YOU'RE LOOKING AT THE FACE OF A 43-YEAR-OLD FORMER 4TH GRADE TEACHER
FROM DAYTON, OHIO. IT'S ALSO THE FACE OF ROCK 'N' ROLL TODAY. RECOGNIZE
IT? PERHAPS YOU SHOULD TAKE A CLOSER LOOK.
While Robert Pollard may look more like your old guidance counselor
than a rock star, he is the singer, songwriter and spiritual leader of
the most high-octane rock 'n' roll band on the planet, Dayton's own Guided
by Voices. For more than 20 years, Pollard has been cranking out three-minute
verse-chorus-verse songs by the hundreds, all characterized by simple,
loud, hard-hitting chord progressions and catchy, powerful lyrics; Pollard's
singing has drawn comparisons to the Beatles, Cheap Trick and just about
any '80s progressive rocker you can think of. There's no choreography
to Guided by Voices. No pyrotechnics. No DJ scratching records. No experimental
departures. No Satan. There's not even a cool haircut in the band. just
a lot of songs, a lot of beer and some really high leg kicks.
]Ironically, the fact that Robert Pollard didn't break out of the garage
until the ripe old age of 36 might actually be a good thing. In many ways,
at 43 he's just getting started. And truth be told, the music world needs
him now more than ever. Go ahead. See for yourself. Watch an hour of MTV
Take a trip to the record store. You'll find boy bands like 'N Sync crooning
pre-pubescently, costumed like extras from Star Trek II. There's Eminem,
using his "flow" to diss teenage lip-syncing vamps Britney Spears and
Christina Aguilera. Of course, the three acts sit so closely to one another
atop the pop charts that their only real differences are a sports bra
and the use of the word motherfucker. And then, of course, we have the
rockers Metallica, whose drummer Lars Ulrich chose to personally rat-out
300,000 of the band's fans as copyright pirates this summer for downloading
or, um, "stealing," his songs over the popular music share software, Napster.
Are you wondering what's happened to good old rock 'n' roll? Wondering
where the band is that can still send a chill down your spine, leave you
singing a catchy verse or playing air guitar-the band that won't sue you
for copyright infringement? Well, worry not. They've quit their day jobs.
And Guided by Voices is coming soon to a bar near you.
"The band was just totally for fun," says Robert Pollard, recalling
his unlikely late-Iife transformation from middle-class respectability
to rock 'n' roll hero. It's early on a Monday morning and Pollard is in
a good mood, eager to talk about his life and music. "When we first started
making music, my only ambition, and this is the truth, was for us maybe
to appear 20 years later on some kind of compilation. That wouud've been
it for me. Obviously, we got a little higher than that.
For 14 years, Robert Pollard's "real life" job was as an elementary
school teacher in the Dayton, Ohio public school systern. But all along
he was writing and recording songs with his buddies, mostly as an excuse
to drink beer, get loud and have fun. "The thing is, we never even tried
to make it," Pollard recalls. "We were basically just a rock band with
no money. We never tried to sell ourselves at all."
And then it happened. After a three-piece band from Seattle named Nirvana,
led by talented songwriter and tortured front-man Kurt Cobain, tried not
to sell themselves, they instead sold seven million records and sparked
a garage band renaissance, dubbed the alternative movement, or "Lo-Fi,"
for low fidelity. "Suddenly we kind of had a category to be placed into,"
Pollard says of the early '90s. "That whole Lo-Fi thing started, and because
we had been doing it for longer than those bands, we were kind of thrust
to the top, as being the pioneers of it." Overnight, Robert Pollard became,
literally, too cool for school.
But after 14 years in the fourth grade-about 13 years longer than most
careers in rock 'n' roll-and pushing 40, the age when most rockers enter
rehab, go bankrupt, look stupid in leather pants and ultimately wind up
a subject for VH1's Behind the Music--could the teacher called "Mr. Rocker,"
married and with two children of his own, really just walk away from the
blackboard to pursue a "Lo-Fi" rock 'n' roll dream? Pollard says the choice
was scary, but not difficult.
"You can talk about that kind of decision with people, but they don't
understand," recalls Pollard, of the decision to pursue music full-time.
"When you've been working, teaching for 14 years, and then you lay on
your fellow teachers and your family, your mom and dad, that I'm going
to quit and go into music-people didn't even attempt to understand that
I would throw away a 14-year teaching career with benefits and everything."
Pollard admits that he never thought he could make a living as a musician.
"I never really had any true ambition to do it," he says. "But I always
wanted to. Everybody wants to be a rocker. It's the best job. It's decadent
and fun."
Decadent and fun sums up Guided by Voices perfectly. In stark contrast
to the scripted, click track, lip-synced arena shows of today, Guided
by Voices is a throwback to the good old days of rock. The band is infamous
for its blistering, raucous and alcohol-fueled stage shows. It's all part
of the quintessential rock 'n' roll experience that legions of loyal Guided
by Voices fans have come to expect from the band.
On stage, Pollard plays the part of rock 'n' roll god with relish, constantly
chugging beer, smoking, singing in a Brit-pop accent and pulling off classic
leg kicks like an NFL punter. He spews humorous observations and rock
cliches effortlessly between songs, while the band huddles to light cigarettes
or swig from a whiskey bottle. And the band almost always plays until
they are no longer physically able to continue, either from exhaustion
or intoxication. Six or seven encores are almost automatic. If you do
the rock calculus on style points alone, Guided by Voices just might be
the greatest American rock band Ever.
"When we first broke out and we had to start playing shows where people
were showing up chanting G-B-V, G-B-V... I was petrified," says Pollard,
explaining the origin of his onstage - Drinking. "It definitely takes
the edge -off'to have a few beers." Pollard says he tries not to cross
the line to where the shows get sloppy. But that's just a flat-out lie.
