Chicago Tribune Review of June 29 2002 Metro Show

Not-so-private party at Metro

Kings of underground, Guided By Voices takes fans along for wild ride

By Greg Kot
Tribune rock critic

July 1, 2002

Five drinking buddies from Ohio turned the Metro into their personal rec room and karaoke bar Saturday, complete with beer cooler. Between gulps and smokes, the bassist and second guitarist raised their fists and animatedly mouthed the words to song after song, and the audience needed no prompting to join in: Together, they were pretend rock heroes strutting in the Madison Square Garden of the imagination.

From the big speakers poured the half-remembered sounds of the '60s, '70s and '80s, as if the band were channeling an imaginary jukebox of lost hits, an alternative edition of The Who's "Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy" or the garage-rock compilation "Nuggets" crossed with the lyrical whimsy of Grimm's fairy tales.

Guided By Voices and its ex-schoolteacher singer, Robert Pollard, are as prolific as any band in rock.

For the last 17 years, they have slowly ascended from Midwestern obscurity to cult giants, one of the most revered bands of the independent underground -- which means they can sell out clubs around the country even though they've never had a top-40 hit or been interviewed by Carson Daly.

In between studio albums they unload box sets of fragments, obscurities and hidden gems to keep the faithful sated. They and their fans are a world unto themselves.

Saturday's show offered more evidence of Pollard's mad skills as a songwriter, and his band as an efficient rock machine that belies its frazzled, boys-will-be-boys appearance.

Many of the songs sounded like one-off hits from a cross-section of bands: "Glad Girls" as a British Invasion classic redone by the Dave Clark Five, "Driving Heather Crazy" as bubble gum with enough snap to qualify as an A-Side by the Sweet, "The Enemy" as an outtake from AC/DC's "Highway to Hell," "The Official Ironmen Rally Song" as an answer to "Hey Jude."

The quintet opened by playing its latest album, "Universal Truths and Cycles," in its entirety, 19 songs spread over nearly an hour. These are demanding pieces, with Kevin March (the latest in a Spinal Tap-like revolving door of drummers) playing the equivalent of guitar riffs on the trap kit, his array of rolls, fills and splashes as crucial to the sonic language as Pollard's vocals. The singer's dense wordplay is highly musical, a flurry of images in which the sound of the words is as important as their sense, the syllables dancing with an English accent.

The guitars aspired to a similar beauty; even Doug Gillard's pithy solos sounded like counter-melodies rather than ego exercises. But the crowd grew restless halfway through the "Truths" cycle, anxious for the "hits." Still, Pollard pressed on: The new songs sound more personal and prettier than ever, with castanets substituting for kick drums and chiming folk melodies replacing windmill chords. They overflowed with interlocking melodies, the neo-bolero groove of "Back to the Lake" giving way to a minor-key chorus accented by Tim Tobias' descending bass line and "Father Sgt. Christmas Card" sung as a misfit holiday carol.

Then Pollard karate-kicked, strutted and minced his way through a decade's worth of power-pop glories: "Twilight Campfighter" evoked a slow, deliberate climb to an epiphany; March, Gillard and guitarist Nate Farley lit a blue flame under "Cut-out Witch"; "Teenage FBI" searched for answers as poignantly and melodically as The Who's "I Can't Explain"; and "Tractor Rape Chain" shifted oblique images into a towering sing-along.

Yet the band flirted with self-parody: the copious drinking, the endless array of cigarettes, the mugging, especially by GBV's Frick-and-Frack combo Tobias and Farley.

A Guided By Voices show has the aura of a private party, neighbors playing a stash of should-have-been hits that will never leave their basement. It is perhaps the only place that makes sense for a cast of rumpled Midwesterners well past the age when they might qualify for "Total Request Live" fame.

Meanwhile, they carry on, writing their own history in relative secrecy, art for art's sake that also acknowledges one other essential fact: that sometimes rock need only be as profound as playing a screaming air guitar solo in front of the bedroom mirror. It's a knowledge that underlies Pollard's voice when he sang, near the end of Saturday's show, "I am a lost soul/I shoot myself with rock and roll/The hole I dig is bottomless/But nothing else can set me free."