"We hope to one day be as big as the Lyres."

Guided by Voices interview in Wind-Up Toy magazine #3, April 1994

Text and photos (c) Liz Clayton; please do not reproduce without permission.

"What's really been convincing me, though, is the Guided by Voices Vampire on Titus/Propeller CD on Scat. When TFUL sing about "wads of masonry and syphilitic sputum filling the street" you get the sense that they're being zany. People with nothing to say but a strong urge to say something often grab random pieces of text and music and throw them together to see what happens. GBV, on the other hand, give me the feeling that there's no other way they could have done it."
— Seth Sanders, 1/9/94

Listening to Robert Pollard talk explains a lot about Guided by Voices. There's just so much going on. Half the sentences that come out of his mouth seem to get lost the minute another idea pops into his head. As rapidly as sounds and thoughts and flashes of color appear and disappear in Guided by Voices' songs, they seem to go through Robert Pollard's head. I'm not sure how the spirit of the conversation comes through in a transcript of the interview, but my talk with Robert, Mitch, Jim, and Toby was one of the most fun interviews I've done. GbV are more down to earth than your uncle, and more high in the sky than most satellites. Present at this interview: myself, Robert Pollard (vocals live), Mitch Mitchell (guitar live), Jim Pollard (guitar, etc. on records; Jim doesn't perform live with the band 'cos he works second shift.), Tobin Sprout (guitar live), and the ubiquitous Bill Meyer, Chicago freelance journalist that seems to pop up in my interviews all the time.

Liz: Why don't you each introduce yourselves to the tape recorder, even though the only one I'll probably be able to identify is you [Robert].
Robert: Okay, we have three members here – you know we're actually six, a six piece band but we play with five live. We've been anywhere from three to six. But I'm Robert Pollard, this is Mitch..
Mitch: Mitch Mitchell.
Jim: Jim Pollard.
Robert: Jim Pollard, my brother.
Liz: And how long have you known Jim?
Jim: Since birth, I believe.
Robert: Thirty-one years I've known Jim. And I've known Mitch...
Mitch: That'd be about thirty. (laughs)
Robert: We played in a heavy metal band together in the '70s. Back when metal was metal, back when heavy metal was heavy metal – called Anacrusis. There's a band called Anacrusis now, from California or something.
Mitch: Yep.
Liz: Are they as good as you were?
Robert: They couldn't be. We did Cheap Trick.
Mitch: We were contemplating suing them and making them change their name to "Anacrusis, Jr.".
Liz: Anacrusis CA?
Robert: Anacrusis CA, really. We were just a bar band. That's where we formed into this because we started wanting to do things differently. We were turned on to Devo. Devo changed that.
Mitch: We got kicked out of Anacrusis 'cos we shaved our heads and tried to do a Bram Tchaicovsky cover.
Robert: We tried to introduce them to Bram Tchaicovsky.
Mitch: It was too radical a change.
Robert: They were into UFO and... hell, when I joined you guys, you guys were doing Lynyrd Skynyrd and stuff. Doing Ted Nugent.
Liz: And then you turned on to Devo.
Mitch: We got saved.
Robert: (laughs) Yeah we were saved.
Liz: There are worse people to be saved by.
Robert: Oh yeah. When I first heard Devo naturally, I was a metalhead..
Liz: What was the first Devo song that you heard?
Robert: Well I heard the first album, I heard the whole thing, and I was like "what the fuck is this?", and then I listened to it again, and I just couldn't believe it, I couldn't believe how good it was. And I listened to prog rock and stuff too, so that's what turned me on about Devo, 'cos it was kind of progressive post-punk stuff.
Liz: And they dressed so well.
Robert: They were snappy.
Mitch: You turned me on to a lot of good prog rock.
Robert: Yeah. We were glam, too.
Liz: Did you guys dress well?
Mitch: Yeah, we did! We had like a jumpsuit with "Anacrusis" in glitter on the back...
Liz (to Robert): How long was your hair?
Robert: How big you mean! About as big as Handsome Dick Manitoba's... We thought we were the Who. We still think we're the Who, we love the Who, you know, we still do..
Mitch: Definitely.
Liz: Are you deaf?
Robert: We're all deaf. You heard us in there, didn't you? Look at how loud [Mitch] is, you just can't turn him down, you just gotta turn it up! The Who. Like I told you, man, the Who could play loud couldn't they? They were allowed to play loud, weren't they, the Who.
Mitch: They were.
Robert: But I guess we'll have to compensate.
Liz: But even they probably still had guys in the back of the club like the one tonight that went "THAT'S TOO LOUD!!!"
