Guided by Choices
Post-punk hero and former Guided By Voices frontman Robert Pollard practically invented modern do-it-yourself music making. In October, the Dayton native simultaneously released Coast to Coast Carpet of Love and Standard Gargoyle Decisions (Merge Records). We talked to him on the second leg of his two-city tour. • KATHY Y. WILSON
You have a lot of fans in this part of the country. That’s good. It’s nice to be appreciated where you live.
It is. Your management says you’re only playing two shows—one in Chicago and one at Southgate House? Those are my two favorite clubs—Metro and The Southgate House. I wanted to keep it local. Chicago, Cincinnati, they’re both centrally located, which makes it pretty easy for fans from all over the world to come to both of them.
You expect fans to come from places like Canada and California? Oh yeah. That’s what’s enabled me to keep doing what I’m doing. I’ve got this hard-core following. It’s not real big, it’s not real large. But it’s hard-core, which is good.
I have a great black-and-white photograph of you framed in my art gallery at home and it’s from a Guided By Voices show at Southgate House in 2001 and it’s of a fan flipping you the middle finger from the crowd, and you’re leaning forward with a cigarette on your lip and you’re giving him the finger back. I’m flipping him back? Wow. Isn’t that a lovely interaction?
I said, ‘Man, that guy right there is a motherf*cker.’ [both laughing] You elicit that kind of response and then you give that kind of response. Yeah, I bring it on myself. It shows it’s a free-for-all. I tolerate a lot. They throw beer on me or whatever. As long as they don’t hit me with some kind of a physical object. I would appreciate them not doing that, ’cause we’ll retaliate.
You’re a grandfather now, right? Being a grandfather, has it had any bearing on being your everyday Robert Pollard self? Nah. More so than being a grandfather, approaching 50 has made me kind of step back and say, you know, I need to turn a corner and be a little bit more...I don’t know if “responsible” is the word, but a little bit more conscious of being 50 years old. Musically, I will always be a little boy. I’ll always write rock and roll music. I don’t see why you need to change that. I don’t see why Paul McCartney needed to change that or the Rolling Stones. I hate to slam Paul McCartney and I hate to slam Pete Townshend, but they haven’t done anything in 30 years. That’s what I liked about Johnny Cash. He made his best album before he died.
You probably hate when people tell you what your music sounds like to them, but
Coast to Coast Carpet of Love sounds really like mid-’80s British pop to me, like Echo and the Bunnymen, like Nik Kershaw. Thank you. I like that kind of stuff, early ’80s. One of my favorite eras of music was post-punk. I didn’t really like punk because I was always kind of a prog-rock, metal-head guy. That late ’70s, early ’80s era is really one of my favorite times in music and Coast to Coast certainly has that kind of feel to it.
What do you say to fans who bug you for a Guided By Voices reunion? Not to take anything from the people who were in Guided By Voices, ’cause if you were in Guided By Voices it was like a club, an elite club. But if I wanted to call my next album Guided By Voices it would be that. I basically am Guided By Voices, at the risk of sounding egotistical. I see no reason for a Guided By Voices reunion. It hasn’t left. It’s just my name.
FYI Admission: $10. The Southgate House, 24 E. Third St., Newport, (859) 431-2201.
Playing 12.1.07