from the LP Bee Thousand, Scat Records, 1994Teeming with enthusiasm and contraindication, both musically and within the narrative of his life, and possessing within him a seemingly inexhaustible fount of pop melodies not yet recorded, Robert ‘Bob’ Pollard is Guided by Voices (GBV), for all intensive purposes; both nobodies and known rock stars, and in cooperation with friends and family alike, the other players always did their part---but what cannot be disputed is that GBV (and the countless other aliases he’s recorded under) has always essentially been about Bob’s pursuits and motivations, and everyone else just did their best to keep up. The phrases “blue collar” and “high-brow indie rock” would typically seem to be at odds with one another, and that is what makes Bob’s reality as both working class everyman and intellectual rock superhero so compelling; for example, the two most important hobbies in Bob’s life remain beer and watching/playing basketball, which might not be the first things which jump to mind when you listen to GBV’s songs (okay, beer does figure prominently in some songs, but one might wrongly presume he drinks good beer.) Sometimes his lyrics are immediately revelatory, achingly honest and penitent, and other times his puzzles prove so abstract and impenetrable that they almost mirror the work of director David Lynch (of who Bob is a big fan, not surprisingly). This song, off of the album which put these guys on the radar after a decade of toiling in obscurity, includes both styles described above; the verses spell out a typical lover’s conundrum regarding trust, “why is it, every time I think about you, something that you have said or implied makes me doubt you…in the first place, it's probably just paranoia, but there's a ghost in my room and he says I’d better run…” The chorus, on the other hand, reads like some cryptic Southern elegy, “…parallel lines on a slow decline - tractor rape chain; better yet, let's all get wet on the tractor rape chain…speed up, slow down, go all around, in the end…” Although he hails from and still resides in Dayton, Ohio, Bob often inflects his singing with a pseudo-British accent, not to be ironic or cool, but because it sounds right sometimes and he knows that. There is a personal quality to GBV’s tunes, as if you are sitting right there at the Monument Club with Bob & the gang (not really a club per se, just a converted garage behind Bob’s house where he and other dudes hang out to drink copious amounts of cheap beer). To date, Mr. Pollard has released into the world over 900 songs, and an absolutely staggering percentage of them are really good tunes, in my opinion. This quote, from a longtime pal of Bob’s, really sums it up perfectly, (taken from James Greer’s book Guided by Voices: A Brief History) “…I just can’t understand how a guy who talks about nothing but sports and shit when we’re home, can write songs so beautiful they make you cry…”
