i gather from your username that you don't like white people

I like white people if they are cool.
Same as any color.

It's krakabash. not Cracker Basher.

so its specifically a literate white guy thing?

What drugs are you ON big dave?

pollard=best songwriter of this generation. he's the lennon of our time.

now...let the "oh fuck, are you stupid?" comments begin.

I just watched the Live From Austin Texas DVD.

It's the complete show used for the Austin City Limits taping. Fucking band was shitfaced drunk on national TV. Classy.




NC, hold the waffles.

krakabash wrote:I don't have every piece of product that Pollard puts out in his attempt to make sure he has a nice retirement. (He understands fanboys who will buy everything, the way he collects shit he likes. I'm just not a fanboy like that.)

me either

krakabash wrote:GBV rip of old styles same as Blur and Oasis. But American indi nerds just think Blur are not as "cool" as GBV because they aren't on Matador or whatever. Fuck that, Blur never put out a bad record. That's a better track record than GBV. Plus a song like "For Tommarow" is just as good as anything GBV ever did and the record doesn't have crap production. Oasis has better songs that GBV and a better singer too. And dress better. And had hotter girlfriends. So who's a better Rock n Roll band?

c'mon dude, that's retarded

krakabash wrote:Guns n Roses were a great band. Period.

I like G'N'F'R too!

krakabash wrote:Fuck you if you are an anti Hard Rock snob.

I'm not

krakabash wrote:Poison were a good (admittedly goofy) band too.

I don't think so.

krakabash wrote:Live they rocked better than GBV ever could and unlike Pollard's unfullfilled fantasies, they rocked ARENAS in front of hott chicks instead of playing the Metro infront of a bunch of pimply faced college radio djs.

Never saw them live, but I doubt that they rocked harder.

krakabash wrote:I can like GBV and GnR and Blur and Can and Killing Joke and The Beatles and James Brown and Bathory and whatever the fuck I like.

Yeah, me to. We're like totally best friends!

krakabash wrote:I don't think I would enjoy your B-B-Q anyway because it would probably be a bunch of losers boys standing around talking about obscure 7"singles with a bunch of virgin girls who look like librarians.

Granted, some of my friends are losers, but tell me, what is wrong with virgins that look like librarians? They may have arrived as virgins, but....harhar.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Cq96uFdq9k4

Bob and band do a quick reunite at the HEEDfest last month.

Fat and happy in Dayton.

good interview with Pollard at suicidegirls.com. I'll paste for you folks at work:

Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices
By Jay Hathaway
Sep 5, 2007

Robert Pollard is best known as the songwriter and frontman of Guided By Voices. Though he didn’t release an album until the age of 36, today Pollard is about to turn 50, and over 2,000 of his songs have been released on records. His next two albums are twins called “Coast to Coast Carpet of Love” and “Standard Gargoyle Decisions.” They represent the two halves of Pollard’s musical personality: the sharp and melodic versus the heavy and dark. But two albums wouldn’t be prolific enough for Bob Pollard: his Circus Devils side project is going to see international release for the first time with an album called “Sgt. Disco.” Pollard will be the first to admit that some people think he’s an asshole, but when I got the opportunity to talk to him on the phone from his home in Dayton, Ohio, it didn’t take long to understand how he manages to attract some of the most devoted fans in music.

Jay Hathaway: So, you’re a notoriously earlier riser…10 am isn’t too bad, but …

Robert Pollard: I’ve got a schedule, you know. When I drink, I start drinking about four or five. So I’m usually in bed by about 10 or 11. I get up now about 6:30, I got a routine going. I take my wife to work, you know, walk the cats. I’m actually outside in the backyard right now, watching the cats. I have to watch them ‘cause one of them can jump the fence, the other one’s too fat to jump the fence. There’s like some dogs. You know, I do things! I’ve got responsibilities, obligations.

