Guided by Voices “Earthquake Glue”
By 1993, I had digested Pavement and Slint and Palace Brothers and had begun to gut my way through the Touch & Go catalogue. That year, I had a very brief moment of peace wherein I figured that I was mostly done with the hard work. With the mystery of Indie Rock behind me, I could go back to shaming my nerdy peers for their lack of fluency in late 70s English Art Punk. I was nineteen and the preening came easily: What sort of post-structuralist are you? How can you really understand Pavement if you don’t know all of Colin Newman’s solo albums? Never listened to The Au Pairs? Well then, how can we even have a conversation?
So, at the time, when somebody told me about this Guided By Voices thing -- this unknown school teacher who might also be Indie Rock’s greatest songwriter -- I assumed it was just a lie. I didn’t want that to be true. It meant more work. More to understand. But then, that friend played me “Vampire on Titus” and I was mostly like: “This is an interesting home demo and it’s impressive that he made so many songs.” But, also, I was like: “Wait...what? Was that a perfect song? Play that again.”
It was unnerving to think that this was really a thirty-something year old man writing all of these songs and recording them with his beer buddies in a basement in Dayton, Ohio. For a few months, I chose to forget it. My too interesting to be dorks but too dorky to be disaffected cool friends did not forget it. At every cafeteria lunch and every night out, there were whispers. “GBV this.” “GBV that.” I pretended to not hear.
So, in 1994, when I heard “Bee Thousand,” I was a combination of astounded and annoyed. I knew this was definitely going to be a thing. I was going to have to listen to it. All of it. And probably like it. And then go back. And be obsessive. And track down the cassettes and the 7”s. The album was such a goddam joy that I almost didn’t mind it. I did the digging. I read the zines reviews. I stared at the collages. I considered the barely-sensical titles. And then, in that digging, I found out that Robert Pollard threw a no hitter for his college baseball team and averaged twenty points a game for his high school basketball team. No. Fucking. Way. I called bullshit. Who did this guy think he was? Paul Bunyan? John Henry? You can’t write ten thousand songs in your basement, make pretty interesting collage art, teach fourth graders and drink a bathtub of beer and do those other things. No way.
So, I circled back to check the facts. “Vampire on Titus” still sounded like a pastiche of interesting ideas from a bored, inspired school teacher who loved The Kinks, The Who & King Crimson. It had the mad professor vibe of a brilliant, reclusive musician experimenting with the chemistry of the form. The apocryphal back story reminded me of Tom Scholz, of Boston, who toiled away working in a lab for Polaroid while he invented guitar amps and honed his perfect debut. Early GBV, though, sounded much less like the Arena Rock perfection of Boston’s debut and more like a much earlier version, cut up with an exacto knife, recorded on a single cassette and soaked in a pint of beer. It sounded like the greatest accidental yard sale find of all time (“Accidental Yard Sale” would make a great GBV title). In spite of its significant cult, though, “Vampire” was really a mixed bag of even smaller mixed bags that contained fridge magnet collage poetry like: “my automated spouse has a bug in her blouse.” The earlier records, including “Propeller,” were similarly curious, though less frequently inspired On the other hand, there were at least two dozen great ideas on those early albums, and none greater than “Gleemer,” from “Vampire,” which fully out-Barlowed Sebadoh.
“Bee Thousand” was much harder to ignore. That was most definitely not an accident. Twenty ideas in all. Most of them actual songs. Thirty six minutes. You could hear the singer. There were some bass lines. The highs were much higher than “Gleemer.” And there may have been ten of them. There was the Beatles-in-Hamburg glee of “Echoes Myron.” There was the slow, wistful grower, “Tractor Rape Chain.” In between and all around there were verses and choruses and shards of noise and quick ideas and quarter baked ideas and fully realized masterpieces.
“Bee Thousand” was the sound of semi-pro joy. It is the sound of brilliant amateurism, where the reward for greatness was simply greatness itself. Robert Pollard was a nearly thirty-seven year old, semi-pro indie rocker when his album broke the indie zine-verse. In 2004, on the occasion of retiring Guided by Voices, he said this to “The Believer”:
I remember, around that time, a friend told me that at a Drag City party someone had said,“Have you heard about this band from Dayton called Guided by Voices? They have this album called Propeller and it’s insanely great,” and I felt it in the pit of my stomach that nothing was going to be the same after that—it was no longer going to be this fantasy world where we were making albums for ourselves, doing interviews with ourselves and photo shoots with ourselves. And, to tell you the truth, it was much more fun when it was like that. I was a fourth-grade teacher at the time, surrounded by tenor eleven-year-olds for eight hours a day, and when you spend that much time with kids that age, you start to develop a similar mentality, and it’s an immature mentality, but there’s also a certain wisdom in it. And then I would go home and hang out and drink with my friends and some of them, you know, their maturity level wasn’t much higher than the fourth-graders’. And neither was mine, in truth. I mean, when we got down into the basement, late at night, we’d basically just turn up all the amplifiers and we’d make up things, and we’d get inebriated to the point where we were totally uninhibited, and we were making this music knowing that nobody would ever hear it. Which is maybe the best way to do it. And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to recapture that sense of innocence.
