It’s 10 a.m. in Dayton and Bob Pollard was working on a cup of coffee and a couple songs when I called him from Denver. I don't think Bob was teaching 4th grade at this point. He's a great conversationalist; in fact, I could have stayed on the phone a lot longer. Of course, I fauned like the fanboy I was. This was a long time ago -- hard to believe the whole Rick Ocasek chapter had yet to be written in the Epic GbV Saga. I hadn't even seen GbV at this point and was pretty excited about them coming to town -- I think they played the Ogden. I remember the neon sign -- "THE CLUB IS OPEN." Getting those GbV records when I was writing for a college newspaper was pretty fortuitous, 'cause I wasn't much into the lo-fi indie aesthetic at that time, and those old rekkids schooled me good. Anyway, I have another Pollard interview, more than three years later, that I will post here another time.
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I think Under the Bushes is my favorite GBV album so far.
Thank you very much. It’s a little bit different, maybe since we went to a big studio. I don’t think it’s slick or anything. The main thing about us is that we get stuff done fast, don't spend too much time on it, so that it still sounds spontaneous. And which we were still able to do for the most part on this record. Of course, except for the stuff we did with Kim Deal, which we took a long time on. Which is the way she works. You can tell the difference -- it’s better sounding quality-wise. It was time for us to start trying to work with someone else. We decided to work with Kim and Steve Albini.
Was he a good choice?
He has a pretty good grasp of our approach, the way we do things in the basement. The main thing is … our philosophy is that every song sounds different. And some stuff with Kim sounded really good. but we rehearsed for a month and then recorded for two or 3 weeks stuff started to sound the same and kinda lifeless. I like to get one thing done and then move onto the next. But the experience was good for us because it helped us be able to learn the board in big studios and be able to go in and do it ourselves ‘cause we’re used to pretty much only a 4-track. I’m happy with the mixture.
You didn’t include lyrics on this one.
A lot of the lyrics were really good -- they were pretty strange and really cool -- but I’ve been having people come up to me at shows and misquoting lyrics, and I kinda like that. People do these analyses of GbV lyrics. They like to analyze every little line like it means something. And to me, it really doesn’t. I write in this stream of consciousness and it really doesn’t mean anything till sometimes later. I want that to happen on this album. I just finished a solo record and I think I’m gonna include the lyrics. My mind is sporadic -- I’m a spur of the moment kinda guy. We had lyrics on the last three records. Maybe we should do one where people have to figure them out.
It seems like your solo records fill the gaps between GbV albums.
We write so many songs that it’s hard, at the sales level we’re at, to be able to market and promote that many. It’s hard for us to put out albums less than a year apart. The way to get around that is to put out solo albums, and they’ll be lower priority, but the songs will still be out there and our fans will still buy ‘em. We finished this album and then I wrote 16 more songs and they were all really cool, so we went and recorded them and they sounded good. Then thought ‘Man, I can’t sit on these for a whole year.’
You’ve said you suffer from an “addiction to songwriting.”
There’s people who like to play softball all the time or basketball or darts or whatever. I like to write songs, so when I’m home, I get up in the morning and make myself some coffee and just get my guitar and turn on my tape recorder. My philosophy is just to write a lot of songs and then choose the best ones and the best pieces of songs, and then just work on ‘em, elaborate on ‘em and revise ‘em. It’s a collage form, I really love to write songs. And another reason is... I’m kinda bored with music for some reason. I don’t know what it is I don’t know if it’s because we’ve become part of ‘rock’ now. When I was just a fan I was just an avid enthusiastic record buyer and listener. Now I’m just bored because I think I’ve found everything. I think rock is dead.
You believe that?
(laughs) I dunno. If you’re looking for a particular type of song that’s not around or that doesn’t exist anymore -- that you really wanna hear -- the only thing you can really do is go try to write it go try to find it in your own mind. So that’s why I write, ‘cause I’m addicted. And when you write short songs you can write more of ‘em.
You just bang ‘em out.
A lot of bands like to labor over a song until they get it perfect for whatever reason, but I can’t stand it. I don’t have the patience you try to make it perfect, because it’s pointless to try to labor over it. You can always make it better. The only important thing is that you capture what you heard in your head it doesn’t matter if it fits any kind of standard, TV standard or radio standard or whatever, you do the song then you move on to the next one. That way you get a lot of em out and it’s more fun.
You must have a huge stockpile of songs.
I’ve got thousands of songs. I’d say there’s 200 90 minute cassettes. I kinda catalog these things, not only on cassette, but in my mind. I keep all the songs that got bumped from records and if I ever need a bridge or an intro or a little lyric or melody I go back to that catalog and get a little scrap.
I’ve read you really love The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis.
Yeah, that album and Ziggy Stardust are probably my two favorite albums.
Both concept albums. Were you planning something like that?
Something autobiographical about the band, how we dwell in obscurity. Are they gonna sell out or stay the way they are? But it got way too complicated and I abandoned it. I don’t have the patience I used to. I’d like to make some songs that are much more like Lamb Lies, but it’s not gonna be so obvious. Not overblown keyboard music. We’re like prog rock, only where Genesis would have a 20 minute song with 10 parts, we just break ‘em down and separate ‘em. We could just put a bunch of ‘em together and turn ‘em into big long song. What would you think if I did that?
Oh, I’d buy it, Bob.
Like Alien Lanes -- it’s like one song.
You guys sure have a reputation now – “See ‘em before their livers give out.”
The thing is, I drink Bud Lite. People see me drink a lot of beer on stage. I mean, there’s the cooler full of beer up there. We get up there and we have a party. It’s actually part of our stage thing -- we drink beer and we like to party, but we’re not ridiculous. I like to run and play basketball also. Plus I drink Bud Lite, which is basically water. Of course we get drunk and it is alcohol and everything, but not as bad as people would say. I really 'em pound on stage, but it’s part of the image — “Look at that guy pounding those beers, man.” I don’t know, everybody’s gonna be dead from something eventually. I’m not that bad. I don’t drink on my day off. I like to drink beer here. That’s what we do in the Midwest -- you drink beer and eat pizza. I called it backbone juice. At first it was like liquid stage fright reducer, and so we relied on that. It’s not so bad now but people expect to see us do it. I told the drummer for the Amps I was gonna not drink one night. He said, “I’ll boo you, man.” If I don’t get up there and spit beer on people, I think they’re disappointed.
(Copyright 2010 by Jeffrey Charles Stratton. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission.)
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