Guided By Voices
Doug Gillard
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(Editor's note: This interview originally appeared in Sponic magazine.)
Have Guided By Voices lost your confidence? Are you an ex-devotee scared off by their cracks at the mainstream? Did you stop caring when Robert Pollard's Fading Captain Series released its 800th CD last year?
We can all empathize. Guided By Voices' massive catalog breeds both intimidation and apathy. For diehard types, those mid-periods between full-lengths seem like endless caverns of inactivity, or worse, noisy declines into side-project hell. Alarmed, we sense a great potential is being squandered. We feel a void is not being filled. We witness declining enthusiasm. We want our fix of frighteningly catchy pop-rock and we want it NOW.
Dear reader, your fears are unfounded. Dayton, Ohio's favorite sons have released their 15th album (excluding several EPs, live albums, comps appearances and rarities discs), and just as you hoped, it's a fucking gem. All is right with the world again. Hang up the phone and stop screaming about the apocalypse. Open a Miller Lite, crank your speakers and lift your skinny fists like antennas to heaven. Earthquake Glue is here.
I know you're full of questions. Is this an instant classic like Bee Thousand? No... I'm afraid that's not possible. Even if GBV tried to duplicate the now-institutional, lo-fi brilliance of that album, it would still sound significantly different (see Alien Lanes, Tonics & Twisted Chasers). But is it self-produced, at least? Oblivious to current neo-garage trends? Brimming with the same idiosyncratic songwriting that propelled the band into the spotlight in the mid-'90s? Yes, yes, and yes. And I'll be damned if they're not hitting a new DIY stride, almost 20 years into their career.
Guided By Voices' new album finds the right balance between high-gloss production and casual brilliance. A typically ambitious, noisy pastiche of all that's right with rock 'n roll, Earthquake Glue is more ragged than the band’s radio-ready TVT Records offerings, but more unified than the stylistic jumble of last year's Universal Truths and Cycles.
Robert Pollard, the Ever-Prolific One, has judiciously weeded out the clunkers and presented us only with his most fully-formed winners. Never mind that some of them are jarringly experimental compared to his recent output ("Dead Cloud," "Dirty Water.") The weirdly refreshing "Mix Up the Satellite," for example, requires a few listens to register, a twinkling brew of early Genesis, The Who and mid-period R.E.M., all soaring vocals and unexpected chord changes.
Earthquake Glue’s closest spiritual cousin is GBV’s 1989 album Self-Inflicted Ariel Nostalgia, which lucidly worked out Pollard's Genesis and R.E.M. fixations amid nervous mid-fi guitars and thin drumming. Earthquake Glue isn't as ‘70s-inflected as Nostalgia, though it does continue GBV's recent trend towards Who-influenced prog. Big riffs, Keith Moon-ish drum rolls, lots of keyboards (for GBV anyway) and angular chord changes outweigh shamelessly catchy melodies and lyrical whimsy. And for once, that's not a bad thing.
The band itself -- regarded in the '90s as an interchangeable backup to Pollard's songwriting talent -- is a powerhouse rock quartet, as tight and propulsive on record as they are in concert. And unlike some of GBV's past songs, each of Earthquake Glue's 15 tracks beg for the live treatment. The double guitar assault of Doug Gillard and Nate Farley, the ass-ripping thunder of ex-Dambuilder Kevin March's drum beats, the rubbery punch of Todd Tobias' nimble basslines -- none are dulled by the sonic limitations of the compact disc format. The band is as integral to GBV this time around as Pollard's voice.
Still, the fickle hipsters of the world feel GBV has something to prove. GBV are not the critic's darlings they once were. The novelty of their methods is now industry standard. The backlash against lo-fi is entering its third year. But really, the Bee Thousand-era accolades and lightning-quick blowjobs were all for shit anyway. Where's the It Band Of Today going to be in 10 years, except holed up in rehab, or staring back at us from the sun-faded covers of your musty, garaged NME stacks? It was the self-important indie press that made GBV a pseudo-household name, and it's the press that sought to dismantle them when it felt betrayed by the band's professional aspirations.