“Bee Thousand” reminded me of Joe Bauman, the great minor league baseball footnote, who in 1954 hit .400 with 72 home runs for a class C team in Rosewell, New Mexico while also running the most successful gas station in town. “Bee Thousand” was Joe Bauman’s 1954 -- the greatness and joy of willful amateurism. Robert Pollard was approaching forty when he broke through -- an age I could not fathom at the time. He was closer to my parents age than to mine. If he were a ballplayer, it would have been the end of his career. But, for Pollard, it was barely the beginning.
The very next year, the semi-pro went pro. Matador Records smartly signed him and Pollard wasn’t going back to teaching school. He was going to make a living as an artist. He’d put out a couple albums a year. He’d fill clubs with ringing guitars, his flying mop of curly hair and floors filled with sweaty drunk college boys and broken beer bottles. GBV’s Matador debut, “Alien Lanes,” was plenty great. Twenty eight songs. “Watch Me Jumpstart” and “Motor Away” were undeniable. But it wasn’t the same as “Bee Thousand” for me. The shock of the new was gone. The beautiful mistakes sounded more like gimmicks. It had more of the pretense of “lo-fi” but less of the joy of amateurism. And, candidly, there was a lot to wade through. There was a lot of waiting for something to happen. For the experiment to finish and for Pollard to arrive with his great invention. Sometimes, it didn’t come. Sometimes experiments fail. The hypotheses are inconclusive.
Around that time, I saw GBV play in front of the eighty of us desperate, elitist, indie searchers in Providence, Rhode Island. That guy and that band sounded fucking great. He was faux British and full Midwestern. Repeatedly, he kicked his leg straight up to the like something only a “Ken doll” or Jean-Claude Van Damme could do. He swung the mic like a Harlem Globetrotter. And he seemed to consume a case of beer in the first hour alone. Somehow, he could sing but not really speak. And I loved it. And I hated beer. And my ears were ringing for days. And I decided after that show that I was done. It wasn’t going to get better. It would only get drunker and schtick-ier and older. I retired somewhere between Triple A and rookie season GBV.
Since “Alien Lanes” in 1996, I have not intentionally listened to any GBV music. I heard some songs on TV. I heard “Glad Girls.” Our local radio station in Austin sometimes plays them. But I’ve not bought a new album or pressed play on a single song of theirs on Spotify. I have no doubt that Robert Pollard has made plenty of great music since 1995. It’s been a quarter of a century. However, for me, GBV is the Pollard brothers, Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell and Kevin Fennell. They’re approaching middle age. But they are brand new. And they are frozen in ember.
I kept tabs. I more than secretly admired them. But I tapped out. While Pollard and his band were making one point five albums per year, plus side projects and solo albums and playing three hour black out, fever dreams, I was finishing college and starting to adult. I had video games to play. I had a nine to five. I had big ideas of my own. I had all the of the Flying Nun discography to get through. How could I possibly keep up with Bob Pollard. Easier to just let it go. Plus, by 1997, my lo-fi jones was resolved by Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel and the Elephant 6 guys. Those guys may have been weird and stoned on mushrooms and making concept albums but at least they didn’t claim they could throw a baseball 90 miles an hour. Oddly, they felt within the bounds of reason. Guided by Voices, not so much.
Within a decade, many albums later, GBV was running too hot. Too many albums. Too many drinks. Too many leg kicks. Too many days on the road. Too many expectations. And so, in 2004, Robert Pollard said farewell to “Guided by Voices.” Tobin Sprout had a baby. Kevin Fennell got drunk and then got sober. Pollard knew it was coming. I wasn’t even paying attention and I knew it was coming. Robert Pollard was not Mark E. Smith of The Fall. He couldn’t decompose forever. And he wasn’t Paul Bunyan or John Henry. He was in his mid-forties and he sensed that in order to go forward he would have to go back to something simpler. Something semi-pro.
