As is analyzing Pollard's lyrics, which are often fragmentary and enigmatic.
"It's for the listener to take whatever he or she wants to be meaningful or entertaining or whatever can help," Pollard explains, sort of. "To me, it's like a dream domain. There's obvious symbolism, things that mean things and other things that don't, and sometimes they tie together and sometimes they don't. My favorite director is David Lynch, and I don't understand what's going on most of the time, but to me it's uplifting and scary. And I enjoy that rather than when things are right in your face literally and easy to understand. I appreciate that in lyrics, and I think the most inspirational and influential lyricists to me have been people who operate that way, like John Lennon and Marc Bolan and David Bowie, where you didn't always need to know what was going on with what they were saying, and I don't think they did for the most part, either. Sometimes you feel like saying something, other times you don't."
"I'm doing this to get back to ground zero and challenge myself," says Robert Pollard, left, of Guided by Voices' end.
(Jeremy Balderson)
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Over the years, the lo-fi label became something of a millstone for GBV, particularly after former Cars driver Ric Ocasek produced their 1999 album, "Do the Collapse." Shouts of sellout were heard.
"We'd exasperated all the techniques we could do in a basement," Pollard answers, adding that GBV's lo-fi approach was dictated by their severely limited financial resources, a problem that lifted on their two albums for mini-major TVT. "You can only move your washers and dryer around and put microphones in them and drop amps to make different sounds on a four-track so much, and I thought we'd done all we could do. At the time, some people were saying, 'Okay, we've heard the lo-fi thing and we're getting sick of it,' so we decided to move on. And then some of the same people said, 'Well, now we miss the old lo-fi stuff.'
"That was the point at which I realized we can only please ourselves," Pollard says. "For the most part the people that have stuck with GBV are the people who realized it's all about the songs anyway, because even when we were doing lo-fi recording on four track, you realized you still had to have songs or it's not going to work."
Another millstone: GBV's reputation as a rowdy, out-of-control, often plastered-to-the-gills live band, though Pollard thinks "this schizophrenic thing is what infatuated people. When we played our first show at CBGB's at the [1994] New Music Seminar, I think people expected us to be like the Residents; they didn't expect us to kick up a Ramones-type show where we banged 20 songs together and kicked ass with guitar rock. It was kind of confusing to people to have a completely different thing live and that was something that helped break us at the time. We don't sell a [lot] of records, but we sell enough to have a label keep us around. And I don't think that would have happened had we not been able to put on this kind of power rock live set. I thought it was cool that we had two different things going on."
There's also the issue of Pollard's seemingly endless canon: His songs number in the thousands, and his releases as GBV, solo artist, side bands and special projects number in the hundreds. The words prolific, obsessive and compulsive attach themselves easily to Pollard.
"Some people think it's diluting what I do, flooding the market," he concedes. "But I don't make music with the market in mind, I make it because it's what I do. It's an ongoing process, a part of my life, coming up with ideas and lyrics and titles. When I go to a friend's place or hang out at a bar, I keep a notebook even then. It's not work, but I'm working all the time. It's almost like breathing -- I do it all day long."
GUIDED BY VOICES -- Appearing Saturday at the 9:30 club. • To hear a free Sound Bite from Guided by Voices, call Post-Haste at 301-313-2200 and press 8121. (Prince William residents, call 703-690-4110.)
