A conversation with Robert Pollard from 1999
New GBV album out this week, old GBV interview in yer inbox!
THE OPENERS
Thank you to all subscribers new and (a week) old, and to anyone who’s recommended this newsletter. I hope you enjoy the show. And if you haven’t already, you can get in on the action here:
At Pitchfork, I wrote about the stellar second album from Cola, a.k.a. the second coming of defunct Montreal art-punk ensemble Ought, whose still-excellent debut was reviewed by me for Pitchfork (holy-shit-has-it-already-been) 10 years ago. RIYL: mourning the deaths of Tom Verlaine and Steve Albini at a Pavement-hosted wake.
This one’s primarily for readers in the GTA (though everyone’s welcome to come up here and join the fun): I wrote a music-festival road trip guide for the Toronto Star, highlighting Southern Ontario events that are bringing in A-list acts who aren’t playing the big city this summer.
Last weekend, I watched a couple of guys in their 70s perform the loudest show I’ve seen all year. Hamilton avant-psych pioneers Simply Saucer touched down at east-end punkporium Vertagogo to play some electro-rock music from 50 years ago that still sounds like it’s beaming in from 50 years into the future.
Three random observations from DJing my kid’s Grade 5 graduation dance this week: 1) the kidz fucking love Eminem, 2) “Espresso” is not the surefire dancefloor filler you might think it is (in related news: Harry Styles’ once-immortal “As It Was” has become the sort of song where half the crowd takes a juicebox break), and 3) in about five-to-10 years, our world will be overrun with teenaged foot-stomp folkies aspiring to be the next Noah Kahan, so brace yourself.
This week’s stübermania 2024 playlist update includes a surprisingly pastoral collaboration between ex-Sonic Youther Thurston Moore and Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier (’90s indie-heaven is indeed a place on Earth), some synthy/funky glam-pop courtesy of Jade Hairpins (a.k.a. Mike and Jonah from Fucked Up), and a track from an album that’s recently floated to the top of my bottomless pit of digital promos—Loving You Backwards, the slanted and disenchanted debut album (out Aug. 2) from Philly-via-Austin sextet Blood.
Here’s a link to the unembeddable Apple Music version. Oh, and the playlist also features a teaser from the 847th Guided by Voices album, Strut of Kings, out this Friday. Speaking of whom…
THE HEADLINER
A conversation with Robert Pollard from 1999
Date: September 1999
Location: Phoner—Bob was at home in Dayton, I was at my apartment on Gladstone Avenue in Toronto
Album being promoted: Do the Collapse
The context: Following three great-to-classic albums on Matador Records, the Ric Ocasek-produced Do the Collapse was GBV’s first majorish-label album for TVT Records—the original home of Nine Inch Nails, the then-current home of The Brian Jonestown Massacre, and soon-to-be-home of Default. I was a huge GBV fan at the time, but I remember feeling underwhelmed by Do the Collapse—even though this was the band’s first real adventure in hi-fi, the album felt oddly tentative (however, “Teenage FBI” and “Surgical Focus” are all-timers). As Bob says in this this interview, “I think the next one will be better,” and he was right—2001’s Isolation Drills is a Top 5 GBV album for me. But their September ‘99 visit to Toronto’s Opera House in support of Do the Collapse is the stuff of local legend—a three-hour, beer-soaked love-in that was hands-down the best GBV gig I’ve ever seen.
Opening the show that night was The American Flag (formerly Hershel Savage and the American Flag), a Toronto band that were gunning to be GBV Jr., and had the candy-coated tunes and Daltrey-summoning stage presence to back it up. Their 1998 self-titled album came out through Pollard’s Rockathon Records, and even contained a cover of a then-unreleased 35-second Pollard composition, “Tropical Robots.” (I also have a vague memory of singer Evan Weisblott crashing the stage at GBV’s 1996 Opera House show to sing “14 Cheerleader Coldfront” with his heroes.) Back then, it was extremely rare for a Canadian band to receive any kind of co-sign from an established American indie-rock act, let alone of the most revered names in the game, and for about six months there in 1999, The American Flag were the challah toast of the town.