Last year, “Alien Lanes” turned twenty-five. In the early days of the pandemic, there was a smattering of think pieces considering the album and its influence. Today, I am roughly the same age that Robert Pollard was when he first ended Guided by Voices. And I’m exactly the age he was when he released “Earthquake Glue,” considered by some to be the best of the end of the first wave. Unlike Pollard I have exactly zero musical talent. I’ll never make a record. But I get it. Probably like many people in middle age, I’ve often thought about losing myself -- the amateur self -- to a job, to a company, to a role. And then, never getting it back. Always being the last version of what you became. Never being semi-pro again. I mean, can you really go back?
Well, I decided to try. And I decided to not start with “Propeller” or “Vampire on Titus” or “Bee Thousand.” I decided to unfreeze the ember at “Earthquake Glue,” the second to last GBV album before their first long hiatus. The one Pollard made when he was forty-six. The one that loyalists point to as a last, great flicker before the flame went out. I figured if I could glean insight into my own avoidance, it might be there.
“Earthquake Glue” finds GBV back with Matador after a failed cup of coffee with Capitol Records that then led the band to wanna-be major, TVT Records, for a couple of albums. Back on the stalwart indie with their own producer and a relatively steady lineup, “Earthquake Glue” sounds much more like a confident farewell than its successor, “Half Smiles of the Decomposed.” By GBV standards, it is assured and tuneful, but also a bit tired and safe. It has the sound of a mad scientist going back into the lab, fatigued from the failure of recent experiments. At their best, GBV’s music often succeeded on the basis of small, glorious breakthroughs rather than through transcendent invention. The albums were great when the velocity and volume of those breakthroughs were sufficient to mask the mistakes and bored waiting. Pollard is famously devoted to trial and error. In the past, those mistakes could lead to beautiful mutations. As the band tired, however, the charm and honesty of those flaws could feel like distraction from the fact that a better idea had not come.
With “just” fifteen tracks across forty five minutes, “Earthquake Glue” contains fewer experiments than a typical GBV album but more distractions per song. The pace of the record is a bit middling. It’s the sound of a scientist who has earned some patience and is confident in his capacity to discover. So, the album stays mostly under fifth gear, waiting to open highway, or sunrise, or sunset or something. There is plenty of Power Pop, some English Folk and some Proggy flourishes. But there is nothing breathless. In fact, it sounds a good deal like the work of a smart, slightly worn out, high school chemistry teacher.
Specifically, Pollard seems to be testing the hypothesis that choruses are unnecessary vestigial organs. Aside from a couple of tracks that were serviceable as college radio singles, the songs on “Earthquake Glue” are collages built from longer verses, paired with ornate Folk transitions and bursts of sound cut with X-acto knives. The parts are generally given more room to breathe. The songs are given more space to prove themselves (or not). To note, there is only one song on “Earthquake Glue” that is under two minutes (and that one is one minute and fifty seven seconds). Two songs on the album approach five minutes. Pollard, the inventor, sounds like he is sitting down and considering his ideas for just a tick longer, before striking a match to the Bunsen Burner.
The results of these experiments trend positive but the breakthrough inventions prove elusive. There’s no “Gleemer.” No “Echos Myron.” No “Glad Girls.” The results are more workmanlike. In his early work, that range could be fast and sharp. The changes of weather could cause whiplash. Instead, on “Earthquake Glue,” we get something that’s more like a hazy memory of a rain storm that gets heavy, gets misty and promises rainbows that never actually appear. Robert Pollard said that emotional range is critical for his songs. There is certainly variance here, but it’s more muted.
The album begins with “My Kind of Soldier,” a track recorded with Steve Albini that was not even supposed to be on the album. At the eleventh hour, Pollard inserted it in the only spot that it could technically fit without disrupting production. As an opener it is a delightful misdirection. The guitars are fuzzy and jangly. Pollard’s voice is mixed center. There’s a chiming guitar lead and an actual chorus. It’s blissed out, part 80s Britpop and part Xanax. It’s 90 seconds of joy and then a minute of ringing guitar outro. For the balance of the album, we Pollard gets quieter, louder, heavier and prettier. But he does not get clearer than this.
Throughout “Earthquake Glue,” there is a dystopian vibe that is cut and pasted here and there. It’s mostly ideas and images more than grand gestures. That’s how Pollard works. But taken as a forty five minute collage, there’s plenty of military surplus, technophobia, tired Nationalism and subtle hints. "My Son, My Secretary, My Country" and “I’ll Replace You With Machines,” get heavier and darker tonally than the opener. And the latter includes an unpleasant waterlogged metronome that also crops up later in the album. But both point to some unnamed American dread.
