Zeppelin Over Dayton

Jeff Gomez

Description

Led by indefatigable singer and songwriter Robert Pollard, Guided By Voices have been one of the most important rock groups of the past thirty years. After toiling for a decade in obscurity, they broke onto the scene in the early 90s by delivering generation- and genre-defining records such as 1994’s Bee Thousand and 1995’s Alien Lanes.

Pollard and a rotating cast of musicians have kept at it ever since, releasing LP after LP of stadium-worthy rock’n’roll. Zeppelin Over Dayton: Guided By Voices Album By Album is the first serious and comprehensive look at the band’s work. Based on the popular GBV podcast Self-Inflicted Aural Nostalgia, Zeppelin Over Dayton takes an in-depth look at each one of the group’s records, looking at who was in the band at the time and how the LP fits into the band’s discography, and providing commentary and analysis of every song.

Drawing on new interviews and extensive research, Zeppelin Over Dayton offers an honest and thorough assessment of GBV’s amazingly sprawling discography, providing ardent admirers with tons of fresh anecdotes and insight, and new fans a way to successfully navigate the group’s dozens of LPs.

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• Musician
• Individual Composer

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 15 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911036609
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

A Jawbone book
First edition 2020
Published in the UK and the USA by
Jawbone Press
Office G1
141–157 Acre Lane
London SW2 5UA
England
www.jawbonepress.com
Volume copyright © 2020 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Jeff Gomez. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

for jasper, my son cool

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
01 DEVIL BETWEEN MY TOES
02 SANDBOX
03 SELF-INFLECTED AERIAL NOSTALGIA
04 SAME PLACE THE FLY GOT SMASHED
05 PROPELLER
06 VAMPIRE ON TITUS
07 BEE THOUSAND
08 ALIEN LANES
09 UNDER THE BUSHES UNDER THE STARS
10 MAG EARWHIG!
11 DO THE COLLAPSE
12 ISOLATION DRILLS
13 UNIVERSAL TRUTHS AND CYCLES
14 EARTHQUAKE GLUE
15 HALF SMILES OF THE DECOMPOSED
16 LET’S GO EAT THE FACTORY
17 CLASS CLOWN SPOTS A UFO
18 THE BEARS FOR LUNCH
19 ENGLISH LITTLE LEAGUE
20 MOTIVATIONAL JUMPSUIT
21 COOL PLANET
22 PLEASE BE HONEST
23 AUGUST BY CAKE
24 HOW DO YOU SPELL HEAVEN
25 SPACE GUN
26 ZEPPELIN OVER CHINA
27 WARP AND WOOF
28 SWEATING THE PLAGUE
AFTERWORD
ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ENDNOTES

‘What I wrote was based on passionate listening, research, and interviewing, and, of course, the kind of speculation that we inevitably apply to anything, or anyone, whom we admire from a distant shore.’
Peter Guralnick , Last Train To Memphis: The Rise Of Elvis Presley

