Pulling into Economy Island: The Prolificacy and Legacy of Robert Pollard and Guided By Voices

ABSTRACT

In 1992, American band Guided By Voices released their fifth album Propeller. A last-ditch effort, Propeller contains the best unreleased material of band leader Robert Pollard. In debt, the band hand-decorated 500 vinyl copies of the album and quietly distributed them. Luckily, this limited release caught the attention of influential musicians, and recording label Scat Records, sparking broader interest in the band. This article explores how Pollard built his subsequent career. It delves into his unconventional song writing practices, ultimately arguing that Guided By Voices’ longevity lies in a dedication to prolificacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Songwriting
• indie
• recording
• Guided By Voices
• independent music
• popular music

In 1992, American band Guided By Voices released their fifth album Propeller. A last-ditch effort, Propeller contains the bestunreleased material of band leader Robert Pollard. In debt, the bandhand-decorated 500 vinyl copies of the album and quietly distributed them. Luckily, this limited release caught the attention ofinfluential musicians, and recording label Scat Records, sparking broader interest in the band. This article explores how Pollard built his subsequent career. It delves into his unconventional song writing practices, ultimately arguing that Guided By Voices’ longevity lies in a dedication to prolificacy.

Interviewer: I heard once, Bob, that while sitting on the pot, you can write 5 songs. Is that true?

Bob: And three of them are good. (Watch Me Jumpstart)

Introduction

In 1992, the emergence of grunge/alternative rock on the American pop charts coincided with the conclusion of Guided By Voices, a band from Dayton, Ohio.¹ In February of that year, the band released their posthumous album, Propeller. This album represented a final effort to release bandleader Robert Pollard’s best unreleased material, consisting of a combination of studio work and scratchy 4-track cassette machine recordings. The band was already in debt, so in lieu of printing album sleeves, the members of the band hand-decorated all 500 copies of the album,² which they shared amongst themselves. Unbeknownst to the disenfranchised Pollard, a few copies were sent to fanzines and record distributors.

What followed is now part of the band’s underdog mythology. Propeller reached New York tastemakers such as Matt Sweeney (then of the band Chavez) and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, as well as Robert Griffin of the Cleveland-based label Scat Records, who ultimately signed the band. The attention and record deal revitalized Guided By Voices, who continue to perform to this day. The legacy of Propeller itself was cemented in 2004, when Pollard and his brother Jimmy sold two of their remaining hand-assembled copies of the album, one for $6,200 USD and another for $4,800 (Valania).

This article explores how this early and fortuitous start gave way to Robert Pollard’s and Guided By Voices’ legacy. My argument here is that creative prolificacy drives this legacy, and it is one powered by a small team around Pollard who facilitate this process. The practices involved here demonstrate marked similarities to both the band’s do-it-yourself past, and some of today’s modern production/distribution methods, but they were initiated well before the advent of the popular internet. In short, the band tacitly and implicitly recognized the technological and networked affordances of the coming age, and have since remained steadfastly committed to the key production processes they developed in the 1990s. These processes—high-frequency/low-cost production, an open-minded approach to audience building and distribution—have proven effective in the band’s 30-year commercial career, which has established them as a defining act of the 1990s and a regular presence at festivals in the current century.

