Guided By Voices:

Since they started self-releasing records in the 1980s, the Dayton, Ohio-based rockers in Guided By Voices have become icons of so-called "college" rock, finding a progressively wider audience with albums like Bee Thousand (1994) and Alien Lanes (1995). The latter part of the 1990s saw the band move away from basement 4-track recording and into the studio, recording an album with Cars frontman Ric Ocasek (1999's Do the Collapse) that divided fans with its more polished sound. The band will kick off its next tour Friday, at the Bluebird Nightclub. Here guitarist Doug Gillard speaks about life on the road, the forthcoming new album and the problems with breaking into the mainstream. \nQ: Do you guys rehearse a lot right before a tour?\nA: Yeah. This time we're especially going to be practicing, for probably two or three days. We usually practice maybe once to bone up for a tour. But we're breaking in a new drummer (Kevin March, replacing the departing Jon McCann).\nQ: You guys have a huge songbook. Is he cramming to learn all these songs?\nA: Yeah, I guess so! When you first join the band there's always at least 60 songs to learn for the live set.\nQ: Is it still hard for you to remember all those songs on stage?\nA: It's only difficult at first, when you very first join. After a while, the songs that you learn along the way and/or have played so often, it just becomes second nature.\nQ: Do you enjoy being out on the road?\nA: Yeah, we always have a really good time on the road. Sometimes the driving part gets a little tedious, but we always enjoy being on the road and being together.\nQ: Why do you think Cleveland, and Ohio in general, produces so many bands?\nA: I could never really put my finger on it. I've tried to offer explanations, but I don't really know. Maybe everyone in Ohio thinks there's something to live up to.\nQ: Musically?\nA: Yeah. So they tried to keep it going. I can't really say because the state's boring… there's a lot more boring states than Ohio.\nQ: Have the songs become more straight-ahead to reflect the move into the studios, or vice versa?\nA: They just happen to coincide. The last two or three years, Bob (Pollard, Guided By Voices vocalist) has been writing a little more straightforward lyrically, lengthening the songs a little bit more, fleshing them out. The songs are a little bit more serious, generally. This new one, there's a little bit of everything on it. It's really not heavy on the serious songs. Bob's also been writing the lyrics and titles first and kind of constructing the music around that. So that's sort of a newer approach for him in the way the songs are done.\nQ: Are you working with an outside producer again on the new record?\nA: No, we produced it ourselves with Todd Tobias, who is (GBV bassist) Tim's brother and also played on Circus Devils with Bob. He's also in the band Tim and I have called Gem.\nQ: When you go into the studio to record, do you take a lot of time, or are the songs ready to go?\nA: Usually, we are rehearsed and we bang 'em out. We did two different sessions for this last album that's not out yet -- one in Dayton where we pretty much had known the songs beforehand, and then we just did one (session) in Kent, Ohio, where a lot of them were not rehearsed, so a lot of those were learned in the studio, but also we wanted a spontaneous feel for that batch of songs. So, it didn't take much time for us to learn them and bang them out, and we weren't meticulous on whether there were mistakes left in or not. We got them to where they were pretty good, and still spontaneous sounding, still fresh sounding, and they sound great.\nQ: Do you guys do the artwork for the albums yourselves?\nA: Not with TVT. Bob wanted to have a collage for the cover of Isolation Drills, and they didn't like it at first, and they said, 'If you'll agree to let us have an artist paint it over, without all the scotch tape marks and everything, then we'll consider it.' See, they're not into the idea -- they think everything should look really professional. Their artist did the airplane thing for Isolation Drills which ended up not being too bad, it's a pretty cool cover. I just think Guided By Voices records need that flavor of what Bob always used to do, which was have his collage. Even Mag Earwhig! has one of Bob's collages. He does really great photo collages, so this next one definitely will. We don't know what it will be out on. \nQ: So the new one won't be out on TVT?\nA: No.\nQ: You're just shopping around for a deal?\nA: Yeah. We're hoping the album will be out within four or five months -- early summer, but we're not sure. \nQ: Are you happy with the level of success you guys have reached, or are you going to try to push higher? \nA: We sort of tried that with TVT and Do the Collapse and Isolation Drills, trying to have top 40 singles, and we had "Hold on Hope" on Conan O'Brien and everything. Nothing was really taking off like a jumbo jet. We're happy kind of having artistic freedom and really doing songs and albums the way we want to. \nQ: Do you think you guys weren't promoted right, or has the climate made it impossible to break through?\nA: I always think it's entirely possible, if there wasn't such a stigma from radio and heads of record companies thinking that things just have to be a certain way. If anything's promoted enough, a lot more people are going to latch onto it. There's no reason "Glad Girls" (from Isolation Drills) shouldn't have been really huge last year. That's a fine song. It's a good pop song that rocks. The other thing is that we're not young and marketable. We're not really cover boys, and that seems to still be a consideration.