Robert: Really! You know they did.
Liz: I get a kick out of them though.
Robert: Definitely.. that's something we have to deal with all the time.
Liz: So is this your first "tour" like this?
Robert: Mini-tour. The "Chicago Tour". Every weekend we go someplace, and that's a tour.
Liz: This is the tour this week.
Mitch: Every tour's been a great tour also.
Robert: We played Memphis last weekend with the Grifters and New Radiant Storm King, that was a great tour. We actually played with Braniac, another Dayton band, the week before in Cincinnati. The weekend before that we played in New York, we played at a place called Thread-Waxing.
Liz: With Envelope?
Robert: Yeah, that's where we met the Matador dudes. So we're "getting chummy" with Matador right now.
Liz: "Flirting heavily" with 'em.
Robert: Mmm-hmm. I love Matador, they're a great label.
Mitch: Yeah, they're great people too. It's like very easy to work with them 'cos they're so open and so nice.
Robert: They said things like "We'll buy you a 16-track board", that's a nice thing to say, you know. They're still, we like your music and we'll do things for your music. Matador, you know, they're not like..
Liz: (in some sort of sleazy huckster accent) "EH, y'know, we think you could work for us!"
Robert: Yeah, none of that, exactly. They're people that buy records, obviously Gerard Cosloy, he knows bands.. it'd be nice to be with that bunch of people; Bailter Space and Pavement, Jon Spencer, Unsane, and all that kind of stuff. It's prestige.
Liz: So are you definitely going to be working with them?
Robert: Well it's not definite yet... I mean, at first Robert [Griffin, Scat Records] was a little heartbroken, but then he said "I'm sorry, I shouldn't be like that, I mean whatever you guys wanna do." I just want everything to work out for everyone.
Liz: Well, you guys have been around for a long time.
Mitch: It doesn't seem like a very long time.
Liz: My question is "why NOW"? Why, suddenly, people are noticing?
Robert: That's got something to do with, I think, this big alternative kick. Now it's "legitimate", it's a "legitimate" genre to be "alternative". We were "alternative" in '86, we were "lo-fi" in '86...
Liz: What do you call yourselves now?
Robert: Uh..
Mitch: Lo-fi arena rock.
Robert: I dunno, have you heard any of our early stuff, the older stuff that you can't get anymore?
Liz: I have the Earful O'Wax compilation, which I'm told is really patchy and badly put together and stuff.
Robert (proudly): All our stuff is!
Liz: (laughs) Well what I meant is that I heard it was sort of sloppy with some parts of things chopped off and shit...
Robert: Yeah, they messed that up.. I'll try to get you The Devil Between My Toes, that was our second album. That's hard to get, that's a really good record. They re-released it, our label Get Happy, the same folks that did the compilation. So, if you can get that that's an interesting record.
Liz: Is everything unavailable?
Robert: Everything is unavailable, but, Robert's gonna re-release everything as a boxed set this summer, with an additional album of unreleased stuff, so it's gonna be cool.
Liz: With nice sexy packaging going on?
Robert: With nice sexy packaging.
Mitch: That box is pretty true to form, with our album covers reproduced...
Robert: We thought about doing the same album covers except maybe, instead of black on yellow, yellow on black we'd do, you know. Reversing the covers...
Mitch: And the out-takes album...
Robert: The out-takes album...
Mitch: It has a name.
Liz: Yeah?
Robert: What, Cuttling Bozo's Octopus? (laughter) We have a lot of names. That's how we come up with our names, lists, song, name lists... you should see some of our notebooks. When we came up from Memphis, we got stuck in the Kentucky snow, you know, and all that mess? We just went to the store and bought a notebook and were thinking of song titles. We thought of maybe fifteen pages of song titles and then we hit this ice... and just, FSSSSSHH! And we could barely stay on the road.
Liz: Did that help or hinder the creative process?
Robert: It hindered. No more song titles!
Liz: Get off the road!

80 grit yellow moon balloon

Liz: So is this your first time in Chicago?
Robert: It's our first time in Chicago, yes.
Liz: Do you like it?
Robert: So far I like it. We got down here today at about... three thirty.
Liz: Did you go anywhere?
Robert: We went to, we walked, a long way, man, Joel [a guy from the club] said it was only fifteen minutes away! We walked to, uh, what's the name of the store, Reckless. Reckless Records.
Liz: From here?
Robert: And Joel said it was fifteen minutes! We ended up running. We were freezing to death.
Liz: It's WARM today, jesus christ! It's a fucking heat wave compared to last week, it was 37 today!
Robert: I know, it's nice.. I was off, I teach and I was off school all week long.
