The Tapes Archive

Answering Machine: 274, leave a message at the beep.

Marc Allan: Hello Bob Pollard. This is Marc Allan

Robert Pollard: Hey, hey, what’s going on?

Marc Allan: Hi. Good. How are you doing good, man?

Robert Pollard: Good.

Marc Allan: Okay, wow. Oh, Okay.

Robert Pollard: What’s going on?

Marc Allan: Nothing. Sorry I’m late. I had to drop off my little girl at school, and the traffic gets pretty, pretty bad at this hour. Took me a little while longer than I thought to get in.

Robert Pollard: No problem. I’m just hanging out, drinking coffee.

Marc Allan: All right. What are you doing up? You should be living the rock-star lifestyle. You should be going to bed just at this juncture.

Robert Pollard: 14 years of programming, man, of getting up at like 7:30 every day. I can’t seem to break that. I sleep a little bit later. Sleep, it’s not so hard to get up if you don’t have to be somewhere. The morning, also, is the most creative time. A lot of people that get writer’s blocks and shit, they can’t write, is because they don’t get up in the morning. They sleep in till two, but I get up pretty early.

Marc Allan: I’m guessing that writer’s block is not a problem you ever have anyway.

Robert Pollard: No, man. I try to write every morning. When I got home from Europe, I sat down one morning and wrote like 15 lyrics, and they were pretty crazy, but then I went and wrote the next day, I did this, I got up the same time, and made another pot of coffee, and put a little bit of music to the lyrics, and now I have a new album. In two days I had a new album .

Marc Allan: That is great. 28 more songs, is that it?

Robert Pollard: Well, it’s like 15, but there’ll be more. I always want to make it a shorter album, but then I always just keep tacking songs on, and it ends up like our new album, was originally gonna be all recorded in a big studio, and it was only gonna be like, I think 13 songs, but now it’s like half and half, and it’s 20 songs, so. You know, you gotta give the kids their money’s worth.

Marc Allan: Yeah, now this is the album that you’re working on now?

Robert Pollard: Yeah, well it’s finished. We got one more song to record I wrote. ‘Cause right now it’s 19 songs, and I wanna add one more to make it an even 20. Plus I wrote this really good song that I wanna put on there. And so it’s finished, basically. We have an EP. We have a six-song seven-inch coming out next month. Well, actually the first week of November, called “Tigerbomb.” And it’s got like a couple of re-recordings of some songs from “Alien Lanes,” for radio play, which some people think is unfair, but we’ll have to put a sticker on there saying, “This is the new, big version.” New versions of them. And then maybe we’ll put a sticker on “Alien Lanes” saying “Features the lo-fi, original four-track versions,” or something. I told ’em to do that. I don’t know if Matador’ll do that or not. But anyway, it has those two songs, and it’s got four more unreleased songs. And then we finished a 10-song 12-inch, which will be out in January.

Marc Allan: Oh, man.

Robert Pollard: That’s finished. I just sent all the artwork in for that. And then our album, I guess, will be out in March if Matador sticks to their schedule.

Marc Allan: Yeah. So you’re really just cranking stuff out. That’s amazing-

Robert Pollard: Yeah, cranking ’em out. And then, see, I tried to get more money from Matador, ’cause I just wrote all these new songs, and I wanna record ’em, and I don’t think they’re gonna give it to me . I think they said that we have to wait until like our next album comes out. I think we’re way ahead of ourselves. But, see, that’s the thing, though, that’s what I like to do. I like to write songs. They should be happy. I could be one of these guys, like they have to beg. “Hey, when you gonna come up with the rest of the material?” Like, you ever see the Dana Carvey skit on “Saturday Night Live,” where he’s the rock star, and the record company asked him to come in, they wanna know what he’s come up with?

Marc Allan: No, I never saw that-

Robert Pollard: He makes them all up on the spot. Oh, that’s hilarious. It’s a grocery list. Yeah, it’s hilarious. I think it’s on “The Best of Saturday Night Live.” You better check that out.

Marc Allan: Okay .

Robert Pollard: So I could be like that, you know. I just like to write. I like to write songs for fun. That’s what makes me happy. I can’t believe I get to do it now for a living. Like, it’s my job. I get to sit around and write songs , and cut out pictures and shit. All the things that my mom and dad said that I needed to quit doing-

Marc Allan: Cut out pictures? For the-

Robert Pollard: Yeah, yeah, for collages and stuff. Doing stupid shit, as my dad used to call it.

