Now they are back at that shady music venue on the edges of town by the freeway on-ramp. Bill and Mike, college chums. A weeknight but they pretend they’ve still got it in them. 2005, mid-thirties. Neither of them have seen the band live but they’ve been fans for years. Bill first heard about them in Philadelphia at the Khyber Pass from a bartender. The singer was a school teacher and they didn’t really take off until their late 30s so they were always basically old. Middle-aged white guys from Ohio playing garage rock, punk. “Guided by Voices,” great name. GbV.

In 2005 the band is older, more like 50s now. The first thing you notice on a Tuesday night is how shockingly drunk the singer is. It’s a small venue. You almost feel sad for them. But then wow. The way they grip everyone and pull them in. And the small crowd (mostly men, middle-aged) are in a trance (also drunk) and there’s this back and forth where the singer is really singing to people, and they’re singing back. They all know the words. Bill and Mike get drinks and settle on the edges.

After taking more time to study their records you see patterns emerge in the artist, the lead singer Robert Pollard. A lot of their songs are only a couple minutes long. It’s like they’re song scraps, unfinished. Vignettes. They have a fresh, off-the-cuff quality but they’re also rough. Pollard probably has thousands of songs like this. And they hand printed record covers too. The touching thing is they wanted to be rock stars so bad they kind of dreamt it into existence. It was like this kid fantasy turned reality for this school teacher and his mates.

Their breakthrough comes in 1994 with an album hailed as an indie low-fi classic. It sounds that way because they used home recorders. So it’s fuzzy at times and raw. But they discovered they could actually write proper songs on that album. Then the music industry said they could be the next Nirvana and they said no thanks.

Pollard probably 60 now, Bill and Loren in Portland. Pollard has always been very public about his love of The Who, Roger Daltrey. He twirls the mic cord like that, tosses it in the air, and then does a split jump. It’s amazing he can still do that. He’s been drinking hard for what, 40 years? Like straight, out-of-the-bottle drinking, liquor. He does airborne splits, even touches his toes on either side. Lands on his feet without a stumble.

Pollard may have some neurodiverse thing happening that would explain his prolific song writing. It’s like he won’t stop because he fears he’ll lose the thread. So even though they swear this is their last tour somehow they quietly start up again. Side projects or solo records or full-blown tours, west coast dates.

Pollard’s gone all white, keeps his hair close-cropped. His face has changed, gone rounder, puffy. He staggers, the voice is like sand. You can hear how the vocal cords are straining like a battery that’s down to its last 5%. But they keep releasing new songs and EPs, keep touring. The records go back to the mid 80s. Don’t stop now. They are his soundtrack to keep going too.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, music

Tags: Guided by Voices, indie music, Nostalgia, pacific northwest