When you were a child, helplessness made a little demiurge out of you. The big world inflicted a parade of indignities: you were picked up, kissed, prodded, scolded. Children deal with this sorry state by creating an imaginary miniature world where they, too, can impose their will. Here’s a magic circle: inside it, you can make mute things talk, bring brute matter to life, force your toys to watch you perform. Young adulthood is supposed to dissolve the magic circle and redirect those powers of creation out into the big world.
Rock and roll music is, among other things, an instrument for managing the shock and disappointment of this transition. It gives shape to the feelings that arise when the world proves unresponsive to your desire, whether in unrequited love or conflicts with authority. Almost as compensation, it offers a window onto broader vistas. Rock tends to scale up. It unfurls stairways to heaven, the great wide open, endless parties and swallowing crowds. The scene in This Is Spinal Tap where the eighteen-inch model of Stonehenge descends onto the stage, much to the dismay of the band, underscores the point: there is no place for the miniature in rock and roll.
Or at least in a certain era of rock when record sales could sustain mid-level artists’ livelihood and label reps threw down massive cash to sign unknown local bands. By the mid-nineties, it was clear that this imperial era was winding down. The 1996 Telecommunications Act allowed conglomerates to gobble up local media outlets more or less without restriction, taking away many of the remaining refuges for genuine weirdos in the music industry as a consequence. The corporate capture of grunge seemed to prove the point that, finally, there was no magical subversive essence to rock and roll, no innate quality to the music that could insulate its makers from exploitation or the product from aesthetic degradation. The few eccentrics who were able to get a foothold tended to face this situation with a shrug and a sneer—consider Pavement’s run of vague music-biz diss tracks (most notably “Cut Your Hair”), delivered in Stephen Malkmus’s cynical drawl and punctuated with an “I could really give a fuck.” These were deflaters, and their music often sounded appropriately small: DIY recordings, amateurish playing, a refusal of any gesture that could be accused of being anthemic.
Maybe the only place where it is still possible to sustain a belief in the transcendent power of rock and roll is within the magic circle of make-believe. For Guided By Voices, a band that formed almost out of necessity as an outlet for the prodigious musical output of Robert Pollard, this circle was a very real place. It was called “the Snakepit.” The Snakepit was a chthonic space in Pollard’s basement in Dayton, Ohio, where the band—which in their early years was more or less anyone who happened to be hanging out on a given night—would work out new songs and cut rudimentary four-track recordings. This was a labor of love among a bunch of lower-middle-class Midwestern guys. For years, Pollard was an elementary-school teacher, and other members of the band were landscapers, nursing assistants, factory workers. Small-time rock and roll offered an escape from the demands of adulthood.
At the same time, there has been something over the top about Guided By Voices from the start. The band was first conceived out of a fantasy of profusion. In his childhood, as he later recounted to his biographer, Pollard had an unusually vivid recurring dream:
There was this record store. And I go in there, and no one is in there—no one. No one working, no one shopping, nothing. But it was just full of fucking albums on the walls, racks of 45s. And all of them are shit that I made up in my dream…. But then I wake up, and that’s the nightmare part of it. You realize it’s not real. It’s like a dream where you find a bunch of money. I had four or five of those dreams. Eventually I said, “I’m going to have to make that reality.” At least in this realm we live in. I had to make it part of that.
Almost compulsively, he first began to draw and assemble covers for these dream-albums in class as a kid and was still at it years later, when he started teaching in his own classroom. The names of these make-believe bands had a surreal, combinatory goofiness that would become the template for Guided By Voices’ song titles: “Elf God,” “Magic Toe,” “Groovy Lucifer,” “Wig Stomper,” “Stumpy in the Ocean.” It was all but inevitable that Pollard would start writing his own songs. When he began in earnest, sometime in the mid-seventies, the songs came in a gush, too much for the hard rock bands he was playing in to keep up with. The spigot has yet to turn off: a conservative estimate gives Pollard over a thousand songwriting credits to date.
