Chapter 4

What We Build in Our Homes
(1981–1983)

When will you come out to our school?

And all will sit around you

Awfully glad they found you

And when you get hooked

You will be so glad we took you

To the carnival at the morning star school

—R. Pollard, “Carnival At The Morning Star School”¹

Bob and Kim got engaged, and married near the end of his senior year at Wright State. After he graduated, they lived in an apartment briefly, then bought a house at 2109 Titus Avenue. “She supported me for a little while,” Bob says. “And then I got a job.”² Kim was soon pregnant with their first child. Bryan James Pollard—middle name from Uncle Jimmy—would be born March 17, 1981.

The Pollards’ union was based on youthful passion, and the common-sense duty endemic to high-school sweethearts turned spouses. But it also sat upon the bedrock agreement that Bob had no intention of changing what he did with his spare time, nor should Kim expect him to. “The point of which,” says Bob, “was to give each other some freedom.”³

Bob intended to use his share of the freedom to continue making music—the real work. Songs were things he constructed with his own hands, in his own home. Inert wood brought to dancing life, as if carved and conjured by a songwriting Geppetto. He had decided on teaching because of the summer vacation time it would afford him. In other words, besides the fact that he loved children and loved working with them, he chose his vocation based on how much time he could spend not doing it.

Over the summer, Bob interviewed at Highview Alternative Elementary for his first position in the Dayton public schools. Highview’s student body was largely made up of kids who’d been expelled from their neighborhood schools.

Bob sheared his fro and wore a jacket and tie to his interview, a manila folder containing his résumé tucked under one tweed elbow. He showed up a few minutes early, and the secretary ushered him into Principal Otis H. Brooks Jr.’s office right on time.

Behind his desk, Brooks’s eyes flicked between the résumé and Bob. His forehead wrinkled, shrewd. First question: “So, Mr. Pollard. If a kid comes in and says to you, ‘I don’t know what to do. My dad’s been fucking me up the ass’—what do you do?”

Bob paused a beat, thrown. The silence stretched thin, almost broke before he regained balance. “Ah… I don’t have an answer for you right now. But I’m from Northridge, so I can handle that kind of thing.”

One of Brooks’s eyebrows climbed upward, almost skeptical, but relented. “I see your point.” Returning to the résumé, his eyes lit up as if seeing an old friend. “Oh—so listen: I see your name is Pollard. Are you related to the Man?”

Bob paused again. Principal Brooks was black, Dayton remained a highly segregated city, and although it was 1981 memories of the race riots in ’66 were somewhat raw. Bob wondered incredulously, Does he mean whitey? What the fuck? He opted for, “The Man? What do you mean?” as calmly as he could manage.

“Jimmy Pollard. The Man.”

Bob, relieved, said, “Well, yes. He’s my brother.”

Principal Brooks smiled and nodded in admiration. Finally, “Well, I can see you put in some effort to present yourself well; wore a tie. You’re hired.”

Bob walked out shaking his head and grinning, thinking, Goddamn. Jimmy. In 1981, the Pollard family already had a homegrown celebrity.

DAYTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS—HIGHVIEW INCLUDED—had an old-basement, musty smell, punctuated with industrial cleaners. Bob started work on September 9, 1981. He had a knack for connecting with the more withdrawn kids. One of his tactics was handing out nicknames like Bluto in Animal House. Coworkers weren’t exempted; a teacher’s resemblance to Anthony Perkins earned him the moniker “Norman Bates.”

Student Darrell Stamper, for instance, was shy, almost never spoke. One day Bob casually remarked, “Hey, Daredevil Stamp Collector—how’s everything going with that spelling test? You good?”

Darrell’s forehead creased, and the way he looked at Mr. Pollard gave Bob a twinge of that old teacher’s intuition. This’ll come back to bite my ass, he thought.

Sure enough, after a day or two Darrell’s parents called the school to schedule a meeting with Mr. Pollard. Bob groaned inwardly.

At the meeting, the elder Stamper said, “Listen, Daryl tells us you call him… Daredevil Stamp Collector.” Silence flooded the room when he invoked the nickname.

Bob half expected a punch to follow. He shrugged and started to explain apologetically, “Well, I have nicknames for most of the kids in the class—”

Stamper shot back: “No—we love it. We call him that now. He’s come out of his shell. He’s Daredevil Stamp Collector!”

Every once in a while Bob would record an exchange between himself and the kids:

“You look like a unicorn.”

“I am a unicorn!”

“OK, what’s a unicorn?”⁴

Bob explains, “You’re spending more time with these kids than their parents do. And that’s why you call them nicknames.”

