Chapter 11
Year of the 7-Inch
(1994)
One time I stayed the night at Bob’s house with Bryan. Bob woke us up about 7 a.m. blaring Mighty Baby at a volume that could wake the neighbors. Once we were awake Bob said, I got you guys breakfast. There was a box of cereal and a gallon of milk on the table. Then he got his guitar and said, I have to play you this song I just wrote; it’s great. And he played “I Am A Scientist.”
—Derek “Taz” Asher1
Beginning with the Static Airplane Jive EP in December 1993, Pollard says, “We cranked them out on a 4-track.” When labels came calling for a 7-inch, Bob was happy to oblige. He even established a formula: Each 7-inch was allotted “five throwaways and one hit.” And everybody who asked got one. Christof Ellinghaus at City Slang sent a note from Berlin about Static Airplane Jive: “You gave me three hits!”
The growing demand lit a fire under Bob. He spent all his free time from school and family writing music, recording it, or playing shows. Gaining confidence, he upped the 7-inch ratio to two hits and four throwaways.
“When we got to the point that we were recording on 4-track and we knew people were interested, that’s when we became good,” says Bob. “Before that I didn’t think we were that good. Once we got signed, and recording only on 4-track, that’s when I found my voice. I started writing weird lyrics. We were recognizable.”2
For the local press, Bob’s voice inspired questions—in particular, about his assumed accent. “The Beatles, especially (John) Lennon, completely molded my musical philosophy and instilled in me an all-consuming passion to seek out and suck in all good rock songs, from the ’60s until now,” Pollard said. “I sing with a British accent because that’s how the Beatles did it and it just doesn’t sound right any other way.”3
Fennell recalls the vibe being positive among the reunited bandmates, a far cry from the fistfights of earlier years. “It was a love fest. Everybody was getting along. Bob’s writing, there was new life breathed into it. I think after doing Vampire On Titus on his own, he hit a creative peak at that time. Everything was sounding really, really good.”4
February ’94 saw the release of the Get Out Of My Stations EP on Siltbreeze, with its eerie black-and-white cover photo: a brilliant sun ray shining into the vinyl-packed Snakepit, illuminating Jim Pollard as Bob stands over him. One might imagine the EP’s contemplative ballad “Dusty Bushworms” as the soundtrack to the image. Bob told Jimmy to sit in the light so it looked like a spaceship was beaming him out, and Tobin Sprout snapped the photo.
The record store dream of Bob’s high school years reared into his thoughts. He was already reaching back—into the Freund’s Precision case of cassettes, riffling among the 8-tracks, tapping the boy within still singing childhood songs—but he decided to do something real by some of the bands he dreamed up. With a split 7-inch by Nightwalker (contributing “Lucifer’s Aching Revolver”) and Freedom Cruise (“Cruise”), he conceived the first of what would eventually become a landslide of side projects and alternate bands.5 With Bob’s reluctant assent, “Trader” Vic put on the cover, “Smells like G.B.V., tastes like G.B.V.”
A few months later, the band followed up with a release on Domino Records: the Clown Prince Of The Menthol Trailer EP, featuring standout tune “Matter Eater Lad.” It was followed by Matt Sweeney–orchestrated Engine release Fast Japanese Spin Cycle on March 24. The latter EP’s blazing, straight-ahead “My Impression Now” became a live staple. Like so many of Bob’s lyrics it opened a transitory window into his thoughts, addressing himself as the song’s “you”:
You told me you’d give your soul to the crowd
You run to the edge of the warzone
You’re finding out that it’s way too late
To be happy around your friends
You changed your head and made your bed
Through time, circumstances and medicines
You lied a lot
Created a plot
To escort you safely away6
It wasn’t a confession, but GBV’s sudden ascent echoed in it. Bob poured his will into creating a plot to escort himself away. With the contribution of psych-drone harmonizer “Chicken Blows” to a Ptolemaic Terrascope 7-inch, Pollard hit ten releases in just over one year’s time.7 Creative quality and quantity raced neck and neck.
Simultaneously, the band undertook a modest touring schedule through March 1994. Actually, it would have been modest for another band. For GBV it was grueling, considering they played Friday- and Saturday-night gigs after working day jobs all week. But they did it for the sake of the party. Bob took GBV as far afield as Tennessee, Thurston’s in Chicago, a return to Philadelphia’s Khyber Pass, and shows closer to home in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and at the Canal Street Tavern.
The band was playful and at ease, confident. Bob engaged in more banter—the comedian in him beginning to surface—and experimented with songs in performance. He subbed in lyrical changes, if they were good.
At the Antenna Club in January the band played “Some Drilling Implied” as a slow-tempo, slightly sarcastic country-western amble before smashing their way through a full-tempo version. For the closer, Bob pulled out a drunkenly energized take on “White Whale” from Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia, as if they were the Who laying down “Magic Bus” at the end of a set. It was a party: laugh, cry, and live it up before you die.
On their way out of Tennessee, Sprout recalls, they hit black ice on the highway and had no choice but to get off the road. So they found a motel by the exit ramp. “We were sitting in the room, listening to cars smashing into each other for the next hour,” he says. They barely beat the room rush that night, which was lucky, but it also meant a night off in a dry county. As much as they wanted to kick back and have a few beers, all they could do was sit around.
On March 18, Guided By Voices played their biggest show yet, and for a hometown crowd. With a little help from Kim Deal they got on the bill for a Hara Arena show with the Breeders and the Afghan Whigs. Bob was ecstatic; shows at Canal Street were great, but this one would be colossal. Young Nate Farley, who’d met Bob at CBGB, worked as a guitar tech for the show. Wearing a multipatterned sweater, Bob walked offstage after the sound check, joking with Tobin about the monitors: “That’s much better than anything we’ve ever gotten.”
Local fans mixed with Mr. Pollard’s former students and fellow teachers from Lincoln Elementary, crowded in the pit at the front of the stage, all there to support Bob and the band. At the height of the set, kids pogoed and crowd-surfed. Bob tried on a baseball cap someone flung from the crowd, then Frisbeed it away into the darkness. It was a huge rock show, GBV finally writ large.
As much as the Hara Arena show felt like the beginning of a new phase, and indeed heralded the band’s official Dayton arrival, it marked the end of the line for “Fretless” Dan Toohey. In March he wrote Bob a letter outlining his demands for Guided By Voices, now that they were getting big. Although the original letter is long gone, and no one remembers what all the demands were, Bob recalls one of them: More time between songs, both in practices and live.
“He didn’t exist after that,” says Bob. “That being said—incredible bass player.”
CONCURRENT WITH EVERYTHING ELSE SWIRLING around him, Bob was busy assembling the LP that would end up being anointed the gem in his career’s heavy crown: Bee Thousand. To many, it still represents a peak he’s never topped. It didn’t seem that way at the time.
“It’s still funny to me to call something thrown together so haphazardly a masterpiece,” Bob said.8 His statement is accurate as far as the selection and sequencing go—these took place in relatively short order. But considering the LP collects Bob’s greatest musical moments from ten prior years, cut apart and Scotch-taped together in an 86-style sonic collage, it’s nothing less than the culmination of more than three decades devoted to music. “Bee Thousand, more so than any other album,” he says, “is comprised of old shit redone.”
Bob says his overriding philosophy for Bee Thousand was to make it sound like a rediscovered relic: “Like a bunch of Beatles outtakes that don’t exist.” If it sounded too good, they added tape hiss and drowned it to bootleg quality. “If there’s something catchy but it’s not working, it’s too cute—fuck it up,” he says. “Play it poorly, fuck it up, bury it.”
A few songs written expressly for the album are arguably perfect in their original conception. As Bob says, “You’ve got to have some creamy songs, or you don’t have any pop sensibility.” One Sunday morning Bob woke up early, brewed coffee, and sat down at the kitchen table with his guitar and a notebook to write. The results were the undeniably creamy “Gold Star For Robot Boy” and “I Am A Scientist,” which cried out:
I am a lost soul
I shoot myself with rock and roll
The hole I dig is bottomless
But nothing else can set me free
“It seemed to have some composure,” Bob says of the tune. Pleased with his work, he put on a Mighty Baby record at full volume to wake up Bryan and his friend Derek, who’d slept over. He played both songs for the boys, who said, “They’re good,” through mouthfuls of cereal and milk.
