The Captain and I

Guided By Voices - Captain's Dead
Guided By Voices - Game of Pricks
Guided By Voices - Things I Will Keep

--from Human Amusements at Hourly Rates and Alien Lanes.

Last night two of my fellow co-workers and I crossed the Ohio River to witness aging song-writing factory Bob Pollard sweat and dance and sing for us for three hours in Newport, Kentucky's Southgate House. We got there early so we could sit on the balcony to observe the show - and I'm calling him old. To me, Bob had always represented the Great Midwest Hope: that I could reasonably expect to work a drab, middle-class job well into my 30s while writing songs with my drinking buddies on the side, and then, by a stroke of sheer luck, be catapulted into a cult-like rock stardom. Easy, right?

I expressed these sentiments to Bob at a book signing for the Guided By Voices biography, after which I gave him a copy of Lansing, Michigan's greatest rockity roll record. It ain't easy dreaming of being a rock'n'roller growing up in these parts. Bob smiled, told me he knew where I was coming from, and slapped me five. Oddly, I never heard from him again.

Well, anyway, the old man's still at it. And, judging from appearances, mildly more sober than usual. There were none of the embarassing collapses on stage, or brazen proclamations like, "Hello, we're Guided By Voices and we're the Best Fuckin' Band in the World! Better 'n the White Stripes; better 'n fuckin' Bright Eyes, that's for sure!" Of course, he isn't GBV anymore; he's just plain Bob. Still chugging out buckets of songs in the same old formula, hoping that by simple statistical probability a few of them will really knock yer socks off. And some of them did. He even managed to knock out a few old man jump kicks before the GBV-exclusive encore. Two of which are included here. The first song is just for my amusement.