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Guided By Voices: Factory Men

To celebrate our return to publishing the print version of MAGNET three years ago, we will be posting classic cover stories from that time all week. Enjoy.

GBV

 

Working-class hero Robert Pollard and his fellow “classic-era” Guided By Voices bandmates clock in with Let’s Go Eat The Factory, their first album in more than 15 years. By James Greer

Twenty years ago, I interviewed Guided By Voices for a different magazine. It was in an RV belonging to Ed Deal—Kim and Kelley’s dad—parked in back of a club in Columbus, Ohio, after a Breeders show. The whole band was there, crowded around my enormous early-‘90s vintage cassette recorder: Robert Pollard, Jimmy Pollard, Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell, Kevin Fennell and Dan Toohey, who would soon become an ex-member due to his propensity for leaving long notes to Bob about various dissatisfactions with certain band practices. Bob did most of the talking, which will come as a great surprise to exactly no one who has ever met, seen, heard or read about him.

According to Ed Deal, who has a better memory than me, after every answer, Bob would ask, “Was that OK? Was that a good answer?” In other words, Bob was nervous, and in retrospect, sure: It was one of his first “real” interviews (even though the piece I was writing was very short). Anyone would be nervous in that situation. He had not yet released Bee Thousand, the album that would come to define, for better and worse, the public perception of Guided By Voices as masters of short bursts of melodic lo-fi rock with mostly incomprehensible lyrics. He had spent the previous seven years nursing grudges and making records that he wouldn’t let anyone hear, because he was worried they weren’t good enough. Was that OK? Was that a good record?

Twenty years later, sitting in a bar in the Oregon District of his hometown, Dayton, Ohio, Bob is anything but nervous. He orders two buckets of Miller Lite in bottles (a bucket is really just a six-pack on ice, so it’s not as much as it sounds) and slides onto a chair in the back room of the bar next to Mitch Mitchell, who Bob has known longer than he’s been in the band, which means he and Mitch have known each other for about 45 years.

“I have some conditions,” he announces, before I turn on the tiny little machine I brought to record our conversation. I don’t know how it works. It’s digital. Maybe it doesn’t work. I hope it works. (Update: It works.)

“I’m going to talk about whatever I want to talk about,” he continues. “I’m going to tell you exactly what happened during the making of this record. But you can’t use anything that would hurt anyone’s feelings.”

Turns out over the course of the next four or five hours and several buckets of Miller Lite, augmented by shots of tequila so big they come in tumblers (and should be illegal), Bob doesn’t say anything that would hurt anyone’s feelings.

And now that I have fulfilled the requirement to mention how much Guided By Voices and/or Robert Pollard drinks, we can get down to the business of discussing Let’s Go Eat The Factory, the first album of new material by the “classic lineup,” featuring everybody who sat in Ed Deal’s RV that night minus Dan Toohey and plus Greg Demos, who brought his striped white pants and dervish intensity to the touring band for about six months before deciding to take a job offer with a law firm, where he’s now a senior partner.

The new album represents a deliberate effort to return to the spontaneity of Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, but advances in technology and in Bob’s songwriting make drawing straight lines from here to there impossible. Songs were recorded at Toby’s house. Songs were made up in Mitch’s garage and Greg’s basement. Sometimes Bob played drums and Jimmy played bass. Sometimes Toby played everything, as he often used to do on his own songs. The result is recognizably “classic” Guided By Voices, but in some unexpected ways (more prevalent use of keyboards and samples, for one thing), the 21st century can’t help but poke its nose into the resulting music.