Although he doesn’t consider himself especially successful as a teacher, Bob remains proud of the fact that he didn’t wear a tie. “They wanted me to, but fuck that, I’m not wearing a tie.” Still—every so often he’d wear one, strutting down the hall and bucking expectations as colleagues gawked.

AFTER HIGHVIEW ALTERNATIVE, BOB TAUGHT at Lincoln IGE Elementary School, which stood for “individually guided education.” Lincoln was a step up from Highview; it was a magnet school and featured a program for gifted students. Parents had to submit an application and children had to meet certain qualifications to attend.

Bob tended to cultivate a student-teacher relationship with his principals, more so than employee-employer. “The female principals were nice,” Bob says. “They let me do whatever I wanted.”

When doing whatever one wanted, it was useful to have a partner in crime—the crazier the better. That’s where William “Pete” Jamison came in. Son of William Sr., a machinist, and registered nurse Geraldine, Pete grew up in Meadowdale, Northridge High School’s rival across the Stillwater River. Pete inherited his nickname from his aunt’s parakeet, Petey Bird, after the pet’s demise.

Jamison graduated from Bowling Green State University with a degree in construction education and moved back to Dayton, where he taught at Meadowdale High and coached the football team’s JV squad. When he wasn’t working, Pete played summer-league softball on a team called the Vacationers. By this point “Petey Bird” had become “Crazy Pete.”

As Jamison’s second season on the team commenced, he was surprised to see the new player they’d gained: a tall, rangy pitcher with a shock of curly auburn hair named Bob Pollard. He could play, he could drink, he clearly liked rock music.

Jamison knew the Pollards as local sports heroes. “Bob was a great quarterback,” Pete says. He knew Pollard had made All-League every year, even when his teams lost most of their games. “They had good, fast receivers, and a couple guys who went on to play major college football. But [they] just somehow did not mesh together.” He also knew Bob was All-League in basketball, scoring 20-something points a game. Pete chuckles, “In our area, the name Pollard was just… I mean, his brother was even better at basketball.”

After he joined the Vacationers, Bob took a job as a football coach at Meadowdale High School. There were a total of five coaches. Pete and Bob were officially the JV coaches, but they came out for the varsity games as well. The teams practiced together, and whoever didn’t play on Friday got to play with the JV squad on Monday evenings.

Bob and Pete sat around one day talking about football over a few beers, speculating on how to make someone better at the sport. “That was the first time I really saw his mind at work,” Pete says. “How he could look at something and pull out something no one else saw.” Bob conceived the idea of “isolation drills,” based in part on how Bob Sr. had drilled him as a kid. They spotlighted the precise skills used in play—how to hold the ball, where to put your feet in a given stance, and so forth. A few of Bob’s best were for zone defense, Jamison says, breaking down the skills a defensive back needs to use in coverage.

Bob got angry when the varsity coaches laughed off his isolation drills. They didn’t see the need to break skills down into something as granular as hand placement. Whatever, Bob thought, because it was his and Pete’s business how they coached the JV Lions squad.

“One time we were getting the hell beat out of us,” Jamison recalls. At halftime they’d really laid into the kids, telling them they just weren’t doing their jobs. So the team was sitting under the goalposts, dejected, when along came Coaches Pollard and Jamison.

Without a word, the pair launched into an impromptu rendition of Black Sabbath’s “Supernaut.” Pete supplied the ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka of a high hat, and Bob sang the song’s distinctive lead guitar riff. The team—primarily black, unlikely to be Ozzy fans—sat staring at the coaches, their faces showing a range of reactions from merely nonplussed to utter confusion.

“All right!” shouted Coach Pollard. “Let’s get back out there and kill ’em!” The Meadowdale Lions won by a pair of touchdowns. “We did that quite a bit on the sidelines with songs that we liked,” says Jamison. “We kind of bonded over that.”

THE ORIGINAL SNAKEPIT WAS THE attic of Bob’s crazy black-sheep uncle—or maybe cousin—who lived in New Jersey. Bob appropriated the name for his basement studio/record storage/hangout area. Through his years of teaching and multiple stabs at music, most of Bob’s off hours were spent in the Snakepit. It was both laboratory and lounge.

Bob’s Snakepit had a dance floor and a mirrored ball. He had a guy named Dennis Jones install tile in his kitchen, but he had to redo much of the work after a foul-up. To make up for it Jones installed the damaged tiles in a bizarre, circular pattern on the Snakepit’s floor.

“It looked like some kind of altar for a consecration or sacrifice,” Bob says. “It looked cool as hell.”