Bob called up Sprout to secure recordings before he forgot them, and they got Don Thrasher to come play drums on the spur of the moment. Bob didn’t like the recordings so much—“Very bad; not good”—but, he says, “We captured the songs. That’s all that matters.”
Album opener “Hardcore UFO’s” was once “Walls and Windows” by Coyote Call, and then again by the original Guided By Voices.
What’s the game, Master John?
Have you been through walls and windows?
I’ll be with you, without you, ’til ten
The song launched anew here, as shiny as a flying saucer, while sounding—as intended—as if newly disinterred from a record company’s deepest crypt.
“Buzzards And Dreadful Crows,” a fleshed-out outtake from Same Place The Fly Got Smashed, functioned as a meditation on human mortality whose breakneck pace turned it into a short horror film. Jimmy wrote the original riff, and Bob arranged it. “It’s Wilson Pickett singing for the Who,” he says. “It’s up there the whole fucking time. It tears my lungs out.”
Bob cannibalized the Crowd’s song “Tell Me” and melded it to other parts to create “Tractor Rape Chain,” a centerpiece of their live set since CBGB. “There have been at least ten versions of ‘Tractor Rape Chain,’” he says. This one reclaimed lyrics from Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia’s “Still Worth Nothing.”
Fragile epic “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory” is famously the only song Bob ever wrote while on LSD. The melody had once been called “The Hallway of Shatterproof Glass,” but he was newly inspired by an ill-timed glance into a mirror. The acid exploding through him, he watched his face morph into his son Bryan’s face. He was thirteen again. He freaked, ran down the stairs two at a time, wrote the lines:
Cold hands touching my face
Don’t hide the snake can see you
The song could easily have been orphaned, because Bob had to record it fast. He felt driven, compelled to get the idea down in its purest form. He recorded it at the very end of a tape. There was no time to rewind. By the next day, coming down and readjusting to three-dimensional space, he forgot he did it.
When they were preparing to go to Cleveland and master Bee Thousand with Griffin, Bob knew he could include snippets, sketches, any piece that seemed like it would fit the collage. Sorting though some old tapes, he put one in and started listening—nothing. Fast-forward a little bit. Nothing. He was about to give up, but then he thought, No, what if there’s something on there? “And right at the very end,” he says, “was ‘The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory.’”
He took it over to Tobin’s place and added a few parts, but the recording Bob made is basically what appeared on the LP. “When you’re combing through cassette tapes,” he advises, “you’ve got to go all the way to the end. You can’t assume there’s nothing else on there.”
A low-down, grimy Sprout instrumental that inspired Bob to say, “Let me just sing over the music,” became “Hot Freaks.” Tobin’s wife, Laura, was having a garage sale while they recorded it in a loft overhead, with the windows open.
Only Bob’s caterwauling was audible outside: “Yeah, this one is on the house! HO-O-O-O-O-OT FREAKS!” Concerned passersby stopped to ask Laura, “What is going on in there?”
From the long-ago works of Mailbox—Bob, Jimmy, Mitch, and a drum machine—came a song called “Humpty Dumpty World,” which Bob updated to “Smothered In Hugs.” He discovered it on an old tape, rearranged its parts, and added a few power chords: “In everything there’s something salvageable.” Likewise “Peep-Hole” came from an old song called “Sleeper” that was one GBV’s early live favorites. “The lyrics and hokey folkiness of the song were embarrassing, but I saved it,” says Bob. “And made it, in my opinion, much more heartfelt and poignant, but not embarrassing. Simple, direct, and punchy. And I used the words ‘I love you’ in a way that wasn’t sappy, which is not easy to do.”
“Yours To Keep,” a quiet meditation on what’s real and important and what’s not, led into barn burner “Echos Myron,” a reworking of “Try Me On For Size.” The exact lyrics mattered less to Bob than the sound they melded to the melody. In revising them he kept the original shapes: The words “Try me on for size,” for example, morphed neatly into “Towers to the skies,” and gained gravitas in the transfiguration. “We’re finally here, and shit yeah it’s cool” dropped it back into the realm of boastful joy. A song like “Demons Are Real,” Bob says, is all about the rhymes; forget what it means, or decide for yourself.
Sprout’s melancholic “Awful Bliss,” sprightly “Mincer Ray,” stately “Ester’s Day,” and album-closer “You’re Not An Airplane” (Tobin’s song, Bob’s title) comprised his most extensive contributions to a GBV album yet. This wasn’t solely due to Bob not wanting to include too many of them—although that may have been a factor—but also a side effect of Tobin’s more meditative songwriting process. Whereas Bob was constantly either banging them out or polishing them up, Tobin took his time.
For Sprout, “Writing music is almost like making a pot of spaghetti,” in the sense of cooking up music, lyrics, and melody separately, then seeing how they blend together. Once he’d written some music, he might let it sit until he forgot the exact sequence, and then go back in with fresh ears to add lyrics. Of Bob, Sprout observes, “He’s got a rhythm to his madness.”
Written by Bob, Jimmy, and Randy Campbell, DIY manifesto “A Big Fan Of The Pigpen,” was recorded as an instrumental on which, Bob says, “Jimmy’s bass playing is phenomenal.” The lyrics spoke of sideshow freaks and soft-rock renegades, but Bob says with a sigh, “The glory of that song is the riff.”
Mitch and Kevin wrote “Her Psychology Today” between takes, Kevin playing a brisk beat on the snare, Mitch adding an angular riff. From the other room Bob yelled, “Hey, record that!” He jumped in afterward with some lyrics.*
Bob calls minute-long “Kicker of Elves” an abstract territorial statement. “That’s probably the boldest statement I make on Bee Thousand,” he says. “It’s about nationalism and flag-waving, jingoism, bullies, maybe the US.”
In Cleveland, Robert Griffin played Bob the sequence he’d done for side A from songs Bob chose. “This is gonna be the one,” he gushed. “This is gonna break you.” Bob gives him credit: “Robert Griffin was one of the first people to know Guided By Voices would be a band that would garner some serious attention.”
Griffin said they’d go ahead and master and sequence the first side. Bob could do whatever he wanted with side B—or even the whole record—but Griffin felt like he had a strong sequence for side A. It was difficult to disagree with him once they heard it. Griffin sent the masters out to be pressed to vinyl, and the band lined up more dates for the summer.
A HEAD OF STEAM HAD been building, and the Hara Arena show blew off the lid. Between Kim Deal’s return to Dayton in 1992, the rapid ascendance of Guided By Voices and Brainiac, a sudden industry-wide focus on the Midwest, and the rise of a little thing called the World Wide Web, Dayton had a vibrant music scene on its hands.
Jim Greer wrote that the Dayton “scene” was promising, “but entirely misleading—almost all of this attention derives from two sources: the critical and commercial success of the Breeders, who relocated here after previous triumphs, and the notoriety lately accorded to underground legend Guided By Voices, which recorded nine flawless albums over a ten-year span, seemingly before anyone noticed.”9 As Bob says, “For the Breeders and Guided By Voices to be from Dayton at the same time, that was pretty huge.”
Spin’s Greer was born and raised in Boston. After a few years at the University of Virginia he’d dropped out, spent a “rebellious” period working in Boston record stores, and ended up in New York with a job at Spin (senior editor salary in 1991: $25K). The magazine was, Greer says, “barely keeping the lights on before Nirvana hit, and then overnight our circulation doubled. It was insane.” By 1992, he’d had enough of the office grind and moved to Dayton to live with Kim Deal because, “It’s tough enough to be in a relationship when one person’s in a touring band. But it’s even tougher when it’s long-distance. So it had to happen if it was going to continue.”10
Greer had to go back to New York to find out about Guided By Voices, from Matador’s Johan Kugelberg. In ’92, no one Greer spoke to in Dayton had heard of them. And it’s not like he didn’t ask; he had a friend write out a list of every Dayton band he could think of. “Just every band, period, because I want to check out what’s going on here,” he says. “And he gave me a list of like forty bands. Guided By Voices was not on that list. They just weren’t part of anything that was considered the quote-unquote Dayton scene.”
