“And there were days when we danced.” ~ My strange and wonderful days on and off the road with rock’s best kept secret, Guided By Voices

For the record, I consider Guided By Voices to be one of the best rock bands on the planet, and in history. I consider Robert Pollard (Bobby from here on out, I’ve never known him as Robert, that’s for others) to be amongst the greatest songwriters to have ever written rock. That being said, I am neither fanboy nor completist. There are many to fill that role, and to do it better than I could ever hope or wish to.

That being said, I was there at the conception, and I have an experience here that is somewhat, if not completely unique. 

It all started in 1974. I was fourteen or fifteen years old, and my older brother brought home some new music, and that music blew my teenage mind.

David Bowie’s Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Mott The Hoople’s All The Young Dudes, T.Rex’s The Slider, Yessongs by Yes, Lou Reed’s Transformer, UFO’s Force It, Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak, and Blue Oyster Cult’s first offerings suddenly showed up in our bedroom.

This was all Bobby Pollard’s fault.

I had known of Bobby for years. We met through little league baseball, and my brother’s friendship with Bob.

Bob was an extremely mercurial legend on the ball field. Famous for being a flame-throwing fast baller with a completive nature that bordered on the unhealthy, complete with a fully developed work ethic and sense of accomplishment. Any failing was met with a complete refusal to accept that failure, from himself or others. These traits have never failed Bob in art or commerce. Over time he learned to hone these tendencies, discarding the less noble aspects and to make the rest work for him and not against him.

But, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.

When I was fourteen, my listening interests were pretty cool. I knew the classics, the Beatles, Stones, the Who, and other rock radio staples, but what you must understand is the in 1974, none of the music I mentioned earlier was to be found on Midwestern rock radio.

My brother started bring home these strange and wonderful offerings along with promises of more to be found in the pages of magazines such as Circus, Creem, Trouser Press, Rock Scene, Melody Maker, and NME. When I asked exactly where the fuck he was finding these pearls among the swine, he blamed it all on his burgeoning friendship with Bobby Pollard.

I knew Bob, but we weren’t friends, I was "Toenail," the brother of his classmate and pal.

This treasure trove of goodies led my on an expedition of exploration that continues to this moment.

A treasure trove that warped my mind with Bowie’s exclamations of “and these children that you spit on, as they try to change their worlds, are immune to your consultations, they’re quite aware of what they’re going through, Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes,” and split my fingers as a young guitarist as I emulated the guitar histrionics of Mick Ronson, Michael Schenker, and Buck Dharma. Life changing moments to say the least.

I dove into these lessons with great enthusiasm and love, in a few short years I was an accomplished young guitar player ready to take his next leap.

My next leap was to form a band.

I had never formed a band before, had never played with other musicians save for a fleet fingered neighborhood whiz kid named Wendell Napier, who had shown me the in and outs of spanking the plank. Many were the day when Wendell and I would sidle into local music stores, and befuddle folks with our abilities to play together seamlessly and even play reasonably complex harmonies in the footsteps of those who came before us. Wendell decided that it was time to move forward and form a band, my first.

In the ass backwards way of unwieldy youths, we booked a gig before we gathered our troops. We had a room the held several hundred, and just a week to pull it off.

We made the obvious calls and drafted bassist Mitch Mitchell and drummer Bruce “Smitty’ Smith, both who had experience with playing in other local outfits. Then it came down to a singer, a frontman. 

Wendell wanted to draft a singer he had worked with previously. I asked about their repertoire, and he replied that they had played a lot of Southern rock. This I could not abide. I liked Lynyrd Skynyrd and the likes of Molly Hatchet well enough, but my experience with these flashier glam and hard rock bands prevented me from wanting anything to do with the imagery of confederate flags and unkempt beards.

Anacrusis - the first gig

I told Wendell that the only singer I would consider would be Bobby Pollard.

He looked at me like I had five eyes, but I explained to him that while Bobby had, indeed, never been in a band, I had heard him sing and that he knew every cool song in the world. He wasn’t thrilled with the idea, but he too had been listening to my record collection and agreed that it would be cool to play some songs that weren’t a direct lift from local FM radio. He somewhat begrudgingly agreed.

Now we just had to recruit a guy who already considered himself a superstar of some sort, even though it was not a status born of any stage but the playing fields of his athletic fame. Bob always knew in his heart exactly who he was.

We called him on a Monday, and told him our masterplan. Here’s Bob’s recollection from Guided by Voices: A Brief History: Twenty-One Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll, James Greer: 

“Tony Conley and Wendell Napier called me on Monday night and said, ‘Do you want to be in our band? We have a show on Friday night.’ 

