Pivotal Film

It isn't often that a Guided by Voices song can pop up on the iPod's shuffle and I won't instantly know who it is. I might not instantly recall the title or album, but I'll know it is GBV. That isn't the case with "Pivotal Film." It came up this morning, and I thought it was a deep cut from a Foo Fighters album or something similar. Then Robert Pollard began to sing and quickly reoriented my ears.

That's not to say that this is faceless riff rock... though it comes pretty close. By the time the song really takes off and soars on the back of Pollard's vocal melody and some particularly muscular guitar work from Doug Gillard, it really starts to fee like a GBV track.

Isolation Drills and Universal Truths and Cycles are an interesting period for GBV. The band seems as if it wants to fully embrace the arena sound that it seemed to flirt with for so long, yet it's clear that ultimately this isn't the strength that will sustain it longterm. This version of GBV can ably pull off this sort of thing, but when it does so it loses much of the shambling charm that made the band so compelling in the first place.

Privately

As much as Robert Pollard clearly puts into sequencing his albums, I've rarely had the sense that he worries much about the songs that close those albums. Isolation Drills and Half Smiles of the Decomposed being the exceptions.

"Privately," which brings Isolation Drills to an end, feels like a closer. It's a mid-tempo track with swelling strings that ends with a fadeout, as if Pollard is unwilling to issue a definitive end and simply wishes for things to trail off in perpetuity.

Lyrically, it seems to be a response to the heart-on-his-sleeve lyrics of many of the rest of the tracks. As if feeling that he perhaps shared too much, he has this to say:

Before most of us knew it
Contagious words have bitten
Don't use them
Don't post them for broadcast
Keep then private and away
Like an old weapon

It's as if he is saying, "Look, I know baring my soul a bit here made for some good music, but don't read too much into things. Let them mean something to you. That should be enough."

Then, as if to reel things back in, he closes with three little non sequiters. Here's my take:

Cigarette lifter = Pollard
The frozen violins = Rob Schnapf's attempt to prettify his songs.
Solid movement = the result, another steaming pile ignored in the marketplace.

Chasing Heather Crazy

By the time of Isolation Drills, Guided by Voices had a formula of sorts. Doug Gillard starts with an interesting guitar figure, Robert Pollard follows with his vocal and then the rest of the band kicks in when the first major hook makes its bow. It subverts that formula at nearly every opportunity, of course, but the formula is there nonetheless.

"Chasing Heather Crazy" neatly follows that formula, and the result is a very catchy song that doesn't really do much. I like it and never skip it when it pops up on the player, but it's like a meal of empty calories: it doesn't stick with me and I don't find myself wanting to belly up for seconds any time soon.

It's a great sounding song, part of an album where the band seemed to find the perfect mix between it's burgeoning arena rock future and its indie-rock pedigree. It's slick, but it sounds like the creation of five guys in a room (as opposed to five guys in one room and several others in another room adding overdubs and production flourishes). The hooks are strong, too. Perhaps it's simply that formulaic presentation -- a very straightforward rock song ready (though left waiting at the altar) for radio.

Unspirited

Robert Pollard's vocals approximate a round on "Unspirited," the singer singing one line, and then, on a second take, starting the second just before the first wraps up. It's an interesting approach, and one that draws more attention to the lyrics than might be otherwise.

Do they hold up? Somewhat.

Even when you're lifted by the lie
Heaven sent and gifted - ask them why
Never give it all up - never try
All their hearts are breaking

It's an oddly contradictory verse, with Pollard's mention of lies -- something clearly negative -- juxtaposed with something being "heaven sent and gifted -- which is obviously a positive. By the same token, the chorus does little to clear things up:

Unspirited
The less than life you live
The lessons make you lame, boy
the same, boy
Everywhere that you go, I'm with you now

Pollard seems to be saying that someone less-than-motivated by life can be made lame, or, in the least, inert ("the same, boy"), but then assures the boy that he's "with you now," as if that could be of some comfort despite the fact that there is no solution proffered.

The second verse seems to offer a clue or two, as it becomes clear that whoever Pollard speaks for is doing more harm than good: "When you lose it all, you'll think of me, when you take the fall, you'll drink to me." For a moment I thought about the play on words in the title, meaning both someone who is listless and/or who has admitted defeat and someone who is no longer drinking. Perhaps that's Pollard's point: someone who is dry, who heeds the "lessons" of those who preach temperance is made to be "lame." Placed on an album with songs like "Sister I Need Wine" and "How's My Drinking?" it seems plausible.

Or maybe it's just a decent little rock song with a decent hook, a good guitar solo and an intriguing vocal.