Doug Gillard, GBV's guitarist of six years, has been a lightning rod for this sort of criticism. He's currently the longest continuous member of the band's notoriously fluid roster. He joined GBV just after lead singer/songwriter Pollard fired the "classic" lineup (Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell, Kevin Fennell, Greg Demos, etc.) As a result, fans that prefer GBV's lo-fi years (approx. 1992-1996) blame Gillard's influence for nudging GBV toward longer, more instrumentally complex songs, or for introducing guitar solos and an element of musicianship to a group that was always about having a good time. What they usually fail to realize is that from 1986 to 1991, Pollard was doing the exact same thing, albeit under the hipster radar and bathed in '80s influences: Writing prog-addled songs and recording them in professional and semi-professional studios with an eye towards mainstream recognition.
In concert, Gillard is a skinny, stoic-faced rock vet in tight black jeans, his piercing eyes and pursed lips subtly mimicking his guitar licks. A former member of seminal Cleveland bands Children's Crusade, Cobra Verde, and Death of Samantha, Gillard's low-profile betrays his influence and experience. Gem, Gillard's "other" band (with former GBV bassist Todd Tobias), released a couple full-lengths and numerous singles, and have tentative plans to release a B-sides compilation. Last year alone Gillard lent his guitar talents to Yuji Oniki, Viva Caramel, Bedroom Legends and the upcoming solo album by former Superdrag member Mike Harrison, while still touring and recording with Guided By Voices.
Gillard's non-GBV work with Bob Pollard (the mind-blowingly good Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department, this year's Lifeguards LP, on which he wrote all the music) consists of long-distance collaborations where Gillard plays all the instruments and Pollard just adds vocals. The caveat: It's all done on a 4-track, bounced and layered old-school style. Like any experiment, the results vary, but to Gillard's credit the instrumental beds are always rock solid, proving that not only is he a guitar virtuoso but an able drummer, keyboardist and engineer.
I called Gillard between tour dates at his Cleveland home to chat about Earthquake Glue, his influence on GBV's sound and the mysteries of the ceramic turtle.
NATN: Earthquake Glue seems more consistent than Universal Truths and Cycles. Were all the songs recorded around the same time?
Doug Gillard: Yeah, except for "My Kind of Soldier," they were all recorded at the same time in the same studio. For Universal Truths... they were recorded a couple months apart at different studios.
NATN: Do you think recording everything at once gave Earthquake Glue its unified feel?
DG: With every album we'll get a CD or tape with lots more of Bob (Pollard)'s home demos on them than he chooses to record with the band. He'll tear those down. When he finally decides on the songs he wants, we rehearse and record them when we're ready. Bob puts a lot of thought into compiling the songs that comprise an album.
NATN: Are there any songs GBV recorded that didn't make the cut?
DG:Really just one: "Broken Brothers" (The B-side for the "My Kind of Solider" 7-inch single).
NATN: I also read that the band experimented on Earthquake Glue by recording in different rooms to get unique sounds.
DG: The only thing that really comes to mind was that we changed the drum rooms a lot. We put Kevin March in this really small isolation booth with his drums, and you get a really nice, immediate, punchy sound rather than in the bigger room. Tim Tobias's brother Todd has been setting up the mics for the last two records, so he finds interesting ways to record.
NATN: What does Todd Tobias bring to GBV's sound that other producers didn't or couldn't?
DG: The biggest things I notice are Todd's ambient keyboard ideas. He makes his own samples. He strives to use sounds that haven't been heard before, or sounds that he's created, rather than pre-sets on a keyboard. He has a way of making parts that stay out of the way of the vocals and everything that's going on.
NATN: How did he create the scraping, watery effect on "I'll Replace You With Machines"?
