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In Bob We Trust
Indie godhead Bob Pollard, best known as lead singer of Guided by Voices, has managed to release over 20 solo albums on his Fading Captain Series label. He was kind enough to sit down with Stuff to talk hangover remedies, Ingmar Bergman and burning assholes. Just like mom!
Stuff,
4/23/2003
By Cory Jones
Stuff: I guess you’re still in Dayton, Ohio, right?
Pollard: Yeah, man. I can’t leave, I’m like a ghost. I’ll be here forever.
What’s been going on with the Fading Captain Series lately?
I’ve been really busy with all of that stuff. I do all these projects and I have so many that I set a deadline for myself for each one, and sometimes I kinda stress out, and sometimes they come pretty easy. Like, sometimes when I do something with Toby [Sprout], it comes pretty easy ’cause his stuff is straightforward and 4/4. I just did this thing with the band Phantom Tollbooth, where we took the original vocals off the master tapes of their Power Toy album, and I rerecorded the vocals over the original music. It’s the most ambitious thing I’ve done, and I’m pretty proud of the idea.
It’s not that I didn’t like the vocals, I just thought they sounded a little too indie, while the music was a little more classic where it sounded like Rush and Blue Oyster Cult at times. I wanted to give it a classic edge, so I really labored over it and struggled to the point where it took me a couple months to get all the ideas together ’cause the music is so complex. At one point I thought, Wow, I’m really gonna fail for the first time because it’s just not working. So I asked a friend of mine to get me some pot, and I got stoned and then the ideas started coming together. [Laughs]
How did it turn out?
I redid the lyrics, melodies and everything. It’s weird because a lot of the places I chose to sing on the songs were places where there was no singing, and the places I left silent were where they sang. You could put the two records together and there will be vocals all the way through. The songs are so complex; I had to come up with so many lyrics. There are some songs with 75, 80 lines in them, so the lyric sheet should be pretty cool.
Will there be a lyric sheet with the record?
Yeah.
How do you think people will take to this approach to rerecording an old album?
I’m not into a whole lot of music these days, and the concept was to take albums that were really, really good and improve on them. There will be a lot of people who think you aren’t allowed to do that, like it’s some sort of sacrilege to rock, but I want to go into that direction. I’m not sure how many people would be into that. I’m hoping this goes well and there will be some other people contacting me. I’d like to do this again. Then my other idea is to take some albums that were really, really good and make them shitty. [Laughs]
You’ve had about 26 releases in four years with the Fading Captain Series. How do you remember all those lyrics?
I don’t remember all the lyrics. [Laughs] I wish we had instant knowledge of the entire catalog, but sometimes you don’t, especially when I’ve been drinking onstage. Some people wonder how I do that, but I just plug myself into it, and if you don’t remember, big deal. Fuck it, make something up.
How many songs do you usually pump out in a day?
It depends, maybe two times a year I’ll get this feeling come over me where I want to brainstorm, and I’ll come up with maybe 20, 30 songs. But that only happens a couple times a year. The rest of the time I just kind of plug away at different ideas I have; maybe I’m driving in my car and come up with a melodic idea or something. I keep lyrical ideas all the time, and if I come up with enough cool titles, I might get inspired to write songs for all of them.
So sometimes the titles feed the songs?
Sometimes the titles come first; sometimes I write poetry and I’ll write songs to the poetry, so the lyrics comes first; and then other times I’ll be sitting around playing guitar and brainstorming chord progressions on my tape recorder. I don’t really have many guidelines or formulas. I just let whatever comes natural. I know some people worry about writer’s block, but I’ll have to knock on wood—I don’t have wood, I have glass here—I have not experienced writer’s block. So I don’t worry about it. If I get to the point where I don’t feel very creative, I use that as a time to relax and just wait till it happens—and it does. You never know what’s going to trigger that spurt of creativity. It could be movies, it could be albums or it could be hanging out with people that are saying interesting things.
Do you have any song titles you could give us right now?
Yes, I do. Let me find them. A lot of these are inspired by the movie Wild Strawberries by Ingmar Bergman: “The Girls of Wild Strawberries,” “The Revolving Horoscope Primary,” “White Skin and Bone,” “The Five Dying Liars,” “The Skirmish at Blackstone Foster Home,” “Giants of the Bible Belt,” “Hitchcock Saw the Wheel,” “A Second Spurt of Growth,” “Goodnight Cyclone,” “Perverse Shade of Blue,” “Fire and Flood,” “Elephant Knuckles,” “Whereabouts of the Sun,” “Domestic Beer and Domestic Violence.” I’ve got a couple punk bands I came up with: one of them is called Townsend Research, the other punk band I have is called the Northridge Whores, ’cause I’m from Northridge.
How do you approach a Fading Captain Series album differently than a GBV album?