Liz: What do you teach?
Robert: Fourth grade.
Liz: Fourth grade. Have you always taught fourth grade?
Robert: Well, mostly, I've taught fourth grade for about eight years now, but before that I taught different grades.
Liz: In public school?
Robert: Public school, in Dayton.
Liz: Do the kids know that you're a musician?
Robert: They know. I used to.. before they knew, before, we got a couple of things written on recently in the Dayton paper, in the local papers, now they end up reading it, their parents.. Before I used to take them stuff "Hey, man, here's our stuff! Lemme play this for you..." and I'd put it on, some kids'd get up and jump around a little bit, some kids'd be "uugh, that's terrible" and pretty soon they'd all get bored, but it wouldn't take long before that..
Mitch: We didn't make it until we got written up in the Dayton Daily.
Robert: Yeah, we still haven't made it in Dayton. Dig this – we're getting ready to play an arena rock show with the Breeders in March, and they're trying, we wanna get Urge Overkill, that's what Kim Deal would like to get. Because it's the big Arena Rock show, and see that's when we make it, it doesn't matter if we sign to Matador Records to the people where we're from. You gotta play Herr [?] Arena. So, when we play Herr arena, we've made it. To transcend from fucking garage, from the lo-fi shit, all the way to the arena you know.
Liz: So what do you do for a living, Mitch?
Mitch: Uh, I work in a sandpaper factory.
Liz: No shit!
Mitch: Yep. I'm a laborer.
Liz: What's your favorite kind of sandpaper?
Mitch: I like 80 grit better, 80 grit's my favorite. It's smooth, it tickles..
Liz: Is that fine?
Mitch: Uh, no, 600 C-weight, it tickles though. 80 grit's kinda nice. It verges on the threshold of pain when you rub your hand on it. So I kinda like that.
Liz: Do you like the big, I mean, in terms of sanding machines, do you like hand sanders or plate sanders better...?
Mitch: No, I work with the big rolls of sandpaper, the jumbo rolls, they're like 63 inches by 100 yards, and I break 'em down.
Robert: Does it possibly, does it shoot flat out of there, could it possibly [garbled]
Mitch: Sometimes, things fly in my eyes, you just can't hold on. You gotta be careful.
Liz: I had a shop teacher once, back in the seventh grade, and whenever we were using the giant sawblade thing, he would just tell us "Yeah! I was once teaching a class and a kid had a finger fly clear across the room!"
Robert: Ugghhh, be careful!
Mitch: I don't want my fingers flying.
Robert: Sounds like Hank.. Hank, the guy that inspired me to play guitar, was born with some of his fingers deformed, he had a rubber band around his wrist, and he had a pick on it, to play.
Mitch: He could play drums and everything.
Robert: He could play drums, he could play baseball, take off the glove and go to bat, y'know. We have a song on our second album called "Hank's Little Fingers" and that's about him. I asked his cousin if it was alright if I played it for him, and he said he could not handle that, so we never played it for Hank.
Liz (to Mitch, obviously): How long you been making sandpaper?
Mitch: Uh, about three years.
Liz (to Jim): What do you do?
Jim: I work for GM. On the line.
Robert: They're laborers. They're worker men.
Jim: Worker ants.
Robert: Still am I, still we all are. See, that's the.. we actually talked to a couple big labels, you know, Geffen and the like, I can't do that shit.. I thought about it, and I don't want a big long contract where we have to do this, that, we're gonna do what we want, we're too old for that shit. But that's what's weird you know, because it's been ten years, and suddenly things are happening for us.
Liz: See, that's one of the things I was going to ask, was why now, and..
Robert: It's appealing I guess to find something and think "Where was this?"
Liz: "It's been here all along?!"
Mitch: It's a style of music that really never, has really been thought of until.. everything's been done.
Liz: It's like the world caught up with you.
Robert: It caught up with us.
Liz: It's like somewhere you've got your Pavement, and the Grifters, and they're coming real into trend, and then there's this, and it's always been here, and people say "What the fuck? I didn't notice that before."
Robert: That's exactly what it is.. we're a good band, we've just been putting records out for ourselves, and partying, partying, and acting like some kind of a rock band for ourselves. We've even got the big, we have record release parties for ourselves! And then we come over the next day, and think "Well, it's time to make another album again."

 

Liz: Do you feel, obviously you're probably happy with the attention you're getting now, but do you finally feel you're getting your due?