INTRODUCTION
Would you like to know how he came from Ohio?
Guided By Voices are the best band America’s ever produced. In their more than three decades of existence, they’ve rocked harder, been more productive, and exhibited more creativity than any other band in the country. R.E.M.? Talking Heads? Ramones? They’re good, but they’re not Guided By Voices. And yet GBV should never have existed. Singer and main songwriter Robert Pollard should have been an athlete, should have played in the major leagues. He should be known for baseball, not rock’n’roll. That’s where he was headed, and it’s what he’d been groomed for since childhood. And yet, like so many other things in Pollard’s life, things took an unexpected turn.
As a child who came of age in the 1960s (he was born in 1957), Bob grew up during a golden era of pop music. His first big cultural experience was seeing The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show . ‘My entire family watched it,’ Pollard later recalled. ‘It was a huge event for everyone except my dad. He wasn’t so impressed.’
Robert Ellsworth Pollard Sr. wanted his oldest son to play sports and make big bucks. But it was too late. The Beatles, and all the other bands that followed in their wake—The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks—aroused something inside of Bob. And so, even though he continued with sports throughout grade school and after high school—he attended Wright State University on a baseball scholarship—Pollard Jr. never lost his love of music and the desire to do what The Beatles did: write songs, make records, play concerts. And while most famous or successful songwriters start in their teens, having been either child prodigies or—at the very least—precocious youngsters who picked up an instrument early, Bob didn’t start playing guitar until college. But that never got in the way of his imagination.
Throughout his teen years, Pollard invented bands, songs, album titles. He went so far as to create make-believe covers for the make-believe records by his make-believe groups. Bob and his friends even wore homemade T-shirts for their fake bands. He would later breathe life into this fantasy by writing words and music to go along with the song titles of his youth, not to mention actually forming and fronting some of the imaginary groups he’d daydreamed, including Guided By Voices.
But that was all later. Right out of college, Pollard married his high-school sweetheart, bought a house, had two kids. He got a job teaching fourth grade at a nearby school. This meant short days and long vacations, giving him more time to do what he’d finally become serious about: writing songs. After joining a local songwriters’ group, he amazed them by bringing in tune after tune. But while these early years of honing his craft basically boiled down to Bob with an acoustic guitar, his main ambition was to be in a band.
Over the years, he formed various groups with various friends. And while none of them stuck—Anacrusis, The Crowd, Mailbox, The Needmores—the songs kept coming. He wrote them all the time and recorded them whenever he could, using whatever gear or players he had on hand at the time. Crude sketches, song snippets, and sometimes—despite the low fidelity of the recording—pop masterpieces. Many of these early attempts can be heard today on Acid Ranch records, or as part of the Suitcase series.
And yet, even though the dream was slowly becoming real, Pollard never expected much to happen. He was from Ohio, a flyover state. Dayton was a blue-collar town in the middle of nowhere. It was filled with people who worked in factories. Nobody famous came from Ohio except the Wright brothers, and that was more than a hundred years ago. Sports were all people talked about, or aspired to, and Bob was done with all that. Plus, Pollard was from a part of Dayton known as Northridge. It was almost an Appalachian community, filled with hillbillies and rednecks, briars. Elvis may have been born in Tupelo, but he went to high school in Memphis. Memphis was the epicenter of a vibrant cultural and musical scene, and he drove by Sun Records every chance he could get. Dayton wasn’t anything like that. There wasn’t any sort of scene, and bands that played in the town’s few clubs stuck to covering hits.
So, for years, Bob and his buddies recorded songs in their basements. Early experiments at playing in front of crowds only reinforced the idea that Ohio didn’t want, or wasn’t ready for, what Pollard had to offer. He and the band stayed underground, literally, retreating again and again to the sanctuaries beneath their homes. A place where they felt safe, where they could escape wives, kids, responsibilities. Bob nicknamed his basement the Snakepit, and it gave birth to hundreds of songs.
From the very beginning, Guided By Voices were about recording. EPs, LPs, double records. Bob was sitting on a mountain of tunes. This led him and a few of his friends, in 1986, to finally introduce their music to the world. The fruit of their labor was the debut Guided By Voices release, a seven-song EP called Forever Since Breakfast .
Even though the record didn’t get much attention, and Bob only unloaded a handful of copies on family and friends, he and his collaborators were undeterred. An LP soon followed. Nineteen eighty-seven, in fact, saw the release of not one but two Guided By Voices albums. Even though the band had no following and no fans, and their families thought they were wasting their time, Pollard insisted on releasing a pair of records in one year (just like The Beatles). It would be the beginning of a three-decade journey that Bob’s still on.
Even after the band broke in 1994, the albums kept coming. It didn’t matter if he was touring or had to make videos or give interviews. It didn’t matter that fans were still wrapping their brains around the last GBV record. Nothing could stop Bob from making albums. Whether it was as Guided By Voices, a solo artist, or one of a dozen side projects, the records just kept on coming. And now, with over a hundred full-length LPs under his belt, Pollard shows no sign of stopping.
While I love some of GBV’s EPs, compilations, and live records—not to mention music made by other people associated with the band, such as Tobin Sprout—I believe the best way to tell the story of Guided By Voices is through their studio albums. By going through them, one at a time, we see the arc of the band: their rise, fall, and rise again.
Looking at GBV album by album also provides the most complete picture possible of Robert Pollard. Because he’s a guy who makes things. Bob’s constantly producing stuff—creating collages, writing songs, or releasing music. By looking closely at what he makes, we begin to see his fingerprints. Pollard’s defined by what he creates, and the aim of this book is to examine, analyze, and celebrate his most accomplished body of work: the full-length albums of Guided By Voices.
Without a doubt, GBV have released a lot of material. Hundreds and hundreds of songs. Decades of records. More words and melodies than are possible to remember (even for Bob). And while it may seem daunting to approach such a vast catalogue of work, there’s only one way to start such a journey. At the beginning.
01
DEVIL BETWEEN MY TOES
nineteen eighty-seven
Most groups release a debut record to meet a need. It’s part of a process that goes like this: band plays around town, band gets fans, those fans want a recording of the songs the band plays live. That sequence of events is one almost every group follows. Not GBV. Devil Between My Toes was the answer to a question nobody had asked.
Citing indifference from hometown audiences, the band had stopped playing live. And because everyone in the group had jobs and marriages and careers, hitting the road and trying to become known on a national level was out of the question. Besides, Pollard didn’t have a stable lineup. He played guitar, and his childhood friend Mitch Mitchell played bass, but drumming was split between two people: Kevin Fennell, who was married to Pollard’s sister, Lisa (although they would divorce the year this record came out); and Peyton Eric, whose real name is Timothy Payton Earick. Tobin Sprout, whose contributions would prove crucial half a decade later, was around, too, but he was focusing instead on his own band, Fig. 4. So GBV became a studio band. And, even tho