Marc Allan: That is great. I mean, you’re living the… A friend of mine said that you have given hope to everybody who plays in a garage and is in their 30s, you know, and stuff-

Robert Pollard: Yeah, Yeah. I think that’s true. I mean, for us to kick around that long, and then for something to finally happen, like is like, it’s a great hope for kids. I mean, I’ve talked to kids, they’ve written me, and they go, “Well, I’m frustrated. We’ve had this band for a year and nothing’s happening.” And I’m like, “Man.” See, that’s a mistake a lot of kids make. They have ambitions for something to happen to their music, and fuck, just do it because you like to do it, you know. That’s what we did it because it was fun. We couldn’t believe that we could actually, you know. None of us came from musical backgrounds, and we couldn’t believe that we could get together and make noise with amplifiers, and three-string guitars, and shit like that. We couldn’t believe it, so. We didn’t care, we just wanted to make records.

Marc Allan: Yeah, but it’s not just-

Robert Pollard: We don’t care about making money, we just love to make records.

Marc Allan: Uh-oh, you’ve seen a Don’s Guns commercial or something.

Robert Pollard: Does that guy say that? We’ve got some guy around here says, “We don’t care about selling carpet, we just love.” Or “We don’t care about making money, we just love to sell carpet.”

Marc Allan: Right. Well, this guy says, “I don’t wanna make any money folks, I just love to sell guns.” He’s got this really sadistic laugh-

Robert Pollard: “I just want to sell guns. I want guns to be in your hands” .

Marc Allan: The funny thing is, this guy’s pro gun control. I mean, he owns these guns stores, and he’s pro gun control, but that’s his slogan, so, okay .

Robert Pollard: That’s pretty phenomenal.

Marc Allan: Now, but it’s not just kids that you’ve given hope to, ’cause you’ve given hope to every guy who’s been plugging away in his garage for 15 years-

Robert Pollard: The old guys, yeah. That’s pretty weird because we appeal to youth and to older people. Yeah, yeah. Oh really, man. I mean, there’s a lot of guys that I know around this area that now the major labels are swooping down on them again. Because they’re looking for another Guided by Voices. They’re thinking, you know, there’s gotta be. if there’s one band like that out there, there’s gotta be more that’s been toiling away in the basement for years, and then have all this backlog of material. They’re out there doing that, and there’s some of these older guys are getting some attention now.

Marc Allan: But there are thousands of bands like that .

Robert Pollard: I know. Yeah, but I guess they’re looking for somebody that maybe is good .

Marc Allan: Oh, yeah. But if you look at it like, like I know some people in this like very fringe collectors’ market, who go out, and they try to find these people who put out like designer, basically. They maybe press 300 records for their friends when they put their band together. And there’s just hundreds and hundreds. And there are records in there, like there was a band here called McKay, I think. And they made like 300 records. I’ve seen catalogs where their record sells for like 1200 bucks on a collectors’ market, and you just-

Robert Pollard: Are they pretty good?

Marc Allan: They’re okay. I mean, it’s very ’70s sounding stuff, but it was okay for the time, I’m sure-

Robert Pollard: Their record sells for $1200. That’s amazing. Our second album, “Devil Between My Toes,” we only made 300 of those. I bet that’s worth a lot of money.

Marc Allan: Yeah. If things keep going, it’s just gonna be worth more.

Robert Pollard: I know.

Marc Allan: The only time you’ve played here, as far as I know, is Lollapalooza a couple of years ago.

Robert Pollard: Yeah. And we played, is Bloomington pretty close?

Marc Allan: Yeah, Bloomington’s like an hour south.

Robert Pollard: Yeah, we played there. That was a good show, though. I mean, that was a nice crowd.

Marc Allan: Yeah.

Robert Pollard: Is it gonna be a good show?

Marc Allan: Oh yeah. I think so. Think so.

Robert Pollard: Cool.

Marc Allan: Anyway, so I took my little brother to see you. He was probably 13 at the time, he’s 15 now, and he asked me to ask you, is most of your stuff still available? Where can it be bought?

Robert Pollard: Well, you know, the original stuff is not, but most of it’s in that box set, if he has the box set.

Marc Allan: Yeah. I think he does have the box set.