Confirmations Through the Wire: Previous Work on GBV

While the volume of secondary literature reporting on Guided By Voices (henceforth GBV) is sizable, especially in the 1990s, academics have seldom investigated the band. Clear exceptions include Encarnacao covering GBV—and their 1994 album Bee Thousand, in particular—as part of the “lo-fi” subgenre in the book Punk Aesthetics and New Folk. Encarnacao defines lo-fi in a broad-reaching discussion as “recordings that sound as if they were made in less than professional circumstances,” positioning GBV as one of the defining acts of the then nascent genre, alongside indie staples such as Sebadoh, Pavement, and Ween. Meanwhile, Supper likewise locates the band as lo-fi in a 2018 article. These two projects draw findings predominantly from the band’s popular mid-career albums (Bee Thousand and follow-up Alien Lanes, 1995), each featuring prominent use of scratchy four and eight-track tape recordings. Outside of Encarnacao and Supper, and their consideration of subgenre and production approach, there are just two other widely circulating academic publications directly about Pollard and his band. The first is Tatom’s theoretical analysis of GBV song “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory” as a musical text—a track from Bee Thousand. The second academic contribution arrives from outside the humanities, via American Entomologist’s Spring 2021 edition, wherein O’Neal nominates Pollard as the “Rock Poet Laureate of Entomology” due to his “repeated use of insects in album and song titles” (32). Thus, the bulk of secondary material analyzed here comes from four trade publications; these are Matthew Cutter’s authorized biography Closer You Are: The Story of Robert Pollard and Guided By Voices, 33 1/3 entry Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth, former GBV bass player Jim Greer’s Guided by Voices: A Brief History: Twenty-One Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll, and finally, Zeppelin Over Dayton: Guided By Voices Album By Album by Jeff Gomez. These publications all provide extensive coverage of their topics and time periods, often featuring interviews with past and then-present band members (sans Gomez), and all notably rest upon the labor of a dedicated fanbase with archivist tendencies. In addition to the traditionally published material, podcasts, and currently maintained web portals,³ I have made use of internet archives of previously accessible GBV-related fan sites, and the collections (media clippings, transcriptions, databases) housed there.

In addition to the scant peer-reviewed research on Guided By Voices, there is a plethora of academic material on the 1990s American alternative rock epoch that bears mention. GBV are often cited as a key indie-rock band, a term typically described as an oppositional taste culture (see Azerrad; Bannister; Hesmondhalgh; Hibbett; Kruse; Rogers). To a degree, “indie” inherited American hardcore punk’s do-it-yourself ethos, and handcrafted sound/practice, but combined broader elements from post-punk experimentalism (in the UK) and New Zealand lo-fi pop. Perhaps more relevant to GBV is Bennett’s more colloquial description of indie as a type of “back-to-basics” revisionism; while this softer, less antagonistic description holds of indie-rock as a whole—it was loud, but not stridently political—this is particularly true of GBV, who appeared far less interested in the communalist pulse of hardcore punk, but were deeply invested in creative control, often welding it to make weird, idiosyncratic rock records.

There are, of course, broader manifestations of these indie ideals that can be found elsewhere in popular music, and comparison with other sectors of the music industry (outside of lo-fi or indie-rock) reveal a degree of natural business acumen operating within GBV. The points of comparison are many, but Pollard’s hyper-prolific, home-recorded output is not as unusual in hip hop (Waugh) or black metal (Patterson) or noise music. Similarly, GBV’s disregard for expensive, hi-end recording is now a routine part of music production across almost all popular music genres but can also be found in the aforementioned subgenres as well. Yet, I argue that the band’s legacy is not built on iconic indie rock status—or even their canonical albums from the mid-’90s—but on an unusually long-term dedication to prolificacy. Pollard’s indie cohort are often depicted as slackers, disinterested in business, and while this does not hold on closer inspection, it is especially untrue of Pollard and his band. Pollard is wildly prolific. At the time of writing, he and his band released over 35 full-length albums since 1987. The finer details of this production line are even more impressive: Pollard has written and released over 1,600 songs, only half of which appear as GBV titles. His catalog of side-projects, solo projects, authorized bootlegs, and rarities collections is immense. He has, for instance, released three boxsets of rarities (Suitcase 1–4), each containing 100 songs a piece. During the 2021–22 COVID pandemic, the band’s Rockathon Records released a further 1,000 song rarities via their digital subscription service Hot Freaks. My thesis here is that the varied practices and processes that feed and enable this level of production undergirds the band’s legacy, rather than their ’90s breakout albums or their unusual approach to record production. Prolificacy, not genre or media coronation, is the ever-present throughline in GBV’s four-decade career.

