Chapter 17
The Blue Fairy
(2002–2003)
Oh, she’s so on top of things
Gone out but so looking within
She’s got her heart pressed to the ground
To extend her knowledge
And I’ll spend my life with her now
—R. Pollard, “Tour Guide At The Winston Churchill Memorial”1
Like Pollard, Collodi’s Geppetto spent two years in the belly of a giant shark. But the fish, like the music business for which it serves as tortured metaphor, was aged, decrepit, and suffering from various ailments—chiefly asthma, heart palpitations, and sleep apnea. So Pinocchio hefted his old creator onto his back, leapt from the shark’s open maw into the ocean, and swam for shore. The creation literally carried the craftsman to freedom.
So it was with Bob’s compositions. When he was asked if he’d gone to a major label seeking fame, Bob replied, “Not necessarily for me, but for my songs.” He wanted them to be heard by more people, in whose minds and imaginations they would come to life.
“I’m kind of puzzled,” Bob said of Isolation Drills. “If those songs can’t get played on the radio, there’s nothing else I can do. That’s as far as I can go. I’m back to being a little more artistic with what I do.” Bob promised the next Guided By Voices LP contained no songs about girls. “If ‘Glad Girls’ cannot become a hit, I really don’t know what else I can write. A hip-hop song?”2
For the next album—whose title had evolved from Invisible Train To Earth to All Sinners Welcome to From A Voice Plantation—Bob carried the overall sound forward while drawing heavily on GBV’s defining qualities of variety and unpredictability. And he brought along a road-tested, studio-savvy crew in Doug Gillard, Nate Farley, Tim Tobias, and Jon McCann when they drove to Todd Tobias’s Waterloo Sound in Kent, Ohio, in late January. Bob recorded a few other songs, on which he sang and played acoustic guitar, with John Shough at Cro-Magnon.
Bob focused on combining everything they’d learned recording to 4-track with what Ocasek and Schnapf had taught them in the studio. The resulting LP was assured, clear without being slick or sterile, and full of the sonic textures and hairpin turns that made earlier albums so enigmatically thrilling. The hiss, the mistakes, the fragments were back. In the process Bob created not merely one of the best GBV albums but one of the finest long-players of his career, Universal Truths And Cycles.
Most of the songs started as poems, and their genesis showed through in bewilderingly varied song structures, the wordplay developed to a degree so far unattained. Bob was pushing himself toward another level. He said he hoped to show “even at my age, at forty-four, that you can still grow and mature. But you don’t want to grow up too fast.”
From the opening seconds we were back to classic Guided By Voices territory. The tracks, most of them running into each other Bee Thousand–style, zigzagged between prog, punk, psych, and delirious pop—a big-studio version of the 86 snippets cassette. “I like to do that because it keeps the listener’s attention,” Bob said.
Sequencing was his favorite part, putting all the elements together as if editing a film or assembling a collage. “The listener is young. You’re dealing with youngsters.” He likened sequencing an album to structuring a day’s lesson plan. “Try to keep them varied; a day where everything’s different. So it’s fun and enjoyable.”3 But likening a rock album to a lesson plan also implies a careful listener might just learn something. Universal Truths And Cycles was made for close examination. The album presented a sonic journey to undertake, as satisfying as any film and over in less than half the time.
Pollard said of the record, “Ric [Ocasek] and Rob [Schnapf] taught us to get the right take. Be patient. […] When you work with producers, you’re just naturally going to get their stamp. Now it has the Guided By Voices stamp on it. The diversity is there, which I think was missing from the last couple records.”4
RELEASES TUMBLED OVER EACH OTHER at a pace that, although many had come to expect it, was no less remarkable for being foreseen. February brought a collaboration with Blue Öyster Cult lyricist and author Richard Meltzer called The Tropic of Nipples. Pollard and Sprout followed up with another Airport 5 collaboration, Life Starts Here, and Bob turned out a batch of songs as musty as the Snakepit itself in Acid Ranch’s Some Of The Magic Syrup Was Preserved.
With these releases came a growing sentiment in some quarters that Bob had no sense of quality control, that his records should sound more professional, that he had no one close to him frank enough to say no. The sentiment wasn’t so much wrong as meaningless from his point of view. “What does ‘more professional’ mean?” Bob asks. “That more people will find it acceptable? I don’t want to do that.”
