because Guided By Voices are the jesters of the great untamed musical frontier. 

   To elaborate on that I'll need to a minute to confront a recurring thought which emerged throughout this process.  The challenge of this article has been to come up with a way of approaching the subject of 'mythology' in music. Mythology, is the preferred mode of PR firms, record labels, and whoever makes BBC Four and Sky Arts documentaries. Mythology, is the reason you pretend to care about bands who haven't made any interesting music in 45 years and are willing to shell out three-figure sums for tickets to see musicians in their 70s play a greatest hits album whilst you sit half a mile away in some gaudy arena. We've all done it. I'm guilty of it. I've seen The Who 3 times, and 50% of that band have been dead for the last 20 years. Guided By Voices simply can't be considered in terms of mythology. There is a graveyard of drafts all dedicated to my attempts to weave either, the band's narrative, or the narrative of my obsession with the band. Every attempt has felt disingenuous and inadequate. To narrativise Guided By Voices into a simple story of a band rising from obscurity to becoming icons of the left-field would not only be wrong, but also incredibly boring. Telling the story of how I went from not understanding them to being locked down with their entire back catalogue during a pandemic would be tasteless, pathetic, and more than a little masturbatory. These kinds of stories aren't part of the dance of Guided By Voices. A band that is only occasionally an actual band, making musical melange from bits and pieces of other songs, releasing album after album without any clear theme or progress. All the questions you have come with easy answers. Why do the albums sound like 'that'? Because they could only afford to record using a 4-track in whoever's basement was free. Why are there so many members? Because they had no static lineup, if you turned up on a day they were recording then you made it on to the album. Why does everything flow like it's held together by tape? Because 'construct, deconstruct, reconstruct' was the mantra. If a song doesn't work, why not rebuild it from scraps that might make it work? 

    How can a band with no mythology be so compelling? 

    Books have been written, Podcasts produced, Documentaries and concert films made. I know, I've consumed as much of it as possible and I only feel further from the truth than when I began. The reason the narrative of a rise to success doesn't work is because there isn't really any success. Not success in the way we think of when we think of Pop Music. There is a brief period of critical success with the release of Bee Thousand (1994), Alien Lanes (1995), and Under the Bushes, Under the Stars (1996), by which point Bob Pollard was already in his 30s, but the interest from the wider musical world hasn't been there. There's no major single that gets played on oldies radio, no biopic, not recognisable logo t-shirt. The band only manage a modest 13 to 15 thousand followers on social media. You have to go back to 2012's Let's Go Eat The Factory to find the last time popular music reviewer Anthony Fantano covered them on his show, The Needle Drop. And, I expect, the level of familiarity most of my readers have with Guided By Voices beyond this article is quite low. They put out a couple of albums every year, tour when they want to, and go straight back to writing. It's a musical exile of their own making. They aren't like those bands who, maybe, have one standout album then fade out, releasing albums no one cares about in order to complete a contractual obligation. They also aren't like bands who, once vital and vibrant, now have to vomit out a mediocre album every three years to justify a world tour and a festival set where they only play the songs their audience remember. Guided By Voices exist as a vehicle to make music, and they will continue to do so as long as Bob Pollard wants to. They are also completely independent. They release music on their own label, having never rejoined Matador Records after their 2012 reformation. Their fans have been picked up away and they'll be there until the end, still having campfire debates about the merits of Universal Truths and Cycles (2002) over Earthquake Glue (2003). 

    Guided By Voices are compelling because they have seemingly actualised the fantasy of a band. They, lyrically, sonically, and aesthetically recall the idealism of the British Invasion filtered through a 60s American domesticity that conjures images of Saturday morning cartoons, comic books, and Monkees singles on the radio. Punk emerges as a surface level characteristic of the music (the tempos are high, the songs are rudimentary) but it eventually becomes clear that the band's Punk credentials emerge in their manifestation of a purely DIY aesthetic. I think the image of GBV as a product of Punk, musically, appears in their subtle aural similarity to The Velvet Underground. In many ways, if you'd said that: Guided By Voices are a geeky and sincere counterpoint to The Velvet Underground; I'd laugh, but I wouldn't disagree. It's these two elements: the permanent recurring image of the childlike perception of the past; and this tendency towards a non-commercial, outsider-ism, most likely a product of necessity; present Guided By Voices in a way that feels completely out side of time and outside of narrative. They are to music what a bubble is to a circle drawn on the ground, a loci point for infinite reflection within the musical boundary of memory and industry. There are ideas taken from 60s pop singles, experimental noise suites, and the scraps of a seemingly endless supply of half finished demo tapes. Bee Thousand feels less like a Pop album, and more akin to a masterful work of collage art, mirroring Pollard's homemade album covers. And yet, it is impossible to mistake it for anything other than Pop music. Somewhat lyrically opaque Pop music, but joyously and unashamedly Pop music. Pop Music filtered through an aural nostalgia more mature, more sincere, more magical than it had ever been prior to Pollard.

