Guided by Voices
Do the Collapse
1999, TVT Records
Mainstream American rock radio in 1999 was the shittiest thing ever. It was the frat party of your dullest nightmares. There were no “artists”, just warm and breathing piles of tattoos. It was the land of Lit and Smash Mouth and Korn. Bad facial hair was everywhere. Whiny singers. The worst production ever. Nothing sounds like human hands made it. Guitars and drums have such little personality that they come off like they’re on a programmed loop (and they probably were). The singers sound electronically pitch-corrected (and they probably were). And all of this nonsense is turned up WAY too loud and compressed to death.
There were few real songwriters there anymore. Bombast was all they had.
It was bad bad bad, is what I’m trying to say. It was terrible. It was awful.
You’re probably still wondering how bad it was.
It was so bad that when The Strokes debuted two years later, people actually thought that they were GOOD.
How anyone thought that Guided by Voices stood a chance at fitting in among that crowd, I’m not sure, but from Robert Pollard’s perspective, I think he needed to at least TRY.
Do The Collapse was something that he had to get out of his system. Pollard was 41 and I think that he didn’t want to grow old without taking a shot at achieving one of those songs. One of those songs that everyone knows. One of those songs that are just in the air. You know what I’m saying. Enough people were comparing Guided by Voices to The Beatles and The Who. How about taking a stab at really living up to that?
I’m mean, I’m sure that it was flattering at first to hear that his songs should be hits, but I do wonder if that gets annoying after awhile.
When you hear people say that your songs should be hits a thousand fucking times, maybe it quietly shifts from a compliment to a criticism.
People say “Your songs should be hits” and they intend to be nice, but what they’re really saying, under the surface–they don’t even realize it–is “You’re not doing enough, asshole! Where are your hits, ya loser?”.
It’s the kind of thing that might put a guy in a mood.
Next thing you know, he’s in the studio with Ric Ocasek recording “Hold on Hope”, a song that came to him in a dream and that he doesn’t even like, only because Mr. “Shake it Up” thinks it’s gonna be his first hit that’s not just another should be.
Or maybe not. What do I know? I have no experience with that. No one has ever thought that I should be more popular. Everyone agrees that I’ve always been at the exact level of popularity that I deserve.
SO, Do The Collapse.
The first thing you need to know is that it ain’t a sell-out. This shit is legit. Pollard did not study the hits of Barenaked Ladies and Sugar Ray and take notes for his next move. Here, he’s still the same oddball with a head full of Genesis and Wire and The Who. He’s not fashionable. He’s still Robert Pollard and he’s still busy showing us the many ways that prog, psych, pop and punk can work together.
The second thing that you need to know is that it’s full of great songs. Out of sixteen, only two are shameless offerings to the radio gods. Those two would be the new version of “Teenage FBI” and “Hold on Hope”. Most of the rest are logical progressions from Mag Earwhig!. Quirky beauties such as “Things I Wil Keep” and “Dragons Awake!” are among the highlights. “In Stitches” is Pollard’s latest stab at stretched-out, heavy art-rock for the stadiums of 1975. The Jergens lotion-slick “Mushroom Art” may be Pollard’s finest song about the important topic of masturbation. Buried toward the end is “Wrecking Now”, a beautiful sleeper pop melody that sounds like nothing GBV had ever done before. It’s a better stab at the AM Gold thing than “Hold on Hope”. The party closes with a punk rock music business rant called “An Unmarketed Product”.
The third thing you need to know is that, yes, the sound of this album is shiny as hell. Ric Ocasek earned his paycheck. The band sound like a new Porsche. They’re aerodynamic and powerful. No tape hiss or drunken stumbles, no accidental blasts of noise or rough edges. It was a little odd to hear back in ’99, but Pollard had been building up to this.
The fourth thing that you need to know is that this was ALL POLLARD’S IDEA. No record label forced him to make it. Hiring Ric Ocasek was Pollard’s decision. “Hold on Hope” is here because Pollard ceded to Ocasek’s judgement. TVT Records weren’t even in the picture when the album was made. Matador financed the recording–and then Pollard decided that he wanted to shop it around to bigger labels. (GBV would work with Matador again three years later, so it looks like there were no hard feelings.)
Today, he sees the TVT years as a mistake. He doesn’t think that the albums are bad, but the business side of it all put a few more gray hairs on his head. In the 2018 book Closer You Are, biographer Matthew Cutter quotes Pollard saying “I love Matador. I should have stayed there. I fucked up.” In the next chapter, after we read about the long tour and the tension between Pollard and the suits at the label (a howlingly bad remix of “Hold on Hope” for radio lead to friction), Pollard adds about the TVT signing, “I was wrong. But I corrected it within two albums. And I met some really decent, good people at TVT.”
From a fan’s perspective though, TVT were great. They indirectly made the Fading Captain Series happen. When Pollard went looking for a label with wider distribution than Matador, he also demanded the freedom to do whatever he wanted on the side. He put it in the contract that he can put out fifty-seven solo records on his own label if he wants and nobody in New York City can tell him to knock it off.
Matador never cared for that sort of thing, but TVT were cool with it. All they wanted were those radio singles.
This allowed Pollard to expand his business. Every band that’s making money is a business. Many of them are young people who don’t have much of a vision when it comes to that, but Pollard was older and pragmatic and determined to make his music career last and do it without becoming a sell-out embarassment.
His strategy was simple. While he pursued mainstream acceptance, he would also simultaneously build his own label and play to his cult audience–freaks like me–with four or five more albums a year. He was a rare artist who could make that work. If the TVT thing went south, it wasn’t going to break him. If the audience who loved Bee Thousand didn’t like the TVT records, they might still like his solo and side projects.
Do the Collapse was Pollard’s third LP of 1999-and there’s still one more, maybe even the best one–coming up. It was a crazy year, with many more crazy years ahead.
Spoiler alert: No big radio hits ever happened. Nobody made millions off of Do the Collapse. At the end of 1999, Guided by Voices were still a band that only indie music nerds knew about.
But Pollard was on the path to the complete independence that he enjoys today.
As I write this over twenty years after Do the Collapse, Robert Pollard does whatever the hell he wants. He’s got this all figured out. His label is a well-oiled machine run by people who care. He’s got a band who are happy to be there (guitar god Doug Gillard is still around; he and Pollard totally get each other). He’s got a vision that he’s still chasing and that still excites him. He’s still putting out four or five brilliant records a year.
Sounds like victory to me.