Watch Me Jumpstart: Making a Mountainous Catalogue

One of the strangest aspects of the canonical Bee Thousand (1994) album is that it is, in part, a bricolagic collection of song fragments and demos, rather than a collection of songs written specifically to purpose. As mentioned in the introduction, 1992’s Propeller was compiled as Pollard’s swan song, and it’s important to note that the album is not an entirely lo-fi recording, drawing as it does on studio recordings as well as home-recorded material. The following year, record label Scat released GBV’s The Grand Hour EP (another mix of lo-fi and studio recording), and the EP was followed by full-length album Vampire on Titus, the very apex of GBV’s noisy lo-fi tendencies. Thus, when it came time for the band’s sophomore release on Scat, Pollard was faced with a conundrum:

(I was) out of song ideas … I was wondering what to do next, what direction we should take it. Then it hit me—and it’s a good thing that it did—that I should take all the best ideas that I hadn’t used over the years—segments of songs, pieces of songs—and throw them together like patchwork. (qtd. in Woodworth 25)

Important here is the fact that Pollard has these fragmented audio pieces of Bee Thousand at the ready. To a degree, the impulse to collect and archive his own ideas, often in a very rudimentary, unstructured state, has already announced itself in his biography. The leap forward of Bee Thousand is thus the assemblage itself, rather than the collecting of resources.

This archive that Pollard draws from to create the Bee Thousand album is long-running. It comes from a historical impulse to collect and archive his own creative output, and it pre-dates both his band and his entry into songwriting more formally. In 1993, Pollard told Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine that he started documenting his songwriting as a child, even before he could record songs or play an instrument:

Well, I probably wrote 500 songs (a capella) from the time I was nine until high school. I would write lyrics down on notebook paper with drawings and staple them together … when I had about twelve or thirteen songs, that would be an album and I’d give it a title. I did a shitload of these, catalogued them and referred back to them occasionally to just look at or sing. Some of our L.P.s have bits and pieces of stuff from this period – I wrote “Weedking” from our Propeller LP when I was about 10. (qtd. in Miller)

This is a process he still maintains, in one shape or another. This is Pollard on the writing of his solo album Blazing Gentlemen in 2013:

I came up with a new formula for writing that started with keeping a notebook full of ideas, phrases, and various bits of imagery. I’ve always done that, but not as extensively or religiously. I did it over the course of three months and had 120 pages of titles and lines. From that, I wrote maybe 40 or 50 lyrics by stringing various lines from the notebook together, adding extra lines here and there. Then I took my favorite lyrics and sang them a cappella, line by line, or stanza by stanza. It created multiple hooks within each song. Lastly, I created chord progressions for each thing that I had written. The final step turned the songs into anthems. (qtd. in Hughes)

Turning “the songs into anthems” begins with his famous (in fan circles) “boombox” demos, many of which have seen release in recent years.⁴ The demo recordings are exactly as described: Pollard singing over guitar into a domestic cassette player. Years prior to GBV’s four and eight-track tape machine recordings, Pollard recorded his ideas in this fashion. According to Cutter, former GBV drummer Kevin Fennell remembers instances of this as far back as 1982, a decade before Propeller. Thus, a vast collection of very primitive song ideas and recordings amassed:

Over time Pollard filled that case with freshly magnetized cassettes from the General Electric boombox. They overflowed into shoeboxes, bins, small suitcases, accreting like water behind a dam. (Cutter 73)

This is not lo-fi recording as production aesthetic but as archiving. It was a means to an end, an affordable way to record work that later informed the sound of the band as new compositions, but also started to appear on GBV albums alongside studio recordings.

