Aside from his eclectic, voluminous discography as Wooden Wand and beyond — in my circles, the dissolute, demoralized Born Bad commands particularly legendary status — I admire James Jackson Toth for his ability to get me, and other people, deeply into things.
He’s primarily responsible for converting me to Drive-by Truckers, Royal Trux, Autechre, Tears for Fears, ECM Records, techno and house, and beyond — whether through his terrific catalog breakdowns, in-depth Tape Op interviews, or just hours of back-and-forth in the DMs.
His wife, Dr. Leah Hutchinson Toth — professor, soap-maker, ambient artist, proprietor of Footfalls Records — is an equal and parallel force. The Toths, in short, are folks to know if you care about music — both Excited Ones! to their core.
Given Toth’s encyclopedic knowledge of jazz, extreme metal, Wu-Tang minutiae (he was born and bred in Shaolin, after all), and more, I’m proud to have one arena of nerd-dom where I possibly have him on the ropes — Guided by Voices’ current output.
But that isn’t much in and of itself, as Toth’s history with Robert Pollard’s music goes back to when I was in diapers. Their mythos and ethos loom large in his corner of the music scene. And the DNA of these songs is tightly interwoven through his.
(Exhibit A, in my opinion, would be Wooden Wand’s 2005 album Harem of the Sundrum & the Witness Figg. Which I imagine, without “Chicken Blows” and “14 Cheerleader Coldfront,” wouldn’t exist.)
Today, Wooden Wand is on ice, but Toth remains a creative force, slugging out bizarre, immersive works of “hyperborean dream dub” as DUNZA. You can keep abreast of his current adventures over at his Patreon, The Toth Zone.
His most recent album of singer/songwriter music, James & the Giants’ self-titled album, was released in 2023 via Kill Rock Stars.
Read on for a full interview with Toth about what Robert Pollard and GBV mean to him. Their new album, Thick Rich and Delicious, was released October 31 via GBV Inc. To order it, click here.
Music fandom is a bit of a pathology for both of us. Do you ever feel self-conscious about overwhelming mixed company with the things you love?
Yeah, because it’s childish, ultimately. But your enthusiasm is infectious. Like, I consider myself a Guided by Voices fan, but I’m not a fanatic like some of the people that you’ve dealt with. I’ve always liked them, but your Substack has made me want to hear the records that I haven’t heard.
Because I don’t want to be one of those fairweather fans, like, “After Under the Bushes or Isolation Drills, I’m overwhelmed.” I don’t buy that. I really, really resent when people say about Pollard in particular, “He needs an editor.” Like, what balls to say that? First of all, it’s looking a gift horse in the mouth. It’s like saying, “You’re doing too much cool shit.”
Second of all, one of the best things about Guided by Voices, to me, is the work ethic. I find that more inspiring than anything else. If you’re a plumber, maybe you take a week’s vacation — but basically, every day, you’re fixing toilets and sinks, right? You’re going to work, you’re doing this thing. And if you’re lucky enough, your job is to write songs.
That quotidian aspect is something I really, really admire about Robert Pollard. People say, “He needs an editor,” and it’s like, “Dude, you need a life coach. You’re just not working hard enough. We should all be so lucky.”
It might be trivial from a listener’s perspective, but as a songwriter, I’ve been really inspired by Guided by Voices. And one of the reasons is, I have this theory — and maybe Bob will read this and be like, “That’s bullshit” — but I have this theory that a lot of the songs, especially from the middle period, were born out of jams. Rather than, you and I might sit down with a guitar and be like, “We’re going to go C, F…”
“Evil Speakers,” which is a great song, is a great example. If you try to listen to that song and just listen to the band and not the vocal, it really does sound like dudes jamming in a room. It sounds like an excerpt from something.
Because if you listen to where the chords go, they’re pretty simple chords, but the changes are very, very weird. Like something you would just kind of bust out in an improv thing. You know the line where it’s like, “The unhitched trailers”? The chord goes somewhere and it never comes back.
That’s something that I’ve done, and I probably picked it up from Guided by Voices. A lot of the first records I made, I was in my freshman year in college, and I would organize these jam sessions with various people. It’s why there are, like, 30 people listed in the credits to my early records.