To my ears, Pollard thrives when he stays close to the form he has most mastered -- Power Pop. Occasionally, he can excel in balladry but I’ve never been a fan of his songs when they get to Folky or Proggy. Those flourishes work as decor, but much less so as the primary form. To this end, the band nearly succeeds on “She Goes Off at Night,” which contains a big Power Pop hook that opens up to a more crystalline idea and then quickly returns back to Power Pop. With just two verses, it gives us enough to excite but nothing more. Following “She Goes Off” is “Beat Your Wings,” a hesitant, English Folk Rock song wherein the verses stop suddenly and the time signatures change frequently. At nearly five minutes long, it is an epic GBV track. It is not a set of patchwork ideas, it is an ambitious song. And it is a probably a good song. But it is not a great song. Pollard once said that his best songs were written in under ten minutes but that this one took eleven.
“Useless Inventions” and “The Best of Jill Hives” fill out the middle admirably. The latter is a slightly dressed up single built around the sad nostalgia of its misheard title lyric (“the best of our lives”). It’s short and bittersweet. The former is more of a nervy jangle-pop song, like REM with less humanity and more science. Taken together, they make up two thirds of the most realized stretch of the album. Sandwiched in between is “Dirty Water,” in which Pollard does his best Mark E. Smith and Syd Barrett imitations in the same song. With its unusually prominent bass line and simple hook, it’s not half bad. But it’s probably not half good, either.
“Earthquake Glue’s” second half is more restless than its first. “Mix Up the Satellite” is a dreamy, almost New Wave experiment that never rests but briefly sits somewhere between OMD and 80s King Crimson. “The Main Street Wizards” is a very slight variation on “Tractor Rate Change,” which makes it familiar and wistful. Like the original text, it takes its time getting there but grows on you along the way. And, as if he hadn’t already referenced every possible influence, Pollard conjures four track Sebadoh on “Trophy Mule In Particular.” Like Lou Barlow’s music, the form of “Trophy Mule” and the process that it exposes wind up being more interesting than its actual function.
The album closes with a trio of songs hunting for The Beatles. “Secret Star,” “Apology In Advance” and “Of Mites and Men” accelerate the pace of experimentation. In fact, there are moments that sound extracted directly from the pavement of “Abbey Road.” The guitar sounds briefly like “Polythene Pam” and Pollard sounds a lot like thirty-something John Lennon. Each of these tracks has brief moments as delirious and joyful as “Abbey Road,” but they of course have almost none of the melody or song. “Of Mites and Men” closes the album with some fury and a briefly catchy hook. Ever the tinkerer, Pollard breaks it down, skips a bridge and chorus and tries to build it back up into something in the song’s second half. When he fails, we get a startling guitar freak out. It is by no means the best song on the album, but it contains several of its best moments, including a closing that sounds like the laboratory is on fire.
Roughly one year later, Pollard would make it official. He threw the beakers away. He shredded the periodic table. He shuttered the lab. Eventually, he’d open a new one down the block under his own name. He would still don the lab coat every day. But the Guided by Voices experiment was done. At least for a while. He was going semi-pro, again.
In my limited research, critics seemed generally taken by “Earthquake Glue.” However, having skipped most everything from “Under the Bushes Under the Stars” through “Universal Truths and Cycles,” I can only compare it to the band’s very early output. And through that filter, I hear a record that bears the same marks of genius as those original triumphs, but with more weight on it. Even in 2004, however, Robert Pollard looked like a former athlete. But he looked like a tired former athlete. A few extra beer pounds. Lines of wear around his eyes. Mostly grey hair. Maybe a little sadder? Or, at least more serious. He looked very much like a middle-aged man who needed a break to rediscover the pleasure of lower stakes. Of mono-tasking. Or clearing your schedule. Of doing things because he chose to and not because he had to.
In that way, retiring Guided by Voices was the logical next experiment for Pollard. In his lab, for nearly two decades, he had proven that he could almost do it all. He had a million ideas. He could write a million moments. He could write a great song. Maybe fifty of them. Maybe more. He could teach elementary school. He could throw a no hitter. He could drink an ocean of beer. He could kick his leg two feet over his goddamn head. But, he’d finally learned the thing he probably knew, but feared, back in the beginning. He couldn’t do it all at once. At least not professionally.