MAGNET: At what point during the reunion tour did you guys decide to make a new Guided By Voices record?
Pollard: First of all, Kevin wanted to make one the whole time.
Mitchell: I secretly was wishing for one, too.
Pollard: But I was like, “I don’t know, man. Let’s just do the reunion tour.” Then, the tour was what, 11 months? And about three-quarters of the way into it I started thinking, “You know, the chemistry’s good. Maybe we deserve to make an album as a reward to ourselves. Let’s make a fucking record and see how it goes.” It still took until a couple months later before we finally decided definitely to do it. Toby and I were in Chicago in a bar with our wives and some other people, and we saw this really cool picture on the wall we thought would look great for our album cover. We ended up not using it. But it worked perfectly with Let’s Go Eat The Factory, because I already had the title.

Was that a previously existing title you had planned to use for something of your own?
Pollard: No, it was just spur of the moment. As soon as we decided to do the album, I thought up the title, and I thought it worked well for the album. It kind of implies that we’re our own industry now, our own factory, and instead of the factory eating us, we’ll eat the factory. Chock full of vitamins.

How did you approach the recording process itself?
Pollard: You know how they say you can’t go back again? I realized you can go back again. Actually do it the way we used to, where … I mean, it’s not a complete democracy. It’s not a collegium. It’s still a semi-dictatorship. I make the calls, but everybody had a little bit more control back then. I took input. We co-wrote some songs, Toby wrote some songs, people would do different things. We’d switch instruments. Whereas, in later-period Guided By Voices, I decided I was going to be the only songwriter.

And you stopped playing guitar yourself in later iterations.
Pollard: I delegated. On this record, I wanted to get back to doing more stuff. Playing guitar. Playing drums. There’s a lot of people switching up and doing different kinds of things. Like Mitch plays guitar and drums and keyboard and bass. Everybody is playing all the instruments.

Is this the album you guys would have made if you’d stayed together after Under The Bushes Under The Stars?
Pollard: No, because we were headed into a slicker, more polished studio sound. We were headed in that direction anyway. That’s another good thing about this one is that we broke it all down to where we recorded everything in our houses and shit. Jimmy and Mitch and I did a session at Mitch’s house. We did an acoustic session at Greg’s.

The stuff Mitch recorded sounds live.
Mitchell: It mostly was. I just used a couple of overhead room mics.
Pollard: That’s part of the reason everything sounds different, which is what we wanted. Because we recorded in different places at different times, with different people. Like the first song, “Laundry And Lasers,” just totally didn’t turn out the way that it should have. It should have had more clarity and separation in the instruments, but still big-sounding. But the thing is, after I listened to it for a while, I started to think it sounded like it was recorded live. Which I thought was kind of an interesting effect for the first song. From a band that hasn’t done an album in 15 years, you have this muddy, murky, but still powerful live-sounding song to start the record. Kind of confusing. The two heaviest songs on the album are the first two songs. That and “The Head.” It’s completely misleading to come out with those two songs. You think it’s going to be a really heavy record and then “Doughnut For A Snowman” comes on and you’re like, “Oh, man. What is that?” It doesn’t fit. It’s jarring. But I like that. I wanted that.

Let’s talk about that song.
Pollard: I’ve had that title around forever, I just could not think of how to use it. “She starts off her day with a Krispy Kreme doughnut.” But now the lyric makes sense, because, like, her boyfriend is the Good Humor man, and he says, “They don’t call us that.” She runs through the street and hands a doughnut to her snowman—he’s the snowman, because he’s the Good Humor man. It comes from a jingle that I wrote for Krispy Kreme donuts. I talked to (GBV manager) David Newgarden a few times about maybe sending it to them, but in the end I thought, “No, it’s too goofy.” So now I’ve taken the back way around. Instead of “Here’s a goofy Krispy Kreme doughnut jingle,” it’s on the record. It’s a legitimate Guided By Voices song. Now we can go to them with a little bit of integrity. [Laughs]

Somehow it fits on the album, though.
Pollard: It adds to the diversity of not only the songs, but the sound of each song on the album, and how it’s all over the place. It gives it staying power. You can keep listening to it. It’s a weird record. We actually set out with the intent of making it sound better than it does. But because of what we had to do to fix things, and fuck things up that were too creamy, it makes it more interesting.