Greer returned from his New York visit with The Grand Hour and played it for Kim. They could hardly believe it had been made in Dayton. Looking in the phone book, Greer quickly found Pollard’s number at Titus Avenue. “We just called him up,” he says. “It’s a small town.”
Greer and Deal attended GBV’s Thanksgiving Eve 1993 show at Canal Street Tavern, and they all partied together afterward: “He’s an extrovert, Kim’s an extrovert, I’m not. Once I get enough beer in me then I can be an extrovert.” But he did. It happened more often than not at Walnut Hills (formerly the 1001 Club), where Bob and Jim Pollard, and Kim Deal and Jim Greer—the core—and sometimes Kim’s sister Kelley or Randy Campbell or Pete Jamison or other friends, adopted a regular booth. (Their picture hung on the wall above it until Walnut Hills closed in 2011.)
“I imported my drink of choice,” Greer recalls. “It’s called a Sea Breeze, but Bob calls it a Pink Drink. He would be like, ‘Get some more of those pink drinks!’ Because they were really cheap and they were really strong. Coming from New York, where everything was more expensive, I thought it was incredible. I could get hammered for like thirty bucks. We did that a lot.”
Another favorite pastime was a game they called Acting Practice. Someone would come up with a single line of dialogue, for example, “If I told you it was easy… I’d be lying to you,” and they’d go around the table. “Everyone does their own delivery,” says Bob, “and at the end you decide who won.” They would sit there all night delivering non sequiturs—“They have, I’m telling you, the smallest shrimp in the world at Red Lobster!”—until they got kicked out. Bob laughs. “It really did make you a better actor, and improved short-term memory.”
Kim and Kelley were into playing pool, which Bob and Greer most decidedly were not. Bob’s feeling was, “When I come to a bar I want to drink and I want to bullshit. That’s what I’m there for. I don’t wanna play fucking pool or anything.” Acting Practice, with its rotating cast of characters, was the perfect entertainment to accompany a drinking session. Bob also remained extremely competitive, and pool was not his sport. He refused to play a game in which he couldn’t compete.
Greer often fell into the role of Bob’s bar stenographer, jotting down notes and titles at Bob’s request to jog his memory later. “I certainly don’t remember half the stuff that happens when I’m hammered with him. And he’ll remember everything,” says Greer. “I was always scribbling things on soggy bar napkins, and [I’d] crumple it into my pocket. I would get a call two weeks later, ‘Remember those titles I told you to write down?’ I’m pulling the thing out of my pocket, and saying, ‘I don’t… it looks like Blazing Moon Kids?’ I was trying to decipher what the titles were. And then he’d remember some of them!”
In early 1994, Deal gave GBV a boost by recording a cover of “Shocker In Gloomtown” for the Breeders’ Head to Toe EP, produced by Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis. Guided By Voices (Robert Pollard, Jim Pollard, Dan Toohey, Tobin Sprout, Kevin Fennell, and Mitch Mitchell) appeared in a video for the track. Bob and Kim, the extroverts, found an easy rapport. The Deal sisters were smart, looked dynamite, were great musicians, and dug the cool shit. Bob and Kim came up with the band name Tammy and the Amps together, based on the pseudonym Tammy Ampersand. It would be Kim Deal, Bob, and Steven Drozd (of Flaming Lips), wearing all black and headsets. Grinning, Kim assured Bob he could write one or two songs for each album.
Kim even asked to be in Guided By Voices, but Bob thought she was joking, ribbing him. She admitted later that she wasn’t, but Bob says, “I couldn’t understand why she’d want to be in GBV when she was in the Breeders and Pixies.”
He recalls, “There was some attraction back then. There were sparks.” Deal dropped Bob off one night after drinking and spoke into the silence in exasperation, “Why do people have to be married?”
“They just do,” Bob said, careful not to step beyond innocent flirtation—but flirting nonetheless.
“She says he hit on her,” Greer notes. “But I didn’t know at the time. She told me years later.”
But these were the granules of interaction, the Dayton scene’s core. In the wider world, gears turned the nation’s fans toward Ohio and Dayton in particular. “It was an exciting time just for music in general,” Greer says. “Partly because of the big huge wave of post-Nirvana alternative euphoria.” The chum was floating, and sharks were swimming in a signing frenzy. In the churning waters, nearly any band could end up swallowed and clutching a generous contract.
“I remember interviewing Henry Rollins about this,” recalls Greer, “and he was like, ‘They changed the music business. They’ve upended it, it’s completely different now.’ And he was just so wrong because… to me, in retrospect, Nirvana was really the end of something rather than the beginning. It was the end of a long process of underground music trying to make its way into the mainstream.”
In April, just after the big Hara Arena show, Kurt Cobain’s suicide concussed the world. Bob’s recently penned lines, “I am a lost soul, I shoot myself with rock and roll,” seem eerily prophetic when viewed in light of the tragedy. Cobain sent a warning for anyone who craved the spotlight; one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenes Sprout sang about in “Awful Bliss.” Pollard took it as a cautionary tale.
“[Bob] is a very contradictory person,” says Greer, “because as much as he wanted to be discovered and found and all that, as soon as he was, he was paranoid of every single person in the music business. The record company, the managers, everybody—that’s what ‘Game Of Pricks’ is about.”11
AT POLLARD’S HOUSE AT 2109 Titus Avenue, a driveway ran along the right side to the detached garage. Behind that was a basketball court Bob installed, a yard fenced closely on either side, and a small toolshed. The garage, “which was horrible when he got signed,” became the official Monument Club in 1994.12
Bob had grown popular enough to have a little more money than he’d been used to. He still had his teacher’s salary, but added to that was the money coming in from Scat and Matador Records, which were distributing the new stuff alongside GBV’s back stock, not to mention steady checks from the band’s live appearances. Even when splitting the take evenly among the band members—which Bob has always done, all for one and one for all—the money was good. He took a hard look at what was next, and chose to go all in on what he’d almost given up after Propeller.
The first part of his plan involved a Monument Club renovation. On the one hand, it created a dedicated space for what Bob most wanted to do, which was drink and bullshit with his friends. It also formalized the space that provided him with the lion’s share of his observations and ideas—if someone was assigned to take notes. What had begun as the simple act of getting drunk after playing basketball or softball became certified. The Sunday get-togethers morphed into what Greer later called, “an institution in Guided by Voices lore.”13
It was emblematic of Bob’s humble ambition. He wasn’t looking for a mansion in Los Angeles; he just wanted a little comfort in his hometown, a measure of security. It was also, Jamison says, “a huge time in the development of Northridge. That’s when Bob became kind of the alpha male.” Actually he’d been that for quite some time, but now he fully assumed the role. “He was showing off to that inner circle of Northridge, like, ‘Hey! Don’t fuck with me!’” Pete laughs. “But that whole thing of the Monument Club? That’s a bunch of alpha males that would fight at the drop of a hat, all uniting around Bobby. That was a very influential tipping point.”14
Monument Clubber “240 Scrigs” Grigsby put up some drywall in the garage, and he installed a drain in the middle of the floor so they could hose it down and squeegee it off. He installed a urinal in one wall—very civilized—but it only drained into a five-gallon plastic bucket outside. The buckets got heavy, and sometimes froze solid—“like a giant piss Popsicle”—and someone had to dump out the buckets in the creek that ran behind the house.15
“There’s ten guys in there, big-screen TV, huge stereo, just drinking like bandits,” says Pete. “You don’t want to piss in the yard, right?”
THE BAND FILMED THE VIDEO for “I Am A Scientist,” their first, a few days after Cobain’s death, on April 9, with directors David Kleiler and Banks Tarver (brother to Clay Tarver, guitarist in Bullet Lavolta and Chavez). Although Bob was largely disinterested in radio or music videos—he preferred to continue the word-of-mouth technique begun in the Snakepit—the imminent release of Bee Thousand and Griffin’s promises of hitting the big time swayed him.