“So, I go, ‘No, there's no way, that's impossible.’ They called me again the next day and said, ‘So, do you want to do it or not?’ I said, ‘Okay, man, you must have something if you're going to be that persistent.’ I practiced on Tuesday night with Mitch and Wendell. 

“On Wednesday night I practiced with the other guitar player, Tony Conley, and our drummer, Bruce Smith. 

“On Thursday we had a full band rehearsal and because everybody knew their shit, we had like twenty-five songs. We had them down in one practice.

“We played the show on Friday, and there had to be three or four hundred people there. We did all covers, we did UFO, Cheap Trick, AC/DC, and kicked ass. 

“I've never been so excited about a show in my life. It's been all downhill from there, haha!”

We were young, fast, and scientific. We rocked like fuck, but we were also clueless. Local legends and overnight has beens, but in that brief time we wrote about a dozen originals with such titles as “Sonny the Monster,” “Fame and Fortune,” “Status Symbol,” “Self-Inflicted Ariel Nostalgia,” “Daddy’s in the State Pen,” and “Somewhere Sometime.”

We then went on to play a short residency (probably a few weekends) at a local dive called The Domino club, ran by a bearded biker by the name of Gibby Davis, and a handful of local club dates and some private parties. 

These shows were things of local legend. The original songs were good enough that we could play a whole set of them in the middle of a night of cover songs, and convincingly fool local bar owners who had no appetite for original rock. Bob could write great lyrics and melodies from day one. 

However, we were without resources or knowledge, so we died of not really knowing what to do next. I’ve heard other tales of our demise, but I tend to refute them as convenient tales weaved after the fact.

It was a year or two before Bob and I reconnected after Anacrusis had fizzled.

Bobby called me at some point and said he had a new project in mind. I was missing playing with him and being in a band, so I anxiously agreed.

This was a new concept with a new twist.

Bob had learned how to construct rudimentary guitar parts (usually single stringed efforts) to accompany his already golden melodies and lyrics, and he turned to me to flesh them out as band arrangements, something I would do again several decades later with a Pollard side project called the Moping Swans, but I digress.

We convened in drummer Kevin Fennell’s basement along with Mitch Mitchell again on bass, a power trio plus a frontman much like the Who in form.

Bob came to our first practice session with a school issue manilla folder that had written upon the tab, Guided By Voices. This was around 1980, perhaps a year later. I wonder what that manilla folder full of smelly mimeographed lyrics would fetch today? 

Song titles included “A Quality of Armor,” “Arachnid Pleasures,” “Poor What’s His Name,” and about six or seven others. These were materially different from the Anacrusis originals as they were the first to feature chord structures and arrangements from Bob’s incredible musical imagination. I constructed chords, fills, and other accoutrements, and they sounded to my ears quite fantastic. 

To my knowledge, the cassette filled with these tunes has been lost to the ages with the exception of “A Quality of Armor,” which found its way onto the later classic GBV album, Propeller in 1992. This tune contained what I considered one of Bob’s first fully developed set of lyrics:

Oh yeah, I'm going to drive my car

Oh yeah, I'm going to go real far

As we were sitting here in the final stages

Staring at the screen as the battle rages

You were finding God in the dictionary

Taking photographs in the cemetery

Oh yeah, I'm going to drive my car

Oh yeah, I'm going to go real far

Beyond the shadow of a doubt

Beyond the power of your clout

The worst offense is intelligence

The best defense is belligerence

How we stalemate our predicament

Governed by tissue and filament

Oh yeah, I'm going to drive my car

Oh yeah, I'm going to go real far

Beyond the shadow of a doubt,

Beyond the power of your clout,

Beyond the secret bogus world,

Beyond the Montezuma Halls,

Beyond the shadow of a doubt,

Beyond the power of your clout,

Beyond the secret bogus world,

Beyond the Montezuma Halls

Yes, even then, Bobby Pollard was a musical genius on the par with everyone he had listened to and learned from.

Even his band name, and in my opinion his musical persona was a tribute to his voluminous knowledge of rock, and the voices that informed his art. He was truly, Guided By Voices.