On January 22, a few days after the Universal Truths sessions ended, Jon McCann notified Bob his time in the group was at an end. Nate Farley recalls, “[Jon] met a girl, fell in love, wanted to make her his wife—and he did, they’re still married—and was just over touring, I think. He laid it out, wasn’t bullshitting about anything, and so it was cool.”5
So Bob again needed a new drummer. He tapped Kevin March, whom he’d met at the Boston Causeway show way back in ’93. March was also drumming in Those Bastard Souls (with David Shouse of the Grifters and Joan Wasser of the Dambuilders) when they opened for GBV on the Do The Collapse tour—an increasingly common means of entry to the GBV gang. “So I got to hang out with Bob,” March says. “All those guys knew who I was and they had seen me play and everything.”6
“When you’re touring with people, you get to see how they are on the road,” Farley says. “Some people are built for the road, some people aren’t. That’s a different skill set altogether.”
In early 2002, March had been touring with singer Leona Naess, Diana Ross’s stepdaughter, but the thrill of live performance had evaporated. “I didn’t want to be playing drums as a hired gun behind somebody,” March says. “Your career starts going in a certain way and you’re like, I’m not feeling this anymore.” He was prepared to hang up his sticks, and had been accepted to Johnson & Wales University to study the culinary arts. That’s when he got the call from David Newgarden, urging him to call Bob about a spot in Guided By Voices.
March says, “I remember talking to [Bob] and he said, ‘I want you to be in Guided By Voices. You don’t have to move to Dayton or anything.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I would love to do it! But hold on. I need to call my wife. Let me call you back.’” March’s wife told him, “That’s a no-brainer!”
He called back and told Bob he was in. “Do I need to come out and audition?” he asked.
“No,” Bob said, “it’s yours if you want it. I know you; I know how you can play.”
March’s mind was blown, insofar as he’d internalized his choice to move on to another vocation. And then, he says, “What you dream about comes true.”
Bob sent March a list of roughly sixty songs to learn. He had a month. “What I learned at Berklee was how to listen to music and write out information, a chart, whatever it was,” he says. “And Guided By Voices songs are not by any standard straightforward. The hooks are so incredible, they sound straightforward sometimes. Like this sounds like it might be easy, but when you dive into the stuff it’s not really that easy at all. So I started doing that and I had a booklet—I have it somewhere—where I wrote down every song, how they went, like a chart.” He played every day, practicing and making notes for hours, absorbing the songs. “Not only do you have to learn it, you have to become it. You have to get it out of your brain.”7
Guided By Voices headed back out on the road with their cadre restored. They would play an ironman’s schedule of ninety-two live dates by December 31.
“IT’S GREAT TO BE REUNITED with our good friends at Matador,” Bob said in a press release on March 24, announcing the band’s return, “fellow rock geeks with the same basic philosophy on record artistry. We are very happy getting back to autonomously making records ourselves and having the ball back in our court.” Their new deal with Matador contained a clause similar to the one Bob negotiated with TVT, allowing him to release anything he wanted on the side, and Matador’s artist-first, hands-off approach allowed Bob total creative control.
“Matador is a totally honest label,” Bob says. “They’re a good label.” Clearly he thought so, as he’d jumped at the chance to go back.
“That seems to happen with a bunch of our artists,” says Chris Lombardi. “You know, we do what we do, and sometimes people want to see what else is happening out there, and I don’t think we’ve ever seen it work better for anybody elsewhere, so they come back.”8
Bob’s actions often had a whiff of healthy contradiction to them. The return to Matador in March 2002 was no different. It was in some respects a step back: from the major label and the big time. But it was also a necessary step forward, for Bob could never have created Universal Truths And Cycles without the instructive experience of TVT.
Citing declining Matador sales since Under The Bushes Under The Stars, Gerard Cosloy pinned some of the shortfall on the sheer amount of music Bob released, which made it difficult for record stores and journalists—accustomed to a more measured pace—to keep up. “We are in a world where people have so much stuff competing for their attention, that for anyone beyond the super-committed following to keep track of this embarrassment of riches that Bob keeps flooding the universe with—he’s making great records, but it presents a challenge to anyone putting those records out.”9
ON APRIL 16, 2002, THE band played Universal Truths And Cycles in its entirety for a show at Cat’s Cradle in North Carolina. “It’s finished,” Bob told the crowd. “And it rocks. We’ve decided that you should be the waters that we test. Because we know that down here in Chapel Hill–slash-Carrboro that you know your shit, and you know rock.”