Pollard’s earliest songs often scan as fantasies about closing the gap between his outsized dreams and the limitations of circumstance. “Little Jimmy the Giant” imagines a pair of magic boots that will allow the titular character to play basketball. (Sports are a serious enterprise in the Pollard family; Robert and especially his brother Jim remain athletic legends in Dayton. Robert pitched a no-hitter for Wright State in 1978—an event that would later be commemorated on an official “Pollard pitches a no-hitter” shirt sold at the merch table at Guided By Voices shows.) “When I get my boots on, baby,” goes the chorus, “they’ll see that I’m not so small.” It’s not that Pollard expected to get famous. As early iterations of Guided By Voices began to play shows around Dayton in the early eighties, they were largely met with crushing indifference. They took it to heart. In an era when hometown bands could still see themselves as toiling temporarily in the farm leagues, waiting to be scouted for the majors and lifted out of obscurity, Pollard and company turned inward and made homespun psychedelic rock confections more or less for themselves and their friends.
It is tempting to see the band’s Snakepit recordings as a part of a broader crypto-tradition of Midwestern outsider art. Pollard’s scenes of “hardcore UFOs” and enchanted children fleeing persecution resonate with speculative works like Dr. Evermor’s Forevertron—a gargantuan scrap-metal spaceship in Wisconsin—and the fantastical visions of Henry Darger, the Chicago janitor who secretly wrote tens of thousands of pages of stories accompanied by watercolor illustrations depicting sexually ambiguous child figures. What these outsider works share, apart from their whacked-out sense of scale, is an insistence that we understand them not as isolated objects but as openings onto a whole fictional world: “Dr. Evermor” is a mad-scientist character with an elaborate backstory, and Darger’s epic Story of the Vivian Girls is something like a novel.
In much the same way, Guided By Voices—itself a kind of fiction, less a band than an arena of rock-and-roll make-believe—treats its songs as projections of tiny make-believe worlds. Pollard’s songs introduce made-up acts, some of them bands, but others with more ambiguous talents. “Introducing the amazing… Rockethead,” he crows, before adding: “You know what the deal is, dude.” Another song announces that the “King Size Electric Institute / Is proud to prevent / The Dazzling Rhine Jive Click and his Up-and-Coming Bombardiers.” Like Dr. Evermor’s futile machine, these acts are models of thwarted ambition—a corporate sponsor prevents Rhine Jive Click from playing the “hottest axe in a million years”; Rockethead’s promised performance fizzles out in a cloud of tuneful non-sequiturs. The will to inertia in these songs is on one level an almost too straightforward allegory for the band’s own failure to launch. But it also betrays a desire to suspend the moment of the most excitement and anticipation before it fizzles. One thing a Guided By Voices song never does is overstay its welcome.
But unlike Darger and Dr. Evermor, with their sprawling, monumental constructions, Guided By Voices favors aesthetic compression. Pollard’s brisk songs often hover around the one-minute mark. Enclosed and displayed within these songs, there is a veritable treasury of tiny enchanted objects: “a necklace of fifty eyes,” “my valuable hunting knife,” “the golden pickle.” These are primordial objects, dream objects, funny in a nonsensical way but also gnawingly familiar. It is not surprising that Pollard is also a collage artist: these songs are Cornell boxes, containers for fragile contradictions. Which is to say, they are miniatures.
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With titles like “Kicker of Elves,” “Wished I Was a Giant,” and “Littlest League Possible,” Pollard’s miniature songs come from a charmed childhood world, one filled with fairytale violence. They seem to present what Susan Stewart, the concept’s ur-theorist, describes as “a diminutive and thereby manipulatable version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination“ and “linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history.” Danger is never far in this world—every elf has its kicker—but the threat is ultimately kept at bay. Pollard’s songs come at you as if through a semi-permeable barrier—like they are insulated from the outside world behind a pane of glass or a fold of gauze..