We would regularly jam, and then over summer or Christmas break, I’d go to my parents’ house and play those tapes and sing over them. I would impose these melodies and lyrics over them. And I would never come up with those melodies over a straight I-IV-V progression on the acoustic guitar, you know?
Then, years later, people would be at shows and be like, “Can you do this song?” And I’d have to be like, “No, it’s not a song. It doesn’t even exist. It’s just something I sang over once, and that’s the only time I did it, and it became this song.”
Anyway, I feel like certain Guided by Voices songs are like this — not a lot of them, but I feel like there’s a few. “Hot Freaks” might be one too, I don’t know. I mean, I can’t picture somebody sitting at a piano or an acoustic guitar being like, “I met a non-dairy creamer, explicitly laid out like a fruitcake…”
I feel like he had a piece of something much bigger, and he had these lyrics and sang them over it. And his gift for melody is just the most natural thing in the world, so he just creates these songs out of pieces.
That’s one way that I feel really inspired. I love that idea of challenging the idea of what it means to write a song. Like, how many ways can you write a song? This is one of the ways, right? Taking scraps from 20 years ago, singing something over it, inventing a melody, and you have this song that people are going to sing along to, you know? That’s so amazing to me.
What do you get out of Robert’s vocal melodies?
In your interview with [GBV producer] Travis Harrison, you talked about the John Lennon thing where the vocal melody doesn’t change, but the chords underneath it do. I thought that was really astute, because I never thought about that in a pop/rock context.
But I think about that in jazz — when I hear Thelonious Monk in the trio with Oscar Pettiford on the bass, what makes those songs so magical is the choices that are made in the harmony underneath what’s going on on the piano.
You know, a good example is the trio version of “Darn That Dream” by Monk. It’s all about what’s happening underneath the melody. So, thinking about that in the rock context, the John Lennon thing, is really cool. I never really thought about it before.
What’s your relationship with prolificacy? Did you try to make music at this clip back in the quote-unquote freak folk days?
No, not consciously. But it ties back to what I was saying earlier about the work ethic thing, because people told me I needed an editor. People who worked at labels that I recorded for, even managers that I’ve had, have been like, “These are 30 good songs, but 10 of them are great. Why don’t you just deal with the 10 of them and make them as good [as can be]?”
I wasn’t really interested in that, because to me, it’s the process of making the song exist — that’s the most fun part, and that’s the magic act. Like, it’s fun being in the studio. It’s fun seeing a record come out. It’s fun playing live sometimes.
But sitting by myself, and there wasn’t a song, but then there is — it’s like the Donovan song, “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain.” Like, that is the magic act. I just made this song exist, even if it’s not a good song. Like, how amazing is it that you can give birth to this thing out of nowhere? The writing and creating is so much fun, and it’s still fun.
So, I just wanted to get on to the next one. Maybe that’s at my own expense. Maybe the records could have been better if I’d spent more time on them. But I like working fast and getting them out there. So, I wasn’t prolific on purpose. I never sat down and was like, “I need to write 10 songs.”
I go through dry spells, but it’s more laziness than a lack of inspiration. Like, if I have built up 40 songs on a hard drive that I think are pretty good, and there’s no record coming out, I don’t feel the need necessarily to record 40 new ones.
I struggle with the disconnect between how a song makes me feel when I write it and how it’ll hit someone’s ears. When a tune feels really fresh and good to me, I dread the reaction being “Boring, sounds like the Lemonheads.”
I think ears are subjective too, though. Like, there are things that you and I both love, but there are people who will be completely unaffected, stone-faced. And you’re like, “Don’t you hear the beauty in this?” Or even, if it’s not beautiful, maybe it’s cerebral. “Don’t you care how brilliant that is?”
My closest friends don’t care about this band at all.
[Laughs] I love Excited Ones!. I think it’s really, really great. And I think that it would be great if it inspired similar Substacks that are centered around one band. I mean, we’ve had message boards and forums in the past — and, obviously, there have been fan sites. But I think what you’re doing — getting under the hood and talking to the whole organization — I think is really fascinating and really good.
