Chapter 18

The Electrifying Conclusion
(2004)

All of my stops

At the top of my game

Don’t have to say that it’s over

Point out the chokes

And the jokes unexplained

Take me

Take me on

—R. Pollard, “Top Of My Game”¹

“I’ve delved to the very depths of sound quality,” Bob says, “and to the heights of making it sound like the whole world can dig it.” He had traveled the world, positioned his songs to take on whatever life and reality they were meant to have, entered and escaped the belly of the music-business shark. He had a loyal core of fans who would buy anything he produced, at whatever pace he chose to do so.

Most important, he had Sarah Zade. They grew closer, ever more certain of the match, one always chipping sparks off the other. In Sarah, Bob found someone to look out for him and for whom he could keep watch. He adored her. They bonded over film, poetry, a mutual interest in the art Bob expressed on a daily basis, as naturally as he breathed or slept. Sarah wasn’t intimidated by Bob’s blustery temper and sometimes fierce moods. She gave him hell, as good as she got. And that begat a deep love and mutual respect that’s apparent whenever they are together.

Bob was gray, road-weary. Two back injuries in as many years had caused show cancellations, but also reminded Bob that despite his iron-horse constitution and impressive physical conditioning, he was a forty-six-year-old man. He’d intimated to the press that he might not do this forever. The band itself seethed with innumerable petty resentments and unresolved conflicts.

Finally, Bob realized he didn’t need a label and its expectations to have what he’d always wanted. The dream was real, waiting in Dayton where it had always been. So in December 2003, he and the band recorded what he decided would be the final Guided By Voices album.

SUBTLE DISCORD AMONG BANDMATES WASN’T anyone’s fault. But it was undeniably there, partly a product of Off Records founder Chris Slusarenko’s rapid indoctrination into a band already on unsteady footing from prior lineup changes. Multiply that upheaval of chemistry by eighty-odd shows per year, endless days spent on US interstates in close quarters, and a punishing rate of alcohol and nicotine consumption. In that unsettled state, GBV returned to Waterloo Sound in Kent, Ohio, for its final recording sessions. The LP was originally called Dreaming Of Sleeping, which Bob later revised to Half-Smiles Of The Decomposed.

The sessions’ enthusiasm was dampened by the knowledge that this was, indeed, the end. Bob had called his bandmates individually to break the news. Nate Farley recalls Bob told him, “Dude, this is it. I can’t be a gang leader anymore.” Farley was cool with it but admits, “I might have been in a little bit of denial.”

Bad weather in Kent from December 13 to 14 didn’t help; rain fell from gray skies and the band spent all their time in the studio or in the tiny hotel they stayed at. And even if Bob had made the decision, Sarah says, “It became apparent during the recording of Half Smiles that it had run its course.”

Rich Turiel characterizes the sessions’ vibe as one in which “some guys had already checked out.” Farley hadn’t fully learned all his parts, and Doug Gillard’s guitar work came across as solid but less than inspired.

Sarah explains, “Because Tim Tobias was gone from the band and Slusarenko was there, there was a lot of discord among the other band members in terms of their relationship with Chris. The recording of Half Smiles was extremely awkward.”

Tobin Sprout joined them to play a dueling lead with Gillard on “Girls Of Wild Strawberries.” Farley and Gillard were unhappy with how many guitar parts Todd Tobias added, at Bob’s direction. “The chemistry was not good,” Bob says.

Kevin March tried to focus on the work at hand. “I spent a lot of time with a drum machine, or some kind of sequencing software I had. Like ‘Sleep Over Jack.’ It’s a drum machine. We just recorded that, and then I played drums to it. It was so cool.”

“I just treated it like any other record, and tried to play the best I could,” Farley says. “Doug always plays solid. We wanted to go out big.”

At a raucous, typically inebriated Bowery Ballroom show in New York on April 24, Uncle Bob broke the brewing news to a dismayed crowd. “We have a new album coming out in August on Matador Records—the best label in the world—called Half Smiles Of The Decomposed. It will be our last album, kids. That’s the last one.” Boos and groans. “Gotta go. See ya when I see ya. Don’t make me cry up here, because… we ain’t goin’ away,” Bob promised. “We’re not gonna go away.”

But he insisted, “There’s gotta be a last album. You can’t be the Rolling Stones. That’s ridiculous. You’ve gotta quit when you’re relatively handsome. We’re gonna go out in a blaze of fire, because we’re Guided By Voices. We don’t fizzle out, we go out like a blaze of fire. We’ve been around for twenty-one years, kids, and twenty-one is time to graduate.”

THE LAST GUIDED BY VOICES album received more than fifty US and international reviews, with the critical consensus suggesting a band going out at the very top of its game. To anyone who wasn’t in the studio, the finished album bears no trace of studio tension. If anything, the tracks have an aura of jittery excitement, a tension born of a push and pull between Farley and Gillard’s guitars and Slusarenko and March’s rhythm section. Bob, dead center in the mix, sang of “all wheels and no control.” It made for a delirious, sometimes melancholy ride.