This distancing effect is in large part, though not totally, attributable to the production value of the band’s earliest recordings. Cut on boomboxes and other makeshift home recording gear in the Snakepit, or sometimes tracked in a studio and then intentionally fucked with during mixing, the often gorgeous melodies and wiry guitars periodically run aground in sheets of noise. On 1993’s Vampire on Titus, lower frequencies are totally absent; Pollard’s vocals sound like they were recorded inside a metal tub.
This work represented a significant point in Pollard’s long arc toward embracing the surreal dimensions of his songwriting. The band’s earliest efforts consisted of pristine, if low-budget, studio recordings of pretty much straight-up R.E.M.-adjacent college rock. The lyrics were direct and confessional. “You’ve got to tell me what you think about me,” went the chorus to one early cut that would later be repurposed into the gnomic “Tractor Rape Chain.” Near the very end of the eighties, Pollard started writing songs that sounded more like his collages: surreal, frenetic, often aggressive, with occasional flecks of gobsmacking beauty. Some of the band’s all-time darkest material appears on 1990’s Same Place the Fly Got Smashed, a miniature rock opera loosely following the story of “this alcoholic from the Midwest who’s pissed off about living around here. He kills someone and ends up getting the electric chair.” Guitars buzz and rumble with coiled malice; Pollard sings with newfound conviction, as if freed from the constraints of the conventional rock confessional.
1992’s Propeller, meant to be a last hoorah before the band fucked back off to their everyday lives for good, further raised both the stakes and the intensity of the compression. It begins with a sort of visioning exercise. “GBV! GBV! GBV!”, chants a chorus of voices at the opening of the album; in actuality these were the voices of the band members themselves, multi-tracked to sound like a crowd. GBV had to stage in miniature the warm reception they longed for but hadn’t yet gotten. Propeller, however, would ironically bring just that for the band. Word got out about a DIY album of impossibly catchy songs from a bunch of blue-collar nobodies from Dayton, an album with no standard packaging, slipped into cases haphazardly hand-decorated by band members and friends. (Copies from the original pressing now sell for thousands of dollars on vinyl auction sites.) Pollard responded to the buzz by making the abrasive, stripped-down Vampire on Titus more or less by himself. It was almost as if he was testing how far down he could scale Guided By Voices, not just as a band but as an idea; how much musical exuberance and melodic energy he could pack into the smallest possible container.
Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, the band’s back-to-back masterpieces, pursued this experiment further still. For these albums, Pollard approached composition as a kind of scrapbooking, following a similar method to his album-cover collages: “I made this pseudo compilation by going through old yearbooks and finding pictures of clusters of people that looked like bands,” he later explained. “I cut out the pictures, named them like a band and put them on the sleeve of the compilation.” The result of this process was about half of Bee Thousand; the other half came from retooled versions of old song fragments. Alien Lanes was composed just as quickly and resourcefully. These two albums occupy a rarefied place in Pollard’s discography in part because they deliver the ideal version of a certain listening experience. Juxtaposing gems of brilliance with bursts of throwaway noise—the pop perfection of “I Am a Scientist” following the caterwauling, 48-second long “Demons Are Real”—these records teach you to listen like a museumgoer or a shopper at a flea market: sifting, searching, distinguishing, extrapolating. But also standing in awe. It’s just as Stewart writes: “That the world of things can open itself to reveal a secret life—indeed, to reveal a set of actions and hence a narrativity and history outside the given field of perception—is a constant daydream that the miniature presents.” These albums grant us admission into this magic circle, where we can watch Pollard’s enchanted objects come to life.
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These albums brought the band unexpected success. One moment, they were throwing away money to do a vanity pressing of their final record, and the next, they were signed to Matador and spirited away to New York to play for adoring fans, including alternative-rock notables like Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo. The music adapted to this situation by turning its built-in miniature sociality outward. Pollard addresses his “proud brothers” in the audience in the anthemic “A Salty Salute,” announcing over a lolling bassline that “the club is open.” As Guided by Voices began to tour nationally, these words would serve as a sort of mantra for the band’s live shows. One dazed fan told MTV that the band was the “ancient Chinese secret of rock and roll.” If you were at a show, you were initiated into the mysteries, admitted into the club. This was the opposite of outsider art: this was insider art—or at least art that wants to make those who experience it feel like they are meaningfully included in it.