Robert Pollard: Hey, also tell him that, I know the show we’re playing is like 21 and over. You know Todd Robinson?

Marc Allan: No.

Robert Pollard: Well, he owns a store there. I’m not sure what it’s called, a record store, but we’re gonna come in there at like five o’clock and hang out, and eat pizza, and drink beer, and I guess he’s gonna advertise, and he wants a lotta kids to come in that can’t come to the show, and talk to us and that kind of thing, so. If he wants to come down.

Marc Allan: Well, he lives in New Jersey, but-

Robert Pollard: Oh, does he?

Marc Allan: But yeah, but.

Robert Pollard: But, yeah. No. But a lot of that stuff is not available, it’s just all in the box set, and like, even a lot of the seven-inch EPs are just getting pretty much hard to find. I think City Slang is gonna repress “Static Airplane Jive.” Some of that stuff’s tough to find.

Marc Allan: Did you save stuff for yourself? I mean, do you have copies for your-

Robert Pollard: Yeah, I have a few of everything, but it’s down to like, I mean, some things I have like three or four copies of and that’s it. I wanted to not get below five of anything. I don’t know why. I know that’s kind of gluttonous, a little bit, but you know . When we put out the records on our own, we just kind of hoarded ’em in the basement, kept ’em to ourselves. We didn’t know what to do with ’em. Hell, we used to take ’em and give ’em away. People wouldn’t even take ’em. Didn’t even want them. “Oh, I don’t have a turntable.” We’d throw ’em like frisbees and shit.

Marc Allan: Oh boy.

Robert Pollard: Now they’re worth like 150 bucks a piece. Oh God.

Marc Allan: Yeah. So this is what your first or second record for Matador, this is “Alien Lanes”?

Robert Pollard: The one coming up, yeah, is our second.

Marc Allan: The one coming up is your second, so-

Robert Pollard: Yeah, well, we’ve only put out one album from Matador so far, “Alien Lanes.”

Marc Allan: Okay, and-

Robert Pollard: Well, actually two, if you count the singles, we put out the “Motor Away” single, that was Matador. And then henceforth, all this stuff’s going to be on Matador. In our contract, I think we can actually put out a couple, two or three releases by other people. But, you know, I just don’t see the point in doing it if Matador is gonna put out, you know, they’ll put out anything we want, you know. Except now, they’re pretty slow about it. I think they think we’re flooding the market with stuff. You know, if we pop it out, put it out, you know. What’s the difference whether they buy our album or our EP, as long as they’re buying our stuff? I don’t know-

Marc Allan: It must be a marketing strategy or something like that.

Robert Pollard: What’s that?

Marc Allan: It must be a marketing strategy.

Robert Pollard: It is. It all has to do with recouping advances and things like that. And just giving records time to sell, you know. We’re involved with bigger companies now, and with publishing companies, and you know I signed a publishing deal and all that. I’m trying to be compromising. I don’t want to put too much on ’em. They give you a certain amount of money for the album, and you gotta give it time to sell and to make back, give them time to make money on it, so. You know, it is a market, and it is an industry, so they gotta do their job. You know, my job is to write songs and put out albums, so put ’em out, please.

Marc Allan: Yeah .

Robert Pollard: I’m doing my job.

Marc Allan: Yeah. I bet there are a lot of people who would like to have somebody like you on their label. Prolific, and having no problems.

Robert Pollard: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know.

Marc Allan: But anyway, I heard the NPR piece on you guys yesterday, and I thought it gave two misleading impressions, and lemme ask you if I’m wrong or right about those.

Robert Pollard: Yeah. Somebody told me about that.

Marc Allan: One impression that I got was that anybody could do what you did. I mean, and I don’t mean make records and stuff, but I just mean like, it gave the impression that if you hang out in your basement long enough, somebody will come knocking and offer you a record deal.

Robert Pollard: Yeah. Well, if what you’re doing is, that will happen. I don’t know what context that was taken in, but that would happen to you if what you’re doing, if you sincerely believe that it’s like something that satisfies your soul, which I did, then that’ll happen to you. If you’re just doing it with some kind of like false ambition that, “If I do this long enough, somebody is gonna find out my talent,” or whatever, and you’re doing it with, in the back of your mind, you’re thinking somebody’s gonna discover you. If you do it that way, then it probably won’t happen. But if you do it just because you wanna do it, then good things will come to you, you know. Good things will come to those who wait, or whatever.