How's My Drinking?

If Robert Pollard has ever been more direct in a song than this, it certainly escaped me. He and his band were known as much for drinking as for making great music, and he clearly was taking a lot of heat on the home front for the former and receiving too little acclaim beyond it for the latter. Rather than cloak his sentiments in cryptic verses or strange metaphors, he gets right to the point:

How's my drinking?
I don't care about being sober
But I sure get around
In this town

To hell with my church bells
And leave me die
With you
I won't change

It's more a statement than a song, though its charms grow on you with repeat listens. It has been played live only a handful of times, which is no surprise. Fans rally around their drunken heroes, but I'd guess that hearing this live might bring listeners a bit too close to the reality that Guided by Voices' fun time party band persona typically conceals. Particularly in the last verse, where Pollard sings, "leave me die with you, I won't change."

Then again, beer hasn't slowed Pollard down, and while I cringe at times when listening to the last bit of any live show as he mumbles his way through some of my favorites, I don't begrudge him his indulgences. Regardless, it would be unwise, it seems, to take anything Pollard does too seriously. In an interview with Rolling Stone around the time of the release of Isolation Drills, he had this to say about the song:

"That was an answer to a really nasty article a guy wrote about me in the Dayton Daily News after one of our shows. Because we played for three hours but for the last half-hour I was kind of stumbling. And he just crucified me in this piece he did. It was like, "A letter to Robert Pollard... Do you realize what a fool your making of yourself. You're going to kill yourself and end up like Mama Cass" [laughs]. Whatever. But this was my song for him: Hey, how's my drinking? Dial 1-800-EAT-S---."

Glad Girls

"1, 2, 3, 4, tell the teacher what she wore."

With that sing-song jump-rope rhyme, Robert Pollard kicks off a gleefully drunken rendition of "Glad Girls" during a November 2004 show at the 40 Watt in Athens, Ga., part of Guided by Voices' "Electrifying Conclusion" tour. The song, a ready-made hit if ever there was one, of course wasn't, which was why it was buried 54 songs into a 60 song set at a sweaty club on a farewell tour instead of being sung in front of hordes of screaming fans at an arena show. Their loss.

It's an impossibly catchy song that rocks, has an instantly memorable hook and even includes the always-marketable line "only wanna get you high." And still the masses yawned with disinterest.

Pollard even ensured that the song could have the largest possible audience, writing yet another song about nothing much at all, one that doesn't challenge the listener in any way, one that ultimately appeals to the slacker in all of us. Pollard assures us there will be no coronation, no flowers flowing, no graduation, no trumpets blowing... Essentially, there will be no fanfare, no celebration. He's just a guy that, no matter what you've accomplished, he just wants to get you high. The closest he gets to deep meaning is in the bridge where he urges the listener -- one of the glad girls, one assumes -- to "confess the dreams of good and bad men all around, some are lost and some have found."

Asked in Jim Greer's GBV book to expound upon the song's meaning, Pollard was typically flip:

Greer: "Glad Girls"?
Pollard: "I don't know. They're all right."

Fair Touching

Though Guided by Voices songs by and large aren't terribly complex compositions, neither are they very straightforward. Robert Pollard usually does something with the structure -- be it an odd strum pattern, a herky-jerky beat or an unexpected melody line -- to make even the simplest song inherently interesting.

"Fair Touching" is the rare exception, an incredibly straightforward song built on the kind of strum pattern and drum beat that has launched a thousand and one garage bands. Even Pollard's melody is fairly predictable; not that this makes it bad, but simply that if one were to make up his own lyrics to accompany the backing track, odds are good that the melody would be close to what Pollard offers.

That, of course, is where the simplicity ends. Pollard's lyrics are odd, reading like a capsule review of a children's fairy tale: "Under the iron shop, the farewell ladies wink/Always promising, no one to crush them." The chorus, in which he intones again and again, "The queen's prize awaits, she might rub her legs" always puts me in the mind of some giant bug queen, perhaps an ant or a cricket, rubbing her legs together to create music of its own. The bridge seems like a sly aside from Pollard, a comment, perhaps, to his critics: "Currently fabulous, and perhaps at last the song you sing will have meaning."

The song debuted on the 1999 Fading Captain series six-song EP Ask Them from the side project Lexo and the Leapers. That sounds like an AM radio version compared to the hi-fi reworking the song received two years later on Guided by Voices' second and final stab at the big time, Isolation Drills. It shows up one more time on the two-CD Live From Austin, TX that captures the band's 2004 performance for "Austin City Limits." By that time, the song had become a muscular rocker.