(Guided By Voices)
Best known for power pop anthems, high-kicks, a lo-fi aesthetic, and seriously heroic drinking, GBV broke out during the indie rock explosion of the early ’90s. Notoriously interview-shy, Pollard wrote his own chapter, revealing that New York hipsters are far more terrifying than aggro metalheads.
Written by Robert Pollard
“Lost at Gonesville Station”
I’m not speaking for the entire band because I wouldn’t say it was a great show. I was far too nervous for it to be one of my better performances. I think it was part of the CMJ new music seminar in maybe 1994, and it was at the behest of Scat Records owner Robert Griffin who signed us in ’93. We hadn’t performed on stage in six years, and Robert told me that this particular showcase in New York City could do a great deal to enhance our profile as an “up-and-coming” band—the “real” band that we had now become, having signed to a “real” indie rock label. Also “up-and-coming” even though we were all around thirty-five years old at the time and had been playing in bands for close to twenty years. Before Scat, it was all make believe with six vanity-pressed LPs on make-believe labels.
Since I had agreed to play our first show in six years, I was all set to the task of assembling an official lineup for the gig, as Guided By Voices had just been a loose conglomeration of whoever decided to pop in during a recording session to that point. The lineup ended up being Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell, Kevin Fennel, and Dan Toohey. We had the look, at the time, of a fairly typical, generic Ohio garage/punk band. We had started to garner some acclaim from the indie rock press and obscure cognoscente as these mysterious, lo-fi weirdos with an affectation for the Who/Beatles/British Invasion/Flying Nun Records. Our look was not only incongruous within the infrastructure of the band but also with most anything going on in the indie rock scene at the time. Some of us had long hair, some of us had short hair, one or two wore baseball hats. There may have even been dreadlocks or a mullet.
The show was at CBGB, and we were third of a five-band Scat/Thrill Jockey Records showcase. As I mentioned before, I was horrified almost to the point of physical sickness. It was a total schmooze fest in front of the club with indie rock luminaries, label people, and press co-mingling. Sonic Youth and Pavement were there. I was greatly concerned that we were about to be revealed as the clueless, talentless Midwestern hicks that I thought we very much had the potential to be labeled, as there was a reason for not having played live in six years. At the merchandise table, we sold a pink tank top with a purple octopus on the front (which to my surprise, ended up selling very well). Indigenous New Yorkers showed up wearing checkered shirts and cuffed jeans, anticipating what they thought might be the current, in-style trend for Southern Ohio lo-fi weirdo recording artists.
Before the show, during the aforementioned jerk fest, our drummer, Kevin, told me that he had approached Henry Rollins and said, “Hey, Henry—” to which Henry interrupted with a very angry and forceful “What!” Nothing against Henry, but I was like, “Why the fuck would you want to talk to Henry Rollins?” It just made me even more nauseous.
So we come on at around 10:00 p.m. with our baseball hats, Les Pauls, and white corduroys and gave it a go. I knew of only one confidence builder other than the alcohol I had been drinking all day and that was the fact that a few of us—at least Mitch Mitchell and I—were pretty decent athletes. We could move, jump, kick…drink. We both had a heavy-metal background, having been in a band in high school called Anacrusis.
So that’s what we decided to do. Drink more. Move a lot. Kick out the set at a very brisk pace (I think it was a forty-five minute set) without much time between songs. Only the count—very Ramones style. I wasn’t focusing on the crowd, just sort of gazing over the top of their heads at the exit sign in the back of the room because that’s where I initially wanted to go. They seemed to be getting into it. What weirded me out and caused a huge surge of insecurity and paranoia was, about two-thirds of the way through the set, a pretty large portion of the crowd, maybe forty or fifty of them, began raising their cigarette lighters and yelling. I mistook it as a possible form of mockery or big city snobbery. A sarcastic protest of our arena rock posturing perhaps. We had been jumping and kicking, and it was a pretty energetic performance throughout the entire set, mainly out of sheer nervous energy from stage fright. I was informed by a group of people that came backstage afterwards that the reaction with the lighters was a show of genuine appreciation for the songs and for the fact that we “rocked” instead of “shoe-gazed,” which was quotidian in indie or alternative rock.
The next morning, we met British rock press legend Everett True, who greeted us in our hotel lobby in a bathrobe and house slippers for our very first interview. In the piece that he wrote for Melody Maker (or maybe NME) he called us “The last great American underground rock band.”
That CBGB show started it all for us. We stayed in Manhattan for the next four days and got tangled up in the scene. I didn’t call anyone, including my friends and family, the entire time we were there. I was lost at Gonesville Station, and life would never be the same after that. We never became KISS or the next Nirvana, but we’re still kicking it out some twenty years later.