Marc Allan: And the other impression that it gave was that you’re making, not huge money, but fairly substantial money.

Robert Pollard: Yeah, I’m making better money than I did. Now you know, the thing is though, it’s like, you get a chunk here and a chunk there. It’s not like a nine-to-five job with benefits and security, and all that. But you know, I’m making a lot more money than I did teaching, which I think is a pretty sad state of affairs-

Marc Allan: Yeah.

Robert Pollard: Where are societies priorities, you know? God bless society. But yeah, I mean, we all were able to quit our jobs, and we’re able to make a living at it, so.

Marc Allan: Oh well, that’s good-

Robert Pollard: I mean, we’re not rich or anything, but we’re making money.

Marc Allan: Yeah. He didn’t give the impression that you were rich, but he gave the impression that it was pretty substantial amount of money that you were like, well, you know, and I just, I think to myself, and I do the math, and you know, like you’re playing here at a 400-capacity club, and it’s seven bucks to get in, so that’s 2800 bucks. So obviously-

Robert Pollard: Yeah, we’re playing a show, the St. Louis show we get $6,000 for an hour.

Marc Allan: Yeah. Well, that’s pretty good. That’s-

Robert Pollard: The thing is, that’s not where we make our money, really. We don’t really make a whole lot of money live, because there’s so much, you know, we’re a business now, and we have to take out payroll taxes, individual taxes. We have to pay our management 15%. We have to pay our accountant 5% We have to pay our booking agent 10%. We have to pay expenses. See, they get all those before expenses. So by the time, we’ll do a tour, and we’ll make $30,000, and we might make $1500 a piece-

Marc Allan: Yeah. And that’s for how many weeks work?

Robert Pollard: For like three weeks, probably. I mean, it’s good money, live, but it’s not great money. Most of my money is coming from my publishing, as a songwriter. It’s just like, that’s what I’m hoping, you know. I’ll be 38 in October, and my hip hurts, my left hip hurts, and shit. And I don’t know how much longer I can jump around on stage, and get hammered and shit. So hopefully, when that’s finished, I can continue to be a songwriter for as long as people need songs.

Marc Allan: When I listen to your records, I think Beatles a lot. Were you a big Beatles fan?

Robert Pollard: Well, you know, man, The Beatles are still, they were a bit hokey, and they were such an icon and everything, but still, their records were the greatest. I just don’t think that like, because of John, mainly because of John Lennon’s songwriting, and because of Paul McCartney’s sequencing of the record, and the time he took in the booth, that he took in the making the records, putting the records together. I don’t think that people can make records that good. And I try to make a record like that, you know. Not necessarily copy The Beatles songwriting style, or what they do. I naturally have a kind of a John Lennon voice. I guess I grew up on John Lennon’s singing style, McCartney and that kind of thing, the British Invasion. But I try to put a record together the way the Beatles did. The time they took in the sequencing the record. And because we have access to, mainly, we’ve had access to a four-track, I try to make kind of like a long-lost Beatles bootleg. A Beatles bootleg of like long-lost studio stuff that you can’t get anymore-

Marc Allan: Yeah. There are times where I think there are songs that sound like The Beatles are goofing around in the studio-

Robert Pollard: Yeah. I love when The Beatles are goofing around.

Marc Allan: Right.

Robert Pollard: Yeah. So I kind of went for that. I occasionally find bootlegs, and I find stuff, studio stuff, where like The Who, or The Kinks, or The Beatles, or whatever, and they’re just like messing around and making up silly shit in the studio. And that, to me, that’s some of my favorite stuff.

Marc Allan: Yeah. And I also think of records like “The Who Sell Out.”

Robert Pollard: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Marc Allan: These are anthems.

Robert Pollard: See that’s a concept thing. I like to think that all of our records are semi-conceptual, in just the way that they’re put together. Like “Alien Lanes,” to me, is kind of like you’re tuning into this weird radio station from another dimension, except there’s no DJ, they just all combust together. So like all the records seem to have, they’re a little bit conceptual, kinda like “The Who Sell Out,” or like “Sgt. Pepper,” that kind of thing, yeah.

Marc Allan: You taught school for 14 years. Fourth grade, right?

Robert Pollard: Mm-hmm.

Marc Allan: Okay. What do you think of kids? Are kids getting dumber?