Paste’s reviewer recognized the developing complexities of Bob’s concepts and made a case for his legacy, noting, “A second spurt of growth is exactly what their last several albums have been. Once upon a time, they helped make lo-fi viable; here their second incarnation headbangs and karate kicks its way into the history books.”²

“Pollard has, thankfully, largely shaken the tendency to write songs that consist of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it snatches of brilliant melody that end as soon as they’ve begun, which made earlier records great listening for ADD sufferers, but otherwise frustrating,” wrote the Guardian. “Half Smiles is U.S. indie rock at its best.”³

Greg Kot agreed, “Like many of the band’s best, it’s packed to bursting with sometimes inscrutable pleasures: melodies with the whiff of half-remembered classics, misbegotten home-taping experiments, arrangements that appear to collapse before resolving in brave choruses […] But [Bob’s] less of a word splicer than he is a general mischief-maker, a fabulist who sees songs as brightly painted reality-distortion knobs.”⁴

Bob took a Do The Collapse demo, “The Kissing Life,” and overhauled it to reappear here as “Sons Of Apollo,” which would become the final tour’s official rally song. It spoke not to an ending but to new beginnings, lo-fi soldiers firing arrows at mythic targets.

The archers have grown

Bending on back

To the new accuracy

Shoot for white hearts

Ugly supreme

Beating their flags with hiss

Coming of age

To the new day of running

“I like Half Smiles. It’s just a confused record,” Bob says. “First of all, what is a ‘half-smile’? It’s what the face makes in its postmortem state.”

“It’s a death mask,” suggests Sarah.

He nods. “It’s a great title for the swan song.”

And yet the album was no letter of resignation. “I’ve been trying to end Guided By Voices since before anyone heard of it. I want to challenge myself in a different direction, but once you’ve become established it’s hard to kill it,” Bob said, talking up his next solo album, American Superdream Wow.⁵

The striking, back-to-basics design of Half Smiles—a collage from Pollard’s EAT magazine titled “Ashes To Ashes,” backed by Sarah’s photograph of a sunset—and its apt title don’t feel, in retrospect, like an ending. It seems like Bob’s concept of what the band’s last album should be—designed, recorded, and executed.

BOB ALWAYS SAID GUIDED BY Voices was a New York City band, insofar as the Big Apple was the first place to really embrace them before Dayton did, or anywhere else. It’s fitting that the Village Voice would pen a most shrewd epitaph for their adopted Midwest sons: “As Bob Pollard and Co. hit NYC for one of the last times, it’s clear the quantity of their output both harangues and enlivens their legacy: You could make some fine mixes out of their vast catalog of perversely catchy tunelets and awkward classic-rock poses, and the blithe enthusiasm with which they braved the indie economy for so long is inspirational in its own unassuming way. So long, Budweiser-soused warriors.”⁶

With Bob’s input, Matador branded the final tour the Electrifying Conclusion, from the Same Place The Fly Got Smashed song “Murder Charge.” Tour shirts showed Bob’s silhouette zapped by three lightning bolts with MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! above it. No one was quite sure of the mission’s exact nature—besides to drink and to rock—but clearly GBV had done it.

The shows were packed with desperate energy: This is the last time we will do this. GBV kicked off the Electrifying Conclusion for a crowd of 8,000 at New York’s Pier 54 on August 19, a few days before the album release. Sets ran to three hours or more; Bob proudly told the audience so before they kicked off. Although the tour was another, final victory lap, Bob stubbornly resisted making the setlists into glory-days retrospectives.

That’s not to imply a dearth of faves—“Game Of Pricks” and “Cut-Out Witch” were standbys, naturally—but Bob focused on Half Smiles and included songs covering the entire panoply of solo albums and side projects. “Red Ink Superman” from Motel Of Fools and Fiction Man’s “It’s Only Natural” rocked next to classics like “My Impression Now,” “Navigating Flood Regions,” and “Chief Barrel Belly.” They extended “Secret Star” into a seven-minute-plus rave-up in which Bob told the legend of GBV and thanked all the kids for twenty-one years of support.

At the beginning of September, Bob staged a “Fuck the Bank eBay Extravaganza” to sell some band memorabilia online and help raise a down payment for his and Sarah’s new house in Northridge. It seemed like a good time to clean a few gems from the vaults and feed the Electrifying Conclusion collectors’ frenzy. Most important—fuck the bank. Pollard sold one of his personal copies of Propeller for a whopping $6,200.