Jamison recalls Tarver trying to get Bob to do things that didn’t necessarily coincide with how Bob wanted to appear in a video: “I think where it gave Bob his edge, today, was that it didn’t look cheesy,” Pete says. “He wasn’t sitting there trying to smile, which Banks kind of wanted him to do a couple times.”
With the band’s image being projected ever farther, at home Bob honed their live presence and performances. On May 7, the band had another show at Canal Street, and Bob called Greg Demos to tell him Mitch had been arrested. Could he jump in and play bass?
“I showed up at Bob’s when he was living on Titus,” Demos recalls. “I had on jeans and a T-shirt. He’s like, ‘What the fuck are you doin’?’ I said, ‘Uh, I’m ready to play a show.’ He’s like, ‘Where’s your pants?’ I go, ‘What do you mean?’” Greg had been embarrassed to show Bob the striped pants at first, but Bob loved them. “He fucking sent me back home to get the striped pants, and so I wore the uniform every time, ever since then.”
“He shows up with Levi’s with holes in the knees,” Bob recalls, shaking his head. “I’m like, go get the striped white pants on, man!”
That night they played the “Free Mitch Mitchell!” concert. Onstage were Bob, Kevin Fennell on drums, Tobin Sprout on guitar, and Greg Demos on bass. “Hey—this show is dedicated to our other guitar player, who will be at the show tomorrow night.… He’s in jail,” Bob said. “Free Mitch Mitchell! We should’ve had Pete print some T-shirts up for that one.”
Bob gave the crowd just a hint of the onstage shit-talking he’d refine to an art form—“This is from our new single on Domino Records in London. They sold out of ’em, and didn’t send us one fucking copy!”—and expressed his gratitude for the openers: “Hey, we’d like to thank the 3Ds, they were great. We’re playing with them again tomorrow night in Newport, Kentucky. And also Pavement. Also Pavement. Pavement was on Leno two weeks ago, so come to that show.”
Someone in the crowd yelled out for one of Bob’s older songs: “Big School!”
“Big School,” Bob said wistfully. “Man, I wish we could.”
At a show in Nashville, playing with the Grifters, Bob executed a mic twirl that sent it careening into the crowd. After that, Jamison started attaching the mic to the cord with gaffer’s tape, which worked for a while. Sometimes a mic would hit the floor and break, and the venue charged the band for it. “I would ask for the mic,” Jamison says, “and we never had to pay except once, and the mic did work when we checked it out.”
WITH THE SUMMER BOOKED FULL of shows, Bob decided to quit Lincoln Elementary at the end of the school year. Bee Thousand was about to drop, and there was widespread major-label interest, so Bob plunged in.
He went to see Principal Toles in her office. “I’m going to resign,” he told her simply. “I’ll finish out the year, but that’s it.”
“Well.” She looked at him skeptically. “What are you going to do?”
He didn’t know exactly how to put it into words. For an instant, screaming “I WANNA ROCK!” as though he were confronting the actor who played Neidermeyer in Animal House seemed like an appropriate response. He said, haltingly, “I’m going into a… career… of music.”
Her eyebrows raised just a little. “Well, you need to tell everyone that at our next staff meeting.”
At the meeting, Bob dutifully stood up when Principal Toles called on him. “Just want to let everyone know,” he said, “it’s been great, but I’m going to resign. This is my last year. I’ve got something else going on. Another career move.” Cleared his throat. “That I’m making.”
The staff all looked at one another, at Bob, back to one another. A few mouths hung open in wonderment. “Uh,” asked one of the teachers, “what is it?”
Again, in his mind’s eye Bob saw himself scream, “I’M GONNA ROCK!” but opted for diplomacy. “I’m going to go into music,” he told them. “A musical thing.”
They nodded and smiled at him, baffled, the way one does when humoring a crazy person.
Meanwhile, Pollard Sr. tried to talk sense into Bob, to no avail. He shrewdly decided to call in his buddy Mr. Freund, of Freund’s Precision. One afternoon Freund sidled up next to Bob on the first-base side at a Northridge High School baseball game.
“Hey, what’s goin’ on there, Bob?” Of course he knew the latest developments; Bob Sr. had already briefed him.
“Not much,” Bob replied. “Just watchin’ some baseball.”
“Anything else?”
Bob knew what he was driving at. “Well, y’know, I’m making a move, doing some music—”
Freund used a disgusted noise to cut him off midsentence. “Listen—I come from a family of nearly all classically trained musicians,” Freund said intensely. “And nothing—nothing—has ever happened for any of us.” He let that sink in for a few seconds.
Bob grinned. “Well, don’t freak out, Mr. Freund, ’cause it already happened.” A week later the band was featured in an MTV news segment, and major-label suitors—among them Warner Bros.—were putting out feelers in GBV’s direction. “Bobby, I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Mr. Freund told him. “I mean, I’m sure you can understand.”
BOB WAS AHEAD OF HIS own curve. Months before Bee Thousand saw release, he conceived of a follow-up called Scalping The Guru, which would take its final form as Alien Lanes. Made in much the same way as Bee Thousand—almost exclusively on Tobin Sprout’s 4-track at Collider XL—it forms the centerpiece of the band’s holy trinity. Where Bee Thousand is baroque and byzantine, moving through a doll’s house of tiny dioramas, Alien Lanes is a nonstop series of rock miniatures—post-punk in the auditorium, designed for the kids.
Album opener (and Bob’s drinking anthem) “A Salty Salute” began as Tobin’s instrumental, recorded with its distinctive “bassline” played on a guitar. “You do that by putting it on the front pickup and turning the treble all the way down,” Sprout explains. Then he turned the treble all the way down in the 4-track’s EQ as well. Likewise, “Auditorium” was a Tobin instrumental later overdubbed with vocals by Bob.
“Evil Speakers” was recorded by Sprout and Pollard, “probably in one of our more playful moods.” Bob played guitar and sang and Sprout laid down the drum track. Of shambolic rocker “Watch Me Jumpstart,” Bob confides, “I don’t want to blow my own horn, but that’s me playing those crunchy guitar riffs,” with Demos on bass and Fennell on the drums. “Every record I put out,” Bob says, “is basically by the same guy”—himself.
Bob recalls “They’re Not Witches” as a “killer song. It’s like a fairy tale or a Brothers Grimm song.” Greg and Jimmy did the song’s basic parts in one take, Greg playing electric guitar and Jim playing bass, and Bob added acoustic guitar. His lyrics continued to mark the divide between myth and mundanity:
Dream kid the size does not matter
Bad luck anyway you call it
Red ants and mercy giants
The angels of the bars
“The bass is really good,” says Bob. “Jimmy should have been a bass player.”
For sheer blissed-out rock, few songs beat “Closer You Are,” with its “chain static rings” and “vapor snakes.” In a couplet, Pollard painted himself as a lonely visionary:
I get up at seven o’clock
And drive myself up to the lookout rock
Greg played the out-of-tune violin on “Blimps Go 90,” and they threw it through a chorus effect to try to get it in tune. (It didn’t quite work.) And aside from “Motor Away,” which saw the entire classic lineup together for recording—one of the few times they were—the record was a patchwork quilt, a sound collage far more jittery than its predecessor.
Sprout’s contributions, most of them recorded on his own, grew in stature and confidence. In “A Good Flying Bird,” Sprout created an enduring GBV anthem:
Fools and kings decide
Ways to live your life
This is just the way we want to be
Sprout laughs. “It gives the whole audience a chance to sing YEAH.” Aching love song “Little Whirl” is Sprout and a guitar, and “Strawdogs” chugged in like the soundtrack for underdogs the world over, “burned out, concerned out, discerned out”:
We are the willing supporters
And we’d like to know
Why everything is so unkind
“A lot of times my goal in writing songs was just to impress Bob,” Sprout says, “so I could get on the album.” But there was a convergence between their styles as well, the musical forms dovetailing and both singers placing a heavier emphasis on Brit-tinged delivery.
Bob hadn’t yet shed the self-consciousness that earlier caused him to throw away his fake album covers. He wondered whether to include a song like “My Valuable Hunting Knife” on the all-important Bee Thousand follow-up. “It sounds nuts,” he says. But Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan complimented Bob on it, calling it, “My Very Valuable Hunting Knife.” Bob decided it was probably all right.