Robert Pollard: Well, kids are getting, actually, technically smarter, with computers, and video games, and all that shit, but I don’t know, maybe in commonsense-wise, maybe they are, I don’t know. I don’t know. Some of the stuff they listen to. I gotta be happy with kids. You know, kids are like paying my bills right now. I have to be happy with them, man. I like to think they’re smart because they listen to Guided by Voices. But then when they listen, a lot of them are still listening to some of this Pearl Jam imitation shit, and the Nirvana rip-offs like Offspring and bands like that. I tend to think that they’re kind of being kind of dumb, and just led along, you know, by whatever they hear.

Marc Allan: You don’t think The Offspring have anything to offer? You don’t like them?

Robert Pollard: From what I hear, no. I don’t have any of their records or anything, but from the stuff that I hear on the radio, and that I see on MTV, it just seems to be pretty much derivative.

Marc Allan: Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s true, but I think it’s pretty hard to come up with something that’s absolutely novel.

Robert Pollard: It’s extremely hard. I’ve tortured myself with that for years. I’ve always thought that we sounded too much like other, like someone else, like, “That sound’s like somebody else, that sounds like somebody else.” But then it got to the point where we sounded like so many different bands, and so many different eras, that you can’t tell what we sound like, and we almost have developed our own sound.

Marc Allan: Right . Yeah. Well, I mean, you’ve had how many years to-

Robert Pollard: Yeah, no shit.

Marc Allan: To do this.

Robert Pollard: Since, well we started doing original stuff in like ’81. So like, what is that? 14 years?

Marc Allan: Yeah. So you’ve had time to develop-

Robert Pollard: As long as I talk, I had a side project. Before that, I used to play in cover bands, like metal bands, and bar bands and shit, you know. In like the Seventies. Pretty sad.

Marc Allan: Yeah. And have you lived in Dayton, or the Dayton area-

Robert Pollard: I’ve lived in Dayton all my life, yeah.

Marc Allan: Wow. So that’s not a place where people usually are discovered from.

Robert Pollard: No. It’s not a real hip place. It’s getting better. I mean, there’s starting to be some bands that are like. I mean, obviously, when bands start to experience success, like The Breeders, and like we have, then the labels are gonna come swooping in, so there have been like four or five bands have been signed to some pretty good independents like Grass, and Brainiac just got signed to Touch and Go. It seems like it’s a happening thing going on right now in Dayton, but it’s still not. It’s still backwards. The media doesn’t support bands. They think it’s bad for the kids now. They’re trying to bring it down. They bring up things that happen, like the Kelley Deal incident. They’ve kind of focused on the fact that we’re like old, sad drunks or something- Yeah, and they’ve written bad things about us in the paper. Yeah, it’s pretty bad-

Marc Allan: In the Dayton paper?

Robert Pollard: In the Dayton paper, yeah.

Marc Allan: Oh man. Not Dave Larsen, he wouldn’t-

Robert Pollard: Oh yeah, that fucking creep Dave Larsen.

Marc Allan: Get outta here! Really? That’s unbelievable.

Robert Pollard: Yeah, he followed us around for a long time. But see, we had a show at Gilly’s, and we invited like four other bands to play with us, Kim Deal’s new band, and three other Dayton bands. It was just a big party, and everybody was having a good time, and everybody was drinking. By the time we came on, we were last, we were pretty smashed, but we played the show, and everybody had a good time, and our amps broke down in the middle, and we had to stop for a while, and I told some people, and they turned the lights on. Our part of our show was only like halfway done. And they turned the house lights on us ’cause they were all pissed off and everything, ’cause everybody’s having a good time. So I said, “Hey, don’t leave, we’re not finished yet. We just blew an amp.” And he wrote it up in the paper that I was like laying on the floor begging and crying for people not to leave ’cause we were sucking so bad. They just completely exaggerated. The headline was “GBD Throws This One Away.” And then the next day he wrote another article said “substance abuse still prevalent in rock,” and then talked about us, and Kelley, just like that kind of thing. And then there aren’t really any really cool record stores here, I mean like really hip. To get really good records you have to go to Cincinnati, or Columbus. There’s no place to play. There aren’t any clubs here. I mean, there’s one club called Canal Street Tavern, it only holds like maybe 200 people, 250 people. A lot of people are misconstruing that this is this really hip city, this really hip town, and it’s not.