This time around, Bob gave more consideration to product synergy, releasing four 7-inch singles—“Back To The Lake,” “Cheyenne,” “Everywhere With Helicopter,” and “Universal Truths And Cycles”—and outtake EP The Pipe Dreams Of Instant Prince Whippet, number twenty-four of the Fading Captain series. Universal Truths And Cycles streamed online at Matador’s website for the week leading up to release.
The album released June 18. “Albums should be interesting, and ambitious, and adventurous,” Pollard told an interviewer in June. “In every aspect of the process. Lyrically, packaging, everything. I think we put the complete package together. Now, the thing is we’ve crossed the threshold to be able to do it ourselves again, in a big studio setting. So now it’s almost a new starting point for us. So it’s kind of exciting.”10
Bob was satisfied with the LP’s sound; for him, it had just the right mid-fi touch. “The songs sound great,” he says. “From the perspective of someone who’s never heard it, you have to think of the song quality. I like them. ‘Back To The Lake’ especially.”
CMJ Music Monthly praised the album opener and glowed, “Over the course of 18 more tunes in 46 minutes, Pollard goes on to neatly split the difference between the muscular-yet-tuneful guitar anthems of his hi-fi days, and the cryptic four-tracking quirks that got GBV off the ground in the first place.”11 In MAGNET, Patrick Berkery called the album “brick-shithouse-solid,” noting “the indulgent torpor of ‘Car Language’ [is] really the only blemish here,” and praised “a wholly rocked-out mid-fi approach (think Mag Earwhig!), with windmilling guitar heroics, bashing drums and dizzy wordplay.”12 Rockpile called it “yet another wild ride through a GBV album” and avowed, “Only Phil Spector could have coaxed a catchier ‘Wall of Sound’ out of the band than Pollard and co-producer Todd Tobias did on ‘Cheyenne.’”13
New Musical Express called the LP “much, much better than a record made by chronically drunk middle-aged men has any right to be,” and pointed out that, “‘Everywhere With Helicopter’ neatly sums up GBV’s enduring appeal: they’re one of life’s most deeply reliable pleasures.”14 Matt LeMay agreed, “While it doesn’t recapture the magic of the Sprout-era Guided by Voices records, Universal Truths and Cycles marks the return of some of the most sorely missed qualities of early Guided by Voices: strong vocal melodies and refreshingly atypical song structures.”15
October 31, 2002, saw the release of another Circus Devils record. The Harold Pig Memorial spawned one of the few Circus Devils tunes to become a standard in GBV’s set: “Bull Spears.” The album played like a late ’60s, Peter Fonda biker epic put to music. Early 2003 saw another solo album, Motel Of Fools, and Lifeguards’ ultra-prog debut, Mist King Urth, with Doug Gillard (music by Gillard, vocals by Bob).
PETE JAMISON HAD CEDED HIS Rockathon post completely, long since moving to Columbus and falling out of touch over various slights, real and imagined. Someone needed to resuscitate the Rockathon label. During the recording of the next LP, Matt Davis suggested to Bob they hand over the operation to Rich Turiel.
Turiel grew up in New York, and was a Brooklynite before that borough became a hipster haven. He first heard about Guided By Voices in 1994, when Bee Thousand got him hooked for life. Searches of the ascendant Internet turned up the GBV website of Brian Mikesell, with whom Turiel struck up an online acquaintance.
Intense fandom ensued, soon followed by Turiel’s inheritance of GBV’s web presence from Mikesell. In a mirror image of young Bob watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Turiel remembers seeing GBV on The Jon Stewart Show. “If I put on Jon Stewart right now,” he asserts, “I could still conjure up that feeling. I remember the excitement of, ‘Oh my God—that’s them!’”16
When Turiel took over Rockathon, he and Pollard began a lifelong friendship. “I feel like he really taught me a lot as a person,” Turiel says. “I think people think of him a certain way—the lovable fun drunk guy—but deep down, he’s such a smart person. Insanely smart. Conversations I had with him, as a father, as a husband, as a man… he really taught me a lot.”
Greg Demos says of Turiel, “I’ll tell you what. We ever get into some serious combat, I want to be behind Rich every step of the way.”
