Closer you are: The Robert Pollard biography

Just started reading Closer You Are: The story of Robert Pollard and Guided By Voices by Matthew Cutter last night, and am already more than a hundred pages in. Guided by Voices and Robert Pollard have been an inspiration to me for quite a long time, so it was interesting to see what if anything would add to their story.

The band's committment to doing things on their own terms, committed to staying in Dayton, and constantly refining a sound matched with Pollard's prodigious output is only matched by the now-mythic telling of his rise to indie rock stardom a full decade after others would have given up.

Here's what I said in my Amazon review of it:

I think this is the type of biography that can appeal to anyone who loves a great story of the long messy road to the top-- however you define the top.

America is not really a nurturing place for artists, and Middle America even more so. It's fascinating to see Pollard's existential crisis of grappling with rock star dreams and  being a so-called responsible grown up, and the near total lack of support he received along the way to indie rock stardom. How on Earth he persevered so long is beyond me.

Closer You Are is a fantastic warts and all portrait of Dayton's finest and a true testament to never giving up on your dreams. I will say, Initially I found the writer's casual style a bit off-putting. But like some of Guided by Voices more weird songs, the more I read, the more it grew on me. Besides, if you are chronicling the life and times of a band who recorded almost everything themselves and did everything themselves, it makes sense that the book written by an "insider,' would come out. Whereas former band member Jim Greer's "Guided by Voices: A Brief History..." was more polished,  "Closer You Are," feels like one of Uncle Bob's friends is telling you. Specifically it is written in the tone of a really good drinking buddy who is just getting started. In other words, it's still objective enough to show you the drama and the costs of staying true to your vision, without being too reverent or coming across as a love letter from a sycophant.

In my short story collection, A-Sides & B-Sides, I used two Pollard titles to create new stories. In "Zoning the Planet," an flight attendant learns the truth about a mysterious plane hijacker known as D. B. Cooper.  In "Buzzards And Dreadful Crows," a black farmer discovers oil on his farm– and so do the feds. Of the two, the last song is probably the most GbV in that it is the shortest of the stories in the book.

My inital idea was to create a book of short stories using only Pollard titles, but I wanted different genres of music to infuse the stories, even if the subject matter had nothing to do with the titles.