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Bowery Ballroom, New York February 14, 2001 By C. Bottomley Conventional wisdom has it that Robert Pollard is a songwriting machine, programmed to accept assignments with a muse that switches on and off like the light in his refrigerator. Hence the gross of material that's emerged from his Dayton, Ohio, headquarters under either his own name or that of his band, Guided by Voices. Beginning with 1987's awkward Devil Between My Toes and continuing with the regularity of a serial novel, former schoolteacher Pollard pumped it out; for 14 years fans have been privy to his band getting its act together. Like a gang of kids gathered in a garage, salivating over a copy of The Who Sell Out, the shifting cast of musicians managed a credible sonic assault on Pollard's free associated sci-fi lyrics. Then on last year's Do the Collapse, with the help of Cars manufacturer Ric Ocasek, Pollard went and confused everybody by trying to become Cheap Trick . Robert the rock god took the stage of New York's Bowery Ballroom in an Elvis T-shirt with an open bottle of beer for a thunderbolt, and sounding the Falstaffian guffaw of a man who knew that within a six-pack or so this place could be the Budokan. Sure enough of his audience to announce that GBV would perform the entirety of their new album, Isolation Drills, in sequence, he launched the show with a shift of his heft and twirl of the mike. Like Collapse, Drills has its share of Kiss-this riffs and biology lectures delivered by the punk rock Hugh Grant, but over the years Pollard has learned how to parlay mere hooks into virtual bear traps of melody. Musically, he's still a mod in the best sense, meaning he uses his obsessions to change style into art. "Chasing Heather Crazy" and "Glad Girl," with its chorus of "Glad girl/ I only want to get you high," had the audience singing along before the songs were finished. Some of it was soggy pub rock, some of it was air-punching anthem, but it was never pastiche. With that disposed of, the audience was free to go crazy to a career-spanning greatest-product set that went on until the singer was ready to fall over. Performing "Long Way to Run" from a 100-strong song collection of unreleased insanity called Suitcase, he muttered, "If we had put out the Suitcase album in '67 we'd be the new 13th Floor Elevators." For now, he has to settle for Dave Matthews with skinnier lapels. The audience threw "Teenage FBI," an excellent "Game of Pricks," and "Tractor Rape Chain" back at him so enthusiastically that an unprecedented tilt at "Baba O'Riley" was almost excusable. Machine-made they might be. But at the Bowery Ballroom, Guided by Voices proved that rock music is still pretty good at doing what it's supposed to. |
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