Chapter 16

Escape
(2001)

The plan is show me live

And then I show up all loud

And proceed to sell my soul

In every nasty hole

Without a saving light

—Boston Spaceships, “The Comedian”¹

“Bob always talked about being a stage presence like Dean Martin, with a drink and cigarette,” recalls Pete Jamison. “A complete entertainer.” By 2001 the band was at the very top of their game. Pollard’s onstage persona was Uncle Bob—that slightly nutso relative who happened to be a kickass rock star. The band swilled tequila and beers from an onstage cooler, and Bob learned to moderate his drinking over the course of a show to maintain maximum performance throughout. He was a professional athlete of rock.

He also dabbled in comedy, punctuating sets with wry asides. Bob boasted, bragged, and shit-talked other bands of the moment, especially if they were in attendance. For a while his shtick was threatening to kick the asses of everyone in indie rock. Lou Barlow and Jason Loewenstein of Sebadoh were on the list.

At its pinnacle, a Guided By Voices performance was a party, a rock marathon, and a variety show. And among the very finest and most illustrative of these shows—highlighting as well the band’s sheer entertainment value—was GBV’s two-night stand at the Empty Bottle in Chicago on February 11 and 12. For their first show of the year, GBV debuted Isolation Drills in its entirety. On the second night, a more freewheeling affair, Bob guided the audience through two and a half hours of utter hilarity, slacker calls to arms, and blistering rock music.

“In his own funny lo-fi way, he carried on the idea of The Beatles,” Michael Azerrad said, “meaning that the record is the record and the live show is the live show; he played to the strengths of each. In other words, you play with your effects and overdubs and things like that when you’re recording, and you kick out the jams live. That’s what each context demands. He was very savvy about that, and he clearly knew what he was doing.”²

In 2001, Nate Farley says, “We were the tightest we’d ever been as a band.” But he adds, “We didn’t make a lot of friends with staff at a lot of places. Having a bucket full of piss doesn’t help.”

“In some ways they wanted to be successful—for sure they did—but they also liked playing for their friends and fans,” says Matador’s Chris Lombardi. “But there were also people with arms folded in the background too, who were like, ‘What are these guys all about? Oh, they’re drunks.’ And that’s not what it was. It was like, we’re rockin’ the house down. And we’re having a party. And you guys can get in the party, or get out of the party. But don’t fucking judge us.”

That take-it-or-leave-it attitude, combined with Bob’s scrappy-underdog origin story, made him, at the very least, notable in American music. But to a growing fan base, he was irresistible. An attorney once asked Pollard what his music and fandom were like. He admitted, “It’s kind of like a cult.” Cult members matched Uncle Bob beer-for-beer (or tried to) and shouted every lyric back at their king, resulting in a surfeit of joy and dearth of recollections. As one longtime fan put it, “I really wish I could remember more… other than amazing memories.”³

They had traditions, mores, even a coordinated chant. As Steven Kotler wrote, “See, GBV fans know to scream ‘G-B-V!’ before the show, to raise their voices in raucous chorus, to shake the very rafters of this, their church. They’re so great, these fans, that Pollard will hoist his beer in holy salute, and he will do so all night long. If you ask him about his drinking, he’ll say, ‘I’ve been drinking this way since I was 11. I drank when I played basketball, when I taught school, when I played music—I’m all pro.’”⁴

“Work!” Pollard shouted at the Empty Bottle crowd. “Life is like a beehive. We all live in a beehive, man, we all gotta work. Everybody’s gotta do their part in society. Everybody’s gotta serve the society. Except Guided By Voices. Fuck society. We say fuck society, man. We swim in a sea of our own.”

“I THINK WHEN YOU’RE IN a sad, melancholy state of mind, you write good songs. You write personal songs. The songs are kind of about escape, remedying the fact that you’re on your own or that you feel alone.” After his divorce, Bob moved into an apartment in Dayton. When he wasn’t on tour, he spent his time working, writing, and making collages.