The first time Pete Jamison had heard Bob’s music was when they’d gone back to the Snakepit to drink beers and play records after a softball game. Jamison was into Zeppelin, Skynyrd, and as he describes it: “all that classic-rock bullshit.” Bob would play him Wire and the Replacements, exposing Pete to bands and styles from far outside his comfort zone.

On this day Jamison found a box full of 8-track cassettes, which he initially assumed were store-bought. The artwork was impressive, and the song titles and times were listed neatly on the back. “Rex Polaroid was one of the fictitious artists.”⁵ Bob had four or five boxes full of them, which he’d figured out how to record on.

“They were unbelievable,” Pete says. “He was either strumming a guitar or doing some percussion thing and singing. When you looked close you could tell it was homemade, but it looked like something you could buy in a store.… He did all the artwork. Most of them were done with colored pencils and crayons, but a few of them were little collages.”

Between coaching football and playing softball, they hung out a lot. At the Snakepit, Pete would always ask if he could pull out a random 8-track and play it, and, “Out of three songs—one was great, one was amazing, and one just should have been on the radio.” Borrowing Paul McCartney’s term, Pete says, “There wasn’t a stinkeroo in there.”

Eventually Bob started playing his new songs for Pete on an acoustic and singing along. Pete remembers, “I would get chills down my back and think, I’m in the presence of greatness here.” He noted how fully formed and copious Bob’s ideas were.

Sometimes they would go running together and every twenty paces or so Bob would say, between breaths, “What about this title—?”

Pete would laugh; Bob’s titles were always great.

But one day, between puffs Bob exhaled the phrase “Guided By Voices.” He continued: “It’s a band name. I found it in one of my notebooks.”

Pete felt a jolt. “That’s it!” More than just it. That was the band name, the credo—what it was and how they did it—wrapped up in three words. It was unique.

Perhaps sensing it wasn’t a name to bestow on just any rock combo, Bob held on to it until later. It wasn’t real yet; it remained an idea, a hint of mystique, the mere myth of a band. Bob saved it until the right time. Pete says, “He knew what he wanted and he got it.”

JIMMY AND BOB’S RELATIONSHIP SLOWLY turned from adversarial to one of gentler jibes and mutual respect. Jimmy says, “I got a little bit bigger, I got a little bit stronger, I got a little bit tired of the shit.” Bob grew fond of calling Jimmy “Muscle Beach” when he’d come in from classes at Wright State and find him lifting weights. “Trying to get in shape,” Jim explains, “to be a better basketball player.”

That he did; during his senior year in high school Jim Pollard had led the state in scoring, and in baseball led the Dayton area in hitting. “He batted, like, .540,” Bob says. As they got older, Jim became Bob’s hero and his homegrown sports idol. Bob had abandoned the goal of professional sports as Bob Sr. had, so Jimmy became the family’s last great hope, just as Bob Sr. groomed Bob to be. Bob can still rattle off from memory Jimmy’s stats and records from his Northridge and Arizona State University years.⁶

Arizona State gave Jim a full scholarship. On the court in high school, he was scoring 35 points a game, back before the 3-point line was instituted; if he’d enjoyed its benefits his stats would have been astronomical. But after playing with a number of future NBA stars his freshman year at ASU—Byron Scott and Lafayette “Fat” Lever among them—he blew out his knee in a summer rec league game. The injury wasn’t career-ending on its own, but it began a downward spiral of reinjuries and rehab.

Jim recalled, “I blew my knee out, rehabbed for six months, I played three days, blew my knee out. Rehabbed, blew my knee out, rehabbed, blew my knee out. After a while the doctors were just like, ‘Hey, you’re gonna have to quit.’ It was fucking relief!: Well, fuck it, good. I tried for two fucking years to rehab my knee. It’s like someone knowing they’re gonna die for two years. It was brutal.”⁷

An elbow injury forced Jim to give up baseball too, and soon it became clear that the university’s rules mirrored those of Bob Sr.: If you’re not playing sports, you’d better get a job. In 1981, Jim was (suddenly) informed that he hadn’t been making sufficient progress toward his degree. A new coach came onboard and nixed his scholarship.

In Bob’s view, “I think my parents—especially my dad—were kind of disappointed. Because obviously sports, for us, was his dream. And if Jimmy hadn’t hurt himself he had a good chance to be in the pros.”⁸ If Pollard Sr. was crestfallen, he expressed it in his usual no-bullshit manner. Having received a letter from the university, he called Jimmy and said without preamble, “So you blew it, didn’t you.”

Jimmy hung up.