Well, I tend to take a little more time on a GBV album ’cause this is going to be heard by a lot more people, and it’s going to get a little more promotion and push. I work it out a little bit more, and I also gear it towards the live setting, like, I want to make it rock a little more. Whereas a Fading Captain Series project—I can do whatever I want because there aren’t going to be any press obligations for the most part. The Fading Captain Series can be a little more personal and a little more off the wall.
How did the recording of new Lifeguards record go? Doug [Gillard] wrote the music in Cleveland and you did the vocals in Dayton, but you were never together.
I like doing it that way. It’s strange because you can make a record and have no physical contact with someone. Like that Phantom Tollbooth thing, I referred to the drum and bass player as “the drum and bass player” because I didn’t even know who the fuck they were, and here I am making a record with them. Whereas now, I know their names—John and Gerard—but I’ve still never met them and I may never meet them; it’s bizarre. You do this thing that’s somewhat spiritual—because I consider music to be spiritual—so you do this spiritual collaboration and you don’t even know who those people are. I like how quick and painless it is. He does the music, sends it to me, I spend a couple days with it and jot down some ideas and then go and wing it in the studio. It’s very satisfying to do that. We used to do that a long time ago; we would just do things spontaneously in the studio, which I don’t do too much of anymore, but I’d like to get back to doing that.
If you ever lost your voice, would you consider putting out an album of singing through one of those voice machines?
That’s funny, my brother used to say that. It’s weird too, ’cause he’s getting a throat operation ’cause he’s got some cyst on his throat. But we talked about him doing a record that way.
Through an artifical voice box?
We had this invention we wanted to call the Amazing Neckrophone, where you could dial in anyone’s name, put it around your neck and sound like that person. You could sound like Mick Jagger if you wanted to. Now watch, you’re going to print that, someone’s going to do it and make a billion dollars.
How has being in your 40s affected your groupie situation?
It was weird because the one thing I went through [that was] some sort of a midlife crisis—although I don’t know exactly what that is—with my relationship with my wife was that we just kind of grew apart with me being gone all the time. So I kind of opened up the door to the groupie situation on the road when I had not even entertained that for a long, long time when I was in my 30s. So in my early 40s I kind of opened it up and we used to say rude things onstage like “We like to eat pussy” and things like that—and it worked! [Laughs] It worked, man, it’s all about attitude. So then I got over that—I met someone doing that and kinda got over that whole stage. But the person I met, we’re kind of separated right now, so I might have to get back into it. Whatever, groupies are there. That famous groupie, Bebe Buell, wrote about dating rock people in her book and said that we were about as sexy as an old brown shoe. So I guess it takes a particular girl to date Guided by Voices.
What kind of girl do you think that is?
A sloppy chick with a beer gut. [Laughs] No, I like to say the intellectual girl. Yeah, right.
Drinking plays an important role in live performances. Does it play a role in the songwriting process?
No, only coming up with ideas. I hang out with a bunch of friends I grew up with and we call ourselves the Monument Club. There are a lot of really good ideas coming up from people just drinking and talking. A lot of one-liners and zingers. But when you’re drinking, you can’t always remember what was said, so I appoint someone secretary for that night. “Write that down.” I come up with a lot of song titles that way, the writing process usually comes in the morning, when I’ve kind of got my shit back together and have some coffee, smoke some cigarettes and start fresh.
There’s a Silver Jews line that says, “In 27 years, I’ve drunk 50,000 beers.” How many beers do you think you’ve consumed onstage over the course of your career?
OK, let’s see here: Over 27 years, we’ve done a hundred shows a year. So what is that? Twenty-seven hundred…There’s no way. He’d look like that band Poison Idea, the only band that can out-drink Guided by Voices, and they’re really, really big—like 350 pounds and shit. But this guy, Berman [from the Silver Jews], I think he’s a little too skinny for 50,000 beers. Good line, though. Is Steve Malkmus still in that band?
I don’t think so.
Oh yeah, he got the Jicks together. I always buy his records. There aren’t too many people that I go, “I gotta hear their record,” but he’s one of them.
Do you have any special hangover remedy?
I bought this book called Drink as Much as You Want and Live Longer, and it basically prescribed a regimen of vitamins and what you should eat and drink. You should drink a lot of water, which I don’t, and I need to ’cause I’m like Frank Sinatra—I’m not dirty, I’m thirsty. But my main remedy is just stay in bed until you feel all right. Just drink a lot of water and stay in bed. Or have a Bloody Mary. [Laughs]
You’re known for coming up with almost as many band names as song titles. Do you ever get to use them?
We played a show in New York at CBGB one time and we were called Homosexual Flypaper. We played as that and it was on the marquee. People just came out to see who the fuck Homosexual Flypaper was. One time we were the Burning Assholes. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were touring with the Flaming Lips, and my idea was to put us on there, and you’ve got the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Flaming Lips and the Burning Assholes.
We didn’t get the gig.
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