Blame it on the Monument Club. It all started on a Wednesday evening in December of 2004 at Wings (a joint many of you know well).
For the three of you that don’t know, Wings is a bar and grill best known for being the de facto clubhouse for the rag tag bunch of reprobates and bruisers from Bobby Pollard’s past known as the Monument Club. I’m writing this as an exclusive to the Guided By Voices Facebook group, but since I’m sure this will be seen elsewhere eventually, I’ll now explain that the Bobby Pollard I’ll be referring to is rock legend Robert Pollard, the rock legend who is Guided By Voices.
Pollard and I met in the little league days back in Northridge, a working class neighborhood in Dayton, Ohio.
Dayton is a strange town, a test market for America known for being the “Birthplace of Aviation,” and the longtime home of the Wright Brothers. Another little known fact about Dayton is the fact that this nondescript Midwestern city is that it was once responsible for contributing more patents to the national trust than any other city in America. Amongst a hot bed of mediocrity, the town has a streak of undeniable genius running through it. Bobby Pollard is one of those diamonds in this rough hewn town.
What is there to do in Dayton? Well, there’s drinking, and then there’s drinking. I believe this provides a lack of distractions that let’s the genius develop.
I knew none of this when I came to know Bob.
I was ten years old, and Pollard was a little league baseball legend already. He was a few years older, and had a reputation as a furious fast ball thrower whose temper was often as furious as his fast ball. Our teams squared off several times, so we knew of each other a bit as little leagers do.
A few years later, Bob and my brother were hanging out and discovering rock ‘n’ roll, and as a younger fellow I started tagging along.
Eventually Bob and I started trading albums and the joys of plunging deep into the crazy world od Trouser Press, Melody Maker, NME, Creem, and other such rock rags of the day.
As time went on we eventually played together in our first band, Anacrusis. I’m sure the intended readers here know the rest of the Pollard story, so I’ll fast forward.
After many years on the West Coast, I had returned to Dayton and was welcomed into the fold of the Monument Club brotherhood of mannish boys.
Since returning to Dayton I had recorded for Bob his cover of “Bristol Girl” for the tribute album, Matter Dominates Spirit - Jim Shepard Tribute in 2001, and contributed to the production of the Motel of Fools album, but that had been the extent of our musical involvement. We hadn’t made any music together. And this bugged me.
It bugged me for no big deal other than the fact that everything we had ever done playing together was pretty fucking magical. Bob was fond of telling people that it was I who taught him that a guitar should be struck with a certain velocity, and not strummed gently. True to this day that.
So, one December night in 2004 in a drunken moment in Wings (weren’t they all?), I drunkenly asked Bob, “When are we going to make a record together?”
He drunkenly responded, “How about next month?” I said sure.
We didn’t discuss it again for a few weeks, when one night he dropped by with a cassette of a six song set of demos that featured just Bob and an acoustic guitar. He told me to create arrangements, and that we would record in February.
For the next month, I worked out the framework for the Moping Swans EP. Many of the arrangements were very guitar-centric and involved, but I trimmed them down considerably to what you now here. We were a four piece guitar army with one afternoon to record. Just a four piece rock band bashing away.
You may at some point wonder what a moping swan might be.
A moping swan is a penis to tired to rise to the occasion.
Indeed, our lineup was superb. Myself, Bob, Greg Demos, and super-drummer Jim MacPherson. A bunch of over forty rockers with a leader who had just ended (so we all thought) his long running band Guided By Voices.
This was to be Bob’s first release since collapsing his long running indie rock juggernaut.
I had given everyone the fleshed out demos and we were going to rehearse one time at a rehearsal space I had off of Wayne Avenue on a Friday night. We were recording band demos the next day ain the basement studio of Dennis Mullins, a longtime fixture on the Dayton music scene, which after many years in Los Angeles I knew nothing about to be honest.
Bass man Greg Demos was drunk and terrified. He was in an extremely busy period lawyering, and had almost no time to listen, let alone properly learn the material.
Perfect, I thought, the animal in his native environment. We couldn’t go wrong. And, of course, Demos passed the exam with flying colors.
Due to someone not bringing Bob an amp, we never practiced.
Miraculously, but not surprisingly we slammed through the demo recording. We would reconvene a week later in Kent, Ohio at the studio of Todd Tobias.