Because it’s not a fan site. I mean, it is, but it also isn’t. It’s not this sort of sycophantic, “These are the jeans that Robert Pollard wears.” You’re talking to the people in this really well-connected, tight-knit community, who are making this amazing thing happen without really thinking about mainstream taste — without thinking about, We need to recoup on this one.
I’m sure that some of those conversations happen, but it’s just great that they’re supporting this dude who is basically like a living art project — where you get the feeling he would do it whether people were listening or not. And that’s another thing that really inspires me: the people who create their own world, their own universe, because what they see is not satisfying to them.
Have you heard of Marta Becket?
I don’t think I have, no.
She was a famous ballerina who started getting older, and then drove out to the desert and found a plot of land in the middle of nowhere for, like, $100. She bought it, and she would stage these shows where she would dance, and she painted an audience on the wall that looked at her. I’m not describing it well, but she’s this spectral person from another time. Leah saw it, and we started buying books about her and stuff. She’s just really inspiring.
Eventually, people started coming, because there was this freak in the desert; I’m sure there was a Daniel Johnston or Wesley Willis aspect to it. But she was just doing it because that was the world she wanted to create. And she walked away from everything else and lived like there was nothing around.
I feel like there’s something of Marta Becket in Robert Pollard. He’s designing record sleeves — the Suitcase thing, where he made up all the fake band names. That’s something you do when you’re a kid and you’re into music; you make album covers for albums that don’t exist, and you come up with band names and song titles before you play an instrument. And he’s kind of still doing that, which is, to me, really incredible.
Is that beginner’s mind, or is there a more accurate term?
I guess with beginner’s mind, you’re approaching everything as if it was for the first time. So, with true outsider art, if you applied beginner’s mind, you’d be like, “What’s this instrument? What’s this thing with the six strings? How do I operate it?” But I imagine if you just pick up a guitar and start strumming — Oh, there’s a G chord, or whatever — it’s not quite beginner’s mind.
I think it’s just that people like him don’t lose that initial excitement, that initial spark, that initial sort of inspiration that you get when you’re into music as a kid, and you don’t lose it. You’re not like, That’s childish. I’m gonna sell all my band T-shirts. That’s the old me. I’ve got to become a banker now, or something. I don’t know — that inspires me a lot.
What I miss about touring is the adventure. I don’t miss playing. I don’t necessarily miss camaraderie. I mean, I miss seeing my friends in every city and stuff. But I [really] miss not knowing what each day was going to be. When Covid hit, that was the only thing that kind of made me depressed: were the days of adventure over? I’ve been touring since I was 19 years old, and I never would have been able to go to Helsinki or Barcelona or Greece just on a whim. I’ve forgotten some of the countries I’ve visited. And music was the visa that allowed a working class person to see this shit.
I mean, I don’t want to be dramatic and say it’s been stolen from me, but it’s the Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Spotify, Covid, and AI. And you have the political aspects that we don’t need to talk about, and all of these sort of conspire in a conflation of events that prevented us from doing the Black Flag thing ever again.
As far as I know. Maybe we’re in a bottleneck and the next generation will figure out how to do it, but I don’t know.
How much did you ever subscribe to mythos and mystique in the days of Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice? Because GBV has both, deeply.
Do you mean buying into it as a fan, or buying into it as something I was sort of engineering for my own quote-unquote career?
I guess they’re two sides of the same coin.
Yeah, I mean, I love mythology in music. The reason I called myself Wooden Wand when it started was because of bands like Swell Maps. They gave themselves names like Epic Soundtracks and Jowe Head. And then Tower Recordings, who were a band I really loved and still love — PG Six, Spanish Wolfman. I don’t know if that just comes from [liking people with names like] Darth Vader, being a kid, but I thought that was really cool.
I get the whole indie rock and grunge thing: I look just like you. I’m wearing a flannel shirt, you’re wearing a flannel shirt. The Fugazi thing: There’s no border between us. When we’re on stage, we’re the same.
I totally respect that, and a big part of my ethos and philosophy definitely is informed by that. However, I kind of like the idea of the star — even in a microcosmic sense.