    Lyrically, You could dedicate a whole book to Bob Pollard. I've always found the comparisons that Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine (Television), make between themselves and the poets, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, to be more than a little generous to themselves. I, personally, have never really heard the comparison. When I have heard it, it's usually because they've been trying far too hard. Because of this, I've never really bought into the whole 'songwriter-poet' idea. There are a few exceptions, I think: Shane MacGowan (The Pogues) is the obvious one, and I once had a meeting with an experimental criticism tutor where we extolled the unique virtues of Mark E. Smith (The Fall). Because of this, I'm reluctant to call Pollard a poet. I think he'd probably agree with my hesitancy. Pollard's very particular set of lyrical skills make them very difficult to discuss outside of their musical context. There's a kind of magic that happens in Pop music wherein individual words, or clusters of noun phrases, transform from being nonsensical clippings into beautiful vessels of abstract emotions once they are spoke out loud. Complete gobbledegook becomes magnificent once contextualised within the unsubtle machinery of sound. Pollard's aim is not to tell conventional musical narratives, or to rewrite the same love song over and over. The aim is to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct, those familiar frameworks using his own idiosyncratic mixture of childlike abstraction and subtle turn of phrase. Bob Pollard is a master at finding the words, no matter how absurd, that just sound right. It's in the lyrics, the song titles, the album titles, the very name of the band; everything about Guided By Voices just sounds right. I don't really like printing lyrics away from music, I think that'll do the lyrics and Pollard a disservice. If you want to get a greater sense of what I mean I recommend you check out:

- The Best of Jill Hives

- Echoes Myron

- Twilight Campfighter

- Everybody Thinks That I'm a Raincloud (When I'm Not Looking)

- The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory

    I've actually been working on this article for a long time. Trying to do justice to a body of work I so deeply admire has proven to be a far greater challenge than I thought it would be. It seemed wrong to make this a pandemic retrospective. It would have been foolish to try to do a huge discography retrospective. I'd tried doing biographical observations and abstract experiments. Little by little sections of this were built up out of the pieces that worked and, the parts that didn't, I scrapped. The second paragraph was originally a huge sprawling discussion about the nature of mythology and repetition and why the retelling of stories always strips and girdles away the bark of truth from history. I eventually settled on introducing Bob Pollard, the hero of the piece, using him as the point of gravity which we could allow all supplementary feelings to orbit. Ultimately that's where GBV find their support system amongst their own flirtation with collapse. As long as Pollard is there, then GBV will remain as they are. They'll pick up new members, drop them off when their time is done. The circus that never ends, only changes. 

    There's something incredibly American about the frontier. If we assess their literature then we'll quite quickly find that they're terrified of it and all it represents. Out beyond civilisation lies wilderness and witchcraft and the siren call that leads men to madness. But, we'll also come to know that there's nothing more enticing to the American than the tale of the person who went out into that wilderness and made it his own. I think we're all a little like that now. In a world that is becoming increasingly controlled and sanitised, where our every move is predicted and accommodated back into the system, we need to see people living independently and following their own pure human instinct. This is why we pay to see Robert Ford kill Jesse James over and over again. This is why we want to see Guided By Voices releasing music out of their basement. We need to know that Bob Pollard is high kicking and microphone swinging through songs about robots, witches, crystal bowls filled with trifle, and the oncoming 14 Cheerleader Coldfront.  Our bodies and our minds are the battleground where civilisation and the call of the frontier engage in constant conflict. Before you go to bed tonight, open your window and look out into the world/ And just out there, if you listen closely enough, maybe you'll hear the song and maybe in the distance you'll see what's left of the campfires. Flickering lights revealing holy grails.

                                                                                                                           William H. Bonney

Guided By Voices - The Best of Jill Hives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5PotUTj558