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Country Sad Ballad Man: GBV & DIY Michael Ross, 04/16/05 |
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Hey Michael, Thanks for the e-mail to Rich. He forwarded it to me and I must say that I'm honored and touched. Please tell the students of your class that they have good taste and are obviously quite intelligent! Thank you very much for sparking their interests, and by all means have a happy "GBV Day"! Love, Robert Pollard In desperation, I slapped a "Join GBV" flyer up in my classroom. I needed some reminder that, somewhere, people listened to something other than Simple Plan. I needed someone to, please, kick out the jams like it mattered from a basement in a neighborhood to which it didn't. Gimme indie rock, please. Bob Pollard has been something of an inspiration to me in the past couple of years. In my previous life at a job I hated, he represented a noble raging; a clanging, clarion call; a giant jump-kicking, guitar-windmilling stab to the heart of the kind of life I was leading. In the life that followed, his songs were the sound of my fist pumping into the sky, of singing along with strange lyrics in the car, and of escapism on a tangible level. I could do this, I thought. Now... I'm a high school journalism teacher. My kids are, by definition, a little bit different. Some of them are obvious; some not so much. My belief that they each were cut from the right kind of fabric was affirmed, however, when two of the girls in first period saw the flyer and declared May 13th to be GBV day (this was determined by inspecting setlists from previous years and discovering that the band had played in Oklahoma City on a previous May 14th; with the correct anniversary falling on a Saturday, the day before would suffice.) We handed out gag awards and gorged ourselves on breakfast sweets. I played "Surgical Focus" on the stereo. We tried to watch some of Watch Me Jumpstart, despite the media center's DVD player goofing up. In short, the day was a celebration of doing it yourself. Here was a band that had willed itself into being and had gone out on the top of their game. Here was said band being celebrated by a class that had spent the previous months toiling on a high school yearbook (due to be delivered early next week.) Here was a teacher who had forced himself through testing to be where he is now. Here were all three, happily together. Ironmen, officially. My kind of soldiers. I am a scientist - I seek to understand me all of my impurities and evils yet unknown I am a journalist - I write to you to show you I am an incurable and nothing else behaves like me -"I Am a Scientist," Guided by Voices I think, at the end of the day, the appeal of bands like this to weird old guys and slightly off teenagers is the idea that, given the proper amount of grit, anyone could do this stuff. Other DIY legends seem to have some aura of greatness, some whiff of a genius beyond mere mortals (I'm looking at you, Flaming Lips), but Pollard and co. aren't any different from the rest of us. They're mortal, yet somehow they transcend mortality and pull back the curtain to reveal the Great Oz to those of us who want to see. Today, I think my class caught a glimpse. |
| Previous editions of Country Sad Ballad Man: |
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London Calling... Collect. -
March 20, 2005 Dispatch from the front, five years after - February 25, 2005 Karl Hass - February 8, 2005 They Don't Love You Like I Love You - October 5, 2004 CSBM Returns - September 14, 2004 Sometimes Hipness Is What It Ain't - July 21, 2004 Reflecting Off Of Your CD - May 20, 2004 Oh Well, Nevermind - April 26, 2004 Fixing the Leak - April 6, 2004 End of First Quarter Report - March 10, 2004 Super Bowl Analysis - February 3, 2004 Liz, it used to mean something when you said "f*ck." - January 7, 2004 The Original - December 17, 2003 |
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