When I was a kid, I worshipped Glenn Danzig for so many reasons. I feel like Danzig is singular in all the multiple universes where there’s not a lot of uniqueness. In rock and roll, heavy metal, even in the music business, nothing was like Danzig.
And I think there’s something to the way that Danzig created the Misfits that reminds me a little bit of Guided by Voices. “I’m gonna take these doo-wop, girl group melodies, but also comic books and fucking Dracula and shit, and I’m gonna put it together in this catchy, really gnarly [aesthetic where] we’re gonna wear costumes and we’re gonna look fucked up.” Nobody fucking did that, you know?
And then he just really committed to the bit. I was probably 30 before I realized he was, like, five feet tall. I was like, No way. He’s got to be at least nine feet. I don’t want to meet him and look down to shake his hand. I want to look up at Danzig. Maybe it’s growing up into metal, which has a lot of mythological figures — people who just seem larger than life.
Your friend Hank Shteamer [of Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches fame] went to see Ink and Dagger recently. That was a band I loved back then. They did the corpse paint and stuff, but it wasn’t black metal. They would start shows by somebody popping out of a coffin. It’s all razzle-dazzle and showbiz and stuff, but there’s something that still kind of intoxicates me about that. Rather than like, “Is that the band, or is that just people in line waiting to see the band?”
It’s harder to have that suspension of disbelief in the internet era. When I started making records, you could still be anonymous. You could maintain anonymity by sending the record to a few record stores and telling a few people, but swearing them to secrecy. You could probably ride on, “We don’t know who these people are. There’s these weird people making these records,” and that’s pretty lost with the Internet.
I remember when Burial came out, and people was like, “Is it Four Tet? Is it Thom Yorke?” That was really exciting.
We’ve all known who Jandek is for, like, 25 years.
That was so, so depressing to me. I remember the moment I found out. My friend Tovah — an old friend of mine who I ran a label with — was at, I think, All Tomorrow’s Parties, and she was like, “Jandek’s playing.” I was like, “Haha, that’s what everybody says.”
She was like, “Look.” And she sent me a picture — and this is how long ago it was, where the picture loaded, like, piece by piece, layer by layer on the screen. And I suddenly saw this image of the man that I’d seen on the album covers. And I swear, my heart skipped a beat. I was like, Holy shit. Like fucking Jesus had come. There’s no way.
You’re younger than me, so I remember the pre-coming-out Jandek and the speculation. There was a website I used to go to all the time — this guy Seth Tisue did it — and there were so many crazy theories. One of them was like, he was a guy that died in Vietnam, and his parents were issuing all these records — like Corwood was his parents. Somebody else was like, “It’s Thurston [Moore] doing it. It’s a big hoax.” There was all this conjecture, and it was amazing.
There was a documentary about him called Jandek on Corwood — and I felt so bad for the filmmakers, because in the last scene, there’s a voiceover, and it’s like, “Who is Jandek? We’ll never know.” Two years later, it’s like, “There he is. Sterling [Smith]. He’s a retired guy who’s finally getting the chance to play out and stuff.” I still love those records, but that definitely took some of the shine off the apple for me.
Robert never worked anonymously in quite that way. But that questionable perception lingers — of the outsider artist, of the savant. When the truth is, he simply worked harder than everyone else.
I think it happens sort of in spite of him. The mythology is the tired thing we’ve all been tired of hearing for 30 years — retired schoolteacher, these guys drink a lot. That was a really good sort of angle in the beginning, but it’s boring when people still talk about that as if it’s part of what’s happened in the last 40 years. I mean, they formed in ‘83. That’s a long-ass time to be still working this angle. He quit being a teacher around the time of Propeller or Bee Thousand, right?
And I don’t know if you can call him an outsider artist, because he’s so learned about music. He’s a student of rock ‘n’ roll.
He has a classical sense of pop/rock composition.
And you can tell from the collages and stuff — he’s internalized Genesis. So, if you think about the story of this former elementary school teacher from Ohio who makes indie rock on Matador, you don’t immediately think of Jethro Tull and Genesis and Amon Düül and shit. He goes pretty deep, and it’s not just the Who. I don’t give a shit about the Who at all.
