November 17, 2003
The Band That Can't Stop Recording
By CHRIS NELSON
Avid record collectors might understand someone acquiring eight copies of the same album. Truly devoted fans might even fathom paying $950 for a copy of that album. But certainly only a fanatic for the indie-rock group Guided by Voices could sympathize with Breck Rowell, who paid up to $950 each for eight copies of one of the group's vinyl records, and Mr. Rowell doesn't even own a turntable to play them on.
The record is "Propeller," originally released by the band's own Rockathon Records label in 1992. Each of the 500 copies pressed at the time has a unique cover handmade by Guided by Voices and its leader, the singer and guitarist Robert Pollard. Mr. Rowell, a 39-year-old from Placentia, Calif., who runs the Guidedbyrobertpollard.com fan Web site, said by telephone that he bought most of his copies through eBay and one through a former Guided by Voices guitarist, Tobin Sprout. That he would hunt down so many copies of "Propeller," and shell out so much for them, is indicative of the obsessive relationship many Guided by Voices fans have with their favorite band.
Such zealous devotion "gives me a sense of job security," Mr. Pollard, 46, said by phone from a tour stop in Towson, Md.
His output is, to say the least, rare in pop music. According to the online Guided by Voices Database, Mr. Pollard has released 811 songs since forming the band in Dayton, Ohio, in 1983. By contrast, Bob Dylan has put out about 450 in 40 years.
The group, still based in Dayton, has issued 15 albums, 16 shorter, extended-play releases and 18 singles, not to mention a handful of additional semi-official live albums, piles of tracks on compilations and split-releases with other bands. And then there are the two dozen albums and singles cut by Mr. Pollard under his own name or with other indie-rock bands like Airport 5, Go Back Snowball and Robert Pollard and His Soft Rock Renegades.
His songs run a short gamut between guitar-driven, supremely hummable power-pop and spacey progressive rock, with classic-rock echoes of the Who pulsating throughout. Mr. Pollard's lyrics are often fanciful; some of his earlier work is so nonsensical as to border on Dadaistic. When songs aren't stocked with musings on girls, they're likely to invoke space ships, airplanes or military imagery. A song title like "Back to Saturn X Radio Report" from 1992's "Propeller" would sound right at home next to "Father Sgt. Christmas Card" on last year's "Universal Truths and Cycles."
At the moment Mr. Pollard has two new Guided by Voices albums in the works, along with another box set of unissued material to be culled from the 500 songs he estimates he has written but not released. In addition, the band, which played the Brooklyn club Warsaw last Wednesday, tours regularly. (The current members are Doug Gillard, guitar; Nate Farley, guitar; Chris Slusarenko, bass; and Kevin March, drums.)
Mr. Pollard knows that every album, every single and all the side-project discs he issues will probably be bought by at least a corps of diehard fans, which he numbers at about 3,000. Several Guided by Voices albums have each sold about 50,000 copies. While those aren't platinum figures, they're enough to allow Mr. Pollard to continue answering his apparently chatty muse.
Earlier this month Guided by Voices released "Hardcore UFO's: Revelations, Epiphanies and Fast Food in the Western Hemisphere," a five-CD and DVD box set â?? the band's third box in eight years. That collection coincided with the new single-disc compendium, "Human Amusements at Hourly Rates: The Best of Guided by Voices." Both were issued by Matador Records, which just put out Guided by Voices' "Earthquake Glue" in August.
In 2003 alone, additional labels, including Mr. Pollard's own Fading Captain Series, have released four other new albums by Mr. Pollard or his extracurricular bands.
All of this would be nearly impossible to keep track of were it not for the ardent efforts of fans like Jeff Warren, 32, of Austin, Tex. His Guided by Voices Database (
www.gbvdb.com) is a Guided by Voices geek's dream, a searchable index of Mr. Pollard's mammoth output. Todd Robinson, who is both a collector and one of Mr. Pollard's two partners in the Fading Captain Series, was only half joking when he called the drive to obtain each release a sickness.
Mr. Pollard's impressionist songwriting style seems to attract fans with a, well, fanatical bent, Mr. Warren said. "You probably get a lot of people who are more, I wouldn't say artistic, but creative," Mr. Warren said. "Or maybe just anal-retentive."
Still, some supporters who laud the quality of the music admit to being exhausted by the quantity. Andrew Carden, a 33-year-old fan from London who began his love affair with Guided by Voices in 1995 with "Alien Lanes," said he had finally begun to run out of steam as a collector. "If I was going to try and keep pace, it was going to damage my bank balance," he said by phone.
Even Gerard Cosloy, an owner of Matador Records, called the output "impressive but unwieldy." With so many titles from Mr. Pollard on store shelves and more always around the corner, it is difficult to create the sense that each new Guided by Voices release from Matador is an event, he said. At the same time, he acknowledged Matador's contribution to the flood.
A fervent record collector himself, Mr. Pollard said he understood some fans' fixation on possessing every song he writes. Yet he said it was strange to know that some continued collecting even when they had lost interest in the music. "They need to keep that collection complete, you know," he said. "Now it's too late; there's no turning back."
Mr. Pollard was already recording his lyrics at age 9. By fifth grade he was imagining conceptual albums, and during high school he created about 150 different album covers, which he has since destroyed, he said. Even today, Mr. Pollard designs most of his own album art. It wasn't until 1994, 11 years after he started Guided by Voices, that he quit his job as an elementary-school teacher to pursue music full time.
Part of Mr. Pollard's appeal is his stature with his fans as both an average dude and an artistic genius â?? as both a basement-music-player-turned-rock-star and a creator whose fecundity is legend. Will the well ever run dry?
"I don't think that really Bob's songwriting talent or prowess is going to falter," said his partner, Mr. Robinson. Such is the fervent hope, of course, of Mr. Pollard's loyal following. At Guidedbyrobertpollard.com, Mr. Rowell admits to having worried about Mr. Pollard's losing his golden touch.
"I'm not sure how I would deal with that," he said.