But on his arrival back home, he stepped off the plane to have Bob tell him, “Congratulations, you’re in Guided By Voices.” So far, the mythical band’s roster was exclusive: You had to be a Pollard brother and a frustrated pro athlete to get in the front door. They’d eventually relax that code, but it was a fitting place to begin the turbulent years ahead.

“That’s a great alternative to being in the NBA, isn’t it?” Bob joked. “Be in Guided By Voices!”⁹

Although it didn’t yet exist in any form that an observer would call a band, what Bob calls the “gestation period” to follow was crucial to GBV’s eventual rise. In the Snakepit, Jim became a driving force in Bob’s continual musical experimentation and development.

“I got back from college and I’m sure Kim was not liking me being back,” Jim says. “I was showing up, hammered, with a twelve-pack. ‘Let’s go downstairs and jam!’” Where Bob might have been tempted to let that go, given the demands of family and work, Jimmy showing up every night gave him a reason—or at least an excuse.

One time Jimmy came over with a present for his brother: an acoustic guitar they dubbed the Buzzing One-Stringer, which he had purchased for $100 from local guitarist Ed Jon Dwyer. “[I think] it was easy to keep tuned,” Jamison says. “Some of Bob’s earlier guitars that he had were harder to keep in tune.”

“Eventually,” says Jim, “I found a boombox where you could record, then dub one time over it.”^* This newfound ability to record songs, ideas, and snippets rekindled the dream in Bob, and saved Guided By Voices from an untimely demise.

Just after he came home from Arizona, Jimmy briefly wrote and recorded his own songs. “He would have been as good as Bob,” Pete Jamison claims. “He had a tune called ‘Bikewreck.’ But he didn’t keep up with it.” It was too soon for a solo career; GBV was waiting.

“THE MOST INTERESTING, SPONTANEOUSLY CREATIVE, and psychotic, moronic thing we did, we labeled Acid Ranch,” Bob recalls. “You know, secretly. In the lab.” It was the secret part that allowed them to experiment so freely. “Acid Ranch was fearless and ridiculous, because we knew no one would ever hear any of it.”

Recording sessions in the Snakepit circa 1981–1982 were extemporaneous, marathon affairs accompanied by copious amounts of beer, pot, and coke. “We’d go to the point of semiexhaustion.” They turned on all the amps, started the tape rolling, and recorded everything—song, interview, or fart. The plan was total creativity, and beyond that there were no further rules. Bob experimented with vocal delivery, falsetto, harmonies, wordplay, and accents ranging from British to a carnival barker’s brassy tone.

They got the name Acid Ranch from Spahn Ranch, the Manson’s Family’s hideout, but it was also a play on acid rain. It was only one of the band names Bob and Mitch—and Jimmy once he was back home—recorded under, but it was a favorite. (They were Mailbox when a drum machine was included.^* “Mailbox was a little bit more refined,” Bob says. “We were influenced by the Smiths and shit.”)

They played whatever was at hand: someone would bang out a rhythm on the clothes dryer or a plastic bucket, Bob played an acoustic guitar or Mitch played bass, they warbled a cappella barbershop harmonies, or even used squeaking squeeze toys—as in the song “Mongoose Orgasm,” a frantic blood relative to the Residents’ Duck Stab and Pink Floyd’s “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict.”

Bob and Jimmy did off-the-cuff episodes of what they called The Frank and Candid Show: Bob was the host, and Jimmy the Ed McMahon–style sidekick. They’d establish a scenario and Bob and Jimmy would improvise a skit. These sessions went on for two or three hours, sometimes more.

“Then we’d stop, get some more beer,” says Bob, “smoke a little.” Only after they were finished recording did they listen back, assigning each song or segment a title and writing down notes. “We always thought it would be about six or seven songs, but it was like eighteen.”

“We did acid a few times,” Bob recalls. “We’d end up naked and laughing our asses off at our brotherhood.” Once, they were in such a state when the doorbell rang.

“Hold on, I have to go get that,” Bob said—entirely reasonably, it seemed to him.

He went upstairs and answered the door, bare-ass naked, to find a pair of surprised Jehovah’s Witnesses. They apologized and said they’d come back.

“Nooo!” Bob protested, laughing, just about chasing them down the sidewalk. “Come on in, I want to hear what you have to say. I’m ready!”

At times—sometimes more noticeably, sometimes not—the listener can hear in these recordings a distinctive sound struggling to break free from its influences. It’s not the greatest music Bob ever made, but it wasn’t meant to be. “There are about seven hardcore Acid Ranch fans out there,” he says. “That’s all they need.” But a closer look at Acid Ranch opens a window into Bob’s creative process.