JH:
So you just wrapped up recording your next two albums?
RP:
Yeah, they were going to send you the new stuff, did you get everything? You get Circus Devils?
JH:
Yeah.
RP:
You know, Circus Devils' Sgt. Disco got one and a half stars in Spin?
JH:
Yeah, but who cares what Spin thinks, right?
RP:
Really. Really. You get a fucking 80-minute record, fucking 32 songs, you listen to it one time and you’re gonna review it? You know that’s what happens.
JH:
I’ve listened to the two solo records maybe twice each now, and I don’t feel like I could review those.
RP:
I don’t see how you could, I don’t see how you could. I mean, you know, a fair assessment, listening to it a couple times. I can’t even do it myself. It takes me, even after … I mean, I wrote the songs and helped record them, and it takes me 10 or 12 times before I can even assess it or compare it to something else I’ve done, you know. But anyway, it’s my stuff, understandably. And granted that people who review records, they’ve got a big stack of shit and they’ve got a deadline, and so they listen to things one time and do reviews, and then the record-buying consumer … a lot of these kids kinda, they go buy things based on what these people who listen to the record one time say. But I don’t take it too seriously, the reviews. Sometimes they can be pretty nasty, and they can get personal. I don’t appreciate when people get personal in a review. Like when they say, “This guy drinks too much,” or “He can’t hear anymore.” That’s what somebody said recently, “I don’t know whether it’s the drinking or he can’t hear anymore. I don’t know what the problem is.” (Laughs) I don’t see a problem! Some people who listen to my music, they’ve got a problem sometimes with the fact that I work with the same person all the time. Like, Todd Tobias. Did the Beatles work with anybody but George Martin? I don’t remember them working with anyone but George Martin. You know, you find something that’s successful for you, that’s working, and why would you wanna change it? Also, it allows me to be indolent and lazy.

I basically write the songs and send them to Todd now. These two records were like, “Record all the music and let me know when it’s done.” And he did. It amazes me how this stuff like, most of the stuff on these two records was written kind of spontaneously, so it’s like they’re all over the place. You’ll notice there’s not a lot of verse-chorus-verse-chorus things going on, with the exception of a few songs, "Miles Under the Skin" and a few things like that, that are actually older songs. But it’s kind of like, I got all these songs, I had like 35, 40 songs, I don’t feel like going up and recording all these, man, I don’t know if I have the patience. And so I sent him all these songs and said, “Pick a time. Spend the whole winter on it if you have to.” He seems to work really well when he’s left to his own resources, in his home and at the studio and he can take his time. Even better than when I go up there and we allot a weekend. Todd’s like my George Martin. He does everything and he can play anything. I think he’s got a better ear for my songs than I do, to tell you the truth. So it’s just a good situation. For the most part, people dig that working relationship, but there are some people that say, “Well, we just wish you would work with someone else, or get a band again or get a producer.” But I don’t see that happening. Like I said, it’s a good partnership. It’s painless. I found somebody who’s got a similar attitude toward making music as myself.
JH:
And look what happened when the Beatles turned an album over to Phil Spector.
RP:
Yeah, look what happened. Thank you! So I’ve got my George Martin, and that’s good. What record was that, anyway?
JH:
Let It Be.
RP:
Yeah, Let It Be. Pretty good record, but it’s sloppy. It’s pretty directionless, you know.
JH:
When you listen to all your old stuff, has your opinion of some of that changed over the years? You were talking about giving something one spin, not being able to give it a fair assessment. You’ve heard the Guided By Voices stuff, all your older solo stuff a bunch of times now.
RP:
