Great musicians, like great athletes, rarely know when it’s time to hang ’em up. For every Strangeways Here We Come, there’s warmed-over swill like Cut The Crap, the musical equivalent of Muhammad Ali climbing back into the ring one last time just to prove it can be done, only to get beaten by a no-name palooka. After 20-plus years of toiling in rock’s margins and byways, Robert Pollard has assembled his Who’s Next, Guided By Voices’ 15th and final album. Half Smiles Of The Decomposed (Matador) is a solidly conceived and executed rejoinder to the insistent claim the band’s best days are behind it. (1994’s Bee Thousand is the same neck-borne millstone Tommy was for Pollard’s hero Pete Townshend.) The anthems here are recorded to sound like rooftop shouts (the ringing, melodic “Girls Of Wild Strawberries,” power-chord sucker punch “The Closets Of Henry”), while the ballads are among the finest Pollard has crafted (the behind-blue-eyes nostalgia of “Window Of My World”). The hissy static that marked classics like Vampire On Titus has long since faded, but so what? Build a bridge and get over it, people. This is GBV’s final moment, and we should be savoring it like a seven-course meal.

MAGNET phoned Pollard to rehash the band’s good times, bad times and everything in between.

For longtime zealots, it seems difficult to grasp that Guided By Voices will no longer exist after this album.
It won’t as that entity, but I’m going to continue doing stuff under my own name. In fact, I just finished doing a double album with (producer) Todd Tobias. I’m always ahead of myself, and that was one of the reasons I decided that it was a good time for Guided By Voices to end. My girlfriend had bought me a CD burner and I was able to go through this huge box of cassettes that I used to tell people were in a suitcase; actually they used to be in a suitcase and then I emptied ‘em into a big, huge box. Anyway, they’re from the late ‘70s on, and I’ve been able to go through all those cassettes and burn ‘em to CD so I could catalog them. I found probably 50 songs, I have about 20 CDs’ worth of stuff. I had all this material that I felt was personal because it’d been there since the early ‘80s. It didn’t feel like a band project; it felt like I should do it. But I thought it was so good, the material so strong, it didn’t deserve to be pushed aside and put on the Fading Captain series, which doesn’t get as much exposure as a Guided By Voices record or something we do with Matador.

And that was one of the factors that made me decide I think it’s time for me to just do this myself. At the same time, a few months ago, after Half Smiles Of The Decomposed, I was like, “I’m satisfied with this record. It has a happy/sad feeling throughout the album, it feels like it’s the last record.” I’ve been trying to make the last record for a long time, but I was never really satisfied that I’d done it. Guided By Voices has been around for 21 years, and quite frankly, I’m a little bit sick of looking at it. The expectations for what a GBV record is, the comparisons between records—“is this as good as the last one?” or even, “is it as good as Bee Thousand?”—I’m tired of the comparisons. I don’t really know where we can progress, I can’t imagine doing another record where I call everybody and send them demos, “OK, learn this,” everyone brings their ideas to the table, they learn their parts. To me—not so much my band, because I always appreciate their input—it felt like I was going through the motions, kind of complacent, and maybe even a little bit egotistical with Guided By Voices. Like, “We won’t open for this band,” and I needed to break it down and start over, challenge myself as a guitar player. I’m not necessarily a good guitar player, but there’s a certain personality to my playing that I think a lot of the people who listen to GBV like. I think the decision’s hopefully a good one, but right now it’s too hard to tell. I’m going to miss hanging out with the guys in the band: Doug (Gillard, guitar), Chris (Slusarenko, bass), Nate (Farley, guitar) and Kevin (March, drums), I’m really going to miss that lineup. But for the most part, it’s something I have to do right now.

I don’t think the record has a particularly valedictory feel to it, but even so, you guys didn’t outstay your welcome. This feels different to me in that respect. I wish the Who would have quit a few albums prior to when they did.
My dad always used to talk to me about Stan Musial: “You gotta quit while you’re on top.” Exactly, exactly. So [the Who] go out with It’s Hard, on somewhat of a sour note. I thought this album was strong, and I thought that I didn’t want to attempt to do something after this and fall on my face, and then we’re forced to hang it up because now we suck. [Laughs] You’re right, there’s so many bands throughout the history of rock that went one album too far, let it go on for too long. We were around for 21 years; to me, that’s enough. And 21 is sort of a time of graduation, right?

Sure, you might graduate college at 21. [Laughs] You can legally drink then, too, graduate to adulthood. At least here in the States.
You’re old enough to go to war. All kinds of things can happen at 21.

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