An engineer scrawled on the Alien Lanes mastering sheet, “This is the poorest sound quality I’ve ever heard.” Bob laughs, “Hey, just master it, dumbfuck. Make it sound like Who’s Next! Sprinkle your magic on it!”
Two camps arose among the band’s devotees, those who clove to Bee Thousand and those who found Alien Lanes superior. Kim Deal was in the former group; Bob recalls she thought there were too many rockers, bang-bang-bang in a row on Alien Lanes. Fennell disagrees. “Alien Lanes is my favorite record. Alien Lanes was a joy,” he says. “Everything about it. I just think it’s a superior record. The hits just keep on coming, man. What’s not to like about it?”
“We could do no wrong at that time,” Bob says. “It was our time.” The album complete—save for Bob’s last-minute tinkering and swapping out of songs, which continued into the summer—advance tapes circulated.
The LP’s cover broadened and deepened the band’s mystery, depicting a multicolored snare drum in a desert, whose juxtaposition with icy mountain ranges and the title was suggestive of another world entirely. The music backed it up. The band photo on the reverse was taken in the basement at Kevin and Donna’s house. Says Bob of his pose, “I’m looking up at the ceiling like I’m trying to think of eighty-five more albums.”
TOURING, FORMERLY THE PROVINCE OF weekends and holidays, took on new rigor. Griffin booked a string of shows through the summer, billing it the Insects of Rock Tour. It included Brian DiPlacido’s one-man punk act A Bullet for Fidel, and reunited Guided By Voices with their Scat labelmates Prisonshake and—most important—Cobra Verde and their guitarist Doug Gillard. Pollard would get a close view of Gillard’s virtuosic technique that summer.
First they played a few warm-up shows in Cincinnati and Columbus. GBV had just released “Always Crush Me” on a split 7-inch with Belreve on Anyway Records, so the latter gig, at Stache’s, was for Bela Koe-Krompecher’s twenty-sixth birthday party—a chaotic, booze-soaked affair. Before the end of the year “Trader” Vic Blankenship released the show—recorded by Dave Doughman (from Swearing at Motorists)—as a bootleg called Crying Your Knife Away.
Sources report the gig started that afternoon in Koe-Krompecher’s backyard. “Kegs were flowing, and Pete Jamison manned the grill, while Bela’s grandmother (beer in hand) presided over the whole affair from a La-Z-Boy in the middle of the yard. Records were traded, lies were told, and perception was severely impaired. Around 10:00 p.m. the party went mobile, stumbling a few blocks away to Stache’s. The drink of choice was Rolling Rock, and before GBV took the stage, at least one band member caught a nap.”16
Recalled Blankenship, “Bob had been watching the O. J. Simpson trial around the time this show happened. While singing ‘If We Wait’ he accidently sang ‘crying your knife away’ instead of ‘crying your life away.’”17 Thus, the bootleg’s title.
On June 21, the release of Bee Thousand heralded Guided By Voices’ full-blown arrival, finally here—and shit yeah it’s cool. Over the next few months, momentum built as the band toured. Already the critics’ darling, by the end of the summer they sparked a brushfire of adulatory press. College Media Journal’s month in review reported, “It is the band’s melodic wizardry that works the miracles on its crude, cut ’n’ paste songs, making Bee Thousand a masterpiece made from scraps.”18
The Baltimore City Paper delivered an understated “GBV is so good at integrating references, in fact, that their records sound like nothing more than well-groomed and quirky modern rock. Call them post-postmodernists—what else to brand a group that sings a song named ‘The Golden Heart Mountain Top Queen Directory’ [sic] without even a smirk, and doesn’t come off as disgustingly pretentious?”19
Dave Morrison called the album “effortlessly good. ‘Bee Thousand’ roars off on a warm lo-fi power surge.”20 Rob Mitchell advised readers, “Buy this, peer through the hiss and fuzz, and feel the purifying warmth of song-writing at its simple, cool, accessible, yes accessible best.”21 In Moo, Jerry Dannemiller named Bee Thousand album of the year, and San Diego State University’s Daily Aztec listed it among the year’s best.22
Even the mainstream music press hopped on the bandwagon. Rolling Stone gave it 4/5 stars, reviewer Michael Azerrad comparing GBV favorably to a number of rock ’n’ roll touchstones. He noted, “The band name also goes a long way toward identifying the surely ethereal source of their inspiration as well as underscoring the way Pollard’s vocals drive the moving, indelible melodies.”23 Reviewer Nick Gaffney observed, “What GBV has done is to take the do-it-yourself, just-play-it psychology of punk and transported it to a much Pop-ier, tuneful feel, to the music where you once stood back and gazed at [sic].”24
Seemingly alone in kicking against the pricks, dean of American rock critics Robert Christgau griped that the record was “undercut by multiple irritants,” was offended by the deliberate nature of said irritants, and lambasted it thusly: “In short, this is pop for perverts—pomo smarty-pants too prudish and/or alienated to take their pleasure without a touch of pain to remind them that they’re still alive.”25
POLLARD WAS READY TO SCREAM it like Alice Cooper: “School’s out for summer! School’s out for-EVAH!” The Insects of Rock Tour began with a caravan to New York City: Prisonshake in Griffin’s van, GBV in a rental. Cobra Verde would join them for later shows, but only the two bands performed the kickoff at New York City gallery Thread Waxing Space on June 25.
On the way to New York Mitch got a speeding ticket. Not a huge deal, but at the next rest stop Bob asked Griffin what the policy was for tickets or—knock on wood—accidents?
“The rule,” Griffin told him, “is pretty much you’re on your own.” Bob noted it for future reference.
At Thread Waxing Space, an act that was startling even in its infancy had clearly matured—GBV’s presence was electric, arresting, in the long, low-ceilinged gallery. The band barreled through seventeen songs, a mix of Propeller and Bee Thousand tracks, with a selection from the 7-inches and their next, as-yet-unnamed, in-utero album thrown in for good measure. MTV was on hand to interview the band and film the show, and Bob rose to the challenge.
Halfhearted mic twirls had become smart, crisp arcs so ambitious the mic sometimes cracked against the ceiling. Twitchy jerks and side-kicks had become a full-on crescent kick. With Demos and Fennell driving the beat, the band hurled themselves into every song. Paired with Bob howling the lyrics to “Some Drilling Implied,” they made the ceiling seem liable to cave in at any moment. But Bob could sequence a show as well as an album; he knew to give the crowd a breather with the sixth song, “14 Cheerleader Coldfront,” and again before the big finale with “Drinker’s Peace.”
The band pulled out a thunderous new number from Alien Lanes, “Closer You Are,” the third or fourth time they’d played it live so far. Its central couplet neatly summarized the live act’s power and immediacy:
“Our energy back then, when we were onstage,” Bob says, “was insane.” They jumped, moved, sweated—basically killed themselves onstage for the good of the show—all while downing heroic amounts of Rolling Rock. It was difficult to the point of athleticism; their lungs would burn. But Bob believed they had set the audience’s expectations, and so had to live up to them. “Now we had to do it every fucking show. Act like maniacs every fucking show.”
“They may not be young guns,” Music Week noted, “but on stage and on record, they produce a shambolic, lo-fi sound that’s irresistibly hook-laden.”26
Next day, the Insects’ caravan crossed the Hudson River for a Sunday-night gig at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. Monday morning they began the 2,855-mile, forty-two-hour trek across North America to the Crocodile Cafe in Seattle for a June 30 show.
Cut to Bob as he startled awake in the early morning. He saw smeared red taillights through the front windshield of Mitch’s van. Outside, thick fog crowded in. They were stopped on the shoulder, hazards blinking.
“Where the fuck are we?” Bob asked.
Not far from Fargo, North Dakota; about halfway there. But it soon became clear they were in trouble. Prisonshake’s van had slammed into a deer while traveling in the lead spot. It was pretty much totaled. The deer lay dead.
The cheapest immediately available rooms were at the hotel on a local Indian reservation. There they drank beer most of the day while they waited for word on the van. The only thing happening that night, Bob says, was the Great Rocky Mountain Testicle Festival. “We didn’t go,” he says. “We should have.”