Throughout Pollard’s career, access to this archive leads to all manner of affordances. Over the long term of his prolificacy, these suitcases of tapes effectively separate his idea generation and drafting from the band’s various composition and finishing processes (home-recordings and various types of studio work). In Pollard’s hands, the suitcase archives dramatically accelerate output and during the band’s mid-’90s era, the real shift in his work is how quickly he becomes alert to possibilities on offer with this practice:

When I write, I brainstorm ideas to the point of exhaustion then go back to the ones I think are worthwhile and work on them. I just file away the rest of the ideas. Going back through old cassettes I’ll find ideas for songs that I actually like better than the ones I worked on and put on albums. Some songs take a while to sink in or only become relevant later. What you come up with can seem a little strange to you. At first, you’ll think, “This is not something I can work with,” but when you come back to it, it can sound good. (Woodworth 25)

On Bee Thousand, to close out my opening example, Pollard wrote a few new songs (“Gold Star for Robot Boy” and “I Am a Scientist”) and the rest came out of the suitcase (Woodworth 25). Here, the sound of these recordings is important—a major narrative hook in the ’90s GBV story—but with regard to the band’s longer legacy, the advances of Bee Thousand contributes far more than audio aesthetics and popular songs. The assembly of Bee Thousand is an early marker of Pollard’s desire to write and record songs in a nonlinear fashion. Two years, and numerous releases later, Pollard would release Alien Lanes — drawn from a similar process—and turn financial necessity into commercial success: the album would garner a $100,000 advance from Matador Records, but cost “$10 to make (excluding the cost of the beer consumed as it was recorded)” (Hyden).

Wake Up with Skills Like This

In his youth, Robert Pollard was an accomplished sportsman. In high school, he excelled in basketball, baseball, and football (Gomez), and later attended Wright State University (WSU) on a sporting scholarship. He famously threw the university’s first “no-hitter” whilst pitching for Wright State (Keener). According to Gomez, Pollard’s sporting prowess is not just a significant part of the GBV fan mythology, but also directly informs Pollard’s approach to song writing:

He approaches song writing from the point of view of an athlete more than as an artist. … What I think happened … he approached picking up a guitar the same way that he picked up a bat; it was less about artistic inspiration than it was just swinging and trying to hit something. (Gomez)

According to Gomez, Pollard’s archiving is a type of practice. It’s not about the creation of a mass archive of material in and of itself. It is not a grand artistic statement, but rather is the exhaust of repeatedly returning to song writing as routine, everyday work.

This sports practice analogy oftentimes appears supported by Pollard himself. In press interviews, Pollard is occasionally called upon to account for his prolificacy, and over the years he has spoken directly about his songwriting techniques (as detailed in the previous section). Over the longer term of Guided By Voices, his exact songwriting routines have changed somewhat, but he remains ardently dedicated to immediately recording his work, before returning to it as a type of sonic collage. This is unsurprising, as running alongside Pollard’s interest in sports, is his long-term interest in collage itself, as a visual artform.

While Pollard was filling up notebooks, then cassettes, with elemental/rudimentary song parts in school, he was also finishing these “imaginary” albums with collaged album covers, assembled from magazines. This was a visual component of the band’s brand that would announce itself more prominently throughout the 1990s, as many of GBV’s subsequent releases featured more and more of his collaged artwork. This century, collage—as an approach—has become more and more prominent in Pollard’s interviews around his songwriting, especially this decade. In 2021, he told Dan Volohov,

Making collages and working on songs is the same process. I stockpile ideas and then move them around until I like what I’m hearing or looking at. Assembling and reassembling until I become excited. Sometimes it takes more time than others. Sometimes it’s spontaneous.

More recently, Pollard has taken to using a CD player to assist with the “assembling and reassembling” adding in a digital component:

“That kind of thing is happening because I’m starting to write songs the same way I make collages,” Pollard said. “I’ll fill up a side of a tape with song ideas, full songs or whatever and then I’ll put it on a CD, and I’ll mark off sections and time them. They’re all tracks so I can just move them around any way I want. I can take something from one song and exchange it for something else. I just keep moving it around until I’ve got something I like.” (Thrasher)

Pollard’s collage work with his audio archive is the second phase of his songwriting. First, the material is recorded and stored—something approached with a sportsman’s practice-led routine. Once in the archive, work can be reassembled into songs and albums. From there, Pollard takes it to the band for recording and live performance. As discussed in the following section, GBV itself—its members and producers—clearly fit this process, and the concept of the band has iterated in recent years to remain highly productive and conscious of Pollard’s workflow.

