I’m pretty sure you’ve never truly lived if you haven’t been to a Guided By Voices (aka GBV) show and watched as former schoolteacher Robert Pollard high kicks and beer chugs his way through a rip roaring set of indie rock gems that touch upon the band’s vast (an understatement—they are releasing their 40th album very soon) three decade catalog. You can trust me. I am a scientist.
Okay, so I’m not actually a scientist in any official terms—it’s mostly a reference to the GBV song of that name, but in my own way, I think I actually am a rock and roll scientist. I observe. I collect data. The data informs certain hypotheses on the nature of things. I test these hypotheses on a regular basis. And taken all together, a theoretical framework is constructed.
Maybe it’s better if I give you an example.
Let’s say I observe a feeling within myself. I note something to the effect of, “I feel like crap today emotionally.” Generally speaking, feeling like crap every so often is fine because it’s just life—highs, lows, victories, losses, mundane in-between blah periods. It’s ok. But sometimes if you’ve been down too long, it might serve you to wonder, “What will help?”
Through your keen lifelong observation you find that music generally makes you feel better. It’s not a magic pill, but it’s more consistent and generally doesn’t have any iffy side effects. A night of beers might make me feel better for the night, but I know from keen observation that for the next few days I’m going to be paying for it with near intolerable physical, mental, and emotional wreckage in the form of a middle aged hangover.
So instead you test your hypothesis and put on GBV’s Under the Bushes Under the Stars, or something akin to it, and it works again. And you find that music experienced in a live setting actually not only helps bring you to a baseline “not-as-crappyness”, but also tends to elevate you to, dare I say, “feeling pretty okayness”!
Taken together, the theoretical framework you tend to base your lifestyle around is one that says a fortress built by songs, albums, and performances will serve to protect, repair, transform, and maybe even transcend the pains of normal life.
GBV gets it. Here’s a line from the aforementioned, “I Am A Scientist”, one of their most beloved songs, that hits me right in the deepest parts of my wanderlust-infected, rock and roll heart:
I am a lost soul
I shoot myself with rock & roll
The hole I dig is bottomless
But nothing else can set me free
Loving rock and roll is a bit of an addiction. You take one shot and you need more. And you keep digging deeper and deeper, half knowing you’ll never truly find what you’re looking for. You dig further into the bottomless pit and many around you won’t understand. They’ll ask, “Haven’t you had enough?” And maybe there is an “enough” for normal people. But for you there isn’t. You have to keep digging and searching because as the lyric goes, “nothing else can set me free.”
Bob Pollard likely speaks from experience. Not only did he engage in the normal people world with a life as a teacher, he was actually at one point a great athlete too, which everyone can probably agree upon as one of the most respected states of being in the normal people world. There’s a newspaper headline/photo that lives in indie rock lore that reads, “Pollard Throws No-Hitter”, because, well, he once threw a no-hitter for Wright State University. I think they made shirts with this headline and the accompanying photo of a smirking, young, baseball-uniformed, future indie rock legend.
The smirk says it all to me. It tells me that he knows something that the normals of the world don’t. He knows he can live in this world of theirs, and in fact be great at it, but his calling is elsewhere. There’s only one thing that can truly set him free.
I am very much an observer. That’s true. The rest is maybe a bit of a stretch in service of the theme of this piece, but hey, one has to do what one has to do in order to not go flying completely off the rails, as is my natural propensity. See? Doing it now. God, I need an editor!
Anywhooo, back to being an observer. Music has always helped me build a rich internal life, even before I really understood the visceral joys of live concert experiences. I’ve watched and listened to how music has enriched my state of being and given me direction. And I’ve watched and listened to how it’s done the same for others like me.
I mentioned the word “wanderlust” earlier because it’s one of the things that rises up within me when music hits me just right. It’s at the center of the idea of songseeking. Sometimes the songs hit just right and make you wonder what else is out there. You want to get in the car and drive to every big and little town and find where the honest, talented, and compelling musicians are making music. You want to hear them play. You want to talk to them. You want to buy a record. You want to ask them who they are listening to and where the best place in town is to buy those records. Then you want to go find the next town and do it all over again. Inspiration, meaning, digging…freedom.
I am a scientist - I seek to understand me
I am an incurable and nothing else behaves like me
It’s all in service of understanding. It’s all in service of living a life that is on your own terms, that is filled with discovery and joy and interesting turns, that eases the doubts and sharper edges of human day-to-day. It’s a choice you make, knowing that the disease is incurable and a lot of people are going to think you’re a weirdo. But you know you’ve only got a handful of days here, so you want to spend it with the other weirdos who are set free by the same music that was never meant for the masses, but rather for a niche of humans who are drawn to this life. Is it a gene? Is there something mysteriously coded within those of us who live for distorted guitars, catchy hooks, a persistent backbeat, three to five minute vignettes built around the search for meaning via rock and roll instrumentation/forms? Maybe actual scientists can study that question and report back to us.
But knowing where it comes from is less important than actually knowing what to do with it. The first step is acceptance. Accept that not everyone cares to hear why you think “The Goldheart Moutaintop Queen Directory” is a brilliant song. Accept that some won’t understand why you’re calling that gray haired guy on stage who just had his third Budweiser, “Uncle Bob”. Is he your actual uncle? Well, no, not genetically speaking, but in a rock and roll sense, yes (you responded this way, but their eyes have glazed over and they are no longer listening, so you may as well have said it’s because he’s your cult leader and demands you call him this…I mean, which is probably not far off…super fandom and cult adherence have some alarming parallels). Accept that this music isn’t popular for most people and will not make you popular in a traditional sense.
But then what? You find a way to live it as much as possible. You find your sympathetic ilk and you celebrate your shared obsession together without abandon and without shame. You listen and feel how the songs affect you. You let yourself feel sad when you need to feel sad. You let yourself be uplifted when you need to be uplifted. You let yourself cry when out of nowhere the experience of seeing your favorite band for the 11th time makes you weepy and you can’t explain why. This song isn’t even sad! What is wrong with me?
Nothing in fact. My scientific approach has led me to the realization that this is the best possible path that I could have taken in this painfully unfair life. All you can really do is learn from your experience loving rock and roll. In my observation, good art makes us more empathetic, more open to multiple points of views, more open to our fallibility and darker sides, more able to recognize the spectrum of human emotion…it makes us better. Rock and roll can’t change the world, but I do think it can make people like me better participants in said world—or at least more equipped to face each day in the face of struggle. All I really want is more moments of communing with this thing that sets me free. And when I’m free, I’m alright. When you’re free, you’re alright too. We’re all out here trying to do our best while we can.
I’ll let Uncle Bob have the last word on this topic:
Everything is right
Everything works out right
Everything fades from sight
Because that's alright with me
I am in awe of the depth of your love for rock 'n roll, Andy. You do a great job communicating how you incorporate music into your life. Once again, great writing about a band of which I knew nothing before reading what you wrote. I read to the end, because it was that good.