When word came that afternoon, it wasn’t good: the mechanic said it would take two weeks and thousands of dollars to fix Prisonshake’s ride. Faced with this setback, Griffin seemingly thought better of his earlier policy; he told everyone unforeseen expenses would be taken off the top of the whole tour.
Fuck that, thought Bob.
Regardless of the arrangement, they didn’t have a few weeks to spare. They had to be in Seattle by Thursday. What can we do, they asked, just to get the thing moving? The mechanic rubbed his jaw and pondered. “Well,” he admitted, “I could tie the hood down. Probably have to duct-tape a few things…”
“Do it!” they cried, aggravated that he hadn’t done it already. The convoy was on the road again in a few hours. It didn’t look nearly as good as before, but it was mobile enough for rock ’n’ roll. They made it to Seattle in time for the Crocodile Cafe show on June 30, and the following day drove south across Oregon’s pine-forested peaks.
Friday afternoon the band arrived at the University of Oregon in Eugene for a show, with Prisonshake and A Bullet for Fidel in tow. What they found did not inspire confidence. A gazebo that was to be GBV’s stage stood at the center of a field full of picnic tables. Demos says, “We thought it was gonna suck.”
Before the show, Stan McMahon and John Chandler approached the band to say hello and tell them they were big fans. Chandler, whose early GBV reviews appeared in Puncture magazine, said of McMahon, “This guy knows every one of your fucking songs.”
“You gotta be shittin’ me!” Bob couldn’t believe it; it was Bill Hustad playing “Sometimes I Cry” all over again. He made the spur-of-the-moment decision to have Stan “The Man” open the show with some GBV tunes on acoustic.
Maybe thirty people crowded around the stage to get a look at the Midwest’s finest freaks. Halfway through GBV’s set the sky started dumping rain, so heavy you couldn’t see more than twenty yards. The sound, however, was amazing. The small crowd just about lost their minds. “It ended up being the most fucking amazing show,” Demos recalls. “One of those things you think is gonna suck, but turns out to be the best.”
Almost nobody came, but GBV was critically acclaimed among those who did. Enough so, at least, that people took them out to eat afterward, and let them crash on their couches and in their yards. There was no budget for hotel rooms; unless they encountered generous fans, the bands slept in their vans.
Saturday found the Insects of Rock in San Francisco for the first time, playing the I-Beam. Again the band was focused, tight, with the compressed energy of a whip crack. Early in the set Bob called out: “Greg Demos and striped white pants!” Later the band tuned up, allowing Bob to break into impromptu comedic banter—mostly in-jokes, but a hint of the legendary rants to come. He led the band through a cosmic, transcendent version of “Johnny Appleseed,” fragile harmonies of “Sooo cherry” giving way to the roar of “Quality Of Armor.”
While drinking and bullshitting after the show, a strawberry-blond woman came up to Bob and smiled at him seriously. “What’s my name?” she asked.
Bob paused, flustered, before he ascertained she was singer-songwriter Barbara Manning of SF Seals, who’d just released their debut LP on Matador.
“Barb!” he said.
She corrected him, “It’s Barbara.” Manning went on: “You guys are all hot. But do you know who the hottest is?”
Bob thought about it. “Greg?”
She smiled, nodded. On the nose.
Not that being hot did them much good on the road; everyone except Mitch had a wife or girlfriend back home. Exacerbating the issue was Bob’s no-masturbation policy. He explains, “You’ve never been out on tour before and you don’t know what to expect. So you lay out some ground rules. I’m like the head coach. What can I do to keep the energy, the guts, the balls up? No masturbating. It gave you raw fucking weirdness.”
It may also have raised band tensions to live-wire levels. They were nervous wrecks; it seemed there was a greater spotlight on them every time they played. And no one could forget the rule with Demos counting days.
“SIR, day seven!” he shouted at mock-attention. “Permission to BEAT OFF!”
Bob deadpanned, “No.”
At the Jabberjaw in Los Angeles on July 3, they played a dry show. “We could drink, though,” Bob clarifies. The band had to crowd onto a stage roughly the size of a barroom table. As GBV was about to go on, Bob found Demos “with half a dozen hot chicks all digging on him.” Bob told him, “Stick with the pants.”
The dark of a club could cover up the funk of showering only every three or four days, and wearing the same striped white pants every night—sweat-stained, stinking, and unafraid. But the cold streetlamps outside dispelled the club’s mystique.
R.E.M.’s Peter Buck was on hand for the Jabberjaw gig, and came out to the van after the show. Bob recalls Buck walking up with his wife just as Demos was changing his pants with the van door wide open. Greg struggled to complete the operation swiftly and hopped out.
“Hey,” Buck said to Bob, “that was great show, man!”
But a stench wafted from the van, and Buck looked over to see Greg’s underwear, lying there like a dead animal. Bob says they had “a thick fucking stripe… visible to them!” Buck and his wife recoiled visibly.
Demos asks the reader to consider what it might be like to take a shit in a porta-john when it’s 100 degrees, or to not really wipe one’s ass for close to three weeks. “Striped white pants and striped brown underwear,” he laments. That was rock ’n’ roll for the other twenty hours of each day.
After L.A. the tour swerved inland across the desert and north to Cicero’s in St. Louis on July 6. The count on Bob’s anti-self-abuse policy reached day ten, when, he says, “Even I needed a whack, you know?”
“DAY 10, SIR,” Demos announced strenuously. “PERMISSION TO BEAT OFF.”
Bob paused. “All right,” he said.
He specifies, “I don’t know what happened after that, but I gave them permission.”
Shows at the University of Wisconsin (July 7) and Cleveland’s Euclid Tavern (July 8, with Cobra Verde) followed, and the Insects of Rock Tour reached its inevitable end at Lounge Ax in Chicago (July 9), where the whole band got a hotel room to share.
“Hey, what do you guys want to be when you grow up?” Bob, the eternal youth, asked the crowd before the set kicked off. Neither he nor the band had lost any energy in performance since the tour began. Demos still leaped and whirled across the stage. That said, after a spirited rendition of “Lethargy,” Bob quipped, “I’m gonna puke, man! We’ve been undernourished and now I have no vitamins in my body.”
The set was immortalized as “Greg Demos’ Balls” in Pollard’s video collage The Devil Went Home And Puked, with the striped white pants—if not the balls—on prominent display throughout. “We gotta find a Laundromat somewhere to wash this guy’s pants, man, he wears them every night,” Bob said between songs. “Throw your quarters up here!”
Cobra Verde’s John Petkovic and Doug Gillard jumped onstage to sing backing vocals during “Quality Of Armor.” The crowd ate it up. “This is GBV land,” Bob purred. “Sweet home Chicago!” chimed Mitch.
It was a long two weeks. “I don’t remember making a whole lot of money on that tour,” Bob says. However, he’d noted the policy from the very first leg—“pretty much you’re on your own”—and he waited to see if Griffin would try to change it in light of the damage North Dakota wildlife had inflicted on Prisonshake’s van.
“Given that it was the kind of tour where we played Hoboken and then the next show was in Seattle,” Griffin says, “I was paying for everything and I figured whatever was left at the end, we would split it. I think that’s where the seeds of any kind of weirdness between me and the band were sown.”27
They waited in the hall while Griffin, in his hotel room, worked to tally the bands’ payouts. Before he vanished into seclusion, Bob strongly implied they expected to get exactly what they’d been promised. They would use their money to pay Mitch’s speeding ticket, per the policy. Although Griffin gave up the cash, they rolled into Dayton exhausted and not much richer than when they’d left.
THE BAND GOT A WEEK off to recharge. On July 13, a piece aired on MTV News in advance of GBV’s Lollapalooza dates, including interview footage with Jimmy, Bob, Greg, and Tobin, not to mention underground music royalty like Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo.
Of GBV’s tenacity Ranaldo observed, “It says the obvious: that it’s really what they’re into doing. They had day jobs in order to do it. And that’s great. I mean, that’s where real music gets made a lot of times. It’s not about record deals, it’s not about even traveling around the country. It’s about what’s in your head and getting it out.”28
A discussion on the band’s advanced age (in rock years, at least) prompted a youthful Demos to joke, “The only reason they got me in the band was because I bring the average age down by about ten years.”