Marc Allan: Yeah. Well. I never thought of it that way, but I’m real surprised Dave Larsen, that just doesn’t… I mean, I know him a little bit, and that just sounds really-

Robert Pollard: He needs to stick to reviewing Whitney Houston and stuff.

Marc Allan: Yeah. I guess so. Holy crap. You know. I mean, I don’t know, people-

Robert Pollard: Matter of fact, we’re putting that show out as a bootleg, this guy in town is. He’s putting it out as a bootleg, with that article as the cover.

Robert Pollard: It’s gonna be really cool. Yeah. I listened to it, and you can hear some of the things I said, but they’re completely taken out of context by what he said, and it’s like for the first 18 songs, we ripped through ’em, it sounds great, man. It got sloppy toward the end, when everybody was just… And yeah, Mitch threw up on the stage, like you said and everything, but you know, that was after the show, and it’s like behind the drums, so .

Marc Allan: Well, it sounds like you were having a good time.

Robert Pollard: It’s not scaring us, all that kind of stuff. We’re gonna play another date. We like to play Dayton. We’re playing UD, playing a University of Dayton show October 12th, at the pub. And we’ve invited Real Lulu, they’re a cool band. There’s some pretty good bands in Dayton now, despite all the bad publicity, the bad press, and nowhere to play, there are actually some pretty good bands in Dayton.

Marc Allan: Yeah. You’re actually getting a good local Bloomington band, I think, opening for you here-

Robert Pollard: Who is it?

Marc Allan: I think it’s gonna be Velo-Deluxe.

Robert Pollard: Oh yeah, John Strohm.

Marc Allan: Yeah, John. Do you know John?

Robert Pollard: That’s a good band. They played with us in Bloomington. Yeah. I like them.

Marc Allan: Yeah, John’s a real good songwriter. What did I want to ask you? So the new album, what’s the title of the next album gonna be?

Robert Pollard: The title of the next album is called “The Flying Party is Here!”

Marc Allan: “The Flying Party is Here!”

Robert Pollard: Exclamation point. Don’t ask me what that means. It just sticks to my concept, or my use of visual, of flight imagery. You know, because we’re from the birthplace of aviation, of course. So we have to use all that rocking airplane imagery.

Marc Allan: Okay. And you’re recording with Steve Albini, is this right?

Robert Pollard: Yeah, we did. Well, on the album there are three songs recorded by Steve, five recorded by Kim, and Ed Easely in Memphis. And then there’s one recorded here in Dayton at a big studio. And then the rest, like 11 of them, are like four track. So it’s like half and half-

Marc Allan: Just recorded at home?

Robert Pollard: We’re easing our way into that big studio. The next one will probably be all. But, you know, those were good experiences, but I still need, for our next album, we’re gonna go into a studio, we’re gonna find somebody who is completely sympathetic to what we want, and they’re gonna let us do exactly what we want. You know what I mean? It’s gonna be like, I have to make it on earth as it is in heaven, man. When we go in the studio, and it hasn’t been really that way yet, it’s gotta be exactly like it is for us in the basement, where we can just like sit around and do whatever we want, and spontaneously do it. Like for the last record we did went in, we rehearsed with Kim for like a month off and stuff, and it turned out good. It sounds really good, but man, it drove me crazy. And you know, I think, I don’t even think we’re gonna rehearse. For the next time, we’re just gonna go in the studio, and I’m gonna teach, and we’re gonna mic the drums. I’m gonna teach Kevin the song. When I think he hits the song, then we’re just gonna build over the top of it. Because that’s how we do it on the four track in the basement. So like, that’s my plan for the next record, is to do it that way. And I’ve got the songs written for it, so we’re ready. I want some money. Give me some advance money, Matador. You know 4AD wants us really bad.

Marc Allan: Yeah?

Robert Pollard: Yeah. We just got back from Europe. It was a really successful tour. We toured for like a month. And 4AD, man, fucking, they love us over there, and they say they want us. So I’ll wave that carrot in front of Matador’s nose . I’m really happy with Matador, I’m just kidding.

Marc Allan: Yeah. You got the right label, I mean. And actually-

Robert Pollard: Yeah, we almost signed with a major label. I would have been miserable now, probably.

