Matthew Cutter
Closer You Are: The Story of Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices
2018, Da Capo Press
The rock star fantasy rests on the myth that none of it is hard work. Maybe a musician’s early starving-artist days provide some strife to talk about, but even that’s often told as a romantic story of young, untethered bohemians who can afford to scrape by on disposable dayjobs and stay up all night in pursuit of their art and/or fortune.
If you can make it to the next level, life becomes a permanent vacation. Go on tour to applause every night. Tell your life story to journalists. Be on magazine covers. The kids all think you’re cool. When you’re feeling exhausted, take a year off. Play golf with The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Take up a drug habit, even. Some of these big rock bands nowadays go three, four, five years or more between their next album of twelve measly songs. Hell, anybody could do that… some regular schmoe like me might think while we punch the time clock, straighten our tie for the office or put on our hardhat.
The refreshing thing about the story of Robert Pollard is that it’s the opposite of all of that. It steps square on the myth’s head.
As I zipped through Matthew Cutter’s righteous Pollard biography, I was struck by how Guided by Voices has always been run like it’s a small business.
Pollard started out investing his own money, earned as a fourth grade schoolteacher, into a run of self-released records that, at the time, went nowhere. For the band, it was all about the art. They were just making records (honing their vision) and living their lives, not shopping themselves around the music industry. They weren’t even playing gigs. This went on for about six years and ended mostly over pressure from family (Pollard, a married man with children, spent the first ten years of Guided by Voices being told that he was wasting his time.)
Then, in one of those little miracles that happens every now and then in life, Pollard began to see a return on his investment when Guided by Voices were discovered, by pure word-of-mouth, shortly AFTER they’d broken up (“We weren’t even trying,” Cutter quotes Pollard in the book. “We quit, and that’s when we made it.”)
After that came further paying of dues–grueling road work, problems with an addict in the band, every pitfall possible that comes with being a group of guys in their 30s on tour with family back home–along with some remarkably shrewd decisions about the band’s direction, courtesy of Pollard, the band’s CEO.
When small labels all over the world approached Pollard about putting out a 7″, he said yes to everybody and made sure they all got something good and exclusive that represented Guided by Voices well.
When bigger labels courted the band with serious offers and the top contenders were independent Matador and corporate behemoth Warner Bros., Pollard chose Matador because they were the most artist-friendly (Warner wanted them to remake their then-unreleased Alien Lanes album in more hi-fi, radio-ready form).
When things weren’t working out in the group and some changes needed to be made, Pollard made the hard decisions.
According to Pollard, the TVT years from 1999 to 2001 were a misstep, but it was nothing that derailed the band and, besides, it was something that he needed to get out his system.
In the end, all of this led Pollard to the place where he is today, running his own label devoted to his own prolific output (five releases a year is about average), calling his own shots, working with a drama-free band of seasoned soldiers, selling to a dedicated cult and building one of the wildest legacies in rock. As of this writing, he has just over one hundred albums out and over two hundred releases overall, counting EPs, singles and several box sets, most of which are composed of exclusive recordings. And he’s got plans for several more.
Pollard is as free as anyone in the music business, finally untethered while also making a comfortable living.
You could criticize this book for being uncritical about the music, I suppose. Matthew Cutter loves Pollard’s music. All of it. The whole mountain of it. I relate. I’m the same way.
Cutter never upturns his nose to any of it, even the very earliest, most trashed-out recordings, pre-Guided by Voices. The Acid Ranch Period (this book might contain the most writing that anyone’s ever done about that phase of Pollard’s). To Cutter, it’s all fascinating. Every last scrap provides insight.
Personally, I’m glad that Cutter isn’t some rock critic jerk-off who hates Earthquake Glue and decides that we need to read several pages about why it sucks. That would have taken me right out of the book.
Because that’s not what’s important here. What matters is the Hero’s Journey, the character arc. How does a regular, middle-class guy from Dayton, Ohio work his way up to being an independent artist and master of his own world?
This book details one path and it’s not quick or easy. It’s a path that means working through years of anonymity. It means building up slowly. It means making mistakes and learning from them. It means having a vision and being confident in it. Sometimes it means a lot of people telling you that you’re wrong.
Pollard may have quit the Dayton Public Schools twenty-five years ago, but in some ways he’s never stopped being a teacher.
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