“Every once in a while you hear a band that’s right, from the word go,” said Ranaldo, “it’s like, everything that a rock band is supposed to be.” An unnamed fan added, “They’re the ancient Chinese secret of rock.”
Meanwhile, Demos made it clear to Bob he was leaving the band to take a job with a law firm in September, and the Lollapalooza dates would be his last. Bob was desperate for another bass player who fit the band’s vibe. Someone who, like Demos, could fall off the stage during a show and pop up none the worse for wear.
Bob knew Jim Greer played instruments—not bass specifically—but that he could hold his own. One night at Walnut Hills he offered him the job, all but begging him to join GBV.
It’s probably every rock writer’s dream to do it for real; still, Greer was reluctant. “I can do it,” he said, “but I don’t want to be in a band full-time. I’m a writer.”
“Well, we spend, like, one week recording, and then we tour for, like, three weeks, six weeks out of the year,” Bob said. “That’s nothing.”
Greer said he’d think about it. Back at their apartment that night, Kim Deal voiced her opposition. “We’ll be broken up within a year if you do this,” she said. But Deal was wrong. It took two years.29
ALTHOUGH HE’S NOT SURE HOW it came about—probably because Mitch asked him—guitarist Nate Farley became the band’s roadie for their three Lollapalooza dates. Farley grew up on Dayton’s West Side, not far from Siebenthaler Avenue, but he had known Mitch since 1986 or so. In Dayton they all ran in the same circles, since Nate’s punk band and GBV both practiced in Mitch’s garage. “He had a really nice garage,” Nate says with a laugh.30
Lollapalooza paid the band only $500 for each show, so exposure was the primary goal. The first date, July 20, was Riverbend Music Center in Cincinnati. With the Breeders playing the main stage and Greer on hand reporting for Spin, the party was in full swing. GBV arrived in Mitch’s van, a graffiti-covered, rusted-out beater that leaked gasoline and had a bumper sticker that said INHALE TO THE CHIEF.
Greer says that as the band headed off to Lollapalooza, “Mitch was on parole for selling pot, meaning that not only could he not be found in possession of pot himself, but he was not supposed to be found in the company of anyone smoking or possessing pot. Not to mention what would happen if he were found to be driving drunk.”31
So as one does when heading off to Cincinnati for a rock show under legal restrictions, they hit a drive-through liquor store in Dayton and stocked up. They started drinking in the van, buzzing down I-75 with the windows down. Mitch drove and then Nate took over for a while. They arrived unscathed, but due to the van’s gas leak the Lollapalooza security staff forbade them from parking near the stage. “We were not allowed to get close,” Pete Jamison says. “They barely let us pull up to unload equipment.”
They drove in past the frowning stage managers, unloaded the gear, and Nate took the van out into the vast, utterly full parking lot to find a spot in the boonies. When the show was over he reversed the process. “I was a horrible roadie, horrible driver,” Farley admits. “I would party with everyone else.” They repeated the process a few days later at Deer Creek Music Center, playing for crowds that were nearly as enthusiastic as the kids in the clubs.
Pollard kept after Greer to join them. “He wanted somebody he knew and that he liked in the band,” Greer says. “He still had this vision of Guided By Voices as a kind of gang. He felt like, in a way, it was also binding the Breeders and GBV together so it was more of a scene.”
Greg Demos’s last show was at Pine Knob Amphitheater in Michigan on July 23. In the trailer after the show with Jimmy and Bob, Greer sighed and said, “All right, yeah. I’ll do it.”
Not everyone was so immediately positive; Demos’s departure sent an undercurrent of uncertainty through the band before things settled into place. Jamison says, “Greer wrote a great article about GBV in Spin […], they all hung out together at Walnut Hills Bar. When all that was over, Greer was still there and got in the band. It was kind of, you know, what’s going on here?” He suspected an outsider had entered the ranks. “But when everything washed up on the beach,” he adds, “it was all cozy and comfortable.”
“I took a week and learned the songs,” Greer says. “They’re not hard to learn, and there weren’t as many of them back then. We practiced and Bob was like, ‘OK, I guess we’re ready to go.’”
Greer’s debut and Dayton coming-out party was the band’s September 2 show at Canal Street Tavern. He described it as bittersweet, insofar as he’d gone irreversibly from fan to professional. He had “crossed the threshold of objectivity.” A brash Greer said, “I won’t be doing any Guided By Voices pieces in the future. I wish I could, ’cause I can probably do them better than anyone else.” Newspaper writer Dave Larsen noted, for the record, “Greer sees no ethical dilemma with joining the band that he’s championed.”32
LATE THAT SUMMER THE BAND drove out to New York for media activities connected to Lollapalooza, and to record a new version of “I Am A Scientist” with Andy Shernoff while they were there. This time the convoy consisted of Mitch’s van and Pete Jamison’s Cadillac. They had a close call on the way into the city, Jamison smoking the tires and swerving across three lanes out of a toll booth to avoid being left behind.
The recording session presented its own challenges. Jamison recalls that Bob didn’t like the vocal sound they were getting, and tried to explain to Shernoff the sound that Sprout had been able to coax from a certain guitar effects pedal. Shernoff said he had a guitar pedal that would do the trick. He drove home to another borough to get it. It still wasn’t the right sound, but they taped a version of “Scientist” to use on an upcoming Scat 7-inch.
After Lollapalooza, they finally rolled in at the motel at three or four in the morning, fairly lit. There was no time for a proper night’s sleep, but Pete told Demos to watch his car for a few minutes while he went in to use the head. Surely, he thought, it’d be OK in the restricted zone for a short time. “I knew not to park there in New York City,” Jamison says, “but I figured it would only be a half hour. Waited too long.”
Pete returned approximately forty minutes later. He found a drunken Demos swaying in the empty spot where his Cadillac had been, mysteriously drinking a beer he hadn’t had earlier.
Pete shouted, “Where’s my car?!”
Demos came to attention and saluted him. “Been towed, sir!”
Demos had begged the driver not to load Pete’s Cadillac on the wrecker, to no avail. He dutifully yelled “Fuck you!” as it pulled away. But even he didn’t know where the beer had come from.
It bears mentioning that the “classic lineup” of Pollard, Sprout, Demos, Mitchell, and Fennell played together for roughly two and a half months, a mere seventeen shows, and—barring outtakes—on two released tracks as a band. But they created an updraft on which even a jumbo jet could glide.
IN SEPTEMBER, THE CIRCLING SHARKS arrowed toward a kill. Matador issued Pollard and Guided By Voices a formal proposal over the summer. Matador originally tried to draft contracts that had everyone’s name included. Bob said no, and Demos—who was still in the band—agreed, “No, it’s all Bob. Put his name on there.” Bob hired Janet Billig at Manage This! to help the band navigate the next phase’s jagged rocks.
Recalls Fennell, “There were other labels that were interested. Herb Alpert from A&M got involved there for a while… which I thought was kind of weird.” Playing the game, Warner Bros. countered Matador by flying the band to Los Angeles to be formally courted. Says Sprout, they “basically took us to restaurants. We ate all day.”
Warner’s A&R man, Geoffrey Weiss, had two glaring marks against him. Says Greer, “One was [Bob] misconstrued something that the vice president of publicity there said about lo-fi. And he took it as an insult. And then [Weiss] made the mistake of taking us to this really exotic Chinese food place. He was a gourmand type of guy. Jimmy [Pollard] was like, ‘I can’t eat anything here. I just like pizza and burgers, what the hell are we doing here?’”
Weiss told them, “Look at Flaming Lips. We’ve stood by them for five, six albums. We don’t drop bands.” But Greer points out, “At the same time they said we don’t drop artists, they dropped Nick Lowe that same week.”
Despite the unfamiliar Hollywood feel, and their intent to have the band re-record Alien Lanes—which, Pollard believed, was finished—Bob was sorely tempted to go with Warner. He’d drawn their distinctive logo on his album covers as a child, dreamed up releases by Warner Bros. bands that did not yet exist. The prestige of signing with them would have been massive.