In hindsight, they were a protoype for the Broken Social Scene model—onstage, founding members Weisblott and guitarist Ayal Senior were flanked by a revolving cast of local all-stars that included Dallas Good of The Sadies (RIP), Matt Murphy of the Superfriendz, Greg Tymoshenko of the Leather Uppers, and Adam Schlesinger-approved piano-man Dan Bryk. (Pollard was so impressed, he poached the band’s drummer, Jon McCann, to replace Jim McPherson in GBV in 2001.) But The American Flag flamed out as quickly as they blew up, leaving behind one perfect album that seriously rivals their Dayton mentor for sheer hooks-per-second pleasures. (Weisblott effectively disappeared from the scene, however, Senior went on to become a big deal in avant-guitar circles, collaborating with the likes of John Fahey.)
The American Flag come up a fair bit in this conversation, as does another piece of Toronto-related GBV lore: the band’s infamous 1995 Toronto debut at the Phoenix Concert Theatre, where they opened for Urge Overkill and stole the show, before Bob got his ass kicked by club security for attempting to come back onstage and satisfy the audience’s demand for an encore.
Also, I’m pretty sure I did this interview from my bed at, like, 9 a.m., because my first question to Bob was:
Are you normally up this early?
Oh yeah, I usually get up at 8 or 8:30.
I was gonna ask you: over the years, have you come up with the ideal hangover cure?
Yeah, you just keep sleeping until it's gone. That's all you can do, man. If you get up and feel like shit, you just keep going back to bed. But that's kind of tough if you've got a job that requires you to get up. But if you practice long enough, and you keep doing it long enough, you don't get hangovers anymore. Keep it up! Persevere!
So are you still harboring any hard feelings towards Toronto after the incident in 1995?
Oh no, I didn't have any hard feelings toward Toronto. It was the crew that fucking started it all. The crowd was great that night. But the club sucked. What was it, The Paradise?
The Phoenix, actually.
I mean they just allowed those fucking strong-arms to just throw people around and beat up the fuckin' aritst, it's kind of a fucked-up thing. They kind of ran the place, those guys in front of the stage, I think they had total artistic control! I don't know if I want to play that place again. Where are we playing when we come there?
It's the Opera House—that's where you played last time [in 1996].
Yeah that was a good place. Hershel Savage and the American Flag are opening for us. Hometown boys!
I was gonna ask: How did you meet the Hershel Savage boys in the first place?
When we played that show where I got my ass kicked, they came into our dressing room and just started hanging out with us for the next three days and they said, "We're not gonna go away."
Apparently, they've dropped the Hershel Savage part of the name.
Yeah, they probably should, because that guy was like a '70s porn star, so he might cop an attitude on it. I think he should be flattered that there's a Canadian band named Hershel Savage and The American Flag!
I noticed one of your older band names was Beethoven and the American Flag.
Yeah, that's where they got that, I guess.
So that wasn't you as label boss forcing a name on them.
No, that was theirs. That's what they said they were called when I met them that night in Toronto at the Urge Overkill show. They said they were Hershel Savage and the American Flag. They didn't really have a real band, but they had T-shirts already made up. You've got to get the marketing down first!
So do you wish your career in rock had happened sooner, in terms of your physical stamina?
No, because we would've been burned out by now. Because it happened later in life, I was able to have a family and a different career, and I was able to make a career change. And everybody wants a career change—you get burned out after a while, you know? So because of that, I was able to do it. And plus the maturity level—I think it helped me at 36 years old, to be able to deal with all the all that shit goes down in the industry.
You didn't sign away your publishing for five dollars...
Yeah, I would have done something like that if I had been right out of college or something. Plus, back in when I was in my early 20s, I think our music was pretty shitty, so it took years.
A recurring topic that's come up in a lot of interviews I've done lately is the correlation between baseball careers and rock careers, where in most cases, you're washed up by the time you're 40...