As for Bob’s viability in the fickle music business, Turiel says, “Making money was never the goal of any of it. Maybe that’s why it always worked. It was all just ideas that Bob had and wanted to do and everyone was always a hundred percent behind him and happy to be a part of it. It’s crazy in an industry so festered with corrupt labels and people, that Bob is miles upon miles ahead of everyone else in even the business part.”17
REFRESHED, BOB WASTED NO TIME in developing and recording the next Guided By Voices album, from its inception as Model Prisoners Of The 5 Sense Realm through Live Like Kings Forever to its final form as Earthquake Glue. So rapid was the follow-up to Universal Truths, Bob joked at the time about a promotional campaign to exclaim: “It’s not them, it can’t be them—it IS them!”
Bob recorded the album demos in a marathon five-hour session on October 13, 2002, and cut the LP at Cro-Magnon Studios. Earthquake Glue retains the raw enthusiasm and musical chops of Universal Truths, but its structure leans toward the TVT records, insofar as fragments and tape hiss give way to more fully formed compositions. In retrospect, Bob considers the LP “spotty.”
On tour, Bob wrote a new song called “My Kind Of Soldier,” and told Matador he wanted to record it for the album, despite the fact that test pressings were already done. Bob intended it as the last song, but Matador inserted it as the opener for technical reasons. “I appreciate that they let us do it,” Bob says, “but it would have sounded better last.” He preferred the horn fanfare of “My Son, My Secretary, My Country” to lead off the LP.
The band recorded “My Kind Of Soldier” at Steve Albini’s Chicago studio on April 10, when they had a day off from touring with Cheap Trick. They learned and recorded the track in one day. “I still remember recording that in the studio and then putting it on in the van,” March says. “Like, ‘Wow! This is awesome!’”
March says, “We did a lot of that stuff live. A lot of times Bob would play guitar, and then do the vocals later. His process was giving us the demos, which are acoustic demos of the songs that he does off his boombox. He gave them to us pretty far in advance so we could start absorbing what that was and coming up with ideas.” In the studio, “Bob would play guitar, and Doug would play, and Nate would play, and then we would just record it as a full band. I will say that Bob has one of the greatest rhythm hands, as a guitar player. A lot of people don’t understand the power that he has as a guitar player.”
Dayton-found sound, in the form of a seventh-grade Northridge band, heralded original album opener “My Son, My Secretary, My Country,” which set a tone of reverence for home. A Todd Tobias audio sample anchored “I’ll Replace You With Machines,” played on a loop. Bob jokes that the song is about replacing bandmates with automatons, hinting at a malaise beginning to creep into the enterprise.
Bob on “Beat Your Wings”: “I don’t like the way that came out. You can’t hear the chords for the song. It’s a weird song. It seemed tedious a little bit—it’s too long. And quite possibly, I don’t like the song. Somebody said if a song takes more than ten minutes to write, it’s not worth writing. Maybe that took eleven.” For faster work, consider that a misheard voice on a waiting-room television saying, “The best of our lives!” spawned poignant “The Best Of Jill Hives.”
“I like ‘Useless Inventions,’” Bob says. “The lyrics were difficult, because I wrote down a list of stupid inventions, and I tried to incorporate some of them into it. Like the banana-seed remover.” He laughs. “I don’t think I mentioned too many inventions in the song. Commercialism’s bad.”
Of “Mix Up The Satellites” Bob says, “I like that one because I thought it had a nice ’80s [sound]. It sounded like fuckin’ Spandau Ballet. Which I’m not too crazy about, but when we accidentally come up with somethin’ that sounds ’80s… it’s kinda cool, you know?”
And what exactly is “A Trophy Mule In Particular”? “Well, a trophy mule would be some stubborn fuckin’ prize,” Bob says. “You know—intransigent asshole. That was probably me.” He laughs. “I’m a trophy mule, yeah. It’s true too. I don’t do what they want me to do.”
RICH TURIEL TOOK ON THE tour managing duties in addition to his website and Rockathon roles. His very first night turned into a minor disaster. On February 22, they played the Bluebird in Bloomington, Indiana. Arriving in the middle of a blizzard, they tried to check in but were informed the hotel’s computers were down due to the inclement weather.
“Don’t worry,” the front desk clerk told Turiel, “we’ve got your rooms. Just go ahead and play your show.”
They did, and it was a blast. Turiel couldn’t believe how much fun it was. He smiles and says, “I got paid to sit around and drink beer and listen to my favorite band in the whole wide world.”