Really? I adore the Who.
Most people do. I just listened to [Boston Spaceships’] “You Satisfy Me,” and I think people overstate the Who’s influence on Bob’s songs and maybe understate the Cheap Trick influence. I mean, “Postal Blowfish” = “He’s a Whore,” right?
I think they’re a better reference point for Guided by Voices. You know this about me: I’m not an anthem guy. I don’t like anthems, generally.
I don’t think you like suspended chords either.
But Guided by Voices are the outlier here. There’s something really galvanizing about their music. Some of the best times I remember listening to music with other people, it’s been Guided by Voices.
One time, I was on tour, and I remember it was [Hush Arbors’] Keith Wood and [Burial Hex’s] Clay Ruby — the three of us in a van. Somebody just happened to put on Propeller; I don’t think that any of us had talked about Guided by Voices before.
And all three of us shouted along to “Mesh Gear Fox.” We knew every word. It was so much fun.
It feels good in the bones to sing.
It feels great. Like your team just won the Super Bowl — every time, that song. And then it goes on from there, because you’ve got “Exit Flagger” and “Weed King.” I mean, that’s a fucking great record.
But, it was just one of those, like — I hate to call it a bonding moment, because there were no girls there. But the three of us had been in vans together for months; we’d spent time together.
And Clay just put it on, like you do on tour — “I’m going to jam this” — and we all knew it by heart. And those aren’t easy words to remember, but we all remembered the whole fucking record.
It’s such a good feeling. I don’t really lose myself. I’m prudish and self-conscious and I put too big an emphasis on some vanishing notion of dignity. I’m not a guy who’s going to scream along in the front row. I wish I was that person, but I’m not that person.
But Guided by Voices brings out that fucking air guitarist in me, man. It’s just crazy, because I don’t really like a lot of bands that have that effect.
How do they pull that off without succumbing to a cringey local-band vibe?
I don’t know. I guess that’s the ineffable magic, because you can’t answer that question on paper. On paper, it’s these guys from Ohio who started in their 30s, and they’re still going, and they’re all kind of townies; they live in this community, or most of them do, and most of them are, like, ex-jocks and stuff.
That’s not something that the average Miles Davis fan, or even the average Pavement fan might be like, “Oh, let me hear that.” It’s a really interesting alchemy, that band. You couldn’t create another version of that. They’re the only ones that can do this.
When you hear GBV’s current output, what do you hear? What hits you?
Well, I’ve been catching up thanks to Excited Ones!, but I hear most of what I fell in love with about the band in the first place.
Because I tend to gravitate towards music that a lot of people would consider inaccessible — you wouldn’t, but most normies would — I kind of miss “Chicken Blows” and songs like that, where they’re really kind of out. Almost like homespun psych stuff.
The other day, when I was listening to the new record, I was like, “Oh, man, it’s a whole record of ‘The Official Ironmen Rally Song’ and ‘Glad Girls.’” The word I come back to, again, is galvanizing. There’s these songs that you just want to hear really loud. Given the quantity and quality of songs he’s written, it’s really hard to think of a songwriter who has that batting average of how many songs versus how many of them are good.
I mean, I loved them the moment I heard them. I think I had heard the name before, but assumed they were, like, a praise music group. This was around the time of Voices That Care. They had a big kind of Hands Across America, “We Are the World” type single with a gospel choir. And for some reason, in 10th grade, I conflated those.
And then I was watching 120 Minutes, as I did religiously, and they showed the video for “Auditorium” and “Motor Away.” They were paired because the songs were so short. I heard it and was like, This fucking rules. This is great. And I went and got Alien Lanes the next day at Nobody Beats the Wiz, which is no longer around.
That was the same year I started college, and I worked with the radio station, where they had The Grand Hour EP, Sunfish Holy Breakfast, and Vampire on Titus. That’s when I started really getting into this band, and I loved everything I heard. I haven’t heard them all, but they don’t make bad records.
In my mind — and this is just a personal thing for me — Guided by Voices occupy a very similar place as Steely Dan. If you asked on the fly, “James, what are your 10 favorite bands?” there’s a very good chance I would leave out Guided by Voices and Steely Dan. But if you were to ask me which bands have lived with me through my life, the longest…
In terms of sustained interest or just exposure?