But that's not the case with us, because we didn't make it until I was 36 years old, so it was a different situation. But you're right. A lot of the people that are my age, a lot of the bands that have been around for a long time and made it when they're young, they're now kind of hoping for comebacks. That's not the case with us, because there never was a beginning, really.
So what ball team do you root for down in Dayton?
The Cincinatti Reds. They've done pretty good this year. I think they're a couple games behind Houston, but I'm just kind of bandwagonesque. Unless they're doing well, I don't even care. If they're doing well, then I'll start watching them. People down here, most of my friends are more into Ohio State football, and I think Ohio State has a very good team this year.
Okay, let's move on to Do the Collapse, which comes two years after your last album, and in GBV terms, that's like eons. What held it up?
First of all, we were on Matador, and we thought it was our turn to get the Capitol push. [Note: Matador briefly entered a partnership with Capitol Records in the late-’90s.] So we went out there and talked to people at Capitol, and they said, "Yeah, we'll put your record out through Capitol, but you've got to make the record that you've always been capable of making—you know, the big rock record that you've always been threatening, and get a producer and so forth.” And so we said, "Okay!” And so we did, even though we hadn't signed yet. We were actually between contracts with Matador, we hadn't really signed for the next three—their option was for three records, and they actually took too long to get us to sign. So, we were actually out of the contract. But we said we'd stay with them if they could give us what we want, whatever that was. And so they said, even though we haven't signed you, go ahead and make the record and we'll put the money up. So we went ahead and did the record with Ric Ocasek, and booked time into a big, expensive studio—Electric Lady—and did the record. And then after that happened, the whole relationship between Matador and Capitol fell through, so we couldn't go through Capitol now. So now we were left with the option of "do we stay with Matador" because they're going back to the strictly independent format, or do we explore other options where we can put out this big polished record—what do we do? There were other labels that started to take interest, and the main label that was taking interest was TVT, and they were really enthusiastic. And they're actually a bigger label than Matador, so we thought, "Well, they probably got better resources for radio and for marketing and everything. So maybe it's time to move on and we did.”
So the delay was all about paperwork.
That's what took all the time, making those decisions—that took many, many months. We'd already recorded the record in September [1998], and it didn't come out till August [1999]. Before that, we had been playing the songs live. I had written the songs and passed out tapes of the songs when I was touring the Cobra Verde guys [in 1997]. I was going insane with how long it was taking to put this record out. Actually, I wasn't allowed to really do anything, you know? I mean, I was pretty much sitting on my ass, creatively.
Did you ever feel like just saying "fuck it" and going back to putting out a thousand copies of your own record yourself?
I said I was going to do that. After this whole debacle, I told my lawyer and I told my manager, "I quit. I'm basically gonna go back and record stuff for my own label and just put out three or four records a year." And they said, “you can't quit, because we're working everything out with TVT and they're gonna allow you to do what you want on the side." And not that Matador didn't, but they kind of asked me, "quit doing so much, because it dilutes the whole Guided by Voices thing—you're putting on too much material."
It's interesting, because in the '60s and '70s, it was common for bands to put out two or three records per year.
For my own sanity, I need to be constantly working on a record. Every day, I need to know that there's a record that I'm working on—that's important for me creatively. And so we got it in the contract with TVT that I can do that—anything on my label or a small, independent label that's not distributed too heavily, I can do whatever I want under pseudonyms or as Robert Pollard. I've just finished another solo record that I did with Doug Gillard that'll be out October 31 called Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department. It's a much brighter, poppier, more up record than I've done in the last couple solo records. The last couple solo records I did were kind of dark. Actually, on my label that I started for myself this year, The Fading Captain Series, I've done four records in one year: Kid Marine… do you have Lexo and the Leapers?
No, I don't think it's been distributed in Canada.
That's the whole thing... the deal with TVT is like, “if you put a record out on your label, we don't want to see tons of ads, it's got to be kind of a low-key.” We distributed it through Surefire. But it's not anything where we're really trying to campaign for huge amounts of sales.
Well, the irony is: Hershel Savage are from Toronto, but if you go to the stores here and want to buy the record, it's $27, because it's technically an import!