They grabbed some food after the show and swung back to the hotel in the wee hours, where the same clerk greeted them looking gobsmacked. “I’m sorry, you guys didn’t come back to check in,” he said, “so we gave your rooms away.”
There was only one room left, with a double bed and a whirlpool. They all slept on the floor, camping out, gamely making the best of it. “Sure, it’ll be fun!” someone might have said.
Bob and Rich awoke a few hours later, as gray dawn poked its rays through the window. Bob was drenched in sweat; everyone in the band was piled on top of one other, sleeping, streaming with perspiration. It smelled of stale beer. Bob got up and looked at the thermostat—someone had cranked it to 100 degrees. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Bob said. “Like now.”
Sometimes Turiel would be called upon to thump interlopers in the rock room, a phenomenon Bob calls “You Just Pissed Off The Nicest Guy In The World.” Because that’s what Turiel is—until someone provokes him. And the surest way to provoke Turiel was to provoke Pollard.
PINOCCHIO’S STORY WOULD HAVE TURNED out much worse for him without the Blue Fairy interceding on his behalf. Appearing sometimes as a friendly little girl with blue hair, other times as a nurturing and matronly figure, she embodied eternal wisdom. It’s easy to imagine Pinocchio thinking, Do you suppose she could save my life? If she could, then I think she should. Something like that happened to Bob in the springtime.
On April 25, Guided By Voices played Mississippi Nights in St. Louis. Irrepressible scenester “Beatle Bob” was on hand to do his signature dance, which Turiel recorded for what would become the “My Kind Of Soldier” video.
… And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead opened the show, trashing the stage with, Bob says, “oranges and water and shit.” Bob sent Farley to straighten things out.
“Hey man, you gotta clean that shit up,” Nate snapped. “You disrespect Guided By Voices? And our stage that we’re getting ready to play on? For these people? You will clean up the fucking stage.”… And You Will Know Us, apologetic, went and cleaned it up. “It’s OK to destroy the stage when you open for GBV,” Bob specifies. “You just have to clean it up afterward.”
The crowd went wild, all the kids freaking out. Bob was in an especially good mood. He had recently broken up with his girlfriend; he was a bachelor again. He’d been exercising and lost some weight, and was impressed not so much with his appearance but rather his youthful energy. He felt good. He wore his current tour shirt: a black button-down with a rose embroidered on each lapel.
After the show a pair of young ladies confronted him. One asked, “Do you see what happened to her because of you?!” The other woman’s mouth was bloody. In the scrum during the last song—“I Am A Scientist”—an overenthusiastic GBV dude ran into her lip with his head. She was blond, with large, limpid blue eyes. Bob was instantly enchanted.
Sarah Zade knew of Guided By Voices before that night, but didn’t have a particular interest in Bob or his music; her friend had dragged her to the show. Sarah was more interested in jazz and ’50s and ’60s R&B. Born in Fulton, Missouri, she worked as an intern at the St. Louis History Museum and was poised to graduate from Webster University with degrees in social anthropology and history. She was a poet in her own right. She and Bob clicked.
Sarah thought Bob was funny and charming. “I like the way you carry yourself,” she told him.
“You know,” Bob murmured, “I could make that lip feel better.”
She smiled. “Bring it.”
Not realizing it at the time, in retrospect Turiel knows he saw it happen. “I saw two of the people I love most in the world get together, and I was there. It was pretty amazing, actually.”
Bob told Turiel he really liked this woman, and he was going to a party with her. Rich, Nate Farley, and Kevin March—whom Rich describes as his “only friend in the band” at that time—tagged along to drink beer in some kid’s backyard. He had a few cases. Bob and Sarah vanished.
Rich and Nate and Kevin drank with the kids. Bob and Sarah spent the party in a bathroom making out. “The whole time,” Sarah underlines.
Before dawn, they took a cab back to her apartment. Sarah put The Wizard of Oz on continuous play. They sat on the couch, sometimes talking, sometimes kissing, sometimes cuddled up and watching blearily as Dorothy’s adventures unfolded on the screen, turning from sepia to brilliant Technicolor before their eyes. Sarah’s loyal little beagle, Ella Fitzgerald, never left her side.
