Looking Beyond The Indie Scene By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 27, 2006; Page WE06
When founder and frontman Robert Pollard retired Guided by Voices after a New Year's Eve show at Chicago's Metro in 2004, fans pretty much knew it was only a name that was being retired. After all, in the preceding 20 years, the hyper-peripatetic Pollard released 20 albums, 30 side projects, numerous B-sides, EPs and singles, and even an album consisting of nothing but his intoxicated stage banter.
As for anyone expecting insights or revelations into the GBV breakup from Pollard's just-released 26-track solo album, "From a Compound Eye" on Merge Records, they'll probably be disappointed since the album was finished six months before the band's final show.
The songs "were written over such a broad period of time," Pollard said from his lifelong home in Dayton, Ohio. In fact, "From a Compound Eye" is "dated now to me because I've been listening to it for a year and half," he says.
"The reason I put out the record, and also the reason I disbanded the group, is I came up with this collection of 11 new songs and 15 old songs that I'd found from the mid-'70s on up to now." After a basement flood threatened his fabled suitcases of demo cassettes, Pollard began digitizing them. "I found all these really cool song ideas that for some reason or other I'd left off of albums before," he says. "Going back, I found that some of them were better than the songs I chose at the time for whatever project I was involved in."
Feeling that the songs weren't attached to any particular incarnation of GBV, Pollard says he "decided it had to be a solo record. And it turned out so good and I liked it so much, I didn't want to relegate it to Fading Captain [his own boutique label]. This is actually my eighth solo album, or something like that, but I decided it should be the first official record as Robert Pollard on a label that's behind me to push it out to the world instead of the Fading Captain series, where we usually put out 3,000 CDs. I felt like it was too important a record for the Fading Captain series, so I decided it was a good time to break up the band."
According to Pollard, "It allowed me to kind of completely break everything down and start over. Some people say, 'I'm gonna break up the band' and then have another band with a different name, and I thought about that, too, but I thought, basically I've been the mainstay in GBV so it's not too much different. It just allowed me to say, 'That's that, wrap it up, take a look at it, see what it's worth and start a new phase.' It's helped me creatively; it's opened up the floodgates for a lot of ideas.
"And I don't have to live up to the expectations of what, another GBV album? Was it as good or as bad as the last one, does it stand up to 'Bee Thousand'? I just wanted to shed that."
"From a Compound Eye" is a collaboration between Pollard and multi-instrumentalist/producer Todd Tobias, who had been with GBV since 2001's "Isolation Drills" and partners with Pollard in the psychedelic/prog Circus Devils, another Pollard side project.
"He's become my partner, and I can't even imagine working without him now," Pollard says of Tobias. "I think it's come from working with him for four or five years now. He has this amazing and intuitive grasp of my music so I can go in there and do what I need to do and let him take over without even supervising. It's always amazing -- 100 percent satisfaction guaranteed what he sends me -- so there's this cohesiveness and the fact that we work together as a team now, and that's all we need. That's why I call the album 'From a Compound Eye' -- it's all over the place, kind of sees in every direction."
Of course, Pollard's reputation as an uber-collaborator is substantial, but he seems eager to temper that aspect of his work a bit. "I'm kinda gonna draw the line there because I've found my niche now, and I'm not interested in doing these collaborative things. I've gotten to where I just want to work with Todd and to do my thing with Merge."
Except . . .
"I'm getting ready to do a project with Tommy Keene [the Bethesda-bred indie rocker now playing in Pollard's band] as the Keene Brothers. And there's this other project I just finished with Todd, called Psycho and the Birds, and it's my more spontaneous thing . . . and I just finished something with [late-era GBV bassist] Chris Slusarenko; we called ourselves the Takeovers."
And the year off performing since the Metro farewell hasn't been a total vacation: Pollard released two EPs under his own name, as well as "Suitcase 2: American Superdream Wow," a four-disc, 100-track collection of Pollard rarities, each credited to a different band name (Apes in the Window, Bug Eyed Mums, Billy Ray Human, Gene Autry's Psychic) with a booklet featuring Pollard's collages and artwork for fictitious singles from the collection, and "Eat II," his second poetry and art collection.
