James Greer - Guided by Voices: A Brief History: Twenty-One Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll

GUIDED BY VOICES

A BRIEF HISTORY

TWENTY-ONE YEARS OF HUNTING ACCIDENTS IN THE FORESTS OF ROCK AND ROLL

With an Introduction by Steven Soderbergh

JAMES GREER

Copyright 2005 by James Greer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Greer, Jim, 1961

Guided by voices: a brief history: twenty-one years of hunting accidents in the forests of rock and roll / James Greer; with an introduction by Steven Soderbergh.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes discography (p.).

eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4641-1

1. Guided by Voices (Musical group) 2. Rock musiciansUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

ML421.G853G74 2005
782.42166'092'2dc22
[Bs]

2005048123

Black Cat
a paperback original imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

To S. A.

No dilettante can recognize a master. They take his mastery for egotism.

Goethe

The purpose of this book, whose secretly real title is Hunting Accidentsa marketing impossibility, obviously, as it might draw too many unwitting Ted Nugent fansis to tell the story, to those interested, of how Robert Ellsworth Pollard Jr., who encompasses and created every Voice in Guided by Voices, came to be considered by some as one of the truly great artists of our time. Logically, that consideration should extend to his band; but because the notion of rock band as Pollard has reconceptualized itthrough a combination of necessity, personality, and restless creativityhas acquired a complex subset of meanings, its a little more difficult to prove the extended proposition, because doing so would mean making mostly arbitrary decisions like Which band? meaning Which version of the band? because there have been several; nearly fifty players have served time in its ranks, some more helpfully than others, but all in the service of a single, and singular, vision.

That vision: sustained and propagated in its infinite fractions by Pollard, the forty-seven-year-old baby whose personal history parallels, intertwines with, in fact is/ought to be the story of GBV, which is shorthand for Guided by Voices, though Bob, as Robert Pollard is known to his friends and fans, and Bobby, as he is known to his close friends, does not and never has liked the abbreviation. Even though it was his idea.

You see? A contradiction in the second paragraph of the preface! Guided by Voices contains multitudes, much like the homosexual poet Walt Whitman, who, in Leaves Of Grass, wrote a poem called I Sing the Body Electric, and thereby invented rock and roll, as well as the art of elliptical song titles that Pollard himself has long mastered.

The Guided by Voices storythe Brief History, as the books title semi-ironically has itis unique in the annals of rock, and not in the way other rock stories are unique, but in a truly expectations-defying, nonclich-embracing, uncanny, and purposely unpurposeful way, so that while Pollard et many al. are held in high esteem by their peers, its unlikely, even (possibly) impossible that anyone will ever successfully emulate the road towhat?plain endurance, mythology, cirrhosis, glory that GBV took. Today, you can look but you will not find a single band clearly influenced by Guided by Voices in the way that, say, a great number of very bad bands were clearly influenced by, say, Nirvana. Because to imitate Pollards songwriting would entail digesting, as he has, the entire contents of the Book of Rock, and rearranging every sentence via a meticulous, intuitive, logically-deranged process that results in another book, almost as long, and just as enlightening to read. Such a thing is not very likely to happen in your lifetime. Though swatches of influence might crop up here and there (The Strokes, for instancewhose gratefulness to Bob for listening to the cassette they threw onstage at a Guided by Voices show and directing soon thereafter that they be asked to open for GBV on an upcoming tour did not extend to a willingness to contribute to this bookbear some traces of Bobs musical DNA, but have only been able to replicate that genetic affinity on the one song they keep writing over and over), no one will ever dupe or duplicate the Whole.

Three months is probably not long enough to listen to, never mind research and write about, the body of Guided by Voices work. We had a head start, we will admit, and a decades worth of warnings, but who takes warnings seriously until someone dies? Who stops smoking until their good friend contracts lung cancer, and even then, who stops smoking? (We do not endorse smoking.) Our twenty months, give or take or add or subtract, playing bass for GBV in the waning years of the last century and our decade-old friendship (Bob was the best man at our imaginary wedding to our imaginary wife) was in the end more obstruction than helpmeet, because we began this book lacking the chimera of objectivity that rules, or is meant to rule, the writers right hand. We are left-handed, and hopelessly subjective. Opinions expressed in Hunting Accidents not directly attributed to others are a by-product of our own unhealthy addiction to solving puzzles, and should not be trusted.

You are encouraged to trust, instead, those included in the long list of acknowledgments that will followlike fans queued at the door of the Greatest Rock Show Everthe coda with which this paragraph will inevitably end, without whose support, help, encouragement, information, inspiration, time, threats, physical abuse, and money Hunting Accidents would be a much poorer excuse for a book. We will not bother to identify the contributions specific to each person or group mentioned, because they know what they did and you do not care. Having said that, we are grateful beyond words that anyone, never mind everyone, was in so many instances willing to direct so much of their time and energy toward the completion of this project, and we fully recognize that the motivating factor was a common love of the band. Guided By Voices tradition of generosity has been, in part, the secret of its success, and now it is the secret of whatever success Hunting Accidents enjoys. A multiplicity of thanks to (in no particular order): Robert Pollard, the reclusive Jimmy Pollard, Rich Turiel, Tad Floridis, Tobin Sprout, Nate Farley, Percy Kew, Matt Davis, Billy Dixon, Bruce Horner, Mike Lipps, Mark Gibbs (qui es in caelis), Buffalo, Dink, Peter Buck, Bertis Downs, Gerard Cosloy, Chris Lombardi, Patrick Amory, Nils Bernstein, Robert Griffin, David Newgarden, Joe Goldberg, Bun E. Carlos, Steven Soderbergh, Dennis Cooper, Bryan Pollard, Sarah Zade, Greg Demos, Jim Macpherson, Don Thrasher, Kevin Fennell, Mitch Mitchell (in absentia), Dave Doughman, Michael Azerrad, Eric Miller, Richard Meltzer, Byron Coley, Todd Robinson, Jason Pierce, Jeff Warren, Ric Ocasek, Anna Crean, Vic Blankenship, Mark Spitz, Doug Gillard, Chris Slusarenko, Kevin March, Steve Malkmus, Andy Valeri, Tony Conley, Wing Committee, Monument Club, Postal Blowfish, Girl Called Captain, Grove/Atlantic and its many helpful tentacles, Pete Jamison, Aaron Blitzstein, Sam Powers, Janet Billig, Jim Romeo, Matt Sweeney, John Wenzel, Celia Farber, Pete Townshend, Jonathan Bernstein, and the forbearance of Danny Greenberg at the William Morris Agency and of Allen Fischer at Principato Young Management. Humble apologies to anyone whose contribution we have failed to note. Even humbler apologies to those who contributed and have found their efforts gathering dust on the cutting room floor. In such instances, physics rather than aesthetics dictated the limits of inclusion. Special extra