She Wants to Know

If Robert Pollard would have done what most people would have done after seeing his band's debut disc sink without a trace, the lyrics of "She Wants to Know" would seem bittersweet. Record an EP of decent, unremarkable pop rock, sell copies to friends and a few local music heads, and then put the rest in the closet and head back to the real world. But Pollard wasn't deterred. Yes, he kept that day job, but he also continued to write and record music. And, most importantly, he got better. A lot better.

That makes this song more defiantly heraldic than bittersweet. It's a pretty standard lyric, one that finds the singer challenged by his girlfriend to grow up and settle down.

She wants to know why I can't take it slow
And why I can't settle down,
but I'm never gonna burn out
She wants to know why I've been lyin' to myself
-- playing a loser's game
Fightin' a losin' battle

With most guys, she'd probably have a point. But Pollard is different. Assuring her that he's "never gonna burn out" isn't just hubris. It's a statement of fact, never mind that his twentysomething self couldn't possibly have known the full scope of that sentiment.

The song has no real chorus, getting by on Pollard's verse melody and Paul Comstock's Buckian guitar jangle. The closest it comes is on the bridge, where Pollard utters the most prophetic lines of the song:

Far away, that's where I'll be
Shine a light down hard on me

He may not have settled far from the place where he first sang these words, but for much of the intervening 20 years he was far away, touring the world with bright lights shining hard down on him as he pranced the stage, high kicking his way into the hearts of fans who were happy he never settled down, assured that he'd never burn out.

Sometimes I Cry

Robert Pollard's early worship of R.E.M. is evident on tracks like "Sometimes I Cry," a song that sounds like something lifted straight from R.E.M.'s Athens club gigs in the time before the "Radio Free Europe" single. There's plenty of jangle, some counter-melodic singing and strong hooks throughout.

The song is also another instance of Pollard's early embrace of common songwriting tropes, content to write songs of heartbreak and loss with little ambiguity or obfuscation. Sophistication was a long ways off at this point.

Pollard starts with something that could have been cribbed from a lovelorn high schooler's notebook:

Sometimes I cry because you don't love me no more
And sometimes I'm dyin' -- I'd be lyin' if I tried to ignore
The hurtin' inside that started when you walked away
And each night reminds me -- it's behind me, but I need you today

He graduates to freshman composition by the time the bridge hits:

Every moment speaks hovering silently in the air
The wind hammers like a drum
Every highway leads into a darker sea of despair
Turn you back to where I come from

Still, it's Robert Pollard, so there's something quotable buried within this decent little song. The protagonist, hearing the call of the trucks on the freeway, seems to realize there is more than the love of this girl out there waiting for him, singing, "This rock just ain't a safe place to hide under any more." Not to overstate things too much, but there's a nice parallel there to Guided by Voices, a band once content to hide under a rock, issuing limited edition vinyl and rarely performing outside of Dayton. Here's one happy fan who is glad they decided it wasn't safe to hide under that rock any more.

Land of Danger

While there will be no order to things here, the idea of writing about every Guided by Voices song did send me back to the very beginning. I toyed with many ideas, wanting to start with "Land of Danger" and end with "Huffman Prairie Flying Field" to perfectly bookend the band's career. There is nothing tidy about GBV, however, so any such plans seemed tin-eared at best.

But when I did go back to the beginning, pulling the band's debut EP, Forever Since Breakfast, out of the Hardcore UFOs box set for a spin, I couldn't stop listening to "Land of Danger." It's an imperfect song that in no way foreshadows the brilliance and longevity that was to come, but it is quite good for what it was. Back in 1986, Guided by Voices was one of hundreds of bands that sprung up around the country composed of musicians who grew to realize that they were just as able as their heroes to make and release music. It was a continuation of the ripple effect of punk, as bands begat bands begat bands.

There is a clear debt to Chronic Town-era R.E.M. here, much as there is in similar EPs and LPs from dozens of other contemporaneous bands. Here in the Midwest, bands like Turning Curious and the Primitons trod similar ground. What I hear most in "Land of Danger," however, is the Hollowmen, a band from my native Des Moines that put out two great LPs in the mid- to late-1980s. The first, Sinister Flower Gift, could have easily included "Land of Danger," its mix of jangling guitar, hard-driving drums and quirky, ominous lyrics -- "Oh, baby, this is the land of danger (each and every home a battlefield)/ Oh, baby, this is the throat of a stranger (searching for the blood that's now congealed)" -- a perfect fit. The Hollowmen discovered Sonic Youth at the same time Pollard more fully alchemized his love of 1960s British rock, and the two band's paths diverged. Pollard's was the more bankable direction.

In an interview I did with Pollard last year, we talked about that first EP and those from bands that were his peers at the time: "You know, I hope those records, and they were, were better than Forever Since Breakfast... I didn’t want to do anything with it, because I knew people would think, 'This sucks,' and I knew we couldn’t play very well. We just did it for our own amusement. It’s just strange. I think I was just rewarded for my perseverance, my sheer love of doing it, and not going for it. We didn’t promote ourselves at all."

Despite the promise one can see in hindsight, its disingenuous to say it was clear Guided by Voices would succeed where others would not. "Land of Danger" is a solid beginning for the band, but without that perseverance from Pollard, it would have been just another footnote in the history of 1980s college rock.