Sustained interest, definitely, more than exposure. Because everything’s easy to ignore now. Sustained interest in the sense that those bands have been with me for more than half of my life, and when I can’t think of anything else to play, I’ll play those records — because I know they’ll sound good, I’ll enjoy them, and I know I’ll be in a better mood.
In that way, I feel like Guided by Voices is a little easy to take for granted, because they’ve always been there. They’ve always been good. Maybe that has to do with him being prolific and the quantity of records: Oh, another great Guided by Voices record, the fourth one this year. It’s easy to overlook it in a world of post-Neutral Milk Hotel or something, where the guy puts out one fucking record once.
To me, that’s the difference between a songwriter and a guy who wrote 10 songs once. I feel like even in my own small, little corner of the indie world, if I had made one record that people liked and disappeared, they’d be reissuing it now. There’d be a box set, right?
But because I was probably more like Bob, I was like, “Oh, you like that? Wait ‘til you hear the next one. It’s way better.” Like, “I can’t wait to do this next one.” It’s a work ethic thing, and I think that ultimately damns a lot of people.
Because if Guided by Voices had done, say, Bee Thousand and disappeared for 10 years — I mean, that record’s already pretty legendary in our world, among our cohort. But it would be something different if he had just stopped.
All I’m saying is, they’re an easy band to take for granted, in the same way that I always forget that all of the Steely Dan records are great. Even the reunion ones — [2000’s] Two Against Nature. The Donald Fagen solo records — [1993’s] Kamakiriad is an amazing record.
I’d probably forget to mention Steely Dan, and I’d probably forget to mention Propeller and Alien Lanes. Although I still play them, and I still love them. I have quote-unquote favorite bands that I don’t listen to nearly as much as The Royal Scam or Alien Lanes.
Shoot from the hip, and give me your favorite Pollard or GBV song.
I mean, “Mesh Gear Fox” is a masterpiece, right? It’s one of the longest songs he’s ever recorded. There were others just as long later on, but…
“I’m much greater than you think.” What a line.
And all those parts, and they’re just like bam, bam. Even the intro: “Alright, rock and rooooll!” “GBV! GBV! GBV!” It’s just so immediate. You’re just there. You’re right there. That has personal significance.
And it seems ridiculous to even mention songs like “Game of Pricks,” because this guy’s written what, like, 10,000 songs? And everybody goes to this song or “Motor Away.” But I consider myself a scholar or student of songwriting, and that’s a perfect song. “I’ll climb up on the house / Weep to water the trees.” That’s fucking beautiful.
I still feel like a poser and a dilettante talking about one of his most popular songs. But I think that in this one case — it’s kind of like how I always say, jazz is the only genre where the consensus is correct. You’ve got Monk, Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Miles… like, those are the best guys, right? Those are the guys you have to measure everyone up to. There’s a reason they’re on the Mount Rushmore.
And you can throw Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins in there. And we all have our favorite players; Sonny Rollins, I’d put in there.
But to me, rock and roll doesn’t really work that way. You could say Beatles, Elvis, whatever. You can argue Beatles vs. Stones. People have been doing it forever. And with a guy with as many songs as Robert Pollard, it’s weird to feel like there’s a consensus where there’s five songs that everybody loves.
He put “Shocker in Gloomtown” on an EP [The Grand Hour], but I’d build a whole record around a song like that.
You’ve mentioned GBV’s various splits before. I honestly don’t know any of them.
Yeah, they did. They did one with Cobra Verde, which was the first time I’d heard them. They did one with the Grifters — a great band from Memphis who you would probably really love. There’s definitely a GBV-ness to them, but a little more Stonesy, a little more ragged. Girls Against Boys, I think that was the first time I heard them.
Back in the ‘90s, the split 7” was almost like a business card, because they were really cheap to make. I remember in punk zines like HeartattaCk and Punk Planet and Maximumrocknroll, the ads were like “$3, postage paid, well-concealed cash.”