Marc Allan: Yeah. I mean, it depends how willing are you to go the big route? I mean-

Robert Pollard: Yeah, you gotta do a lottery. They tell you, you don’t have to do this, and you don’t have to do that, but then they don’t have to do this now for you too in turn. You know, we’re too old to be glamor pusses. We can’t be doing every interview every magazine wants us to do, to be doing a hundred. Yeah, we’ve been asked to do a lot of things, like host “120 Minutes,” and that kind of stuff. I turned that down. For one thing, I’m not that crazy about most videos. I don’t wanna just sit there and introduce videos that I don’t even like. But there’s a lot of stuff we turned down. Did you see us on “The Jon Stewart Show?”

Marc Allan: No.

Robert Pollard: Yeah. I think we maybe gonna do “Conan,” maybe.

Marc Allan: Oh, that’d be good.

Robert Pollard: See, I don’t mind performance. I don’t mind the band performing, and I don’t mind doing interviews, and that kind of thing, but like hosting things, doing projects with other people just to be rubbing elbows with them. And touring with bands like Soul Asylum and all that shit, ass-kiss moves, you know? I’m not into doing that.

Marc Allan: So being in “Random-

Robert Pollard: No, but you know with a big label, you might have to do a little bit of that.

Marc Allan: Yeah. Being in “Random Notes” was not your lifetime goal, I guess, right?

Robert Pollard: No. No.

Marc Allan: All right. Anything else you want to cover? We covered a lot of ground.

Robert Pollard: No, it was a good conversation.

Marc Allan: Yeah. Yeah. It was fun. I’m looking forward to seeing you. I had a great time watching you at Lollapalooza. The thing that I thought was so cool, and that impressed the hell out of my little brother, was that you were walking around afterward and talking to people, and signing autographs and stuff. You never got the rock star vibe-

Robert Pollard: Yeah, just mingling with the common folk, man. That’s what I am, yeah. Yeah, but really man. I tell you what, I see a lot of that rock star attitude now that we’re touring with people and different things. There’s some bands, like I know Kim Deal’s with The Pixies. She said they toured with U2 for two months, and they never talked to ’em one time. U2 never came around. We played with Ween, a show in Dallas. They never came in and talked to us, anybody. As a matter of fact, they circled the venue in a limousine until it was time for them to come on-

Marc Allan: Ween!

Robert Pollard: Yeah.

Marc Allan: Who the fuck is Ween? I mean, I know who they are, but that’s like. I mean, they’re nobody. How could they ever-

Robert Pollard: They’re nobody. I know. And they just act like fucking such rock stars.

Marc Allan: Yeah. No, that’s crazy.

Robert Pollard: I know, but whatever.

Marc Allan: So I gotta find out what record store you’re gonna be at at five o’clock. Do you have any idea what the guy’s store is?

Robert Pollard: Oh, shit. I don’t know the name of his record store, I’m sorry.

Marc Allan: That’s all right.

Robert Pollard: His name’s Todd Robinson. He’s from Dayton. He moved there and opened up a record store in Indianapolis. I wish I could think what it was.

Marc Allan: Okay. Well, I’ll ask a few people, maybe they’ll know-

Robert Pollard: I’ll tell you what though. Let me see. I wrote something out. Just a second.

Marc Allan: Okay.

Robert Pollard: Okay. I had the address.

Robert Pollard: Okay. I don’t know what the code is. 1521 West 86th Street.

Marc Allan: 1521-

Robert Pollard: It’s in a shopping plaza with-

Marc Allan: Oh, I know the store you’re talking about. It’s, man, I can’t think of what it’s called, but I know the store. I can picture it. That is a cool store.

Robert Pollard: Do you know when you called, man, I’m working on a song that I’m supposed to submit to for a soundtrack. I guess Tom Hanks is working on directing and starring in a new movie where they’re like a ’64 one-hit-wonder band. And their one hit’s called “That Thing You Do.” And I’m writing that song right now. They may want us to perform that for the movie-

Marc Allan: That’s pretty cool. Okay.

Robert Pollard: I like doing shit like that. I was even asked to score a whole movie and shit. It’s an interesting new direction.

Marc Allan: All right. Well that sounds good. Look, I’m looking forward to seeing you, and I’ll come up and say hi, give you a copy of the article on Saturday.

Robert Pollard: Cool.

Marc Allan: All right.

Robert Pollard: Looking forward to seeing you.

Marc Allan: Take care.

Robert Pollard: See you later. Bye-bye.