Don’t Stop Now

Guided By Voices is by no means a stable lineup of personnel. Since 1983, the band has had over 50 members perform under the moniker. This fluidity, taken with the vast collection of side-projects bands, is another layer of Pollard’s collage practice. All elements of the band and its sound can be moved around, reassembled, and reproduced, and all in aid of the one goal: continuation and productivity. In 1999, Pollard stated this explicitly:

To me, it’s all Guided By Voices. That’s what kills me, when people say, “You’re putting your solo career in front of Guided By Voices.” It’s all Guided By Voices: My solo career is Guided By Voices, it’s all Guided By Voices. It’s my name, it’s my fuckin’ baby. It’s all Guided By Voices! (qtd. in Stratton)

How the live band write and record has evolved over time, and I’d like to conclude this article by examining the current iteration of the band as a case study in the optimization of Pollard’s creative process.

The current lineup of Guided By Voices is enjoying a late-career resurgence. This is reflected by an increase in positive reviews about the band’s later-day albums, but also a growing tide of very positive fan response. In the media release for 2017’s August By Cake, the band’s current configuration is referred to as, “the most musically adept and versatile line-up Pollard has ever assembled” (August by Cake … Database). There is also a feeling that this current version of the band is approaching—perhaps bettering—the “classic” lineup that performed and recorded the highly regarded 1990s material. The degree to which this holds is subjective, but there are objective markers of success present, especially if prolificacy is the focus. The current GBV lineup has remained uniform since 2016, consisting of Pollard, the long-standing Doug Gillard (1997–2004; 2016-present), Kevin March (2002–2004; 2014; 2016-present), Mark Shue and Bobby Bare Jr. This makes them the longest running, complete version of GBV, and they have issued 12 full-length albums and 2 double-albums in this time. The lineup even managed two albums a year during the COVID pandemic moment (2020 and 2021) where many artists took leave from the studio and the album production cycle, unable to assemble their bands to practice or record safely, nor promote or perform their work.

The new lineup isn’t the only stability now enjoyed by the band. They have, since 2016, worked exclusively with sound engineer, Travis Harrison in various capacities (mixing, production, and live sound).⁵ In a 2019 interview, King refers to Harrison as the band’s “George Martin” and Pollard, in response highlights Harrison’s prolificacy:

He never stops working. He’s a workaholic and he’s extremely intelligent. He’s almost telepathic when it comes to my songs. We have a very similar lexicon and he’s got a great musical vocabulary. We have a similar interest in literature, the occult and films. He might be a little trashier in his tastes sometimes than me, but not by much. (qtd. in King)

This represents something of a new chapter for a band so historically known for its DIY home-recording tendencies, but it is not the only change made to the GBV workflow.

The current lineup of GBV is not a home-recording project. The band is spread across four states of the U.S., more than 600 miles apart (Enos). According to Fortune Magazine, Pollard’s boombox demos now circulate among band members online, before the ensemble converges in Harrison’s Serious Business Music studio in Brooklyn (Enos). There, the ensemble tracks their parts, under Harrison’s guidance, before returning the work to Pollard who records vocals. In the Fortune piece, Pollard did this in an AirBnB in Dayton. This streamlined process explains the fast succession of late-career albums—all of a similar studio quality—and all produced with a focus on Pollard’s momentum. Harrison told Fortune, “Bob’s writing sometimes happens almost spontaneously. I focus on keeping the flow of the process intact.” Forty years into their career, GBV have found a hi-resolution recording style that matches the speed of their early lo-fi work. During the COVID-19 pandemic lock-downs, the band continued working and releasing records. The aforementioned Hot Freaks subscription service relied heavily on Harrison, working with Pollard’s archive, to surface 53 recordings (approximately 1,000 songs, including various live show recordings). This service was a financial boon to the band—subscriptions were priced at $100 USD—and comes directly from the preexisting supply chain and work approach the band uses to make new work. In essence, it is a very clear distillation of Pollard’s creative process, representing as it does the most direct and rapid commodification of his archived material.