The man likes to drink beer and play rock 'n' roll. If the band's having
a good time, everyone has a good time. And Pollard knows it.
"Bob's little trick is that he says when it looks like he's chugging
beer onstage that most of it's spilling out of his mouth," says Jim Greer,
who played bass for Guided by Voices from 1994 to '96. "But having said
that, he still goes through quite a bit of beer. There are five cases
of beer on the rider and one bottle of Jack Daniels. And it's gone by
the end. It didn't drink itself, I know that much."
More famous for his role as a music journalist with SPIN magazine in
the '90s, where he penned the memorable A Year in the Life of Rock and
Roll series, Greer now works in Los Angeles as a screenwriter but remains
close to Pollard. "It was fun, always fun," he recalls of his days touring
with Pollard and Guided by Voices. "Most of the time when we were touring,
everyone's getting drunk, and we're just having a really good time, and
that's the whole point of it," he says.
Of course, that's most of the time. There's also the time Pollard was
tossed from an Austin, Texas punk rock club for heckling an opening band.
And there's that night in Toronto, when the band was opening for Chicago's
Urge Overkill. Opening is something the band never likes to do and rarely
does. Prohibited from performing encores by the Urge Overkill crew, tensions
were already running high that night. But when Pollard returned to the
stage after a typically hot set to acknowledge the crowd's ritual chants
of "G-B-V, G-B-V," the Urge Overkill crew apparently took exception. There
was some pushing and shoving. "You just don't push Bob," says Greer. "You
just don't. It's just not a good idea." It took about five members of
security to subdue Pollard, and the band left the tour a few shows later.
Urge Overkill broke up shortly thereafter.
"I don't think I drink on tour as much as I used to," says Pollard in
his defense. "I used to start drinking sometimes at noon, and by the time
we played, I'd be completely trashed. Now, I start drinking a couple of
beers a few hours before the show. Except for some of these hometown shows."
Oh yes, the hometown shows. They say the hometown shows are always the
toughest. And as a former teacher and pillar of the Dayton community,
they can be particularly tough for Pollard. "When I play a hometown show,
if I'm a little too drunk, they'll really assassinate me in the paper,"
Pollard says, pointing to the band's latest hometown gig, a benefit performance.
After partying with friends for three hours and then playing for another
three, Pollard says he was stumbling drunk and exhausted. "A couple of
times I fell into the drums," he recalls. A few days later, the local
music columnist tore him apart.
"He was comparing me to like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, saying this
was a tragedy in the making. My parents, and other people, like the older
ladies I used to teach with, they got all concerned-is Bobby OK? Is that
really happening to him? I mean, it'd be different if I came out in the
first half-hour and I was like that. But this was after six hours of drinking
and playing. I would think that would be heroic to someone who's into
rock 'n' roll."
Despite Pollard's local critics, to those who are into rock 'n' roll,
make no mistake, Robert Pollard is a rock hero. And he intends to stick
around for a while. "At first, people would say this may not last very
long. This may last a year and you're done. Well, it's still going pretty
strong," he says.
Ultimately, Pollard's maturity at the time of his success has served
him well. At a point when many young bands get sucked into the rock 'n'
roll machine, becoming beholden to large record companies, bargaining
away their artistic freedom and touring with large, cash-draining entourages,
Pollard chose a simpler, if less glamorous route, signing first with Matador,
the renowned independent label, over music giant Warner Brothers. "That
was a conscious decision on my part," says Pollard. "It was Warner Brothers
and Matador for like eight months. It took me eight months to make a decision
because Warner Brothers was being really, really nice to us. But I also
kind of saw through it. I didn't know if I was ready to go from complete
obscurity right to the major labels. I thought we might get lost in the
shuffle."
It's a timeless rock 'n' roll tale, says Greer. On one side of the table
sit the greedy record companies and on the other side the starving anists.
But artists, he notes, ultimately make the choice.
"You can't put all the blame on record companies," says Greer. "There's
enough history there to know what's going to happen if you sign to a major
label, and there are ways to do it without being destroyed. If you're
not intending to make a record that is going to sell well, you're going
to get dropped. And if you take all this money as an advance, you're gonna
have to pay it back. Bob was smart enough not to do that."
By forsaking the quick strike, Pollard has survived a '90s alternative
gold rush that saw a number of promising bands destroyed. And by remaining
true to their rock roots, the band has developed a large, loyal fan following.
They've also been able to make music at an astonishing rate. Pollard is
probably the most prolific songwriter in modern rock, with his combined
solo/Guided by Voices catalog numbering more than 600 tracks.
In October, Pollard headed back into the studio to record the follow-up
to Guided by Voices' first major label release, 1999's Do the Collapse.
Produced by the Cars' Ric Ocasek, Do the Collapse was the band's slickest,
cleanest-sounding record to date and helped showcase Pollard's powerful
pop vocals and signature hooks. The singles from the record, "Teenage
FBI," "Hold on Hope" and "Surgical Focus" earned considerable airplay
on the radio. And the band even played on network TV on the Conan O'Brien
Show, prompting the music media to suggest the band was ready to break
into the mainstream. Pollard isn't so sure.
"We're trying to shed that indie rock tag," he says. "But I guess it's
a good tag to have, with what mainstream music is like. Our thing is just
to do what we do-play rock in a purist sense. Hopefully, something will
happen where rock kind of comes back again."
It's logical to assume that after recording their second major label
release, Guided by Voices will pile into their limo and catch their private
jet for a whirlwind tour of America's greatest arenas to follow it up.
"Yeah, right," says Pollard. "What, no private rock jet?" I ask. "No jet,"
he says. "We're not as big as Ween yet."
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