It’s weird because you record a record, listen to it for a couple of months and then you put it away. Your initial excitement’s over, you put it away for a while. Then you get it back out after a couple, two, three years and sometimes things are surprisingly better than you thought they were. I pulled out Universal Truths and Cycles and Earthquake Glue and I thought those were particularly really good records. Not only the performance of the people playing on them, but the production and the way we put together the songs. Both of those records – I wrote a lot of songs around that time, and there were some things that got deleted or were put on EPs – but that particular time right before the end of Guided by Voices, I thought was good. Especially Universal Truths and Cycles, that was a really good record. I think it had to do with the fact that I wrote two different batches of songs. One batch of songs where we practiced and rehearsed and took some time on it, kind of longer songs and prog-rock type songs. And then there was a batch of little short songs, Alien Lanes-style. And so that record has, I think, stood the test of time. It sounded better when I brought it back out than when I listened to it for the first time. And obviously, there’s stuff that will always be my favorite records that I’ve done. I like Kid Marine, for some reason. Kid Marine’s really personal to me. It was really conceptual, and that was also the first Fading Captain series record, it kind of started all that. You have Crickets?
JH:
Yeah.
RP:
That’s the wrap-up, so the Fading Captain series is over. There was a lot of stuff in there that I thought was really good, too. I thought it was interesting that I was able to do 40-some records on the side, and we’ve been able to wrap it up and look at it as a body of work. People are kind of digging it. I think it’s more digestible in this form for people to check out that it was for people to try to buy all the Fading Captain series records. There were some records that people thought we shouldn’t even have released [in the Fading Captain series], and maybe we shouldn’t have, but I never release a record unless I think it’s worthwhile. Actually, I release records because I want to hear them. In particular, I’m talking about the Hazzard Hot Rods and Acid Ranch and shit like that. Just crazy, basement field recordings that we did. I mean, I wanna hear them. I want these things compiled and I want them to be real. I don’t think it’s real unless you put it on an LP. CDs aren’t real. Anybody can do that. That’s ok with me. When we first started making records, it was hard to do, you had to get the money together if you weren’t on a label, and you had to spend some money to put out an LP. There were no CDs, and so not just every band could make a record. You could make a cassette, whatever, but now kids’ll come up and be like, “Here’s our new CD. We bought a hundred of these. This is our new album.” Anybody can do that. When we first started making records in the early '80s, you had to make an LP. It’s expensive, and unless you’re sure of yourself and you have the money and the time, you can’t really do that. And now people just make records on a computer and burn it on a CD and they call it an album. There’s not a lot of love in that.
JH:
So even if you were recording something in the basement on a 4-track for ten dollars, you’d still have to get it pressed …
RP:
You do it in one night. You buy some beer and a cassette and do it on a 4-track or do it live, back in the '80s you still had to come up with a couple, two three thousand dollars to get 500 of them pressed. Most kids couldn’t afford to do that.
JH:
Do you think LPs actually sound better, or is it a symbolic thing, the work that goes into it?
RP:
It’s a symbolic thing. The fact that it’s so easy and so accessible, and anyone can make a record now. There was something more special about it. You had to have the drive, and not necessarily have the money, but just, “We want this record to come out really badly, so we’re going to save our money and we’re going to have it pressed and have our own box of records.” And you had to go through that process to make a record, or you had to be signed. I guess you could call that the early days of indie rock, to go through that whole process. Now indie rock, it’s so easy to be part of it, because anyone can burn a CD, anyone can make a record on the computer. It’s not as romantic as it used to be. The blue-collar ethic part of it is not there anymore. And I’m talking doing it DIY and indie rock. Obviously if you get signed, it doesn’t matter. It’s not that easy to get signed. I think it’s easier than it used to be.