His influences were exposed, as in the Morrison-esque “Electric Indians,” with its titular Native Americans and death-trip ruminations. But often a listener can catch sonic snippets that would later collage their way into Guided By Voices songs. It’s a strong indicator of Bob’s authorial process, banging out drafts that incorporate the best of what came before until a composition arrives in its final form. Acid Ranch’s seams are taxed to bursting with detective work for the Pollard obsessive.

The title alone of “The Megaphonic Thrift (An Odd Assembly)” invoked latter-day works. A tune called “Edison’s Memos” asked a question remarkably similar to one most GBV devotees know by heart—“Do you suppose that you could change your life? If you could then I wish you would”—a full fifteen years before the song “Cut-Out Witch” saw proper release.¹⁰ “It’s Weird What The People Say” began with a woman’s prim voice asking, “Bob—would you and Living Praise Choir lead us in ‘To God Be the Glory’?” to which Bob replied with golly-gee enthusiasm, “I sure will!”—another moment that would return in later recordings.

“Daily Planet” is an epic at 4:58—an apocalyptic, satirical, substance-fueled operetta detailing Superman’s accidental suicide by Kryptonite ingestion and the drama that follows. Bob played a full cast of characters. In its midst he assumed the role of Dick West—a portmanteau of DC Comics’ Dick Grayson and Wally West—to intone, “The start of the ‘Turbulent Years.’” The non sequitur fell where it was spoken, flowing from far-off cries, followed only by creaking guitar feedback against the song’s lazy bassline.

It was a wry observation on Bob’s situation; here he was settling down into a domestic existence as husband, father, teacher—but in the Snakepit, and maybe in Bob’s thoughts too, there were turmoil, unrest, and yearning. Superman was eating the Kryptonite.

Still, it’s tough to append dire omens to music that radiates such joy. “Daily Planet” closes with a peculiar monologue by Pollard, the same recording later heard closing out the final notes of GBV anthem “Alright”:

And blowing smoke out the eyes of another, and drilling two holes in the bottom of the Earth… Where life could be once again like it once was, in the ice age, in a kingdom long ago, without chance, without hope, without vision, and therefore: Always creating the same effect, without ever knowing why.¹¹

Bob pinched his nose and spoke in a nasal, British-tinged voice, especially to pronounce the word chahnce, an early experiment in accent and delivery.

Songs like “Pictures From The Brainbox” and “The Theory Of Broken Circles” again bring to mind Jim Morrison and the Doors, with Jimmy alternating between two power chords, Mitch adding a more-involved guitar layer, and Bob speak-singing verses and repeating a distinctive title phrase in melody for the chorus. “Congratulations (You’re Under Sedation)” featured Bob, Jimmy, and Mitch singing confident—and competent—three-part harmonies. What linked most of the proto-GBV tunes here was the common thread of Bob’s early delivery, still displaying—for the most part—the particular twang of the Dayton-raised.

Despite their secret origins and the certain knowledge no other ears would hear them, Bob culled and released three albums’ worth of Acid Ranch recordings in the 2000s. Hearing them is like being a fly on the Snakepit wall (just before it gets smashed). In the titles alone, one senses Bob’s familiar touchstones coming into focus: sports, women, pop culture, local history, the Golden Age of rock ’n’ roll, and of course music: “Beatles And Stones” admonishes the listener, “Don’t confuse success with luxury.” Its plaintive, self-aware sloganeering of “I want long hair! I want free love! I want no more war!” spoke to Bob’s still-private longing.

“ANYTIME BOB HAD A PHOTO op, we were on it,” Jamison says. Without anything close to a real band, nevertheless Bob, Jimmy, and Mitch kept refining their rock image, taking part in all the activities a band would—aside from recording albums or playing shows.

“We did photo sessions to make it feel like it was real. We were working on getting the look and the moves down,” says Bob. He describes his policy at the time as: “You gotta look a little bit cool to be in my band that can’t play.”

In one series of early photos, Bob’s sweaty and swept-back curls, impassive features, and aviator sunglasses evoked childhood idol Jim Morrison—but the thigh-length red-and-gold striped coat was all Bob. Spray-painted on the underpass wall behind him: THE C.I.A. KILLED KENNEDY. A graffitied DON tag seemed to radiate from Mitch’s head.

