The Power of Suck

Guided By Voices: A Brief History:
21 Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock 'n' Roll
By James Greer


My favorite quote about Robert Pollard was from his old bandmates, one of whom said something along the lines of, "Bob can write five songs every time he goes to take a dump." To which another bandmate added: "And three of them will be pretty good!"

I'm a Guided By Voices fan. My wife walked down the aisle to a string quartet arrangement (thanks again Trott!) of a Guided By Voices song. (Which one? "Big Boring Wedding," of course!) I could go on at great length to explain how learning to love "Bee Thousand" changed my life, and I could do so while being less than 50% full of crap. Suffice it to say that I learned from GBV's Robert Pollard that the key to creativity was to stop worrying about the details and just get something down on tape (or paper, or in type, etc...). If it was a question of rock 'n' roll, you didn't have to worry about the recording being any good, or even if your drummer missed a beat, or if your lyrics made sense, or if what you were doing was currently considered cool by the hipsters, or if you were considered too old. I found all of that very liberating.

It's the punk/indie ethos, essentially, and I had already heard it, but GBV crystallized it all for me precisely because they didn't really look or sound like your typical punk or indie band.

But, as time went on, GBV grew less interesting to me. As Pollard put out a staggering number of releases every year, it became nearly impossible to keep up with him. And some of the novelty and charm wore off. Eventually I began to feel that what he needed was a good editor.

Which brings me to James Greer's book. Fans will get a kick out of it, I guess, but I need to qualify that. I consider myself a fan, but this book is for the kind of fan who owns nearly every one of those innumerable releases and can recall all of those incomprehensible song titles.

Greer played bass for GBV for a while, so he's an insider, with all the good and bad that implies. But he's also a former staffer at Spin, which I would have thought had taught him something about writing for a more general audience. Instead, we get lots of long, apparently verbatim interviews with Pollard and cohorts, often when they're drunk (which, clearly, is a very common state for them). This yields some fun stuff. For instance: Bob says he started dyeing his graying hair around the time of "Do the Collapse" in an effort to look younger. But mostly it's overkill. Greer could have used a good editor. And he could have written more critically, evaluating the music in more detail.

But I guess that Greer is trying to write a GBV book that follows the GBV ethic. That means turning off his internal editor and internal critic. That's a great way to spur one's creativity, but it's not necessarily a good way to spur the writing of a good nonfiction book.