story by Sean Condon
For years the routine was as steady as his never-ending output: Robert Pollard drinking coffee and writing songs from his home in Dayton, Ohio, while waiting for his friends to get home from work so they could grab a beer (or 17). Pollard still goes drinking with his childhood friends from Dayton, one constant group of people in a revolving door lineup of over 50 bandmates during his career, but a few years ago his routine of simply writing piles of new material took a radical new direction...after Pollard’s girlfriend bought him a CD burner.
The new technology prompted Pollard to begin sorting through a giant box of unmarked cassette tapes of experimental projects and basement jams from his past. Many of the previously discarded ideas that he found were in hindsight more interesting than some of the songs he had actually used, and a lot of them, he believed, could be transformed into new material. Soon, the dilemma of what to do with his new treasure chest left Pollard at a crossroads. "It was really cool because some of these songs were written in the '70s and they were all over the place," he told Chicago Innerview in a recent interview. "There was all this diversity and soon it became this epic monumental thing. When I recorded it with Todd Tobias it was like 'man I’m really into this' and the task at hand is 'what do I do? Do I fade it into the Fading Captain Series or do I make a decision?'"
POLLARD'S INNER VIEW |
“God forbid, I'm not saying I'm professional, I'm saying the show itself is. I do retain a certain aura of amateurism.” |
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It was that decision which led to the breakup of Guided By Voices, one of the most admired and entertaining underground rock groups of the '90s, who played their final show — a 4-hour, 62-song drunken marathon on New Year’s Eve 2004 — at Chicago's Metro. For more than 20 years Pollard, a grade school teacher until his mid-thirties, had been the core member of the group, recording an overwhelming collection of songs on whatever equipment was at hand, from personal four-track to professional recording studio. For half of those years, few outside of Dayton even knew the band existed. It wasn’t until the release of Bee Thousand in 1994, generally received as a debut even though they had already recorded six albums, that the simple immediacy found in Guided By Voices’ song fragments and endless queue of hooks became noticed.
The other result of Pollard’s decision is his new Merge double album From A Compound Eye, his first release since embarking on his new solo career. Made up from 15 of the "discovered" songs and 11 new ones, F.A.C.E. retains the whimsical nature of Pollard’s songwriting while digging up some of his roots. "For some reason, the record is a little more satisfying than anything I’ve done in a while,” said Pollard. “It prompted all these decisions of ‘what do I need to do with GBV?’ and the album itself made that pretty easy. At the time, I was wanting to break up GBV anyway. I was a bit tired of the name and being the leader of a band, so I thought this album is personal and of epic proportions and a good time for me to go solo. I saw GBV as something that I wanted to alleviate all the comparisons and expectations between lineups and albums from — [like] 'is this album as good as Bee Thousand?' I wanted to wrap that up and put it aside."
Another advantage to placing distance between himself and the band is that it has enabled Pollard to take a look at the worth of GBV as a body of work: "I like to think we provided inspiration for a lot of people that kind of felt like time is slipping by — [like] 'I do this and I do that and nothing is happening'. It didn’t happen for me until I was 36 years old and then we were kind of welcomed into the indie rock community with open arms. I never considered us to be an indie band or a lo-fi band, I always had arena rock aspirations. GBV allowed me to do what I wanted to do and it’s kind of a weird success story in its own way. Through perseverance, I was able to do what I wanted to do."
When Pollard, now 48, brings his success story back to town in all its glory, it may be a different type of scissor kick entertainment that fans have become accustomed to. Although he originally told his band to just bang it out on guitar like GBV used to do, this backing group has his new material polished and ready for live reproduction. "As far as what you had to do to be in GBV, it didn’t take much discipline," Pollard recalled. "I didn’t care about mistakes — pretty much the only thing you had to do was at least pretend to look cool and have fun, and get into it a little bit. If you did that, it was pretty easy. I think it is stepped up here a little bit on a higher professional level. God forbid, I’m not saying I’m professional, I’m saying the show itself is. I do retain a certain aura of amateurism."
Some level of professionalism does sound strange for the ex-frontman of a group known to have a full-time bartender set up on stage along with buckets labeled "puke" and "piss." Could it be that he is approaching 50 and feels more at home writing songs in his basement while waiting for his drinking buddies to get home from work than touring? Maybe that’s only part of the answer: "We used to have five cases of beer for a show,” Pollard noted. “Now it’s only four." Enough said.
Robert Pollard :: with the High Strung :: Metro :: March 31.
Listen to an mp3 of "Love Is Stronger Than Witchcraft" by ROBERT POLLARD - courtesy of Better Propaganda.