Voices are lifted high for one last time
For those of us who didn't really believe it was happening -- that the microphone-twirling, scissor-kicking teacher-turned-rocker Robert Pollard was actually pulling the plug on his 20-year-old muse, Guided By Voices -- the teary, beery slide-show montage that prefaced Thursday night's show brought that reality ruefully home.
Yes, it was true: We now knew that from the giant screen onstage in front of us. Pastel images of doves, butterflies, and Bob and his band, beers in hand and looking grand, majestically dissolved into one another like memories from a high school yearbook.
There were cheers, there was laughter, and there was the sense of having been privy to something special. When the tribute was over, the familiar war chant of "GBV! GBV!" went up from a crowd that had sold out the Paradise in anticipation of this last hurrah. It seemed that Guided By Voices, that mighty melody machine, would go on forever. It wasn't forever, of course, but for nearly three hours Thursday night, this is what standing inside Robert Pollard's pop universe felt and sounded like.
The songs came fast, furious, and triumphant, with Pollard at the helm in fine faux-British Invasion voice, reeling off the colorful titles like a peacock ruffles his feathers: "My Impression Now"; Gold Star for Robot Boy"; "Buzzards and Dreadful Crows"; "Game of Pricks."
The mantra-like splendor of "The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory," from GBV's breakthrough 1994 album, "Bee Thousand," segued into the urgent, humming "Cut-Out Witch" and eventually into the bright, Mersey-beat bounce of "Glad Girls."
Doug Gillard didn't move or say much, but his electric guitar did. His exuberant leads and sculpted riffs lent heft and grit to the gleaming chords that drove "My Kind of Soldier" and "I Am a Tree" (his own composition), as well as the new "Sons of Apollo" from the band's latest and final album, "Half Smiles of the Decomposed."
Ultimately, no matter what is said years from now about the legacy of Guided By Voices -- the shy little band that rose from the bedrooms and basements of Dayton, Ohio -- nobody can ever accuse Pollard of shortchanging his audience or skimping on his songs. He's written reams of them, of course: memorable lo-fi gems; unlistenable prog-rock indulgences; classic blasts of sonic euphoria that in a better world would have been all over the radio.
And he has scattered them like seeds across dozens of albums, some credited to Guided By Voices, some to any number of alter egos and side projects.
An idiosyncratic song-scripting genius, Pollard, although closing in on 47 years, remains a mad, true believer in the redemptive powers of rock 'n' roll. Watching him up there onstage Thursday, eyes shut, blissfully embracing yet another melody-cloaked couplet, one could hardly imagine Pollard not being guided by the voices he's listened to for what seems like a lifetime now. They were his guide, and he was ours.