It was great to finally play in a guitar band with Bob. I knew we’d be good together. I was Buck Dharma to the “stun guitar” of Eric Bloom. I’ve always loved Bob’s guitar playing. His left hand game isn’t fancy, but his right hand is friggin’ golden. His timing is impeccable when he’s whacking an electric guitar, and I knew exactly how to wind my playing around his. I like to think the proof is in the pudding. Give a close listen to Bob’s right hand. His guitar is cleaner in tone and he usually kicks off the song and then I try to weave my way around him. Great fun!
For any guitar geeks, Bob was playing a Gibson SG ‘61 Reissue (thanks Tom Byrne!) through his Music Man HD130 2x12 combo, and I played my Mark Kaiser built Gibson Les Paul ‘59 Burst replica through Tom Byrne’s Mesa Boogie 22 Caliber 1x12 combo that was dimed. I believe we were both recorded by Shure SM57s on the speaker cones.
We arrived in Kent on a frosty February morning having convoyed up from Dayton for the three hour ride.
We had a few laughs as we loaded in and got to work. We had to complete the instrumental tracks on Saturday (all live - no overdubs, except for the added after the fact flowery keyboards that show up on a few tracks. Somewhere I have a CD of just the four piece band version, and I find it wickedly superior.), and Bob would record his vocals on Sunday. Bing, bang, boom.
We set up, plugged in, and line checked. All good.
We were recording in the sequence you hear today.
We did a first take of “Beaten By The Target.” I don’t think there was a bit of eye contact aside from me watching Bob’s right hand. We were all pretty hyper focused.
Todd walked out after we were done. We were sheepishly grinning at each other like school kids. He was slowly shaking his head. He looked up at Bob, and said, “I think that was a take. Do you want to hear it?”
Of course we did, and when we heard it, our sheepish grins turned to shit eating grins. The same grins Bob and I may have exchanged when we finished our first song at our first gig 27 years earlier.
We went back out and blazed our way through the rest of the song list. As I recall, nothing took more than two takes, and the most time was taken up sorting out a cable issue going into the drum room, just a normal technical gaff, which you are going to have on occasion.
I believe we were done in about three hours.
I also believe there’s a reason we were able to knock the job out so quickly, and to such satisfaction.
Jim MacPherson.
I’ve played with some great drummers in my life. Bruce “Smitty” Smith, Ted McKenna, Hunt Sales, the late great Cozy Powell, and I will now tell you that my friend Jimmy Mac is as great as any.
He never dropped a single beat throughout the session that I could discern, and I have a shitty picky ear for such things.
Yes, he drove this tank to the general’s commands. Anyone in the world would be proud to call Jim MacPherson their Ringo.
He made my job as musical director quite easy, and the bedrock tracks were done, and we were off to the bar. I won’t tell you the worst of it, but I remember at one point we had commadeered the women’s bathroom at a local dinner joint. Boys will be boys...
I remember at the sessions, and looking at Demos (who was playing remarkably well), and thinking he looked like the cat who ate the mouse as he cranked out tune after tune.
Bob lead the guitar army with his brilliant right hand and aggressive rhythm work, and I just gloriously bashed away with my usual over the top obnoxiousness.
I will say that the high point of the session, aside from my great joy of making music with Bob again (but in a way we had never done before) was knocking out the one take solo on “Look At Your Life.”
I knew Bob’s catalog was never jam packed with flashy solos (appropriately so), but that’s what he asked for, “Big assed arena rock,” as I recall, so I gave it to him.
It was all shockingly easy, amazingly pleasurable, and remains to this moment one of my life’s great memories.
We drug our most likely still buzzed butts back to Todd’s the next day to cheer Bob on as he laid down his vocal tracks. He made incredibly short work of it, and I believe our caravan was headed back to Dayton by one o’clock.
And that’s about it! I’m writing this through a haze of three heavy duty pain medications, so I hope I’ve covered the most of it as I remember it!
Thanks to the nearly 9,000 of you who have inspired me to finally write this down. For a guy who’s earned his way writing about rock it’s surprising that I’ve never written about this, but there is a whole other bittersweet side of this that makes me keep it safe in a drawer.
I’ve not spoken to Bobby Pollard for many years. I hate this, and I miss him fiercely. I’d like to see that someday remedied. So much love to Bob, the band, and anyone reading this.
I’ve always been thrilled that Bob gave this crazy bastard the opportunity to be a Moping Swan. I served proudly.
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