They were photographed walking across the road in a line with their guitars, like the Beatles’ Abbey Road. Or they would take pictures with black people sitting on their front porch in the background. “It’s got to be in a predominantly black neighborhood, so it looks like Creedence Clearwater [Revival] or something,” Bob says. “Like a fuckin’ lo-fi Creedence Clearwater.” Once Bob dressed in a suit and had Pete take black-and-white pictures of him with Dayton’s post-industrial decay as a backdrop; he labeled them “Rex Polaroid.”

For another shoot, Bob, Mitch, and Jimmy wanted to simulate the effect of having just played a show. They got all dressed up in jackets and Beatles boots and ran close to a mile despite the summer heat. As they rounded a corner, they saw a dude walking in full punk regalia. He looked over his shoulder at the pop rockers charging at him and, terrified, took off at a dead sprint. Back at Bob’s place they took pictures with towels around their necks—sweaty, exhausted, without actually having played.

One day Bob asked Pete Jamison if he knew Todd Robinson, who worked in a Dayton record store at the time. Robinson had a good camera and had offered to take pictures of the band. So they drank Jack Daniel’s in large quantities—as one does to prepare properly for a rock photo shoot—and tried to think of every weird thing they could commit to film.

Pete recalls, “We’re in Mitch’s van. We’re driving around town. Todd’s taking pictures. We got a case of beer, drinking whiskey, screaming. We pulled up to a stop sign, yelling at people and stuff.” They stood in the river, hung from tree branches, whatever came to mind.

“Todd Robinson fuckin’ ran when we got home. He just fuckin’ ran,” Pete laughs. “It took Bob a while to get a hold of him, but the pictures were cool.”

Robinson seemed cool with the shenanigans, but when they called him to see if he’d do another one, he cried, “Not if you’re going to act like that again!”

“Well, fuck it then,” said Bob. “We’ll get somebody else.”

Bob’s skin was growing thicker to the slings and arrows of rejection. Even if a lot of it was pure bravado, he got a little better at not caring what people thought about his hobby. “We weren’t real; we couldn’t even play,” he says. “Mitch had some experience. Anacrusis aside, I had none. This was just fun in the basement.” As far as Bob was concerned, they didn’t have enough going for them to be able to get away with not looking cool.

HANGING OUT IN THE SNAKEPIT in ’82, Pete Jamison kept haranguing Bob: “You need to get a band together. People need to hear this.” Finally Jamison resorted to reverse psychology. He teased Bob that he was afraid to get a band together, as a way of urging him to do it. “I pulled his tail,” Jamison explains.¹²

Bob had just finished playing an R.E.M.-tinged song he’d written called “Echoland.” Pete shook his head. “Y’know, Bob, I’m just a little disappointed in you.”

“What?” Bob stopped strumming. “Why?”

“Listen,” Pete continued, “you’re the greatest athlete I’ve ever seen. So you have no problem being in front of people. And you just played that song and sang it to me, so I know you can do both at once. I don’t know why you don’t just get a band together.”

“If not for Pete,” Bob says, “there is no Guided By Voices—or anything musical, for that matter. If not for him, I’d still be teaching.”

Pete counters: “I think he would have come out someplace else. He was too great of a genius. I may have made it easier a little earlier, but I just think that somewhere along the line he would have emerged.”

Around the same time, Kevin Fennell started dating Bob’s younger sister Lisa. One Friday night she suggested, “Let’s go over to Bob and Kim’s house.”

The plan was to watch a ball game and get a pizza. But only a few minutes after they arrived, Bob (knowing Kevin from way back and well apprised of his musical background) shanghaied his sister’s date to the Snakepit to check out some new LPs. They ended up spending the rest of the evening down there. Fennell said:

You can tell by a person’s record collection how deeply they’re into music and Bob was in really deep. The collection was massive. I started writing down the names of records I wanted to buy. He would say, “Oh, you gotta have this Sparks album,” and recommending other records that I wasn’t familiar with at all. I was always a record collector and I prided myself on being a pretty intelligent collector, but after seeing Bob’s records I thought, “What planet is he from?”¹³

Bob started strumming his acoustic and singing, and Kevin said, “Man, that sounds fucking great.” He too urged Bob to get a band together; after all, he could drum. They could get Mitch, with whom Kevin had played music since they were twelve. This time Bob relented.

A couple weeks later at softball practice, Bob told Pete about the new band he’d assembled, Coyote Call. Pollard was on guitar and vocals, Fennell on drums, and Mitchell on bass. Bob invited Pete to come by and watch practice that night in Mitch’s garage. After hearing a few songs Pete assured him, “You’re only going to have to play a couple shows, and everyone’s gonna want to be in your band.”