DG:I'm not sure what that is, but he had a cassette tape full of samples. We also threw one of those onto the end of "Pivotal Film" on Isolation Drills. He said they were slowed-down crickets, and then of course he put reverb on them. It's probably him dragging something across the cement, and then slowed down.
NATN: It's got this wet-plank scraping sound...
DG: His first idea was to have it in there somewhere, but Bob liked the noise so much he demanded it be put at the forefront. He ultra-compressed it to give the song a different mix, something that sounded weird.
NATN: It reminds me of Vampire on Titus-era recordings where Bob would fuck with songs for the added texture.
DG: But you can still tell it's a high-fidelity recording. I think it came out cool.
NATN:Did you use the same guitars on Earthquake Glue as on recent albums?
DG: Yeah, pretty much the same for the last two. There's a friend of ours in Dayton - Tom - that would let us use his nice Vox AC30 amp. We used that for some of the clean sounds. Nate and I pretty much stayed with our rigs that we use live. But we would change it up and use something else. Sometimes there'd be like a Fender Twin that we'd use, different combinations of that. Bob used different guitars for his parts, different amps.
NATN:You once said that the cool thing about the TVT-era recordings was that you got to use whatever (producers) Ric Ocasek or Rob Schnapf had sitting around.
DG: Rob flew in a lot of his own guitars. He also had a big Rubbermaid tub full of stomp boxes that he had flown over. Ric Ocasek had his whole guitar arsenal. We had a lot to pick from. We always have a variety, usually. One of our good friends, Tony Connelly from Dayton, has a Les Paul that's hollowed out inside that a friend custom-made for him. I used that on a couple songs. For the last two records it's pretty much been the same stable of equipment.
NATN: When you recorded "My Kind of Solider" at Electrical Audio in Chicago had you just dropped in because you were in the area?
DG: We were on our way to join the Cheap Trick tour. We played four dates with them and Bob had just come up with the song a few days earlier. We were trying to see if we could record it in Ohio before we left. Since Chicago was on the way, we set it up two or three days ahead of time to record at Albini's. Steve had a session downstairs that day, so we recorded in Studio B with Greg Norman, his assistant. We learned it right there that day. We kind of stopped in, learned it, I saw what the rest of the band was doing, developed my part and played it all at the same time. It's one way to do it.
NATN: The Lifeguards LP Mist King Urth is different than your previous collaboration with Bob (Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department) in that you not only played all the instruments and recorded it on a four-track, but wrote the music too.
DG: It was designed to be a different project. It was on Bob's request to give him some music and he wanted it to have a little heavier-bent, less poppy. So I came up with a batch of music and sent it to him. He did the vocals in Dayton at Cro-Mag and I did the music here at home.
NATN: It's almost more of a showcase for your talents than Bob's. There are three instrumentals out of 11 songs.
DG: They weren't intended to be instrumentals. I gave Bob the batch of songs and he told me which ones he was going to do. Then after he recorded it he told me that he left three of them as instrumentals. I was like, "that's cool."
NATN: You play some really crazy '70s-sounding prog stuff on "First of an Early Go Getter."
DG: Yeah, the end of it has a reverb-y thing, sort of Bill Nelson type thing, like a Bebop Delux-type sound.
NATN: Do you have a favorite Lifeguards song?
DG: I've always liked "Society Dome." I like "No Chain Breaking" probably the best. I thought everything came out pretty cool. "Feather Heard," which is the drum song... I kind of thought Bob would come up with a chant to go over that, or maybe some kind of Gary Glitter thing. He just liked the way the drums came in, and the ceramic turtle that I blew through, that's in there. He just kind of let that be by itself. "Red Whips and Miracles" came out cool too.
NATN: What's that dry flute sound on "Society Dome"?
DG: That's the ceramic turtle. It's this little turtle about the size of your fist with four holes in the top.
NATN: And you thought it just fit with the song?