Even me — I didn’t have any money growing up, but sending $3 in the mail and waiting at the mailbox like it was Christmas, it was the best. You could probably trace a lot of my obsessions to that: I’m getting a present in the mail. It cost me $3, and I got to take a walk to the post office, and reuse a stamp anyway. It’s a very low-investment thing, and I’ve heard a lot of bands on splits with bands I liked that I didn’t know. And I was like, Oh, I like this band, too.
Talk about regionality as a creative value. GBV sprung from the soil of Dayton. Like the Wu-Tang Clan, you sprung from the soil of Staten Island.
I think that’s a great question, and a question I wish other people would ask when these things come up. Because I think it’s really awesome and inspiring when someone like Bob stays in Dayton.
And I think anytime somebody achieves a level of renown that he has, where they come from a place, but stay close to home, and they represent such a place — Devo, too [from Akron, Ohio]; I don’t think they moved to LA until the soundtrack work later, or whatever. I always really respected the fact that Wayne Coyne still lives in Norman, Oklahoma.
When I lived in Kentucky, I would see Will Oldham at shows all the time in Louisville. These are people who’ve achieved a level of success where they could be living in LA or Brooklyn or Berlin or wherever, and there’s something that keeps them in the place where they’re from.
And it’s not in a townie way; it’s just like, This is where I come from, and this is what I understand, and this is where I like to be. And I can travel all over the world and eat exotic food and everything, but I still come back here. With Guided by Voices, I think that’s an additional, inspiring layer for me.
Because I do come from a very working class background where you’re not really supposed to go make records and tour in Europe. You’re supposed to be a firefighter or work for the phone company or be an elementary school teacher. Which is not blue collar. But you know what I mean? It’s something that’s expected of you. Like, nobody would be shocked at graduation if you were like, “I’m going to be a teacher.”
But coming from a family of civil servants and being like, “Yeah, I’m going to make this psych folk record and go on tour in Europe and sleep in a van” — that doesn’t sound like something that a lot of families would accept.
So, you have to earn it more when you don’t come from, whether it’s money or it’s cultural capital. Like, maybe you don’t have money — but your dad’s a composer, your mom’s an artist. I think it’s a lot easier to make a go of it under those circumstances.
I don’t consider myself a prejudiced person, but I’m always a little suspicious when I see that a band’s parents have their own Wikipedia pages. That’s always an immediate red flag. But, I mean, we could talk about Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt and even Miles Davis. These are people who grew up affluent, and they made some of the greatest music ever.
The last time I got caught shoplifting, Under the Bushes Under the Stars was the album I was stealing. I was a prolific shoplifter in high school. I got really good at it. We had a whole crew of people that used to do it. We were deep. We had tricks, we had tools, we knew blind spots. We were really into it.
But the last time I went was a solo mission. It was like a mafia movie where it was like, Just this one last score! because I had already been accepted into college. I was like, I’m turning 18. I don’t need a police record for petty larceny or whatever.
And I went to the mall, and I remember it was Under the Bushes Under the Stars, Spain’s The Blue Moods of Spain, and Elvis Costello’s Blood & Chocolate. Those were the three records. And I put them in my pants, and I got caught stealing.
That’s a whole long story I won’t go into, but I just always associate Under the Bushes Under the Stars with getting caught shoplifting, which adds a certain personal mystique to that record.
You’ve said that a mid-’90s Guided by Voices show opened by Railroad Jerk and the Frogs was among the best “non-jazz” performances you’ve ever witnessed. Which kind of gave me chills, given the volume of shows you’ve attended in the ensuing decades.
It was June 15, 1996 at Irving Plaza, and I was a pretty new fan. That story I told you, where I heard “Motor Away” — that was just a year prior to that.
Most of my interests were punk and hardcore. And that’s the other thing about Alien Lanes; it was the first album that I ever had with that many songs that wasn’t Discharge or grindcore, you know? It’s very common to see old punk and grindcore records with 40 songs, but I’d never heard of a rock band [with a similar number in 28 songs]. I was like, Wow, this is weird.
Anyway, that was a diversion, but I had some older friends who were kind of getting into Polvo and Versus and Archers of Loaf. We were moving away from screamo and punk rock into more of what we know as indie rock.
