A book for the Portable Men's Society:

Moments before his ill-fated camping trip Friday last (more on which I may or may not write later), of which I was a temporary guest, Captain loaned me his copy of Jim Greer’s biography, "Guided by Voices: A Brief History -- Twenty-one Years of Hunting Accidents In The Forests of Rock and Roll." I finished it in mostly one sitting on Saturday night and have collected a few thoughts on it:

As an objective observer - as someone who might not have ever heard of GbV except maybe as a supposedly-fantastic underground band who didn't quite crack the big time, or as someone who might have only heard a smattering of their songs via drunken mixtapes - these are my thoughts:

Ever eaten a cheese pizza or a pack of crackers out of necessity because it was the only thing in the house, and even though you thought it would hit the spot, it was not necessarily as satisfying as it was filling? That was my feeling after reading “Hunting Accidents.”

While the book is over 300 pages long, a third of the length is devoted to various appendices (a GbV discography, a Robert Pollard discography, various set lists and a history of tour dates) that can be culled from various sources on the internet. This brings the actual body of text down to 215 pages ... which was a grand disappointment.

The best parts were when Greer got out of Chris Farley Show mode. Sure, there’s a certain mythology surrounding GbV and the copious drinking. And there's a certain mythology around the real-life folks he sometimes mentions in song - the Monument Clubbers, etc. But I got the feeling that the book wasn't so much about the music as it was about Pollard and the legends attached to him.

HOWEVER ... I am not an objective observer. I am a hardcore fan, and as such, as someone for whom GbV was a huge part of my life for the better part of a decade (is that proper sentence structure?), I thought the book was a great read. I'll still grant that Greer tended to veer off into tangents about the real-life folks I mentioned in the paragraph above; regardless, I thought that those tangents, more often than not, only added color to the story of a kid from Northridge who wasn't like everyone else.

The book is not for a casual fan; it's for the GbV completist. I think that the book was written for people like me and The Captain and Lisa (who is sorely missed): people who devoted much money and car mileage and inner-ear damage following this man and band who were unlike anything else that came around in our lifetimes.

Following GbV, and finding others who were like us, was like being a part of a secret society, except without the hazing. I recall finding this out when The Captain and I were leaving a record store in Bloomington one afternoon, while a couple of members of the band Cadmium Orange were going in. Captain and I were wearing GbV t-shirts, and Jason, the singer of the band, made note of it. We struck up a conversation, and although we had never heard the band, we were pleasantly surprised to have met some kindreds. (We made note to see the band the next time they played out, and we were not disappointed; the Cadmium boys could both rock and throw down.)

Despite its inevitability, there was regardless a sadness when Pollard decided that Half Smiles of the Decomposed would be the last album released under the GbV name. That album, and Jim Greer's book, provide a sense of closure to an era when they couldn't conquer The World, but they conquered ours. Hunting Accidents is a fitting epitaph to that era.