Robert: No. No. I think it's weird because in Dayton, we didn't receive any feedback whatsoever. The only feedback we got was "When are you gonna quit doing that shit? What the hell?" We heard that from everyone, and we'd start to believe it.. But then, you know, some people got a hold of it, and it's great to find out that it's actually alright. Yeah, we're hot now.. it'd be nice if we could do this, and solely concentrate on it, but I don't wanna compromise the music to do that.
Liz: So... in terms of Ohio, this strange midwestern music mecca that it is...
Robert: Is that what it is?
Liz: I don't know!
Robert: Is Dayton the new Athens?
Liz: Well there's you guys, and there's the Breeders.
Robert: There's a band Braniac that's getting a lot of writing right now..
Mitch: And The Method.
Robert: But you're right though, the whole Ohio [garbled]
Liz: Ohio's got a lot of good bands..
Robert: They've always been there, though, these bands, and right now something's starting to happen.
Liz: So have you been a fan of these bands in the past?
Robert: Not really, no, just since we've been doing things with them, we've been working with people... Mike Hummel, have you heard of Mike Rep and the Quotas?
Liz: Yeah, what's your relationship with that?
Robert: He took our, when we did Propeller, our sixth album, we took it up to him, he said "Let me mess with that, it sounds like it's in another room or something." We did a lot of it in a 24-track studio, he took it to his record store and re-cued everything, brought up all the treble and high end and everything, he gave it the Mike Hummel, – he calls it "lovingly fucked with it", he gave it the Mike Rep touch, it was just a big revelation for us to do that. "Wow, he can do that! He can actually fuck with it after we're done, after that guy fucking with it, we can fuck with it again and change it?"
Jim: What we used to go through, with putting it on a 8-track, and...
Robert: With putting it on a DAT and all that stuff. You can just put it on a cassette and take it in and make a record right from it. You just need the cover and all that stuff.
Jim: You know the covers that Bob makes are like three inches big.
Robert: Yeah, the covers I send to Robert are like that big [indicates a small size with fingers..] you know, he just blows 'em up like on our last one, it's cool.
Liz: Art in miniature scale.
Robert: He blows it up, it's a little bit blurry but not much. It's just.. to find out that we can do all these things, that we've been doing all along, that we're allowed and that's what people like..
Liz: So did you do anything exciting or experimental on Vampire on Titus?
Robert: Yeah.. it's really fragmented, that album... that's another revelation we've come to, is that no record is ever 30 minutes, it's long enough.
Liz: What's the average song length?
Robert: Probably two minutes, a minute and fifty. You don't need, we don't, we've written so many songs and been around for so long, you don't need to go into a little kind of an instrumental bridge and then back to the first verse again, just go right to the damn thing.
Liz: Yeah, it seems like every song of yours is real short but that's the good part. In many bands you know, you've got a long song, and then there's a good part here and a good part there. And Guided By Voices songs are just, they are the good part, and then it's over.
Robert: They are the good part. But some of 'em are done on the spot, we just did it like that. We'll jam, we'll do short jams, but then you can fade it any way you want and do a short jam and put the vocals over later, and things like that. So we work in any kind of format. We work backwards on records. Like, I'll have the album cover first, with a bunch of titles. So "let's make it this", you know? And then we'll jam to that. "This song's called..." and then we make the song.
Liz: So it's all reverse-engineered.
Robert: Yeah, it is, it is. Sometimes, very rarely does that work all the way through without deciding how we do it, but you come up with good things out of that.
Liz: So you take all the little granules and then you have the sandpaper at the end.
Mitch: Yup. There you go.
Robert: Exactly, exactly.
Mitch: You can use the analogy of photography, I don't know if you're into photography, but you can take fifty pictures, and you may only have one good one out of the whole fifty. But you can take fifty pictures twenty times, and then if you get one good one out of each time, then you have twenty good pictures.
Robert: It used to work like that for us, 'cos we've done all these songs, and a lot of them are terrible! You know, and some of them are good. But it's getting to be that we're getting good at that, where not too many of 'em are terrible, they're all pretty damn good now so... we don't even jam as much when we get together and write.
Liz: So, how is, is there a songwriting process?
Robert: There are a lot of songwriting processes.
Liz: I mean you guys are pretty insanely prolific...
Robert: The process is where we have the pictures and song titles and things and jam to it, and we take the best one. I mean, I even do that when I'm writing by myself, when I write alone I have song titles and I'll sit there and I'll go through all of them. I'll go through all the songs and I'll have little rough sketches of them you know, and then go back and listen to them and see what needs what. Maybe add one thing to another thing if it needs it.
Liz: How frequently do you get together in a week? Once or twice?
Robert: Once a week. For awhile, around about our fourth, fifth, and sixth releases, we hardly ever got together, we'd just get together for an album. And then we got together, and we were supposed to play the New Music Seminar, and now we're doing the live thing again.