Which makes the story of Bob’s old friend Mark “Gibby” Gibbs, destitute and suffering the final stages of lung cancer, especially poignant. That’s Gibby who turned down a spot in the Propeller draft because he didn’t have a turntable. Loyal Gibby who drove Bob to the hospital when his scrotum was swollen to regulation NFL pigskin size. Gibby, who’d laughed at Geo’s logorrhea and exclaimed, “Put that thang away!” Founding member of the Monument Club and steady presence in Bob and Sarah’s Dayton life.

On the morning of September 28, a Cat’s Cradle show scheduled for that evening (hand selected for what Bob called “the coolness factor”), Bob got the phone call while they were driving. Gibby had died the night before. It felt as if the world had been yanked from under him.

The band opened the show with “Sad If I Lost It,” a plangent and moving performance. Bob’s voice almost broke before he pulled it together. Conversely, he sounded excited to pull out “Gonna Never Have To Die,” as if enunciating every word could halt the inevitable. “Do you wanna die?” he sang during Gillard’s solo. “I don’t wanna die.”

Bob didn’t mention Gibby; there weren’t any words for the agony he was trying to quench. He noted, “Hey, I quit smoking tonight, man. Your uncle Bob might be around a little bit longer if he quits smoking!” And just before the encore of “A Salty Salute” Nate Farley leaned to the mic and yelled, “It’s for Gibbs!”—the only mention of his name.

It was over. Bob had David Newgarden cancel the next four shows. The GBV family went back to Dayton for Gibby’s funeral. “That was a hard adjustment,” Sarah says quietly. “Gibby was part of our everyday lives.”

A few days later Bob held a Monument Club meeting in Gibby’s honor—a Dayton wake. After a few hours of drinking and reminiscing, Forester Hickman stood up. “Why didn’t you take me?!” He staggered out to the driveway and shouted at the sky, “Fuck you, God! Take me instead!”

Bob waved at him from the couch. “Siddown, Hickman. If he wanted you, he would have taken you. Nobody wants you.”

IF IT WAS CLEAR THINGS had run their course the previous December, during another year’s misadventures it became, at times, painfully obvious. At the Engine Room in Houston on November 7, Rich Turiel had to kick someone’s ass. Here’s how it happened: On every show of the Electrifying Conclusion they had the venue play an intentionally cheesy “In Memoriam” video for the band, accompanied by a saccharine Muzak version of “Window Of My World.” In Houston, they heard some guy yell from the audience, “Who the fuck do you think you are?! The Beatles?!”

This prompted Bob to brag as he took the stage, “Hey—we’re better than the Beatles.”

In the rock room after the show, some guy—the very same “Some Guy”—sat there smiling. Abruptly he blurted out, “I’m the guy who said it.”

The band was confused, quite drunk.

“Said what?” Bob asked.

“You know—‘Who the fuck do you think you are, the Beatles?’”

And there was Turiel, looming behind Some Guy. He grabbed him by the neck and dragged him outside. Bob chuckles. “Rich didn’t fuck around with shit like that.”

A couple days later GBV reached Austin, Texas, for their taping of public television stalwart Austin City Limits. They would end up showcasing not only their best songs old and new but also their ability to keep playing despite the legendary intake of plastic cups of tequila and, as Bob marveled, “buckets of cups of beer!” In Farley’s case, it showed how close the band could come to disaster, tiptoeing along the precipice without quite going over.

“Honestly, I never felt that tyrannical thing when I was in the band,” Farley says. “Maybe I was just too oblivious to it, but I never felt like I was going to get fired. Austin City Limits, I came pretty close I think.”

The band was told to wait in a room for what felt like hours, with nothing but chairs, a table, stacked beer cans, and a few Cuervo bottles. Eventually a show runner appeared at the door, cheerily announcing, “All right, it’s time to play!”

“Oh fuck,” Farley groaned. He stood up and realized he was much farther gone than he’d intended. “I think there was some anxiety involved in me getting fucking wasted all the time, but I think the rest of it was just I fuckin’ didn’t know anything else. And that’s kind of what I did.”

They played the show and taped an interview segment. The next day, on a flight to San Diego, Farley could sense something had gone very wrong. “You know, when you wake up feeling great and you’re like, ‘Nailed it!’ And then as the day goes on you realize how you didn’t nail it? Then you realize people are looking at you a little different.”

Bob was telling the others, “Somebody better talk to Nate about what happened yesterday, or else I’m going to have to.” Farley seemed to feign ignorance, when in fact he remembered it quite differently. They told him, “You couldn’t stand up and you had a kid in your arms.”

During the show a drunken Farley fell off the stage, recovered, and saw a baby three rows up in a mother’s lap. He grabbed the infant and staggered back onstage, with the panicked mother following him. Farley recalled the baby being handed to him. Show security stopped the mother from following onstage, so she could only watch as Nate went up there with the kid. She had her arms outstretched, horrified; to Farley’s inebriated eyes she was goading him on, screaming, “Yeah! You rock!”

