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Subject: 09/28 GbV live review from Eye Weekly (Toronto)
This Bob's for you
GUIDED BY VOICES
Sept. 28, Lee's Palace **** (out of 5)
It's a scene you'd stumble across in any bar on any given night: a bunch of
piss-drunk middle-aged jokesters barely fumbling their way through Black
Sabbath and Rolling Stones covers -- the difference here being that there's
a crowd of 500 equally sauced yahoos hanging on every bastardized riff like
it was gospel.
But then it wouldn't be a GbV show without such unconditional love. Bob
Pollard's Dayton, Ohio indie-rock jukebox has always been the terrain of
obsessive record-store scavengers -- who else could truly appreciate their
integration of Cheap Trick kicks and Wire-y schematics? -- but these days
the cult of GbV has exploded into a fearsome Budweiser-boosted booster club
that makes Dead/Phisheads seem noncommittal. But the awe is justified: even
as their several encores (I lost count around the time I lost track of my
brewski intake) degenerated into classic-rock karaoke -- with Pollard trying
his hardest to remember the words to "Wild Horses," "Start Me Up," "Ziggy
Stardust" and "Paranoid" -- GbV still got their shit together for gloriously
bang-on renditions of such immortal touchstones as "The Goldheart
Mountaintop Queen Directory," "Hot Freaks" and "Smothered in Hugs."
Credit Pollard's most stable and proficient lineup ever: new drummer (and
local boy) Jon McCann served up nothing less than his best Keith Moon, while
guitarists Doug Gillard and Nate Farley and bassist Tim Tobias attacked the
staccato riffage of "Waved Out" and "Cut Out Witch" with the sort of
ferocious, Helmet-like precision that would easily scare off the bookish
Sebadoh types that comprised their fanbase back in 1993. But as GbV has
gotten tighter, Pollard's gotten more endearingly reckless, making more
references to his dick than Eddie Murphy in his Delirious heyday and
declaring GbV "the cock rockers of indie rock" -- a tag they more than lived
up to with a mid-set cover of "Baba O' Reilly" that fit so snugly in their
repertoire, you wanted to sue Pete Townshend for plagiarism.
Fans clinging to GbV's lo-fi glory days would've balked at a set list
consisting mostly of Pollard's side-project material and a handful of old
"hits." But even they would be bopping their heads to "Glad Girls," the
prospective single for GbV's upcoming Broadcast in Your House album, and a
song so freakin' catchy they had to play it a second time to close out the
two-and-a-half-hour show -- and by that point, you already felt like you'd
known it your whole life.