Guided by Voices by James Greer

Author:James Greer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2005-12-12T16:00:00+00:00

Do the Collapse sold somewhat better than previous GBV releases, but Pollard’s gold record dreams were still well out of reach, despite a major promotional push and an extensive bout of touring. The cost of the promotional push meant that despite the minor bump in sales, the band stood no chance of “recouping,” meaning GBV would be in debt no matter how many records it sold. The way this works is: everything the company spends to manufacture and promote an album, from studio costs to packaging and poster costs to radio promotion to remixing a song for radio to making a video to tour support, on down to buying dinner, gets counted against sales, so that it often happens that a band doesn’t “recoup” even if it goes gold, because the record company has posted so much money against the band’s account that the band is still technically in debt, and the record company doesn’t have to pay royalties until the record has recouped its costs. To be fair, taking a band from one level to the next, as Gerard Cosloy explained earlier, is a costly process. Which is why, once a band understands the economics of recouping, the phrase “nonrecoupable expense” becomes one of the sweetest in its vocabulary. Not to mention the fact that management takes 15 percent of a band’s gross income, meaning, for instance, that if a band gets an advance to make a record, management gets paid 15 percent of that advance whether the band makes money or not.

Very few major label bands recoup, ever, which is one way the big record companies have managed to stay in business despite the general slump in sales (often blamed on piracy and illegal downloading, which, while certainly a factor, have much less to do with the problem than the industry-wide insistence on putting out really terrible music from bands that maybe have the right look and can be chummed to the sea of fans for one or two big hits, then cut loose). In fact, the tiny minority of acts that, mirabile dictu, consistently sell millions of records subsidize their lesser-selling colleagues.

Bob’s ambivalence toward the idea of success did not help Guided by Voices’ chances of breaking into that tiny minority. While fully capable of writing a hit song, the artist in him bucked against the idea—lyrically, he could only serve his muse, and even a blatant attempt like “Hold on Hope,” with the exception of the chorus, could not help but befuddle mainstream listeners, who by and large respond to songs that respond to them. Lyrics like “Animal mother / she opens up for free,” and “At the station / there hides the cowboy / his campfire flickering / on the landscape” are not the sort of easily digestible pap likely to connect with fans of anyone except, well, Guided by Voices—not to mention that the song, while espousing a universal message, is suffused with typical Pollard melancholy, referencing “this life of misery,” and centered on a chorus which explains that hope is “the last thing that’s holding me.

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