Pollard’s vision began to scale up accordingly. When his fellow amateurs started leaving the GBV fold and returning to their everyday lives, he hired a readymade, fully professionalized rock band to replace them. With several permutations of this group, Pollard spent the late nineties and early aughts making shiny records that tried to reactivate the world-shaking power of classic rock wholesale rather than picking up pieces of its shattered form and preserving them in little boxes and jars. These albums featured occasional patches of the band’s very best work: the sludgy guitar stomp of “Not Behind the Fighter Jet,” the brain-meltingly catchy, Ric-Okasec-produced “Teenage F.B.I.,” the melancholic power-pop surrealism of “Twilight Campfighter.” But this material was good in a fundamentally different way from earlier songs like, say, “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory,” which has been described as an entire lo-fi rock opera condensed down to an impossibly thrilling minute and a half. The music was starting to become full-scale: shiny five-minute songs bristling with commanding stacks of vocal tracks and virtuosic guitar solos, the latter courtesy of longtime band member Doug Gillard. Guided By Voices had all but become the band they were cosplaying as—in all aspects but fame.
The band’s performances and overall output scaled up, too—or less charitably, swelled or puffed up. The live shows often stretched out to three hours, punctuated increasingly by drunken rants by “Uncle Bob,” as he had become known to fans, about everything from (appropriately) alcoholism to the love life of Counting Crows singer Adam Duritz. Pollard opened up his vaults and began to release hundreds of archival recordings, all while frenetically producing new material with several side projects in addition to the band. Seemingly everything was released—even Uncle Bob’s stage banter was collected on an album called Relaxation of the Asshole. One could detect more than a note of bitterness in these rants about the band’s inability to break into the mainstream.
But the band arrived just a bit too late to the party. A bit of indie-head recognition may have activated a desire in Pollard to front the next Who, but the conditions that made the Who possible had vanished. Gone was the dream that major labels might scout out hometown talents and invested unfathomable amounts of cash in their ascent to stardom. Pollard’s music up to this point understood this loss on a formal level: consider a song like “Hank’s Little Fingers,” an affectionate ode to a small-time Dayton guitar player, or the moody defiance of “The Hard Way,” where he declares a commitment to “doing everything the hard way—a stubborn craftsman among the line workers at what he calls “the factory of human pride.”
The miniature, Stewart would remind us, is always a time capsule. Miniatures enclose dead forms of labor. “We cannot separate the function of the miniature,” Stewart writes, “from a nostalgia for preindustrial labor, a nostalgia for craft.” Miniature books first appeared at the dawn of printing, when the hand-writing techniques required to produce them were becoming obsolete. So too did Pollard’s rock and roll miniatures arrive on the scene at the exact moment that the conditions that made rock possible as a dominant, blockbuster-selling cultural form were drying up. As Steven Hyden writes in a retrospective review:
Alien Lanes can be viewed as a nexus point in rock history, representing the end of an era when the record business believed that a band like [Guided by Voices] could make a million dollars, and the beginning of our current era in which rock is essentially folk music, where it’s kept alive not out of financial imperative, but because rock can act as a safe space for people who have consciously decided to ignore financial imperatives and exist outside of mainstream culture.
The microcosmic universe of the classic Guided By Voices albums is largely shielded from the outside world, with its market forces, streaming numbers, licensing deals. When these concerns do enter, they are ambivalent or ironized.Songs like “Lord of Overstock” and “Generox Gray®” introduce a certain kind of corporate-stooge conceit akin to what Stewart, in her reading of miniature toy versions of airplanes and other industrial products, calls a “representation of a product of alienated labor, a representation which itself is constructed by artisanal labor.” The miniature sacrifices stature for a measure, however small, of autonomy.