Liz: So when these song titles, that eventually evolve into songs, come up, when and how do they come up?
Robert: Just, freak out, flip out, we have flip out sessions, you know. Just get buzzed, sit there, and write it down. Just let your minds go, close your eyes and see, change your vantage point, just freakout sessions.
Liz: Just, the titles, they're definitely quite colorful – there's a lot of imagery going on there.
Robert: They have colors. You know, that song's yellow; that song's red.
Liz: Yeah! I do that with months, and days, and everything. I sit down and talk to people and say "What color does December bring to mind?" and they say "What the fuck are you talking about?"
Robert: It's brown, it's black, is it brown?
Liz: It's brown! What's January to you?
Robert: January's almost red.
Liz: Yes!!
Robert: Is it really?
Liz: Yes.. (laughing) Okay, what's February?
Robert: February's orange.
Liz: It's green. I say it's green.
Mitch (laughing): Green...
Liz: And March is blue.
Robert: March is blue? What's April? Is it yellow?
Liz: Yellow. May is a lighter shade of blue.
Robert: What's October?
Liz: October is I think an orangier brown.
Robert: Orange, black... my birthday's on Halloween, what can I say.
Liz: My birthday's today.
Robert: It's your birthday? Happy birthday.
Liz: I do a lot of color-associations.
Robert: Yeah, we do too. There are some of my friends that also do titles with me, they think in colors too.
Jim: Randy.
Robert: Yeah. Do you have Vampire on Titus?
Liz: Yes.
Robert: You know on the back, where I'm drinking a beer, that big guy behind me? That's Randy. That's the guy that, yeah, he moved to Boston, he's my buddy. But he does song titles by colors too.
Liz: Yeah. It really seems that the songs and the music and the titles, they all kinda encompass and transcend all sorts of sensory things at the same time.
Robert: Really. Yeah. It's kind of an aesthetic thing, isn't it?
Liz: Very much so.
Robert: It's not really, it doesn't mean anything, it's neat, and it's like something neat to look at or listen to. And the words, you know, the lyrics and stuff, sometimes you have to look at it, you gotta write it down to see if it looks cool. A lot of the same kind of letters, a lot of "o"s or whatever. An "x" here and there. Certain words like "kick", I love the word "kick". What were some of the words that we said were cool? Double-consonant "g"s?
Mitch: Double-entendres. (laughs)
Robert: "Witch", "witch" is a good word...
Mitch: "Zoo"
Robert: "Zoo" is a great word. There are certain words we like, we use them a lot. Oh, "moon", we love "moon". "Giant moon", "moon balloon", we love the word "moon".
Liz: What colors do you like?
Robert: Colors, I like yellow, I love yellow.
Mitch: I like black.
Robert: I would put every album cover in yellow.
Jim: Red.
Robert: Red's good. But yellow, man. Yellow and blue, I like.
Liz: Yellow's a pretty evocative color.
Robert: What color do you like? Yellow?
Liz: I like green a lot. The deeper kind of green. I like purple just as a color, but I don't know if it would say much to me on an expressive level... (laughs)
Robert: Purple's a good color. Yellow, just... yellow and black, is sweet. For record covers? Yellow and black, with a high contrast picture of a band, I'd put yellow instead of white, put the black behind it...
(somebody): Devo used to wear yellow suits.

 

dayton: crazy and full of roosters

Liz: Okay, so, Vampire on Titus, the address is on Titus street, who's the vampire?
Robert: I live on Titus street.
Liz: Is that you?
Robert: I know who the vampire is.. there's another guy that could be the vampire on Titus, yeah. It could be anybody. His wife's the Bride of Frankenstein. (laughs)
Liz: Neighbors of yours?
Robert: We've got some [something garbled] neighbors. On our second album, The Devil Between My Toes, on the album cover there's a real blurred picture of a rooster that Mitch took. I bought a chick, for my little boy, I bought a chick for him on Easter. And it grew up into this real scary, nasty looking rooster. So we gave it next door to these crazy people... and then it came back and it was always chasing me, it was a mean son of a bitch. We called it "Big Daddy", and they had to confine it, you know?
Jim: They had a dog pen up.
Robert: We went back and took that picture and on the cover it says "what makes big daddy happy". What that's got to do with vampires on Titus I don't know..
Liz: How many kids have you got?
Robert: Two. A son, 12, and a daughter, 9.
Liz (to Mitch): Do you have any kids? Are you married?
Mitch: I'm single, never been married.
Liz: And you, Jim?
Jim: I'm married.
Liz: Ya got kids?