Fennell recalls that the trio started recording in early 1982, on the General Electric boombox Jimmy had bought that allowed you to lay down one track, then overdub one more track over the first. If one was careful about volume and microphone placement, a relatively smooth recording resulted. Kevin, Mitch, and Bob started kicking some of Bob’s songs together, like “Quality Of Armor” and “Walls And Windows,” to record a cassette called Pissing in the Canal, a collection of twelve songs.¹⁴

“We were getting used to playing together, getting used to Bob’s writing style, dealing with personalities, just kind of getting a feel for what it was like,” says Fennell. “We had a couple people drift in and out—people that weren’t really on the same page.” One of them was a drummer they called Andy Capp due to his strong resemblance to the Cockney drunk of funny-paper fame. “He was always trying to kind of dethrone me from the drums. And he really couldn’t keep time, so he didn’t last a week, maybe two weeks. There were always people wanting to get involved. But the core always remained me, Mitch, and Bob.”

After a handful of rehearsals, Bob deemed Coyote Call ready to gig. The problem, to Bob’s mind, was they couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be garage rock or jangle pop. Whichever was the case, they made it through only a few shows under that moniker.

The first official Coyote Call show was, says Fennell, “at a shit bar on North Dixie called the Greenleaf Inn.” Bob was excited all day, calling Pete Jamison to ask if he’d be in attendance, only to arrive and find the sign had billed Coyote Call’s lead singer as “Boby Pallard.” The show went on despite the flub. Bob wore a western string tie, and the band powered through songs from Pissing in the Canal, including “Echoland,” interspersed with covers.

“That was a pretty fun show. We really got a pretty good response for the first time,” Fennell says. “It was the first time we played out, and it was all people we went to school with, and they were pretty supportive.”

Bob dismisses the early attempt with typical self-deprecation: “Coyote Call sucked.” He downed band names like Miller Lites. Says Fennell, “We were Instant Lovelies. We were Dash Riprock and His Hairspray Boys for a while. Just a lot of different names.” Chuckling at the memory, he adds: “Tweezers.”

The Instant Lovelies played a songwriters’ night at Canal Street Tavern. It was supposed to be one guy with a guitar, but they went up with three. “It was lovely for an instant,” Bob quips.

BOB’S NEXT BAND, “WHEN WE wanted to be power pop,” was the Crowd. For this incarnation Bob brought in a guy called J. K. on guitar, and kept Mitch and Kevin. The Geese followed, with the same lineup as the Crowd, except Tony Conley (of Anacrusis) took over for J. K. The Crowd had a song called “Cardio-Combustion” (the Geese played it as “Run From The Angels”):

Here I go

(Here I go)

Cardio

(Cardio)

Combustion!

And where was Jim Pollard in all this? According to Bob he was sitting there telling people what to do: “Hey, double-time that. No, no, no—not gonna work!”

A musician from another band that regularly played Canal Street stopped by to listen, and liked what he heard so much he promised Bob, “You’re on. You’ve got a gig.” But the Geese weren’t meant to fly. The day of the show found them sitting at Bob’s house, waiting for Conley to arrive so they could all drive to the gig together. He was a no-show, so the band bailed. Three weeks later, Bob ran into him and asked what happened.

“I’m sorry, man,” Conley said. “My head’s all fucked up.”

He talked it over with Bob and they decided it was no big deal, they’d try again. So the band got together and practiced a few times during the following month, and pulled another twenty songs together. Again Conley was a no-show on gig day.

That was it for the Geese. It would be twenty-two years before Bob and Conley joined up for another musical endeavor.

IN THE WAKE OF DECADES of funding difficulties, in 1983 east-side voting blocs finally cracked and approved a Dayton school tax levy. It was held at Wegerzyn Park, off Siebenthaler Avenue and bordered to the west by the Stillwater River. Much of the money raised by the levy was realized through beer sales. Bob had been looking forward to the event for a week or more.

Bob and Pete proceeded to get lit. They shouted jovially at passersby, yelled and sang a lot, and at one point were lying on a flight of concrete steps looking up women’s dresses as they passed. Jamison wore a Styrofoam bowl on his head, with two lit cigarettes stuck in it like antennae—as one does when drunk, circa 1983.

“We were dying of thirst, and then we got some beer in us,” Jamison laughs. Sometimes Bob would have them fast for four or five days and then start drinking beer, just to see how hammered they could get—to enhance the experience. “Being around Bob, there was always something daring going on. Nothing was complacent.”

As they were leaving Wegerzyn Park, threading cars in the lot in a beery haze, they saw the assistant superintendent of schools with his wife. Bob played softball with him too.