DG: I pitched the tape machine down to try to get the tone. It's breath-sensitive; the more breath you put into it the sharper it goes. You have to train yourself to keep a steady breath through it or else the note will quiver. And then I doubled it or something like that...
NATN: Did you record the Lifeguards songs in your attic, as you did with Speak Kindly...?
DG: No, I've moved since Speak Kindly... so this was just a couple different rooms in my house.
NATN:With those kind of projects, do you wait for Bob to let you know he's interested in doing something? Do you ever bring an idea to him?
DG: This time I waited for him to let me know he wanted to do something else. When he said so, I just came up with some tunes. I mean, I'd had a couple already, but most of them I came up with after he requested.
NATN: What's it like working within those relatively tight constraints?
DG: It makes me get stuff done that way. Deadlines always make me more productive.
NATN: Are there any Gem or solo releases on the horizon?
DG: There are a lot of Gem songs that were never released. I'd like to eventually release an odds 'n ends collection. Not that there's demand for that; we've only had two records and they've both been way under the radar. But I'd still like to get them out somehow. I'm recording some stuff right now in my studio here.
NATN:Anything like the Malamute Jute EP?
DG: I guess it's sort of along those lines. It's mostly pop stuff.
NATN: Any plans to collaborate with anyone else in the future? I know you played on some records in Cleveland and San Francisco last year. And Mike Harrison (from Superdrag)'s solo album.
DG: I don't know when that's going to come out. I played on three or four songs and helped him with a couple backing vocals. John Davis from Superdrag plays a few things on it too. I like his music as a whole. It's just kind of diverse. There's a couple country-bent things and Americana-type things. There's melodic indie rock. It's good stuff. I don't know if he has a deal for it or what.
NATN: Would you be interested in doing another movie soundtrack?
DG: For sure. In fact, the guys that did that last film -- it wasn't a feature-length film, it was just a 15 minute short comedy -- they wrote another one that's only 11 or 10 minutes. So I did a beginning and ending thing for that. They just filmed it this month. It'll probably play at a festival next year. They'd like to get funding for a full-length. They have several ideas under their belt, some really good screenplays.
NATN: So I've gotta ask you this question. The last time I saw Guided By Voices play Denver was at the Westword music festival. This hairy, overweight guy that Bob introduced as "The White Buffalo" took a nasty stage dive head-first onto the concrete five feet below. Is that guy okay?
DG: (Laughs) He's fine. Buffalo's a friend of Bob's from Dayton. He drives a truck, so he'll pop up in any city in the country. Sometimes we never know when we're going to see him. Sometimes he'll call ahead and tell someone to put him on the list, because he knows he's going to be in a certain city. I think he's from Florida but we see him all over the place... L.A., New York, everywhere. That night in Denver he was kind of hammered before the show. He was hanging out with us before the show, and then he got on stage and was playing air guitar. He saw Nate Farley's spare guitar sitting there and picked it up. I saw him behind me just holding it and I looked back and said "Put on the strap!" I could just see that thing dropping, right? He puts the strap on and it was criss-crossed in front of his neck, which was kind of funny. I wasn't even looking when it happened, I must have been looking at my frets or something.
All of sudden Bob stops the song and says, "Hey, we got a man down!" I'm like, what happened? And I see Buffalo laying between the pit and the stage. The guitar's on him and he's just kind of laying there with his eyes open. Bob says over the mic, "We just lost our lead guitar player." So the paramedics came and the crowd was trying to help him up. They took him away. The paramedics were asking a friend of ours what he had to drink, was he on anything? etc. And we said no. They said to one of our friends on the side of the stage, "Well, I'll tell you one thing, you're going to have to find someone else to play guitar with you, cause I think he's done for the night."
NATN: Does he typically get that trashed at Guided By Voices shows?