That's what [American Flag singer] Evan [Wesiblott] was saying, he was kind of pissed off about that. He's always up my ass about him not selling enough records. I said, "Hey man, we just put out records by our friends. We're not a big label. We're the smallest, shittiest label in the world.” You know, that's pretty much it. That's Rockathon. And actually, man, there's a lot of good bands starting to be on the label. We just put out a record by a band called The Tasties from Dayton, and then we're getting ready to do the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments record. And now, I think we're going to do the next Superconductor record. So we have quite a stable of good bands for being such a shitty little label. But don't expect anything of us, man—we'll send it to Surefire, they'll distribute it to whoever they distribute to, and we'll put one little, small ad in Magnet or whatever. That's about all we'll do. I don't really work for Rockathon—I mean, I get bands for it, but it's basically Pete Jamison's label, and it's just him and one other guy. There's only so much they can do.
So is Do the Collapse your ultimate hi-fi dream record? Or are you still plotting your Sgt. Pepper?
I think the next one will be better, probably. I think it'll be a little bit more adventurous. I mean, this is the first time we've ever worked with a producer on a full project. I'm happy with it. I think it sounds good, and I think the songs are good. I think we worked them out pretty well, and took our time on it, and did what we were supposed to do, but I would have done some things slightly different—like, I would use noise a little bit more.
When you’re constantly bringing a new band to play with you, is it hard getting the dynamic down?
It takes a while to get used to a band. We just got together with this band [guitarists Doug Gillard and Nate Farley, bassist Tim Tobias, and Breeders drummer Jim McPherson], so that's why I'm saying the next one will be better, because we will have had a couple of years under our belt together as a band. So on the next one, we will have been able to feel each other out a little bit and know what we're capable of doing. And so I think it'll sound better, the performance will be better. And I just think now that I've gone into this big studio for the first time and crossed over that threshold into the realm of hi-fi, that I'll be, as a writer, a little bit more comfortable with the songs I'm writing for that. Because it's kind of a new thing for me. I mean, I’m used to doing an album in a week, and just pumping them out, and not working on arrangements and that kind of thing. So now I'm kind of into things like pre-production and arrangement that sort of thing, it's kind of interesting.
I guess I was kind of expecting a big, grand statement, but this album is actually kind of low-key.
It's just rock. It's a pretty straight-forward rock record. It's getting good radio play. That's kind of what we're after. We have three singles on the record. The first was "Teenage FBI," and it's getting a lot of radio play here in the States. We're trying to break through to a larger audience. We kind of hit a wall with Matador where we sell the same amount of records on every record, and so that's one of the reasons that we decided to get a producer and make it sound better and make it more radio-friendly. And so the next single is "Hold on Hope"—I think that’s going to do really well, because I think "Teenage FBI" set it up perfectly for that, and then "Surgical Focus" just got remixed by Lou Giordano and it sounds fucking amazing. So I think, after it's run its course with these three singles, we're gonna do what we set out to. I think we're gonna sell some records.
Well, I was wondering if the last two songs, "Picture Me Big Time" and "An Unmarketed Product" are sort of like a mini-suite about the state of GBV...
Yeah, they're kind of autobiographical a little a bit about where we're at and what's gonna happen.
It almost seems like a cynical conclusion....
It is! Totally. I'm always cynical. You gotta be. You can't get all wrapped up into it. You just gotta think of it as a big fucking joke, because it is a joke. To get on stage and play, you're basically the circus. And to make a record, that what's not a joke. That's your art, and you should be happy that you're able to do your art. And the rest of it, like doing interviews, doing photo sessions and playing live, that's a big fucking circus, that's a joke, and you gotta get a treat as such, you know? I mean, it's fun. If it's killing you and you're all swept up into it, and it's driving you insane, you really should try to do something else, because ultimately, you should be happy. Hey, just a sec, there's some big truck outside and I can't hear, I'm going to shut the door... alright, I'm back, sorry about that. I'm getting a new driveway, my driveway's all fucked up.
So you're big into the home improvement thing now?
Yeah, I've been trying to spend all my money before the Y2K thing [laughs].