Jim: Two girls.
Liz: So is all of Dayton crazy and full of roosters?
Robert: Dayton is crazy and full of roosters, it is.
Mitch: That's another favorite word, "roosters".
Robert: Yeah, Dayton's kind of crazy and full of roosters. It's kind of a, kind of a pot-smoking town, isn't it?
Mitch: Dayton's the crossroads of America.
Liz: Where is it in Ohio?
Mitch: It's south.
Robert: It's southwest, way down by Cincinnati, it's 50 miles north of Cincinnati. It's, uh, there aren't many places to play, and not much music filters into there. It's always been sort of a backwards place. It's getting cooler.. you've got the Breeders, there's a couple stores that are getting kind of cool. There's a guy, that owns a club – it's not a good club, it's not big enough, but he's trying to get a bigger venue and trying to attract bands and stuff.
Liz: Yeah.. I've only been to Ohio twice, once in the Columbus airport on my way to Boston –
Robert: What'd you think of it? The Columbus airport is the heart of it all, isn't it?
Liz: Well, I didn't find it really interesting, I was laid over for two hours because you can't ever fly to Boston directly. Their airport is probably the worst constructed transportation hub in America.
Robert: Yeah, we had to fly to Chicago to get to Boston.
Liz: I just wandered around the ol' Columbus airport playing pinball and stuff.
Robert (to Mitch): Have you ever been to the Columbus airport?
Mitch: Yeah, I have, I took a plane there once.
Liz: A lot of flights to the east coast stop in Columbus and make connections. I drove down the Ohio Turnpike one weekend going back to school 'cos I was really bored, rather than taking 94 into Michigan, 'cos I go to school in Ann Arbor... so I thought "well, I've never really been in Ohio, so I'll take the turnpike and see what it's like in Ohio..."
Robert: Do you know the Big Chief dudes?
Liz: (laughs) Not personally.
Robert: They have a movie, that's cool. I used to like Big Chief , but they kinda, they're a little too funky for me now.
Liz: Last I saw they were giving away cassettes of the new album at this hip clothing store in Ann Arbor, Urban Outfitters.
Robert: Mack Avenue... "Mack Avenue Skull Game"...
Liz: Yeah. So all I've really seen is the airport and the turnpike. And a couple of Ohio's finest.
Mitch: You need to live it up, come to Dayton.
Robert: Live it up. We'll go down to the Green Leaf and have a couple beers.
Liz: I got a speeding ticket and that's all I remember.
Jim: They're good for that.
Liz: Well they were good 'cos I just paid it and it doesn't go on my record.
Robert: So they were good about it.
Liz: Good for it and good about it.
Mitch: The cops are bad, a lot of busts there, back at the crossroads 'cos that's where everyone's bringing the drugs back and forth.
Robert: A lot of drug trafficking going on down there.
Mitch: Don't even start on that. Don't even start on that drug trafficking shit. (laughs)
Liz: "COPS", live from Dayton, Ohio.
Robert: But cops in Dayton, pulling people over, they don't have nothin' better to do than that. Cops here, cops in New York, they've got things to do.
Liz: It's a big contrast going to school, going through these small towns where cops will write you tickets for the strangest things, and I think "if I were at home, they'd have something better to do". Someone'll call the cops at a convenience store in Ann Arbor and SIX cop cars will show up! That's like the whole city. They'll pull you over for 5 over.
Robert: It's ridiculous. They pulled me over, I got a DUI a couple of years ago – I didn't have that much, it wasn't that bad – he pulled me over 'cos I crossed the center lane, TURNING. When I had to go back to the left, I said how could I cross the center lane when I have to go back that way?
Mitch: I do it every time.
Robert: Everybody does it. But you don't even want to go into your bullshit...
Mitch: Don't even go in.. I'm in enough trouble as it is.
Liz (to Mitch): Do you have permission to be out of the state, young man?
Mitch: I have permission from the parole board to come here.
Robert: He's a fugitive.
Mitch: Every time I go somewhere I have to go to the parole office and get a written permission slip.
Robert: Do you really?
Mitch: Yeah.
Robert: You have to get a written permission slip to come to Chicago?
Mitch: Yep.
Robert: Don't lose it, man.
Liz: Them mini-tours are murder.
Mitch: No, they're great.
Robert: You should've seen his heroics getting us out of that snow in Kentucky. He was, he followed the truck, not the salt truck, but this guy that was just GOING... he just got behind that guy, everybody else went off the road, we just kept going.
Liz: You just gotta stay behind someone with big wheels makin' good tracks.
Robert: "The King".
Mitch: We followed The King.