DG: No, not quite that much. It was funny. We were just hoping that he was okay. We stopped at the hospital afterwards to try and get him out. They wouldn't let him go because he was still hammered. He's a great guy and he actually is okay now. They let him go the next day.
NATN: When this article comes out you guys will be playing in Europe. Do you think there are differences among GBV audiences around the world?
DG: The American crowds tend to get more nuts, just because they know the drill and people have been to previous shows. In Europe we get a lot of people that haven't been to one of our shows before. It depends on where we are. They have their own different rituals for us over there. I don't even know what I meant by that, but the reaction's a little different. But still enthusiastic. In Europe they wait until we go on to see if they'll like the show. They're very attentive and mostly they watch the whole show and try to take it all in. They listen.
NATN: The reviews of Earthquake Glue are overall pretty positive. Do you read the reviews?
DG: Sometimes. I wouldn't say a lot of them. You can't keep up with it all. You don't want to either, really. If you let a bad review effect you, you really shouldn't be playing.
NATN: Do you try to avoid being tainted by them?
DG: If something's really negative we'll read it to each other in the van and just laugh. Like, maybe they said something funny. We largely don't care at all.
NATN: There was a hipster backlash in the late '90s against Guided by Verde, and also when you made the jump to TVT Records. People cited your influence for the change in GBV's sound.
DG: Yeah, there did start to be guitar solos because I joined. But other than that fact, Bob was just growing differently as a writer anyway. The two coincided. He started writing longer and more complex songs. He did leave space for leads if it called for it in the song. But that's just the way he evolved and grew as a writer. The same people that moan and groan about the newer stuff, and say they only like Propeller or Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes, are still showing up at the concerts. I guess to hear the old stuff. I'm not sure. There's a lot of hypocritical behavior there.
NATN: I seem to remember that Bob was an admirer of yours even before GBV and Cobra Verde met on Scat's Insects of Rock tour.
DG: He liked what I did in Death of Samantha. I didn't even know he knew about the band when we were around. He was quietly collecting records there in Dayton and listening to a lot of indie stuff while he had Guided By Voices going on. He's told me there's a couple things that ended up on records like Same Place the Fly Got Smashed and Sandbox... he'd put a guitar part in because it was inspired by something I did in Death of Samantha. The fact that he did that Phantom Tollbooth record was because he bought that album when it came out on Homestead in the '80s. He was collecting a lot of things.
NATN: Your first GBV appearance was on the song "Mice Feel Nice" on the Tigerbomb EP, which came out really only a year or so after the rest of the world had heard about the band.
DG: I guess you're right. I think it was either Cobra Verde or Gem, both bands had opened up for Guided By Voices around '94. I had given Bob a tape of some instrumentals and one was "Mice Feel Nice," the regular version and the slowed-down version. He used the slowed down version. I'd given him a tape of that and a tape of Gem stuff, which included "I Am a Tree." When the Gem record came out "I Am a Tree" wasn't on it, so that's why he decided to use it on Mag Earwhig!
NATN: Didn't you eventually release your version of "I Am a Tree" as a single with a Cleveland magazine?
DG: Yeah, actually that was on one of the CLE magazine releases. It's no longer in print. Scat also released the Gem version as a 12-inch. We originally recorded that in '93, but I think I wrote it around '91 or '92, so it ain't a new song.
NATN: Now for the standard Sponic question: do you have a favorite mixed drink?
DG: I hardly ever have mixed drinks, but if I do I have a Manhattan, and I don't really know why. They taste great. They're strong and robust. Otherwise I like scotch.
JOHN WENZEL | John is a Denver-based writer and former editor of Sponic magazine. John currently works for The Denver Post and Rockpile and has contributed to such noble but non-paying enterprises as Shredding Paper, Aversion.com, and Erasing Clouds. He's obsessed with the Dayton, Ohio '90s music scene but likes to think he's keen on some of the new bands the kids are listening to these days. John also helps run the Friendly Psychics Music recording collective. Email.