I saw this thing on the news about this family that took out 20 grand from the bank and buried it in their backyard...
I've entertained that idea!
...but then it got stolen.
Somebody found it? Oh man, that's too bad. That's a bit paranoid, I think.
Do you have a big GBV New Year's bash planned?
They want us to, they want us to play somewhere in New York or something, but I said I'm not playing. This is a special New Year's Eve, so I'm going to be home for this one. But they're really trying, really hard. They're trying to offer us some big bunches of money to fuckin' play that New Year's Eve show. But I'm just like, "No. I'm staying home." I don't know what's going to happen. All the power might shut down or something. Nah, it'll be alright, I'm not over-paranoid about this sort of thing. But I did take my money out of my mutual fund, because I got a sense that there's going to be some kind of, like, not necessarily a stock market crash, but something. It's been going up so drastically, and I made a bunch of money on it, so I just said, “I'm gonna take it.” I just would rather have what I have now, and not continue to gamble. So I'm just like "give me my money." I mean, I think the banks are gonna be all right. But I just think, you know... not even anything to do with the Y2K thing, I just think the stocks are gonna start going down…
So a lot of your earlier songs are often attributed to teaching school children...
Yeah, in the mid-period Guided by Voices four-track phase I was still teaching. So there's a lot of fairy tale imagery. I was reading Grimms fairy tales to my class a lot, so I'd steal a lot of lines from some of those stories.
But now that you're just sitting around watching your stocks grow, what inspires you now?
I just sit around with my friends and drink now, and if they say something funny, I write it down, and it may become a song. I don't know if that's maturity or what, a lot of my songs come out of just boredom, I guess. I don't have enough money to just sit around and count, man. But if you notice, I write a lot of drinking songs now.
So you've moved out of the childhood phase and into the adolescent phase...
Exactly. I've gone from, like, 12 years old into 15 drinking mode. I don't want to paint the wrong picture. Some people go, "I've never seen anybody drink like that," but that's just onstage. I mean, I drink, but I just drink beer, like Budweiser... it's like water. I don't have inflamed whiskey nose.
So what did it feel like back in '93 when you're just making records in your basement, and then all sudden, all these indie-rock tastemakers from New York say, "oh my god, this is genius!"
That was weird, man. That was totally shocking. Up to that point, it was just this joke fantasy thing for us, like we were a band—we'd grow our hair long, and buy clothes in the thrift store and walk down the street and have somebody take pictures of us, do fake interviews and shit—it was just a joke, you know. Then all sudden, we were thrust into the real world, and it's terrifying. It took me, like, a year or two to get over it. I mean, I didn't flip out or anything, because like we were talking about earlier, you just kind of take a deep breath and just go with it, go with the flow. Ride it out. It just blew my mind, because we went to New York and played a show and I had no idea that anyone gave a shit. After the show, all these people from already established bands came back and were, like, hugging us and shit. I just was not prepared for it. I had never done an interview in my life and then right after the show, the next day, I had to do an interview with Melody Maker, and I was just fucking petrified. I had to get drunk at 11 o'clock in the morning to do the interview. But since that time, I've settled down and gotten used to it—it's my job.
It's interesting, how old tunes like "Weed King" are pretty much almost as hi-fi as you are now.
I know. The ambition from the beginning was to be like a classic-rock-type band, you know, like almost arena rock. That's what my roots are. You know, I was in a heavy-metal band in the mid-'70s, so that's where I learned kicks and jumps and all that kind of shit. And so, like, when we first started making records, we wanted to go into the studio make big, thick, crunchy guitar-sounding records. We finally got into it, you know? The whole four-track phase was good because we kind of discovered that, we were doing it for ourselves. We didn't have any money, so we kind of got addicted to it. I like the sound of it, that kind of warm in-the-room sound. Still, the whole time we thought, "if we ever get any money, we're gonna go in the studio and make a proper record." So that whole being pigeonholed into the lo-fi genre, and being called the pioneers of lo-fi, that was kind of a surprise, also.