“Hey, Bob!” the assistant superintendent called out. “How are you?”

“Hey,” Bob replied. “You ever seen a one-eared elephant?” (Whatever that meant.) Bob and Pete piled into Bob’s car, cackling. Aside from the next day’s mild hangover, they didn’t fret over it much.

But on the Monday morning following the levy, a voice intoned grimly over the intercom: “Mr. Pollard—please report to Principal Toles’s office.”

Ah shit, Bob thought. He asked colleague Art Mitchell, “Watch my class, OK?”

In her office, Principal Nancy Toles said diplomatically, “So I hear you made quite a spectacle of yourself at Wegerzyn.”

Bob replied with a straight face, as though he’d rehearsed it: “I was enthusiastically supporting the levy.”

She smiled. “Personally, I think it’s cute. Get out of here.”

LATE IN 1983, AS BOB cycled through possible lineups and band names, he kept trying to get gigs. His latest target was a bar—“It wasn’t even a good bar,” Pollard laments. “It was all sterile and shit. It was a bullshit bar”—on High Street in Columbus. “You’ve got a band?” the owner asked him.

“Yeah,” Bob replied confidently. He didn’t really, but he knew he could get one together if he could first secure the gig.

“What’s it called?”

“Beethoven and the American Flag.”

“No, that’s not gonna work,” the owner said. “No way.”

Bob came by a few weeks later. “I got a new band.”

“What are you called?”

“Pinocchio and the Whale.”

The owner laughed. “No.”

Bob came back next week. Seeing the owner’s raised and expectant eyebrows, he paused a beat and announced, “Guided By Voices.”

The owner smiled slightly. He nodded. “That’s a good name. But I need more than that.”

Bob thought, OK… we’ve got a good name. Now he needed another band. For Guided By Voices’ initial, short-lived lineup, Bob covered vocals and rhythm guitar, steadfast Kevin Fennell was on drums, and Mitch Mitchell was on bass. Bob added Ed Jon Dwyer—better known to posterity as “Captain Bizarre”—on lead guitar.

During soundcheck, Bob drank to steady his resolve. “I get nervous every fucking show. That’s why I drink.” Not only was this Guided By Voices’ first official outing, but Jimmy, Kim, Bob’s sister Debbie, and his mom and dad were all in attendance.

Jimmy came up to Bob and said, almost casually, “Hey, Nick Nolte’s here.” Pete Jamison had seen Nolte and his pregnant wife walking by (Nolte was in town filming Teachers) and somehow convinced them to come inside. Bob says, “So here comes Nick Nolte, hair all greasy. He was the first, and the biggest, celebrity to ever see GBV.”

During the set Bob saw Nolte tapping his hand on the table, acting like he was getting into it. Bob thought, You’re not fooling me, Nick.

After the show, the Pollards took snapshots gathered around the smiling actor. Nolte signed a $5 bill and gave it to Bob. “I gave it to my friend,” he says. “He said, ‘That’s not real!’ Hell yeah. There were only twenty people watching that show, but two of them were Nick Nolte and his wife.”

After the show Mark Wyatt, the keyboard player from Great Plains—a Ron House band—complimented Bob on the performance. While they chatted, Bob could hear Mitch’s voice raised in anger as he argued with the management, growing more pissed by the second. Bob divined that the dispute was over them not getting paid.

He and Jimmy, tall and menacing in overcoats, went over and stood behind Mitch. Mitch yelled back and forth with the bartender, who was adamant about one fact: “You’re not getting paid.”

Mitch hollered, “Oh, we’re gonna get paid or some shit’s gonna go down!”

So the bartender called over the manager, a short black guy in a hat and sunglasses. He held up his palms to placate Mitch, saying, “Hey, what the fuck’s goin’ on? We can settle this shit.”

The manager flicked one hand at Bob and Jimmy, the enforcers. “But first of all, you bes’ getcha two New York–lookin’ motherfuckers outta my face.”

Bob and Jimmy looked at each other, smiled. “Hey,” Bob said, “we’re from Northridge, man!”

“You’re from Northridge?”

Rationality took hold as Bob said, “Yeah, we’re from Dayton, man.”

The manager grinned conspiratorially. “Oh, I been to Dayton,” he said, and name checked Siebenthaler Avenue in a sibilant rasp—“Siebenthalah…” Bob and Jim busted up laughing. The band got paid.

     

* Jimmy’s ex–old lady eventually broke the boombox, commencing an unending string of replacements.

* Mailbox song examples: “Cody’s Antler,” “Old Friend,” “Call Me,” “Old Engine Driver.”