This early iteration again fizzled, and while I’ve read humorous and nearly slanderous versions of how this early version of his musical identity ended, I think the truth is that it simply died of not knowing what to do next. Why any other tale persists somewhat mystifies me, and I will add that I’ve never failed to show up for a gig in my life. God knows I have foibles aplenty, and while I’m the first to admit my many failings, this is simply not amongst them, a convenient tale for someone made up for reasons unknowable. Of course, if you live the type of life I’ve led (and never denied or defended), you get used to wild exaggerations where the simple truth would suffice, c’est la vie, que sera sera, and who really gives a fuck? Not me, but I have to speak to my truth at the end of the day. It’s complicated, it would seem to some, I suppose.

After this, I moved to Los Angeles, Bob returned to the classroom, and our paths didn’t cross again for many years. This is something I’ve always regretted as, a) I think we were excellent musical partners, and b) I simply missed the guy. I’ve heard million crazy tales about Bob, ego, self centeredness, and other items of jealousy and ignorance, but to this day I only remember the guy as a fantastically engaging and generous soul. 

I re-entered the realm of the now Robert Pollard and Guided By Voices while I was living in Portland, Oregon in 1999. I saw that the now famous wonder kids of indie rock were playing a local gig, and I told my new wife that we had to check them out. We went to the gig at Barbati’s Pan, which was a fucking incredible show (I had never seen a Guided By Voices performance to this point, and it blew my mind. All made even better by my introduction to my dear friends Nate Farley, Doug Gillard, Tim Tobias, and my favorite drummer and world class nice guy, Jim Macpherson. After the usual booze filled evening Bobby said, “You guys should move to Dayton.”

We did.

I moved back to Dayton, and fell into the Dayton life. As I’ve often said, there are two things to do in Dayton. There’s drinking, and there’s…drinking. So, we drank.

I was largely lost in the bottle at this point in my life, and while it was incredibly fun, it was also incredibly decadent and irresponsible (on my part).

Musically, we played footsie a bit, and I produced several songs for Bob, including the 2001 track, “Bristol Girls” for the compilation album, Matter Dominates Spirit - Jim Shepard, and a couple of tracks for Bob’s 2005 EP, Zoom (Happens All Over The World), including the title track “Zoom (Happens All Over The World) Soundtrack,” and the Doug Gillard performed guitar instrumental, “Dr. Fuji and Henry Charleston (Zoom Variation).”

To this day I consider Doug Gillard to be not just an underrated guitar player, but one of the greatest guitarists and musical sidekicks on the planet.

During these years, Bob and his soon-to-be wife Sara were living in an apartment directly above Monica and I in the famed Cannery Building in Dayton. It was there that I recorded Bob many times, including the demos for the 2004 release, Half Smiles of the Decomposed, which Bob literally performed as an acoustic performance with a few overdubs, but little else. An amazing performance by any measure that I was stunned to witness, as I had simply never seen him do this, and also that I suspect a very few have. 

I’ve never stopped dreaming of a Pollard acoustic tour, but I think that one will be left to my imagination (even though a Bob and Doug tour would have amazing appeal and cash cow potential).  

Our last musical collaboration came just after the first demise of Guided By Voices.

The Moping Swans was the first project put together after GBV’s famed Electrifying Conclusion shows, and our EP was recorded in February of 2005.

The Moping Swans again saw me playing musical director to Bob’s brilliant songwriting, and marked the first time we had ever worked as a guitar team. I think maybe the project was born of my drunkenly badgering Bob to do another musical collaboration, but it was still a thrill and an honor to again be fleshing out his incredible compositions, and composing some slashing solos, a relative rarity for a Pollard project. This is probably the closest thing in his catalog to arena rock, which he always enjoyed and rigorously avoided. We recorded the thing from stem to stern in about three hours, and it was a joy to make music with the great Greg Demos and Jimmy Mac, who tied the whole room together with his rock steady beats.

And, that’s about it. We never again crossed musical swords and as my life fell apart and Bob’s star ascended our paths have seldom crossed as sometimes happens in life.

My love for Bob, Sara, and all things GBV remains untended like a garden out of season, but I’d love to think we’ll meet again. 

I will say this. I’ve never learned more from any human I’ve ever met, and with the exception of Monica and Ian (our son), there is no one I love or respect more. If I do nothing else in this life, I can always say that I made some truly great music with Bob, Bobby, and Robert Pollard.

p.s. Much love to Bob, Sara, Jimmy, the Heed, Nate, Doug, Tim, Billy Dixon, Gibby, the Monument Club, and so many others that made this such a glorious, if infamous period of this rock ’n’ roll life. I’m sure there’s a lot I’ve left out (the Cheap Trick tour (?)), but this is enough for now.

This, as everything I write, was done live without a net, as one continuous thought, so please excuse any meaningful omissions.