It was in October of 2000 that I was spending another day in the hospital room of my dying grandfather. He had recently had a heart attack, another in a series of several of them and the resulting corrective surgeries. Something felt final about this one, as it would turn out to be.
He was asleep in a drug-induced fog as I watched a ladybug crawl in a straight line from the bottom to the top of the wide window of the room. The path it walked was dead-center in the middle of that pane, the bare tree branches in the background. It was the kind of thing one only ever sees in overly serious movies. I hoped it got to whatever destination it had in mind, and I remember thinking at the time, “Everybody’s got a hold on hope. It’s the last thing that’s holding me.”
That line is from “Hold on Hope”, a single from what was at the time the most recent Guided By Voices album, Do the Collapse. I had been listening to that CD a great deal, after a few years of trying to appreciate the lo-fi rock that is their trademark, but which I couldn’t seem to connect with. Go figure, it took the big-budget, major-label release which repulsed most of their fanbase for me to find a gateway.
A criticism still frequently leveled at the album is not the glossy production, but the lack of good songs. My own assessment is there isn’t a bad track among the sixteen (!), though roughly half of those are rather pedestrian tunes. If nothing else, the remaining tracks are truly stellar and throw into sharp relief those which don’t reach those heights.
It isn’t possible to convey with words the strength of those tunes, though I will say one could whistle most of them, and I always regard that as high praise. At a time when the age of the big guitar riff looked to be facing an extinction event, the hooks of “Teenage FBI” and “Zoo Pie” scan like a raging against the dying of the light. Or, at least, they feel like devil’s horns silhouetted in the stage lights.
The album was mixed to emphasize such elements, and this was to be expected when one has former Cars front man Ric Ocasek producing. Supposedly, working in a professional studio did not sit well with Pollard, who was reportedly not pleased by Ocasek’s pronouncement during the recording of “Hold on Hope” that this was their “power ballad!” Apparently, whatever Robert Pollard (the man who basically is GBV) was aiming for, it wasn’t that.
I don’t have any issues with the production or mixing, as I like to think the chief allure for me were the lyrics. Pollard’s work before was largely obtuse, sometimes to the point of feeling like the product of a magnetic poetry kit. He is more direct this time, without compromising his values. Consider some of these selections: “With surgical focus/she/glared and me and said/change is not going to hurt you/not this time”, “They even count as numbers/no longer cold and hard like/things that I will keep/and hide them in my sleep”, “How do these things appear/in our lives so obtusely?/Why do they change their prices/accordingly?”
My absolute favorite track is the penultimate one, “Picture Me Big Time”, what scanned initially to me like a self-mythologizing song such as Urge Overkill’s “Now That’s the Barclords”. But then the chorus shifts the focus to “there was a band from Beantown/they drove the now sound/with a girl at the top of her lungs now”. Beantown…Boston? And Pixies are the first band that comes to my mind when I think of that city. And Kim Deal is not only a fellow Dayton resident, but she even produced the Guided By Voices album Under the Bushes, Under the Stars. Then the end of the track has Pollard delivering divine rock gospel, like Moses with new commandments, but descending from the Tower of Babel this time: “the world is divided by tongues now[…]but there are words which speak to everyone/which I will deliver to you, yeah/I will deliver to you.”
But the lyrics are a bit more deceptive than appear on first glance. “Hold on Hope”, the song I carried in my head like a talisman through my grandfather’s final days in the hospital, has something which slid right by me for the longest time. That couplet is: “animal mother/she opens up for free”. It is hard not to put my own interpretation on that, as I can’t help but read this as, “bitch puts it out for free”. It doesn’t change the importance the song has for me, but I do wonder what else I might be misunderstanding or overlooking beneath that studio high-gloss sheen.
The cherry on the cake is the Hold on Hope EP, which pairs that track with eight non-album selections, any of which could have been easily slotted into the album’s tracklist. This generosity, and the quality of the additional material, made me a fan for life. Odd how both Do the Collapse and its satellite EP largely alienated their core fan base who were upset by the temporary abandonment of the home four-track studio. Go figure, a band improves their sound and loses fans and hardly gains any new ones in the process. Don’t know if it matters at all to Mr. Pollard, but he gained at least one new fan.