Well, The White Album is kind of like the first lo-fi album…
I know, there's been lo-fi records forever. So, I don't know, I just don't understand the fidelity issue. Good songs are good songs are good songs. That's all that matters. I think the core of our fans, most of them are into us because of the songs, not necessarily the way they were recorded.
But now, every time you tune into a college-rock station, you hear some guy fucking around on his four-track...
It's irritaing as hell, actually, I get tons of tapes from people like that—people just banging away on a guitar into a shitty boombox. They send me these tapes, and expect me to listen to them, but I don't like that kind of music anymore, unless it's good songs. I mean, every once in a while I get a tape where there are some good songs, and actually, somebody's doing something, and that's fine. It's not that I don't want people to give me tapes, because sometimes they're good, but more times than not, it's just like, "I don't want to hear this shit, you know?" I can't even listen to the records that I buy—I don't have enough time to listen to those, much less somebody's tapes. You'll probably write this and people will get pissed at me, but this whole onslaught of tapes, man… they're coming to me all the time and people don't understand.... I've had people go, like, "Hey, man, this is my cassette, would you check it out?" And I go, "Yeah." And then they're like, "Hey, man, I'll take it back—if you're not gonna listen to it, I don't want to give it to you." Well, fucking take it then, I don't give a shit! The whole lo-fi thing was great, it was great that it opened the door for us. It was great that there actually was a movement. It was kind of like the extension of punk rock, because not only did you not have to know how to play your instruments, you didn't even have to know how to record it. So it was like the ultimate punk rock. And that was good, but it kind of opened the door... just like any kind of phase of music. Like, the whole grunge thing kind of opened up the door for all these shitty post-grunge bands. So with the lo-fi thing, there were great bands—The Grifters and Sebadoh and Pavement…
Have you heard the new Those Bastard Souls record [1999’s Debt and Departure]?
Yeah, that's a good record. They're gonna play some shows with us on the East Coast. Dave Shouse is a good songwriter, a good singer. So there were some good bands because of that, and I think fondly of that whole [lo-fi] movement. But it opened up the door after that for anybody to think they can just pick up a guitar and think, "Now, if they can do it, I can do it." Do It Yourself—that's all good and fine, but you should be able to play and write songs. You know, I've got some good days, I've got some bad days, there's good bands, there's bad bands, it's always been the same. Although music's not as good as it was. The golden age of rock was '67 to '79. And after that, it just started slowly declining. I'm reading this book by this guy, Jim Miller. He's a music critic at Newsweek or Time magazine. And this book puts forth the theory that basically, rock 'n' roll died in 1977... I say '79, because I think the post-punk stuff that came right after punk is some of the best music of all time, like Devo and Wire and XTC and all that kind of stuff. I think that was brilliant music. And then it started dwindling after '79-'80 so then after that, it was kind of spotty. But hey, listen, I gotta go do another interview—I apologize, but I had a good time talking to you.
THE ENCORES
Here’s GBV performing “Teenage FBI” in 1999 on Open Mike With Mike Bullard (a.k.a., Canada’s excrutiatinly unfunny dollar-store replica of Letterman).
The Superconductor album on Rockathan that Bob mentioned never materialized, sadly. (I guess Carl Newman was busy.) But we’ll always have Bastardsong.
And as I mentioned earlier, GBV do indeed have a new album coming out this Friday (June 28), Strut of Kings. I’m not gonna lie: my GBV fandom is not nearly as fervent as it was 25 years ago—I kept up with their post-2012 reunion releases until 2014’s very good How Do You Spell Heaven, but eventually lost track as their releases continued to proliferate like the water-logged mogwai in Gremlins. (If you’re looking for someone to debate the relative merits of Mirrored Aztec versus Welshpool Frillies, I’m most certainly not your guy.) But I did make this (chronological) playlist of GBV’s best post-2012 tracks, and I continue to update with each new albums. And I have to say: “Serene King” off the new record is another stellar example of Pollard making power-pop perfection look easy.
(Here’s the Apple Music version of the playlist.)
Next week’s Headliner: The Breeders.