Bob woke up on the couch hours later, still in his tour shirt, sunshine streaming in. Sarah came out wearing what Bob calls “unbelievable pants.” She in her brown patterned pants, he in his embroidered shirt, ragged and deathly hung over, they walked along the side of the road to the gas station to buy cigarettes.
Bob laughed. “We look like George Jones and Tammy Wynette.” He asked her if she wanted to go to that night’s show, a few hours away in Columbia. She said yes.
TURIEL WAS FREAKING OUT. HE and Bob had been hotel roommates on this tour, but today he woke up to find Bob’s bed undisturbed. He vaguely recalled through the beer haze—or did he?—Bob mumbling the night before, “Hey, I really like this girl. I might not go back to the hotel.”
“We gotta figure out where Bob is,” Turiel pleaded with Farley. “We gotta figure out where Bob is!”
Nate shook his head, frowning. “Don’t be a fuckin’ asshole, man. Bob can take care of himself.”
So Bob and Sarah drove to Columbia together. Once Turiel sussed out the situation he called Sarah constantly, very nervous that Bob would not be delivered on time for the University of Missouri’s annual Springfest. And although they reached the university on time to play the outdoor show, Sarah was indisposed, deathly ill, in the restroom the entire time. Turiel stood outside the door, taking care of her, asking if he could get her anything.
After the Columbia show, Bob had to go back home for his daughter Erika’s high school graduation. Sarah thought, Well—that was a good time, but didn’t know if she’d ever hear from Bob again. She went home to St. Louis.
Bob, smitten, called Sarah a few days later. Would she come to Dayton to visit? “Sarah’s an older soul than me,” he confides. Once he told her, “When I met you, I found a wife, a mom, a sister, and a daughter all in one.” He’d found his match, his blue fairy and guiding light. “She saved my life,” Bob says simply.
The first time Sarah traveled to Dayton to visit, they walked into Bob’s apartment to find the answering machine’s message light blinking. Bob hit Play. The ragged voice of an ex-girlfriend screamed, “Fuck you, Bob Pollard! You’re old and washed up!!” Click.
SARAH MOVED IN WITH BOB in June. In joining Bob, she also joined Guided By Voices on the road. Turiel describes tour managing as being like a circus and a family rolled into one and compressed into a van for two or three weeks. Given rampant consumption and generally rambunctious behavior, Bob admits, “I need mommies and daddies on tour.”
Patience frayed and tempers flared. In the van, Bob and Tim Tobias would play the “You Like” game, the object of which was to accuse the other person of liking (preferably shitty) obscure bands. “You like the Chameleons!” “Yeah, well you like the Insect Surfers.” “You like Radiohead!” With their combined musical knowledge, the game went on for hours as the landscape slid past.
Sarah says, “Falling in love with Bobby was also falling in love with Rich. We became like brother and sister pretty quickly. So as far as tour managers go—as far as best friends go—we would be able to tell at a glance what he needed or what would be best for him. Even though it meant removing myself, sometimes.”
One night, on tour in Orlando, Florida, on a night off, they were scheduled to attend a party that Sarah did not want to go to. She ranted at Bob in the elevator.
Bob signaled, “Riiiiich! Get ’er outta here!”
“If Sarah was jumping on my ass when I’m getting ready to play a show,” Bob explains, “I mean… I’m gettin’ ready to play a show!”
Turiel, best friend and tour manager, pulled the duty of ejecting Sarah for the night. “Sarah, I love you… but you gotta go.” He drove her back to the hotel. Sarah sat in the passenger seat, fuming, dangerously silent. Turiel said as he drove, just trying to fill the silence, “I’m sorry, Sarah, but I have to take you back.”
She crossed her arms. “Well, fuck you, Rich!”
Ten minutes of awkward silence ensued, all the way back to the hotel, where she got out and slammed the door. “See you tomorrow, Sarah!” he called out cheerfully. She flipped him off.
But for the most part they got along famously on the road. “Rich and I had that relationship from almost the very beginning,” Sarah says. “That was something that’s never been replaced with other tour managers.”
SARAH’S DAD, WAYNE ZADE, WAS a tall man, a literature professor at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, who would eventually brag about Bob to his students. “You might know my son-in-law… Robert Pollard,” he’d tell them with a flourish.
“Wayne’s proud now,” Bob says with a laugh. But when he went to meet Sarah’s parents and make clear his intentions regarding their daughter, Bob was forty-six and she was twenty-three. He had the jitters. He felt like he had to fully assume his “Robert Pollard” persona to meet them.