Today, several breakups and reunions—not to mention dozens of albums—later, Guided By Voices has settled more comfortably into a marginal but respectable role in the rock world. They have come to stand for a certain brand of Gen-X cool. They have been depicted as a favorite band of tech workers on the British sitcom The IT Crowd, provided the soundtrack for an especially maudlin fantasy sequence in the med-student dramedy Scrubs, and even entered the official White House archives when Obama’s press secretary Jay Carney briefly mixed up Mitch McConnell with Mitch Mitchell, the sometime guitar player for GBV—which turned out to be Carney’s favorite band, too. This sort of dull reification, as Theodor Adorno taught us long ago, has had the side effect of preserving the band in the listening public’s awareness.
As for the band itself, they are no longer either hoarding their songs for themselves or trying to score a Top 10 hit. They are simply making music, at a healthy clip of three albums or so per year, for their devoted group of listeners. Today, for a rock and roll band, that is about as good of an arrangement as you can hope to get. The adverse conditions that Pollard and company once faced as a bunch of peripheral misfits have now been generalized across vast swaths of the pop-music industry. Perhaps no other rock band was quite as prepared to develop musical forms that could resist these conditions, or at least try to make a virtue of them. Guided By Voices have taken the basic condition of rock’s decline and, rather than trying to fight or minimize or deny it, incorporated it formally into the substance of their music. Rock may be dead, but somewhere on the decaying wasteland where it’s been buried, there is a small neon sign that says: “The club is open.”
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In a club in Dublin, many years ago, an Irish lad put the moves on my girlfriend in front of me. Through the thick clots of people, riding medium-low from the convenience-store wine I had been slugging, I felt the only thing I could do was give him a shove. “You touch me again,” he said, pressing his puffer-jacketed bulk into my face, “and I’ll fucking kill you.” “Ok,” I said. I don’t remember what happened next. The only other distinct memory I have from that night is dissociating in the middle of the dance floor, writing something on my notes app. The next day, I found my message to myself: Oh yeah, I’m going to drive my car.
This little nugget of inanity is a lyric from a Guided By Voices song, “Quality of Armor.” At first, on an aborted 1984 album called Pissing in the Canal by an early version of the band, it was a folky strummer adorned with twinkling harmonies. Over the next eight years or so, it became a scrappy garage-rock number, the harmonies now floating over distorted power chords, urged on by a clanging ride cymbal. Within the song, the chorus functions more or less the way that I found myself using it in the midst of blackout: as a charm or incantation, a little promise of escape from what it calls the “secret bogus world.” Like so many Guided by Voices songs, “Quality of Armor” has a totemic quality. It presents itself as a little memento invested with wonderful power.
When we saw GBV together just a few months before this, I was waiting for them to play “Quality of Armor.” It was the rare song that captured exactly how my life felt at the time—and not just its immediate texture, but my fantasies and aspirations. I was trying to escape my summer job as the world’s worst proofreader of medical textbooks by playing rock and roll music with my friends. I drove many hours, spent some money that I didn’t really have, and slept in cars to record a DIY album of songs we had written. I wasn’t stupid enough to think I could recreate the magic of “Quality of Armor.” It was more that the song, and the band as a whole, gave me a vocabulary for imagining how rock and roll music could survive today without compromising itself. It could survive not by trying to encompass the whole world, but by drawing a tiny magic circle and making everything inside it shimmer with a distant warmth.
They did play “Quality of Armor” that night. But by that point we had already left. There was a terrible intensity to that show: it was loud, bludgeoning, unrelenting. There were so many dudes. The GBV live show has always been maximalist—all the aesthetic energy packed into the miniature’s fragile form unleashed and given free play. There’s a video of the performance we missed. It is so loud that even from the very back of the club, the sound is completely distorted. But even through the noise, I can’t shake the feeling that what we’re seeing through the lens is a rock and roll fiction, a kind of play, a consensual illusion that we are watching the biggest band in the world. Rock and roll is the real “secret bogus world.” Guided By Voices puts this world in a snow globe, takes it out of the wunderkammer, and lets us live in it for a little while.
Mitch Therieau
Mitch Therieau is a writer in California.