Guided By Voices

Bob Pollard is the king of funny names. His band, Guided By Voices, is about to release its 14th record, Earthquake Glue (Matador), which features such word-salad titles as “I’ll Replace You With Machines,” “The Best of Jill Hives” and “A Trophy Mule in Particular.” He’s also hard at work on Pinball Mars, the next record from his Circus Devils side project, and yet another GBV album—possibly to be titled Unconditional Saviorism, though Pollard is known for not committing himself until the last possible moment. And then there’s the new GBV box set, Hardcore UFOs, due out in November, which will give fans access to the high noon of Guided By Voices’ critical success—a period when Pollard and then co-writer Tobin Sprout created lo-fi, Cheap-Trick-channeling-the-Monkees-through-an-Edison-wax-cylinder classics like “Kicker of Elves,” “My Valuable Hunting Knife” and “Burning Flag Birthday Suit.”

“I find that if you come up with an interesting title, you have to write a song for it,” he explains, laughing. “A song with a name like ‘Kicker of Elves’—how can it not be good? When you see a title like that it makes you want to buy the record.”

Maybe. If you’re a longtime fan of the Dayton, Ohio-based songwriter, though, such a “technique” might also make you wonder how many more titles, let alone melodies, he can come up with. The notoriously prolific—and, some would say, notoriously uneven—Pollard estimates his lifetime songwriting output at around 4,000 songs, topping out at around 200 per year during the time of Bee Thousand (1994)—the album whose opaque cover art, enigmatic song titles (“Tractor Rape Chain,” “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory”), and grainy production blindsided the rock-crit establishment and allowed Pollard to finally quit his school-teaching job and become a full-time musician. These days, he says, “I’ve slowed myself down”—meaning he now writes “around 50 [songs] per year,” most of which appear on the various side and solo projects released through his ever-lengthening Fading Captain Series, a numbered and continually expanding set of records released independently by Pollard.

“Any idea I had, no matter how half-assed or fragmented it was, we would record it,” he says of GBV’s early years—the “classic period” when the band, signed first to Scat Records and then to Matador, released the cluttered, addictive albums that garnered their reputation among indie rock fans. “We thought, we’ll record as many songs as we can, then we’ll sift through it later.” Thus albums like Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes (1995), Under the Bushes Under the Stars (1996) are landfills of breathtaking, poorly recorded melodies, some of them no more than fragments. Suitcase, the 2000 collection of unreleased Pollard demos that extends back to the ’70s and, Pollard insists, barely scratches the surface of his unreleased oeuvre. It’s no surprise to hear Pollard name The Beatles’ delightfully messy White Album as one of the five he’d take to a desert island: “You have to take the White Album. That’s the Bible.”

The band has endured many lineup changes—the biggest one in late 1996, when longtime member Sprout left, prompting Pollard to break up the lo-fi version of GBV and bring on Ohio rockers Cobra Verde as his new backing band. Afterwards, there was a stint at TVT Records, where he recorded the more conventional, big-rock albums Do the Collapse (1999) and Isolation Drills (2001) with producers Ric Ocasek and Rob Schnapf. But now, Pollard says he’s slowing down and tightening up. “I’m knocking around lyrics and working with structures until they’re perfect, something I do now more than I used to do,” he says.

Some of this stability he credits to GBV’s current lineup, which includes Doug Gillard and Nate Farley on guitar, bassist Tim Tobias and drummer Kevin March. “This band, more than any lineup I’ve had—and I’ve had some good lineups—they’re all able to do their homework and they come to the table with ideas. We don’t practice; we don’t need to practice. They’re very good at pulling off anything that I can come up with. It’s a bigger challenge for me as a songwriter; I try to challenge myself and them. It’s caused me to be a more mature songwriter. I don’t just bang things out; I find myself being more patient.”