The GBV farewell juggernaut also included "The Electrifying Conclusion," a four-hour DVD of the final concert that featured an onstage, band-only bar and a 63-song set that began with "Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox," the first track from GBV's breakthrough album, 1992's "Propeller," and ended with "Don't Stop Now." There was also "Guided by Voices: A Brief History -- Twenty-One Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll," by former GBV bassist James Greer. At 280 pages, it was hardly brief but was complete, with a useful GBV family tree and discography. Film director Steven Soderbergh, a longtime GBV fan, contributed a humorous foreword, which is appropriate since Pollard contributed music to Soderbergh's "Bubble."
Opening this weekend, "Bubble" is the first of several high-definition, low-budget digital movies that will be available simultaneously in theaters, on DVD and on digital download. One of the EPs released last year in the Fading Captain series was the instrumental "Music for 'Bubble,' " and Pollard has recorded the follow-up to "Compound Eye" with "Normal Happiness," consisting of pop songs Soderbergh didn't use in the film.
The connection between this musician and director is understandable: Although Soderbergh can deliver the big-budget, glamorous superstar event movie ("Ocean's Eleven" and "Ocean's Twelve"), he's indie at heart. "He's kinda got the same thing going on, plus he works a lot," Pollard says. "He's always involved in a movie, I'm always involved in a record. He's got his big-budget babies and then his experimental projects, and that's pretty much the way I operate."
Except, one should note, for the "big budget" part.
Pollard met Soderbergh only "right before he started shooting, but I've been reading for years where he said GBV was his favorite band. He used 'Do Something Real' [from 1999's 'Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department'] in [2002's] 'Full Frontal' -- the only song in the movie. He said, 'We must cross-pollinate.' I said, 'Yes, please, I can use the work!' "
Which fits Pollard's notion that such work not include so much debilitating touring.
"The other thing is you don't make a lot of money playing live -- we're not the Rolling Stones," he says.
That's why eBay may serve as Pollard's personal Social Security down the line, particularly after he noted the high prices folks seemed willing to pay for GBV rarities, such as $4,800 for a mint-condition "Propeller." (Each copy has a unique handmade cover.)
"I sold one before that for $6,200," Pollard admits. "I was kinda curious to see what it would go for, so I signed one of my own. The thing is, if you're an indie rock artist, you don't make a lot of money. Not that I need to do that right now, I'm fine. . . . But just out of comfort I entertain the notion of selling things on eBay.
"I'm thinking of doing an auction with my collages. I have a lot of them and they're all one of a kind, so I'm sure people will want to buy them. If I'm not making much touring or on advances for albums, I don't see what the problem is, though some people think that's gouging fans. I'd disagree. It's about trying to stay afloat and looking at the future. Hopefully the future will hold enough for me to start doing some soundtracks."
According to Pollard, after Soderbergh finishes directing George Clooney and Cate Blanchett in "The Good German" and several other projects (including "Ocean's Thirteen" and "Che"), "he's interested in doing a musical of Cleopatra with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jim Greer writing the script, and Steven's asked me to write the songs. I hope that kinda pans out because, first of all, it would be interesting -- I like Steven's films, he likes my music -- plus it could actually be quite lucrative."
Having not played live since the Metro farewell, Pollard's shaking off road rust.
"This is the longest time -- 13 months -- that I haven't played a show," he says. "It's been nice, I've had a lot of time to do creative things that I needed to do that were difficult to do when you keep going out on the road."
This weekend at the 9:30 club, Pollard will be backed on guitar by Keene and Dave Phillips (Frank Black, Tommy Stinson), Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster and bassist Jason Narducy. "Tommy Keene's going to be playing keyboards on 14 or 15 songs, and I've never been onstage with a keyboard, it might freak me out," Pollard says. Narducy was recently playing with Bob Mould, who was also featuring a keyboardist for the first time.
"As you get older, you start entering the Peter Gabriel phase; the punk rock days are over," Pollard says. "I'm 48 years old now, and I'm sure Bob felt the same way. We'll be opening with 'Gold,' and Tommy said he's going to play the tremolo guitar and then whip out a harmonica and then go over to the piano -- I'll probably start laughing, probably won't be able to finish the song."
