Let’s face facts – Guided by Voices is not for everyone. Not everyone loves their barely-produced, dashed-off songs loaded with often-nonsensical lyrics and devious guitar hooks or the constant flood of new releases that make casual fandom nearly impossible.
To a certain species of Ohioan, a Guided by Voices concert guarantees two-plus hours of musical bliss through endless anthems. Seeing them in Dayton doesn’t necessarily guarantee a different show, but it was enough to draw old concert compatriots Mike and Ron to Dayton. They invited me to join, which I did gratefully.
GBV played Oddbody’s Music Room, which occupies strip-mall space in a suburban corner of Dayton. The hometown show sold out, even then only 400 or so people crowded into Oddbody’s.
After a punky opening set DTCV, rock music’s most famous former elementary school teacher ushered in the latest iteration of the indie institution. It was another unexpected resurrection. After almost four years of touring with the 1990s “classic” lineup, GBV pulled the plug in September 2014. Pollard went back to churning out all manners of albums before the latest incarnation of the band arose earlier this year.
Only Pollard remains from the early days, but that has been the band’s usual state since the late 1990s. One of them was familiar and prevented me from claiming the only Nashville connection in the room --- Bobby Bare Jr. When introducing his new bandmates, noting his one guitarist as the youngest member at age 32, Pollard quipped, “I was 36 when I joined.”
Now close to 60 and white-maned, Pollard still flexes his frontman chops, bouncing around stage and breaking into scissor kicks. His ability to switch from drunken slurs to belting out pristine lyrics remains superhuman. Few other musicians can consume his quantities of Miller Lite and tequila straight from the bottle and remain standing, let alone stay focused on singing.
The “classic lineup” tours focused on the mid-1990s and the new material from their reunion years. With this iteration, everything was on the table, from less-heralded GBV albums to Pollard’s voluminous solo work and side projects like Boston Spaceships. Emphasis fell on tracks from the most recent GBV (Pollard wrote all songs and played all instruments) and his solo record Of Course You Are made in collaboration with Nick Mitchell (one of GBV’s other current guitarist).
Pollard peppered the set with tracks from those classic albums. It almost doesn’t feel like a GBV show without Echoes Myron or Game of Pricks – Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes are touchstones in the GBV canon, albums central to the band’s cult following. In concert Pollard wisely skipped the ephemera that fill out most GBV records, even the afore-mentioned classics.
During the show, Ron worked his way up the stage, and grabbed me an empty Miller Lite bottle handed from Pollard himself. He once grabbed a baking tray that Pogues' singer Shane McGowan smashed against his head during an encore, and the beer continues Ron's tradition of recovering unexpected souvenirs.
GBV hit a few songs from Isolation Drills, a highly consistent GBV record from the early double-aughts, for the infinitely catchy Fair Touching and the pop anthem Glad Girls that could have been a hit for some other band. The encores covered a wide swath, from Smothered in Hugs to A Salty Salute to The Who’s Baba O’Riley.
Soon we spilled into the Dayton night, Pollard and company neatly wrapping up their sprawling set. The easy anthems only stop when the show does.
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