So, we got into Guided by Voices, and then that show happened. I count that as definitely in the top three rock shows of my life. Nick Cave on the No More Shall We Part tour, and King Crimson just a few years ago, I would say are my holy trinity. But Guided by Voices was the first of those.
How so?
From a purely sociological, rock ‘n roll history way, it was just a fucking — I mean, I can’t be articulate about it. It was just everything you want in a rock show.
At that point, Pollard was still doing the kicks and stuff, and the dudes from the back cover of Alien Lanes were in the band. Tobin [Sprout] and Mitch [Mitchell] were in the band. I don’t think Jim Greer was there, but I was like, Oh, man. Those are the guys.
And it’s just coming from punk rock. It was almost like I had to go back to that, because when I was a kid, my dad would take me to arena shows. We saw Judas Priest and ZZ Top and the Black Crowes and stuff.
And then I got into punk, and it was like, I could touch the singer from where I’m standing. That was a really important pivot for me. I was like, I can buy this record from the guy who made it. Everyone who’s been into punk has a story like this.
But seeing Guided by Voices at Irving Plaza — it’s relatively big, bigger than a VFW hall or something. It was full on, like, I’m back into the big rock show. And I’m back into this because this is a band I can claim for my own.
It was just the energy. They didn’t stop between songs. It was loud. They did most of the stuff I wanted to hear. I was just so psyched. I was leaving for college that September. It felt like the last hurrah of living with my parents, and it was just super memorable for me, and still very vivid.
I’m a person who doesn’t have a great memory for things, but I remember that show pretty well, and it was just incredibly fun. What more can you say about a great show than you had a great time? I don’t mean, like, The band was really good, or They played all my favorite songs, or We went and got pizza later. This was just like, I had fun watching this band play for an hour and a half. I’ve seen so many shows, but I can’t say that I’ve had that much fun.
You’ve told me you’d like to cover Alien Lanes front to back.
Oh, dude, I could sing it in real time to you right now. I perceive it as two long songs that are perfect. You can’t imagine putting any of those [individual] songs on a mix or a playlist. They just segue into each other. I’ve heard those records hundreds of times, and I can anticipate every…
Transition, almost by the microsecond. It’s not gridded.
It moves like a suite, almost like a medley. The two sides of that record are like two perfect songs. I can’t separate any of those songs. They flow right into each other.
What would you like to see from Excited Ones!, and what would you like to see discussed more on this subject in general?
I would love to hear from people out there who own every Guided by Voices release, because I know they’re out there. And I don’t mean the 40 records — I mean the singles, the radio station EPs, box sets, everything. Maybe even memorabilia — T-shirts, posters. I would love to hear their experience.
Honestly, man, I think you should just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s a really good and sort of very seductive Substack. When I see it pop up, I’m like, Oh, cool. And if I don’t have time to read it, I’ll pin it so I can read it later. I do look forward to it.
And it’s because I love the band and I love you, but I also think it’s more than the sum of its parts. You definitely do have some access that a lot of people wouldn’t have, but you’re doing it in a really interesting way. You’re building the world the way Bob built the world — taking the components and showing it one piece at a time.
One of the things I love about this band is that they probably don’t care that much if more people check them out, and that’s the coolest thing in the world. They’re doing fine. I mean, there’s always going to be new fans and people brought in.
But I think we’re all — and I put all of us in the royal we — long past the days of thinking we’re going to be on the cover of Billboard or Rolling Stone. I think with that in mind comes a certain liberation — like, I’m just going to do what I’m doing and do what I feel is good and what I’m capable of and try to enjoy it as much as possible.
And I think that’s a great takeaway from the Guided by Voices story. You know this — they’re not going to win a Grammy award. [I doubt] there’ll be a Guided by Voices museum. That’d be cool, right? In Dayton?
But they’re a self-contained universe. As far as getting somebody to listen to them, I would say, pick any one of the records. There’ll be a great song that’ll be in your head for days after. So, if you want to check them out, you’re spoiled for choice, because there are no bad ones.
I had no idea he was a fan! great interview. I have a lot of love for his music, particularly Blood Oaths of the New Blues.