Robert: This one guy came up in a pickup truck, and just was zipping in through everybody, went down into the median and just came back up, and we go "That's the KING, man, we need to follow him."
up next: end of the world
[the conversation here degenerates into discussions of bad snow on Michigan's M-14, bad car accidents, and where Bill Meyer's parents live in Plymouth]
Robert: It's a rough world, isn't it? You could get snuffed anytime.
Liz: Well they were saying on the news yesterday that like, 106 people got killed in the recent cold snap, and only 50 people died in the earthquake.
Robert: Wow, really. Hey, we were thinking of titles before the whole shit hit, before we found out about the quake and everything, and one of the titles was "Up Next: End of the World." And we said "uh-oh!" It's fuckin' crazy.
Liz: So you guys have a, uh, a shitload of singles coming out soon, right?
Robert: We have a single for Engine records coming out. These are all little albums – we're calling 'em albums. As a matter of fact, our next album, Bee Thousand is our thirteenth album, including seven-inches. So we've got coming out for Engine, Fast Japanese Spin-Cycle, we have Get out of My Station coming out for Siltbreeze at the same time, we just released one for City Slang called Static Airplane Jive...
Liz: I just heard about that... that's not released domestic, right?
Robert: No.
Liz: Do you have any of those with you?
Robert: No, I'm sorry, I should've brought some. I don't have many but I should've brought some.
Liz: I'll go shoppin'.
Robert: Well, as a matter of fact, I think I brought two.
Mitch: Toby has some.
Robert: And I also have a couple copies of the reissue of The Devil Between my Toes, it's a shitty looking cover, but... what else coming out...
Mitch: Crown prince.
Robert: We've got Crown Prince of the Menthol Trailer coming out for Domino in London, and we did a split single with the lead singer from Vibralux on Anyway records, and that's about it. We just couldn't turn anything down. You know, we signed to Scat for a three-album deal, we could've done a thirty album deal.
Liz: And you could have done it.
Robert: We were just so happy that somebody wants to put our records out. Wow. We're still paying on a loan, and I tell people that, from all the records we've put out, and that'll be paid off this summer.
Liz: And you guys probably have still enough material to stretch...
Robert: We've got a suitcase. A big ass suitcase packed full of cassettes.
Jim: Bob's actually recorded, did vocals over stuff that we recorded in the basement years ago.
Robert: On our new album, there's some stuff on Vampire on Titus that's old instrumentals with new vocals on top.
Liz: Like what?
Robert: Like "Marchers in Orange", that's a real old one... oh, uh, "Superior Sector Janitor X" was just a little oddly-tuned acoustic thing we did awhile ago. And I listened – you get to listen to something and you go "Oh, that's kind of cool!" and you get a little melody in your head and go back and do it, you know? There's no law that says you can't. There's just so many different songwriting processes. There's all the influences.
Liz: So what are the influences? I mean.. It's... what I thought maybe the third time I sat down and listened to the Vampire on Titus/Propeller CD, just sitting there really focused on it,
Robert: Did you hear things in there?
Liz: ... I just thought that it reminded me of everything I've ever liked, and something completely different at the same time.
Robert: That's what we can only hope to do. That's great.
Liz: It's, I mean they're not even songs, they're all just fragments of everything... a bunch of sand blew together from every dimension of the universe...
Mitch: Yeah.
Robert: Well thank you, that's nice. That's what I want.
Liz: Well, that's the impression you gave me.
Robert: It's weird, because I used to be in this songwriting guild, back in 1981, and these guys brought me this tape, we were trying to form a band – and the tape was just this fragmented 35 minute thing of great shit and I thought "wow, that'd be cool to put out a record like that", and I just stuck with it. On our first EP we did, we went away from that, we put out conventional songs, and I don't like that, but our second one, Devil Between My Toes, we came back to that fragmented, recorded anywhere, you know. And I just think it's a cool thing.
Liz: Yeah, it seems to me that your songs more than anything else I can think of at the moment at least, do the best job of capturing "little moments of time", little bits and pieces,
Robert: Time frames.
Liz: ..and put them all together, and they don't pound them in your head either, they come and they're gone.
Robert: Exactly, that's what we try to do. Even the length. Everything's important if you make a record. The final product of a record should be something, it's gotta be a nice cover, the title should sound like a movie or something, it should be sequenced properly. Some things should be really considered by bands and sometimes they don't. You've got to put it together, and sequence it, and make it right, you know?
Mitch: Bee Thousand is going to be longer.
Robert: Bee Thousand is going to have a full color inside sleeve, with a different picture for each lyric and stuff, it's gonna be that old XTC looking kind of thing.