They went out for dinner. During the meal, Sarah and Wayne abruptly got up and went somewhere, leaving Bob to make conversation with Sarah’s mom, Cathy.
She looked him over. “Why do you want to be with Sarah?” she asked.
Bob stammered, “Because, uh… I love her. I want to take care of her.”
Cathy just about busted a gut laughing.
They married soon after in Dayton, a small ceremony with witnesses. Afterward Bob, Sarah, Mike “The Heed” Lipps, and Rich Turiel went to the Spaghetti Warehouse to celebrate.
When Sarah left to go to the restroom, the waiter sat down next to Bob in her seat. Bob looked at him. The waiter smiled and asked casually, “So—where’d the girl go?”
Bob gave him an incredulous look. “The girl?! What the fuck? You mean my wife?”
The waiter withdrew; clearly someone had misunderstood something. When he brought the bill, Bob looked it over and threw the money on the floor, Sopranos-style. “There you go.” Lesson learned: Do not mess with Robert Pollard’s old lady.
DESPITE HIS INDIE-ROCK CACHET AND propensity to be recognized in major cities around the world, in Dayton Bob enjoyed the same disrespect-cum-anonymity as ever. One day when he was in the Oregon District drinking at the Southern Belle, a woman whirled on her barstool and said, “Aren’t you Bob?”
He said, “Uh, yeah.”
“Yeah,” Bob said drily, “I’m Bob from AutoZone.”
Everybody had been a little snotty toward Bob around the Southern Belle, but they laughed like hell at the joke. After that they thought Bob was OK.
EARTHQUAKE GLUE WAS RELEASED ON August 9, with a few random copies of the numbered edition including a golden ticket—In Bob we trust, all others pay cash—that entitled the bearer to a free, autographed copy of the Hardcore UFOs box set scheduled for November release. Promotional gimmicks aside, the LP took hold with critics and fans immediately.
“Earthquake Glue meets any GBV album that isn’t named Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes,” declared Pitchfork in a reversal of recent reviews, giving the record an 8.5 rating. “This is Bob Pollard at his most direct, most natural, and finally ready to shake the stadiums down to their very foundations. […] What’s felt like ‘falling off’ for so long was really a gradual metamorphosis into a different beast entirely.”18 Sponic agreed, “Encouraging and exasperating, Earthquake Glue proves that GBV’s musical evolution never stops, even when we sometimes wish it would.”19 Glorious Noise scoffed at those who yearned for stasis, “If you’re a die-hard skeptic of Guided By Voices, and wish that they’d make another Bee Thousand and quit riding the ‘wish we were popular’ horse they’ve been on for years, quit reading. And skip Earthquake Glue. The old lo-fi, frustrated-math-teacher days of GBV are long behind them and aren’t coming back.”20
With Stan Doty and Rich Turiel trading the tour manager duties, the band rolled out on the Earthquake Glue tour on August 20, riding high. They were invincible and indivisible. Almost.
IN LATE AUGUST, BASSIST TIM Tobias vanished abruptly from Guided By Voices. Billboard revealed enigmatically on September 3, “Tim Tobias has left the band for unexplained reasons.”21 Bob asked Superdrag bassist Sam Powers to join as Tim’s replacement. Powers went on the trip to Europe in late September, and played the balance of 2003’s shows. It was no mean feat to learn the catalog. The setlist had expanded to showcase songs from all Bob’s side projects; the band played an impressive seventy-six different songs during the tour.
As Bob told a German crowd at the Logo in Hamburg on September 18, “Hey, Guided By Voices goes under many guises. We’re the Circus Devils, we’re the Lifeguards, we’re the Howling Wolf Orchestra. Many different guises do we go under.”
On Bob’s birthday, the Circus Devils dropped their third LP, Pinball Mars—now an annual tradition. What was billed as the definitive GBV box set, Hardcore UFOs, followed close on its heels. The set showcased outtakes, unreleased tracks, alternate takes, and live versions of songs from all throughout Bob’s career—from the Acid Ranch days to last month. Throw in a DVD re-release of Banks Tarver’s documentary Watch Me Jumpstart and a new Best of Guided By Voices comp, and it amounted to a victory lap for His Bobness.
For Guided By Voices, the lion was in winter. Bob had plans for the band to record another album in December, but a degree of exhaustion had set in. The grand conclusion was at hand.