TONIGHT at Metro in Chicago: The Return of Robert Pollard

One of if not the favorite late night lair of The Shark's happen to be the balcony at Chicago's great rock club Metro. In all the time I have spent there listening to many bands none has approached nor equaled the high performance art meshed with four track garage rock ambience that was Guided By Voices. Make no mistake about it, Rob Pollard is the shit: completely brilliant, funny, complicated and fearless in his utterly compelling trajectory towards drunken debauchery and heathen like celebratory performance. He may very well be the finest frontman in rock music today. He is certainly the most intelligently prolific.

In recent times any number of rock stars have considered themselves poets, churning out reams of beautifully bound yet completely awful prose best forgotten -that is, if one found oneself unfortunate enough to have unwittingly stumbled upon this particular genre -but not so with Pollard, a lyricist of Dylanesque proportions and ambition -who's poetry.....lets just say he does not embarrass himself. Mr. Pollard is The Sharks kind of soldier; a terrific, apex artist in the midst of creating a large body of fine, uncompromisingly honest work of the highest level of conception and execution within the confines and perimeters of his metier.

The standard hipster take on Guided By Voices is that they were great early on -Vampire On Titus, Bee Thousand -and that the loss of Tobin Sprout dramatically altered the band. None of this is true: Guided By Voices was Pollard's band, reaching their peak in the later half of the last decade with a string of brilliant recordings beginning with Isolation Drills, continuing with purposeful meandering through Universal Cycles and Truths, Earthquake Glue, finally culminating in their last moment of recorded greatness with Half Smiles of the Decomposed.

I remember standing in Metro's balcony three years ago witnessing the performance of a band that would blow away The Who (Keith Moon notwithstanding), Robert Pollard staggering across the stage half in the bag -the rhythm guitarist Nate Farley polishing off a quart of Jack Daniels and finally at the concerts end being lead of the floor by security after heading off stage to pick a fight with an offending fan -all of which would be rendered moot if it had not been accompanied by one of the greatest rock shows any of us present that evening had ever been fortunate enough to see.......the shark having to go back to Led Zeppelin at the Fillmore West in 1969 to draw an adequate comparison. They were just that good. Unleashing anthem after anthem the crowd less audience than collaborator, becoming an equal part of the ensuing fray. It, was a happening.

Joe Shanahan gave the Chicago rock world a Christmas present a year and some months ago by bring to Metro for their last two performances ever Dec. 30, 31st 2004, Guided By Voices. If you were there for those last two performances nothing else need be said: two sets, roughly 60 songs each -with perhaps 7 or 8 repeated from one night to the next. The bar on stage, the great rhythm section, and the sturdy guitar heroics of Doug Gillard all serving as backdrop to the brilliance of Mr. Pollard.

Rob Pollard returns to Metro this friday night after a fourteen month hiatus, fronting a full band with (of course,) an army and array of new material all from his new release From A compound Eye. Door is at 8:00, opening is the High Strung, 18 and over.....not to be missed