Liz: So it's going to expand on that whole aesthetic quality.
Robert: Yeah, it's going to be colorful and really bright.
Liz: When is that going to come out?
Robert: April. It was going to be a double album, and then I thought "I can't take it...", thirty minutes... we always wanted to put a double album out, but...
[Toby comes upstairs and joins us]

blimps go 90

Robert: This is Tobin Sprout.
Liz: Hi.
Toby: Hi.
Liz: What do you do for a living?
Toby: I'm an artist.
Liz: Yeah?
Toby: Painting...
Robert: But I don't let him do anything on our album covers. He's too good!
[Some more digression into cover art which wasn't really worth rehashing here, band names (Robert suggested some friends of his call themselves "Blimps Go 90" which I kinda like), boring details about my fanzine, and more assorted Bill Meyer stuff which I won't go into.. the tape gets kinda interesting here 'cos Robert was talking to Toby and Bill and Mitch was asking me about my pupils and trying to figure out how dilated they were (I don't know why, I wasn't "baked" or anything) also there's some stuff here about beer, and that you should go talk to Joel if you wanted some free]
Robert: It's something we've always wanted to do. It's just a fantasy to be in a band. We used to sing a capella in the fourth grade? Like the Monkees and the Beatles and all that, in the classroom. We'd go out to recess and the little girls would chase us, it was great.
Liz: Do your fourth graders sing?
Robert: Do they sing? Do they sing my songs or...
Liz: Do they sing any songs? Do you have them sing?
Robert: Well, I sing in class, and I let 'em sometimes, but it's not like "Okay, everybody!"
Mitch: You've got some rappers in your class.
Robert: We've got some rappers, we've got some grunge kids.
Liz: We were talking about the influences thing, and I'm sure there's way too many to list...
Robert: I can go through mine, the first stuff that I was influenced by – bubblegum music in the '60s, and then the psychedelic stuff, how it started to twist. That's the greatest period I think in rock, the late '60s, that, the late '60s and the late '70s — early '80s were my biggest influences. Glam rock in the early '70s, T-Rex and the Spiders from Mars and all that stuff.
Mitch: Glam rock, KISS.
Robert: KISS, oh yeah, shit yeah. We loved KISS. We saw them at the Palace when they didn't even have, they only had makeup, just rock, they didn't have anything else.
Bill Meyer: That's pretty early.
Robert: It was about '73 or so. The Palace was cool. We saw Hawkwind and Kansas and the Pretty Things played there. I just bought a couple of Hawkwind albums as a matter of fact, yeah.
Liz: So what's going on now, what other bands do you admire now and why?
Robert: Right now?
Liz: Right now.
Robert: I really like Rocket From the Crypt right now, because they're so sonic and big, and the way they use the sax. I don't like sax, but it sound like another guitar. It sounds like an organ or something and it's so good, there are songs. You've got to have songs and they've got songs. I like Pavement a lot, and New Radiant Storm King and the Grifters and that sort of thing.. and I like Superconductor's a good band. I like Sebadoh, but I.. I don't like saying bad things, I don't like saying negative things about bands, I was getting ready to say something negative about Sebadoh, but I like 'em. [This junk goes back to some neg. review of a GbV record Lou Barlow wrote somewhere, if you really wanted to know. – Liz] Uh.. some of the bands that have been around for a little longer, like Dinosaur and Sonic Youth too. And they're good because they still have songs. You must have songs. I like the country artists if they have songs; not too many of them have songs. Charlie Rich did. Charlie Rich had some good songs.
Liz: Do you have a favorite song?
Robert: A favorite Charlie Rich song? Or any song.
Liz: Any song.
Robert: What's my favorite song... I love "Under Pressure" by Queen and Bowie.
Liz: That's a good song to like. Got one, Mitch?
Mitch: My favorite song is "Blacktop" by Helmet.
Robert: Toby, what's your favorite song?
Toby: "Walk Away", the Left Banke?
Robert: What is it?
Toby: Left Banke, that one song...
Robert: "Walk Away Renee"? That's a great song.
Liz: Jim?
Jim: I don't have a favorite song. (everyone laughs)
Mitch: Another great band's the Lyres.
Robert: We hope to one day be as big as the Lyres.
Liz: Just don't put out anything on Taang!.
Robert: We love 'em, we just love the Lyres.
Bill Meyer: They've hit that heroin ceiling and started coming down.
Mitch: Don't do heroin, people, it'll fuck you up.
Liz: Guided By Voices does not endorse the use of heroin.
Robert: Or cocaine.
Mitch: No, no way. A little pot now and then never hurt no one.