Conclusion

This article argues that Guided By Voices’ legacy lies in Robert Pollard’s long-term dedication to prolificacy, rather than the iconic indie rock status of his band or their unusual approach to record production. As a catalog, Pollard’s work proposes a fascinating case study in creativity, and the role of workflow in artistic production. Pollard’s commitment to archiving his songwriting ideas and utilizing collage as a creative approach has enabled his output over three decades. As he has moved closer to embracing collage as a central aspect of his creative process, his prolificacy has increased. This concept-led approach is predicated on various experiments made with recording technology, charting coordinates from early lo-fi home recordings to their current streamlined process of circulating demos among band members online, tracking parts in a professional studio, and recording vocals separately. This approach allows Pollard to maintain his momentum. It is also worth noting that Pollard’s work and approach to creativity extend beyond music. His collage-based approach can be seen in other creative endeavors, such as his visual art and lyrics. This suggests that his workflow and commitment to prolificacy are not limited to one medium but are fundamental aspects of his overall creativity.

This analysis raises several questions and avenues for future academic exploration. My primary motive here is to begin the discussion of the band’s work within popular music studies. For example, further academic research could delve into the specific influences and inspirations behind Pollard’s collage approach and the ensuing catalog. Pollard is an avid record collector, so his musical influences (something excluded from this discussion) are common knowledge, frequently discussed by fans online. Additionally, the impact of GBV’s prolific output on the music industry, including their unique approach to record production and distribution, could be examined in more depth, contrasting it against the fundamentals of music business. Finally, the GBV audience is steadfast and active, and thus ripe for methodologies surrounding audience behavior.

In conclusion, Robert Pollard and Guided By Voices offer a compelling case study for academia to explore the relationship between social context, musical practice, technological affordance, and independent distribution. While their ’90s breakout albums and their unusual approach to record production may have garnered attention, it is Pollard’s dedication to musical archiving and collage, that underpins their legacy. The story of Guided By Voices is one of creativity, innovation, and a commitment to pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the world of music, and it is a story that is ready for continued scholarly investigation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In January of 1992, Nirvana’s Nevermind album replaced Michael Jackson’s Dangerous as the #1 album on the Billboard charts. As Azerrad details, the success of Nirvana came after the long 1980s gestation of American underground rock music. Yet the success of Nevermind soon gave way (or bolstered) the early-’90s careers of many grunge/alternative acts such as Soundgarden, the Smashing Pumpkins, Alice in Chains, Hole, L7, and Pearl Jam. This, in turn, introduced media attention and capital to a vast array of independent recording labels, scenes and bands. See Strong for a fuller account.

2. Pollard told Sean Kitching for The Quietus, “I gave everyone in the band plus a few other friends the homework assignment of coming up with 20 covers a piece. The back was just a photocopy of some drawings of wrestlers that I found and threw together with the hand printed titles and credits. Different people did the colourings. My brother [Jimmy] did the coolest, most elaborate ones.”

3. The long-running GBVDB—Guided By Voices Database is an essential source for anyone studying the band’s career or their expansive back catalog.

4. Over the years, Pollard has allowed more and more the boombox recordings into circulation. The most obvious example of this is his 2011 solo recording, Let It Beard: Boombox Demos, but the recordings can also be heard on the Suitcase boxsets and via the Psycho and the Birds albums.

5. While this holds true for Guided By Voices, the reliance on Harrison as the sole producer of the band’s work has a clear precedent when considering Pollard’s broader oeuvre. Between 2004 and 2015, Ohio-based multi-instrumentalist and record producer Todd Tobias worked on a vast assortment of Pollard-related records, including the GBV album envisioned as their last (2004’s Half Smiles of the Decomposed). The great majority of this work forms Pollard’s solo career between the brief GBV downturn (2005–2009), but also includes side-project records by Circus Devils and Psycho and the Birds. The Psycho and the Birds releases (see discography) are especially curious as they are Pollard’s boombox recordings, tracked over by Tobias, forming another new and unusual intersection between lo-fi home-recording and more studio-led practice.