Everyone in the band had had a rough year personally, but the rate of touring and releases allowed Bob, at least, some solace. “I like being alone,” he said. “I miss being at home, but this apartment looks like my office. I’ve got my records and my stereo, my table with everything on it. I don’t have to clean up after myself. I think that helps the creative process.”⁵

Following an EP of Do The Collapse outtakes called Daredevil Stamp Collector (young Darrell Stamper’s twelve inches of fame) on Fading Captain, TVT released Isolation Drills on April 10 to near-universal acclaim. The critical consensus was that Pollard had perfectly melded his craft to the studio tools at hand; a few longed for the lo-fi days or cited the album’s overall consistency as a drawback. “Pain, they say, makes for great art,” Eric T. Miller wrote. “If this is true, it might explain why Isolation Drills, Guided By Voices’ 12th proper album, is one of the band’s best.”⁶

“Guided By Voices have never quite risen above schoolteacher-turned-singer Robert Pollard’s richly mythologized culthood,” Greg Kot wrote. “But Isolation Drills makes the case more persuasively than ever that these indie-pop godfathers should matter to more than just the loyalists.”⁷ The Los Angeles Times called the record “an irrepressible collection of sawtoothed pop” and Rockpile agreed in a 5/5 review: “File this one next to Blood On The Tracks and Who’s Next in a bin labeled: ‘Personal pain bleeds into masterpiece.’”⁸ Michael Corcoran wrote, “Never has the prolific sounded more purposeful, nor has the top of Pollard’s head, from where the lyrics sprout, come off so polished.”⁹

The following month saw Bob reunite with Jim Macpherson and Greg Demos for a pseudo-solo album, Choreographed Man Of War. It introduced the live standards “Instrument Beetle” (which incorporated a rambling, unintentionally hilarious answering-machine message from Bob’s design partner Mark Ohe) and “I Drove A Tank,” perhaps Bob’s most militantly stubborn and iconoclastic anthem.

UNMOORED FROM HIS TWENTY-YEAR MARRIAGE, Bob decided to leave TVT once their two-LP contract was done. He made the move because he was disgruntled with where the band was going. But now the grind of touring—almost ninety performances in 2001—combined with constant radio appearances and promotional stops started to be a drag.

Then there was Steve Gottlieb, demanding a hit. “You’re holding out on me!” he told Bob. They tried to get Bob to stretch songs out. “Sing the chorus again,” they’d say. When he tried to write them longer, the A&R people told him they were too long.

“They put you out on the road, and you basically have to do everything yourself,” Bob says. “You play a show, get back at three a.m., then the next morning you’re supposed to do a radio show. Croaking out ‘Surgical Focus’ at eight a.m. at a radio station after drinking all night. Who could do that?” He chuckles. “Doug wasn’t digging it.”

Matador wanted them to do that too, but the crucial difference was Cosloy and Lombardi didn’t accuse Bob of shooting himself in the foot if he refused. Bob says of the TVT experience, “I was wrong. But I corrected it within two albums. And I met some really decent, good people at TVT.”

OF SPECIAL IMPORT AMONG THE year’s releases was Bob’s first true collaboration with Tobin Sprout since 1997, Airport 5. August 21 saw the release of Tower In The Fountain Of Sparks, the product of “postal rock,” similar to what Bob had done with Gillard. Sprout traveled to Cleveland to record, mentioned to Bob he had some music lying around, and found Bob game to add lyrics and melodies.

“He already had the name Airport 5. I had all these pieces,” Sprout recalls. “You know when you write something but you can’t do anything with it? There’s nothing wrong with it; it just isn’t working. So I made a bunch of tapes and sent them to him, and he went in to Shough’s and put vocals on them.” He says, “That album seems like it has a movement that goes all the way through it. I like that record.”

On Bob’s birthday another gestating side project saw daylight: Circus Devils. Ringworm Interiors was a collaboration between Tim Tobias and his brother Todd Tobias, who composed and performed the music, and Pollard. With Guided By Voices a hi-fi, pop-rock outfit, Circus Devils gave Bob a chance to explore his love for experimental acts like Devo, the Residents, and Captain Beefheart. Opening with a fifty-second sonic squall called “Devilspeak,” the LP pushed the boundaries of experimentation and, in some cases, listener patience.

“The first Circus Devils album, I don’t even sing until about the sixth song,” Bob recalls. “It’s awful. I don’t even know what the fuck it is. At the time, I was winging it, you know. I just didn’t have any fears. I was just kind of talking. I didn’t know what the fuck to do, man.”

The album struck a chord with reviewers. Calling the LP a “weird psychedelic tangent,” Bill Cohen rated it 8/10 and raved, “Just when Robert Pollard seemed doomed for the indie-rock graveyard littered with Lou Barlows and Bob Mould, he releases his best group album since Guided By Voices’ 1994 opus Bee Thousand.”¹⁰ The Portland Tribune hailed “a brisk set of sludgy guitar anthems, grating siren blasts of noise and even some delicate pop shards.”¹¹ And even Pitchfork heard “an album with a few wonderful moments” paired with “a general feeling of disarray.”¹²