In the sober light of day Bob told him, “Nate, you may not want to listen to them, but you gotta listen to me. I’ll get rid of you.”

Bob was still pissed when they reached the West Coast, calling everyone to his room to watch a videotape of the incident. Farley says, “I think I did OK enough to where I kept my job.” But at the same time, when everyone went out that night in L.A., he stayed in the room. “I’m just gonna take it easy tonight,” he told them. No one objected.

“I’m not gonna take it away—I was a fucking maniac and I fucking botched a lot of shit,” Farley admits. “But I think a lot of people just see me wasted and write it off as, ‘He can’t even play his guitar right now.’ But if you listen, I was playing the guitar. I was just having gravity problems.”

Bob adds, “No, I thought so too. Nate got too drunk to play. But I listened to a recording of the show and I heard two guitars playing the songs note-perfect. Now unless Doug was playing two guitars simultaneously, then Nate was playing and playing well. Nate’s a good man.”

“I REALIZE NOW THAT THERE are just a certain amount of people that like Guided By Voices—they’re hard-core, and it’s almost like a religion with them—and I should have just been happy with that,” Bob told Jim DeRogatis in December. “We kind of found a niche, and we found what I consider to be the Guided By Voices sound. After this last record, I couldn’t see beyond this point, where it could progress.”⁷

But only as they hastened to depart did the world seem to wake up and notice Guided By Voices. On March 6, NASA beamed “Motor Away” to the rover orbiting Mars as its wake-up song. Spin magazine named Bob one of the top fifty front men in rock ’n’ roll. Mayors nationwide proclaimed “GBV Days” to honor the band. GBV was featured in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On December 3–5, they played a sold-out three-night stand at New York City’s Irving Plaza, saying farewell to the greatest city on earth, their first home away from home. They dined at their favorite spot, La Mela, as they always did in NYC.

The end of December brought a sold-out two-night stand at Chicago’s Metro—housed in a broad, four-story neoclassical building with an ornate stone facade dating from 1927—another favorite haunt. Friday’s New Year’s Eve show was released on DVD as The Electrifying Conclusion. Tom Scharpling wrote of the film, “It properly captures the feel of the night, which was exactly how you’d want GBV to go out—rocking, drunk, hilarious and heartfelt.”⁸ It was a marathon show for the ages. The band and nearly everyone who’d ever been in it collectively shouted a barbaric yawp at the gods of rock.

Backstage, Bob sat close to Sarah and basked in the glow of family, friends, bandmates from GBV’s long run, folks from Matador, TVT, Scat Records. “With a guest list of more than 200 people commingling with 1,000-plus hard-core followers,” Don Thrasher wrote. “The Metro had the air of a raucous family reunion with a killer live band, fitting for a group known for its tight connection with its fans.”⁹

An insistent crowd chant of “G-B-V! G-B-V!” brought an introduction from Beatle Bob, and moments later the band filed out: bashful Nate Farley, an animated Chris Slusarenko, Kevin March calm and merry, Doug Gillard in a bright-red lion-tamer’s coat and top hat. Then Bob appeared in a dark shirt with white pinstripes, black pants, and rock shoes—grinning ear to ear.

“Thank you, crazy-ass Beatle Bob!” he shouted. “And thank you, kids.”

Bob curated the setlist to feature songs from the band’s entire run, and to provide opportunities for his guests to step into their old shoes, however briefly. Songs from Half Smiles shone, as usual; Bob always had an affinity for the new shit. But the classic rarities and guest spots were impressive in their breadth—sixty-nine songs—all the better to stun a crowd that had seen it all. “This show might take five hours,” Bob warned the audience.

Four hours later and yet still too soon, Guided By Voices slammed drunkenly into the Electrifying Conclusion’s conclusion. “The final set,” Bob said, a little sad but satisfied.

“Even though no-one wants it to, the night must come to an end,” Carl Dalermo wrote in the New Musical Express. “The people in the front rows are exhausted and do their best to pay the songs the respect they deserve, which is hard after hours of singalong and jumping up and down. And still, when the final notes of last song ‘Don’t Stop Now’ ring out, everyone chants ‘GBV! GBV! GBV!’ desperately trying to get the band back onstage. But it’s too late. Guided By Voices: RIP.”¹⁰

“People are teary-eyed, people are smiling broadly, people are hugging profusely and indiscriminately,” Jim Greer wrote of the final moments, “and we’d like to think this blizzard of hugs, this hug-storm, reflects in micro-view the macro-effect of Guided By Voices—its legacy in the broadest sense.”¹¹

Before the show a fan outside the Metro described her feelings as “like somebody pulling a bad joke on us, where this isn’t the last show. And he’s just gonna say, ‘Gotcha!’ and he’s gonna keep going and going.”

Maybe she was on to something. For Bob, songs came as reliably as tides, sun, and seasons.