But what was crazy back when we first got signed was that right before that happened, there were bands being signed to major labels and it just blew my mind that major labels would be interested in such bands, and that was because labels were looking for another Nirvana. So they were just signing any local punk rock band that they thought had Nirvana or Green Day potential. And to me, that blew my mind, but it kind of opened the door like, “Hey, we got a chance.” But it kind of still was like, “That’s not good,” because back when I bought records in college and in high school, these big labels were signing bands like Sparks and T. Rex, you know, those kind of bands. Hell, Big Star couldn’t get signed! It was a good thing because it opened the door for us, but it was kind of scary because it was like, “Anybody can get signed to a major label right now. What’s going on?” and this had to do with the advent of CDs and shit. It was so mass-produced and formulaic.
JH:
Can you tell me a little about the infamous suitcase?
RP:
Yeah. I had a suitcase full of 300 cassettes. And I did, and I do. A lot of that stuff is coming out on the Suitcase compilations. I think I lost a bunch – I had a flood in my basement, and I think some of them got damaged or destroyed. I still have a lot left. It just gets really hard to go through them. Because when I used to record, first of all I’d never mark any cassettes. We’d just record on them and throw them in a box. It was pretty stupid to do that, but now it’s kind of fun trying to find them. Sometimes, if I was just recording by myself on acoustic or I had an idea for a song, I would just pick up a cassette that was lying around and record, just to get the idea down before I forgot it. And so a lot of songs are at the end of cassettes, or in the middle with nothing on a side, or maybe a few things. So now the process of going through the cassettes to find old songs wears on you after a while, because it could be at any point on the cassette. There could be silence for 35 minutes and then you’ll find something. So trying to go through them and find them all can be kind of hard on the brain. So recently, Rich Turiel gave me an old cassette player where you can actually hear it going through. When you forward and rewind, you can hear the noise, winding up fast. So you can actually hear sound. When I was trying to find stuff on cassettes on my stereo, you just kind of had to hit the forward button and stop it sporadically and see if there’s anything on there. But now I can actually go through the cassettes and hear noise all the way through, even on fast forward. So I think I’m going to start going back through the cassettes and see what else I have. ‘Cause there’s ton of stuff . Even compiling the first two Suitcase compilations, I’ve probably only gone through about half of the stuff in the suitcase. That’s the other thing: how did we find time to record all this shit? Basically all we did was we’d get together on the weekends and just record everything we did. Dialogue and skits and jams and whatever.
JH:
Did you rerecord any of that stuff and send it to Todd for the next two albums, or are those all new songs?
RP:
When I send Todd stuff for a record, including these last two records, Standard Gargoyle Decisions and Coast to Coast Carpet of Love, I probably wrote … what are there, 33 songs? Probably 23 or 24 of them are new songs I wrote, and then there are probably 8 or 9 of them I found on these cassettes and just sent them to him. What we do is I’ll get together with Todd on the phone, he listens to them for a while, then we kind of get our acoustics out over the phone. You know, like, “What are you doing here?” and if I know what I’m doing on the guitar, I’ll explain it to him. I can’t explain it to him with the names of chords and progressions and notes and so forth because I don’t know how to read music and I really don’t know what I’m doing. So I can only explain to him finger position, you know, “My middle finger is on the top string on the 4th fret.” Basically that’s it, he’ll say “I think I got the rest,” and I leave it pretty much up to him as to what he wants to do and what kind of atmosphere he wants to bring into the song, what sort of bass runs he wants to do, and riffs. The exciting thing is, “Send it to me when you’re done,” and two months later he’ll call me and it’s finished. To me, that’s like Christmas. I don’t know exactly what he’s going to do. It’s been about 95% guaranteed that what he sends me, I’m going to like. Not only like it, but probably end up liking it more than I anticipated. It’s almost like to be able to hear your songs for the first time. Which is difficult to do if you write songs and spend months on writing and spend another month on the demo process and then spend another month rehearsing and then go and spend four months recording the record. After a while, you can’t stand to listen to that shit.
JH:
You’ve written so many songs that have these kind of narrative threads to them, that suggest a longer story. Have you ever thought about writing a novel, a collection of stories, something like that?
RP:
As far as a novel, my attention span is too short to do that. I don’t think I could keep it together for that long. I have entertained the possibility of writing a collection of stories. I even have a title, it’s called – and I’m not sure this will ever happen - but if I do, it’s called The Dogshit Chronicles.
JH:
I love it!
RP:
It’s just going to be the very best drinking, crazy-ass party stories that I can conjure. The “How the hell did I survive that?” kind of thing. Kind of like the Basketball Diaries, but it’s the Dogshit Chronicles. It mainly has to do with alcohol, not heroin or whatever.
JH:
You must have a ton of those stories.
RP:
I do! I’ve got shitloads of them. But I can’t always come up with them, because they’re not like we went out and fucking burned a building down or something. It’s just where we went out and shit that we didn’t expect to happen would happen. The next day we go, “Jesus Christ, we’re lucky we didn’t kill ourselves.” Those kinds of things. And I’ve done lots of those kinds of things, too. Not so much anymore, ‘cause I’m getting older and I’m not quite as wild as I used to be. But still, I drink about four or five days a week. When you drink, things happen. So that’s what the Dogshit Chronicles is about.
JH:
What about the people who compare you to all the great American songwriters and try to figure out where you stand? Are you in the top 10?
RP:
It’s too complicated. It’s all out there, and it’s hard to distinguish what’s good and what’s not good, what’s supposed to be good and what my intentions are. It’s harder to judge whether I’m one of the great songwriters because there’s just too much stuff. My point is that I just don’t care. People have pointed out to me before that I dilute my brilliance, or whatever you want to call it, by putting out too much shit. I don’t care. That’s my modus operandi and how I work. I’ve been in top hundred, top 50 songwriters of the last 20 years, 40 years. I’ve been in those things, which is very flattering, but it’s hard to tell whether I’m a better songwriter than Ray Davies. Or as good, or comparable. Or Pete Townshend. Because those guys are great songwriters. I’m sure I have some songs that stand up to some of their best songs, but like I said, my stuff is just so spread out, there’s so much that it’s hard to compare me with anyone else. I guess I’d have to be the most prolific songwriter, I would think. A lot of people say prolific’s just another word for just putting out a bunch of shit, but whatever. I’ve probably put out 2,000 songs on records. There’s probably another 5,000 that haven’t been out. I put out records and I release records that I like. If some people say that compare to some of the great songwriters, then that’s great. I’ve got so many songs, everyone has their favorites. I’m sure because I have so many, that makes it easier for the percentage of good songs that I do have to be up there with other people that have written a lot of good songs. I would say a lot of people would agree that I’ve at least written 15 or 20 really really good songs, and I would say that that’s probably good. The rest of it, depends on who you talk to. Depends on if you’re talking to me. There’s a lot of songs I’ve written that I think are good, and other people disagree. It depends on what you think a good song is.
JH:
It’s interesting that after all of the times you’ve had a double-album of material and had to cut it down to a single album, now you’re actually getting to put out both.
RP:
Yeah, that’s cool. I hope this record is one that people kind of – WOW! - stand up to. ‘Cause I think they’re really good. It’s an interesting concept, it always has been, and I kind of go, “Maybe this one’ll be slightly different, and it’ll generate some excitement the way Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes did.” But that kind of shit doesn’t happen too much anymore, because of the initial freshness of the band, the stuff was new at the time and we were on a 4-track and people were seeing us for the first time. I don’t think you can ever get that back. Every time you put out a record, you just hope that maybe this will be the one that stands up and does really really well. And you never know when it happens, and that’s not what you make records for, but you can’t help thinking in the back of your mind that maybe this’ll be the one that does really well.
JH:
Coast to Coast Carpet of Love grabbed me right away. It’s really pop, really accessible. Standard Gargoyle Decisions took a couple more listens, but it’s growing on me. Do you think one half might be more well-received?
RP:
That’s the good thing about having two records, it can be dissected. It’s a competitive thing. Which one’s the best one, the rock album or the pop album? Which one has longer staying power? Which one is better at first? There’s a lot of different angles you can take. It’s a cool built-in marketing device for Merge. They came up with the [album cover with] the two halves of my face, one half is negative and the other half is regular. That’s part of their way of thinking, too, that we make this into a two sides of the psyche thing. We were talking about the id, the ego and the superego. It’s different emotional concepts that can be compared and studied. Like you said, Coast to Coast Carpet of Love is more immediate and poppier, but the other one grows on you. I was going to put a sticker on them that says, “You must play Coast to Coast Carpet of Love first!” That’s our rule around here. If you’re going to listen to both of them, you’ve gotta play Coast to Coast first.
JH:
Oh man, I listened to them in the wrong order. I guess I fucked up.
RP:
You did!
JH:
But then I went back and listened to Standard Gargoyle Decisions again. It was back-to-back-to-back.
RP:
Oh, ok, that’s cool. I like the way you did that. Ok, that’s acceptable then.
JH:
Yeah, but I should have put the other one on first, it makes more sense that way.
RP:
Everybody else agrees about that, too. Obviously you don’t have to listen to both of them at the same time either. But if you do, like I said, we were even thinking about putting on a sticker. And then, obviously, there are going to be people who make one album out of both of them. I’ve done that already, actually.
JH:
How did that go?
RP:
Fucking great, man. I was just looking at the possibilities. Let’s see what these sound like as one album instead of releasing both of them. And it’s good, but I like the fact that one of them’s kind of like a Beatles album and one of them’s kind of like a Stones album, or whatever. I think I’d have to go with the two albums. We already have, actually. The decision’s been made.

For more information go to robertpollard.net

Bob Pollard wrote:Yeah, Let It Be. Pretty good record, but it’s sloppy. It’s pretty directionless, you know.

Robert Pollard calling a Beatles album "sloppy" and "directionless". Ok there, Bob.


GBV, Not Crap with the biggest waffles imaginable.