But between Matador’s hands-off policy, and Janet Billig and Greer voting strenuously in their favor, Bob chose the label that “goes to the mat for bands you’ll adore.” The deciding factor was Bob’s unwillingness to redo Alien Lanes. He specified that the albums were recorded in a certain way and they went out a certain way. Warner Bros. would have made the band re-record everything in a big “sterile” studio.
“Ultimately, Bob’s the one who made the decision,” Fennell says, “but we were in agreement that we would get swallowed up by Warner Bros. It was too big a label. We just didn’t feel like that would be a good fit. That we wouldn’t get the personal attention we needed.”
Fennell says they knew they would sacrifice money to go to Matador, but specifies, “It was never really about the money anyway. I always cared more about being able to do what we wanted to do, not being told by a suit, you know?”
“You wonder [what might have happened],” Sprout says, “but I don’t think it would have lasted. Even during the interview they were telling us what to do.”
The fact that the band had yet to see any real money from Bee Thousand was a factor in leaving Scat for greener pastures. Some of that was due to the vagaries of Scat’s distribution deal with Matador. “By December or January,” Griffin said, “I still haven’t gotten paid by Matador. I’ve got a record that’s sold at least twenty to twenty-five thousand copies already and I haven’t gotten dime one.” And although the accounting wasn’t malicious or deliberate, just business, as Griffin asked Matador for money Bob did the same with him. Griffin eventually paid the band much of their royalties owed. But in the divorce Bob left Griffin with the rights to Propeller, which had been entangled with those of Vampire On Titus as part of the CD reissue. In his naïveté, it was easier for Bob to let it go than to fight over it. So in the end Scat may have lost GBV, but Griffin received a nice settlement—he holds the rights to Propeller, Bee Thousand, and a few other early LPs.
“I always felt weird about signing them away from Scat,” said Matador’s Gerard Cosloy. “Like it wasn’t maybe the right thing to do. Because we’ve had that happen to us, where we’ll work our asses off to bring a band to a certain level of success, and then a bigger label swoops in and reaps the rewards.”33
Years later, Greer ran into Warner Bros. A&R man Geoffrey Weiss at South by Southwest. Weiss asked him, “Was it the Chinese food? Is that what did it?”
“It didn’t help,” Greer replied, shaking his head. “It didn’t help.”
Back in Dayton, Bob went over the Matador contract and got the Alien Lanes master tapes ready. Bob Sr. noted there were twenty-eight songs on the record and asked Bob, “Why would you put twenty-eight songs on there when you only get paid for twelve?”
Bob was taken aback; it was an astute question from someone who’d taken the time to read up on and understand record contracts.
SCAT RECORDS DROPPED THE I Am A Scientist EP on October 15, and touring continued into the fall—close to twenty-five shows before year’s end. Director Banks Tarver and his crew tagged along for a string of live shows and interviewed the band for a documentary, Watch Me Jumpstart. They hit the East Coast, New England, the South, and Florida.
An October 28 show at Lexington, Kentucky’s the Wrocklage, however, was unceremoniously shitcanned. Bob called the venue early in the day to finalize a few details, only to be told there were riots in progress.
“But don’t worry,” the promoter said. “They’re a couple blocks over.”
Bob was incredulous, “A couple blocks over?! Forget it. We’re not coming.”
When she realized he was serious, the promoter sputtered, “You—you’ll never play Lexington again!”
Bob thundered, “GOOD!” and slammed down the phone.
ON BOB’S BIRTHDAY HE SIGNED with Matador Records, and the band raucously returned to Tramps with New Radiant Storm King and Chavez a few nights later. “I thought we quit drinking,” Greer quipped as the band got onstage. “We quit quittin’ drinkin’!” Bob agreed gamely. He was relaxed, took his time about getting the show started, made a show of introducing Pete Jamison so he could get some beer from him. As always, the new songs were Bob’s primary interest. “A lot of these songs that we’re doing that you don’t know are on our next album coming up, on Alien Lanes. Out in February, I think.”
After “Gold Star For Robot Boy,” Bob held up a bottle. “I’d like to raise a beer to a sweet relationship thing we got going tonight with Matador. And thank Chris and Gerard,” he added. “They better be here somewhere!”
Jamison recalls with a chuckle, “He got his first check—a hundred and fifty grand or whatever—from Matador and he quit teaching, for a tape that cost like four bucks and twenty dollars’ worth of beer.” In 1994, $157,000 was roughly five years’ teaching salary. The payout afforded Pollard a measure of financial security he’d never had in his life, with the freedom that accompanied it.
But in Dayton, the fact Bob was doing this still seemed insane to anyone not plugged into the underground scene—which was most of Ohio. He went back to Lincoln to show his former colleagues the Matador check, just so they would know he wasn’t nuts. “See?” he told them. “I wasn’t crazy.” They believed him, but at least a few just thought he was an egomaniac.
Bob got together with Greer and Kim Deal to record a cover of Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” for the Love and a .45 soundtrack. “One of the many things she did to help them out,” Greer says. They also hatched plans to work on the next GBV album together.
“Lemme tell you something about that,” Bob says sneakily. “We did that in an hour—in just a 16-track studio—and we got 10,000 dollars for it. I got 5,000 dollars. Fifty one-hundred-dollar bills for an hour of work.”34
“GET OFF THE STAGE!” BOB screamed at the band between songs. It was just like the old days in Dayton, with Jimmy and Mitch at his side. But here at Emo’s in Austin, Texas, on November 18, he had no use for Picasso Trigger. Bob wished he had some cheese to throw at them.
The fall tour with Strapping Fieldhands and the Grifters covered the South, where Dave Shouse promised to show GBV around and eat lots of barbecue. “We certainly did,” Bob says with a laugh. The tour had started with the Grifters headlining, but after a string of shows in which the crowds noticeably dispersed after GBV’s set, Shouse suggested GBV should be the headliners. “Up to you,” Bob allowed, but the clubs wanted the same thing.
Before some gigs Shouse was confident, saying, “We can do this town. Definitely.” And yet the audience would thin by two-thirds after GBV every time.
Earlier that day Picasso Trigger barged onto the bill, and Emo’s management allowed it—without asking GBV. The first Bob heard of it was Bob Malloy (of Strapping Fieldhands) complaining that they’d been bumped into an opening slot to make room.
Bob was having none of that. “Listen,” he said, “that’s OK if they want to go first, but this is our package tour.” It was the Strapping Fieldhands, the Grifters, and then GBV. Emo’s agreed, but Picasso Trigger called them Guided By Retards and similarly clever epithets during their set.
Bob polished off a beer and screamed, “You suck!” All of a sudden, Emo’s management and security were in his face. “You’re done,” said the club manager.
Picasso Trigger’s lead singer, Kathy Poindexter, said later, “Guided by a lot of primadonnas, I don’t know.” In reference to Bob and GBV, Emo’s assistant club manager fumed, “Shitty people like that give industry people a bad name.”35
GBV’s van pulled up in front of the club. From the passenger window Big Jim razzed them with a line that encapsulated his feelings about the “industry”: “See ya, sideburns!”
The next night they arrived in Dallas and got a call from Janet Billig. Ween was playing that night too, and their management wanted to merge the shows into one gig with both bands at Deep Ellum Live. Bob agreed, not realizing Strapping Fieldhands would get twenty minutes, the Grifters thirty, GBV forty-five, and Ween three and a half hours. Ween was driving in circles around the venue in a limousine before the show, partying conspicuously. “I saw what kind of rock stars they were,” Bob says.
At soundcheck, Dave Shouse told Bob about the Austin show GBV wasn’t able to play: “Dude—you missed it last night. That was the best show of the tour!” The best show of all had no GBV? Bob was a little hurt, after he’d stuck up for his tour mates all along.
* On the recording that plays in the background: It’s Bob recounting an intense dream of Jimmy’s. Jim was climbing the Eiffel Tower, wind whipping and tearing at his clothing. He lost his grip. He plummeted to earth. When he slammed into the concrete he made a deep, person-shaped hole as if in a Looney Tunes cartoon. After a moment’s terrifying paralysis, he climbed up from the hole—unharmed. And the crowd burst into applause as the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” began to play.