I understand there were problems with some of the songs you originally recorded with Toby.
Pollard: We probably didn’t give him enough time. We went in there for a couple of days, and I expected to come out with a finished product. So, he had to redo a lot of things and had trouble mixing some of it. I don’t think he’s used to recording with two Marshalls and a full band at that volume. Some stuff needed work on the guitars, some needed even drums. The song “Hang Mr. Kite” originally kind of rocked. Now it’s just basically chamber music. An “Eleanor Rigby”-type song. It’s completely different. But I like it better.

There’s a lot more samples on this record that in the old days. Of course, even one would be more than there used to be.
Pollard: I like the samples. They sound like the real thing, so why not? What are we gonna do, have an orchestra come in? But we still did stuff ourselves. The recorder at the beginning of “Doughnut For A Snowman” is me. There’s a full song that goes with that; it’s only about 50 seconds long. Maybe it’ll be a b-side or something. It’s called “So High.” The recorder is not easy to play. The secret to playing woodwinds is you have to have a real light touch. The blowing of the pipes and the touching of the holes. [Laughs] But I came up with that little recorder part, which is basically “Hang Fire” by the Stones. And then I came up with the rest of the song, and I got really scared that I would never be able to play that recorder part properly again, so I had to record it immediately.

I haven’t seen the cover of Let’s Go Eat The Factory yet, but I’m guessing you did a collage.
Pollard: The cover reaches a new standard of what-the-fuck-is-that. Collages of photographs I’ve taken and other stuff, really intangible. Abstruse would be the word I would use. It’s difficult to figure out what’s even going on.

Right, because a lot of your collages are visual puns.
Pollard: This is not directly connected to anything on the record. Very oblique. It’s ridiculous.

You’re famous for working quickly. Start to finish, how long did this album take to record?
Pollard: Way longer than it should have. Because we had to fix and fuck things up. Sometimes if you record a song cleanly, it becomes too obvious. But if you fuck it up, put some weird noises in or a layer of static over it, then you’re like, “There’s something cool under there.” So, we had to do that a little bit, go through that process. Toby works a little bit more deliberately than I do.

Everybody works a little more deliberately than you do.
Pollard: So, we probably took … I think we started in late May, and the cover’s just being finished now. So, that’s what, four months?

That’s like a Queen album or something.
Pollard: When we made Do The Collapse with Ric Ocasek—because the Cars had recorded with Roy Thomas Baker, who did a lot of the Queen albums—I told him, “We have to have one song with those harmonies.” He goes, “You got like three months? For one song?”

Are you gonna make up studio names for every place you recorded like on Alien Lanes? For the credits.
Pollard: No. We decided to keep it simple with no specific credits for who recorded what or who played what. Because it could get really complicated. And because I like preserving a certain sense of mystery.

Clearly your songwriting has evolved over the last 15 years, but you still write songs that are immediately identifiable as “classic” Guided By Voices songs. “The Unsinkable Fats Domino,” “Chocolate Boy,” “Doughnut For A Snowman,” on this album, for instance. That’s not always the case with songwriters—to somehow retain the ability to write songs that are as good as the ones they wrote when just starting out. Why do you think that is?
Pollard: One loses one’s innocence because of public acceptance. You become cognizant that the whole world is listening, and you’re not just writing for yourself. You have to maintain the attitude of a child.

You become self-conscious.
Pollard: You’re trying to please everyone and end up pleasing no one. You have to be able to throw your own record against the wall, like we did with (1986 debut) Forever Since Breakfast. You have to make records for yourself. That sounds selfish, but it’s a paradox. By making records for yourself, you’re being not selfish. It means you’re not trying to make records for the whole world, and the record will be better because of that. I see people to this day complaining about how they keep sending stuff out and banging their heads against the wall and not getting anywhere, and it’s because they’re trying too hard. We don’t try too hard.
Mitchell: We don’t even try.
Pollard: We try not to try. That should be our motto.