Saturday, February 25, 2017

Gloriously Baffling: The Real Story Behind "Sonny the Monster" (Part 1)


One day in 2015, out of curiosity, I googled "Sonny the Monster," a song I had sent off to gbv.com webmaster Rich Turiel back in the mid-2000s with a message to the effect that he should tell Bob (aka Robert) Pollard to feel free to use it. Lo and behold, Bob had taken me at my word. The song wound up on the Guided by Voices compilation Suitcase 3: Up We Go Now. Following up, I found a slew of articles, blog posts, and the like, as well as a fan tribute video of the song.

Of course, "Sonny" was not really a GbV song. It was, like many others, developed in other bands/projects and later sort of grafted onto the GbV canon. Although I received a writing credit for the track on Suitcase 3, I had almost nothing to do with writing the original song. For my version, I tweaked a couple of chord progressions in the verses and chorus, and added a couple of goofy little hooks. That was all. At the time I recorded the cover, I was oriented toward electronic music. I was working mainly with synths and a drum machine, and the production reflects that. Anyway, I didn't really want to reproduce the original version of the song, since I figured that had already been done.

In the comments for the YouTube video, I saw a link to a web page that supposedly explained the origins of the song. I followed the link, but the page was no longer active. Someone later went and found the original web page from Wires and Waves in the Wayback Machine archive and posted a link to it in the YouTube comments. However, that post only tells the most basic part of the story. I've decided to tell my version of the history of "Sonny." Any story starts at the beginning, but I guess technically most of the rest of this is a flashback. Anyway, it started at Northridge.

Anacrusis

Northridge is the name of the local school district in the eastern section of Harrison Township, Montgomery County, Ohio. It was a decidedly blue-collar community when I was growing up there in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the people worked in industry in and around nearby Dayton. My dad worked at the McCall Company (later Dayton Press) as a job setter for decades. My brother worked for General Motors. Other folks in the community worked at one of the GM plants or at National Cash Register. At the height of its population, the district had close to 4,000 students. Now the number is less than half of that.

Musically, there must have been something in the water. People reading this certainly know of Bob Pollard. They might not know that Grammy Award winning songwriter Frank Myers also went to Northridge and graduated around the same time as Bob did. We were all developing musically in the shadow of a rich Dayton scene best known nationally for soul and R&B at the time, including artists like the Ohio Players, Roger Troutman (Zapp) and performers like Keith Wilder (who became a founding member of the international hit group Heatwave, along with his brother Johnnie).

Anacrusis is where I first hopped the train that would become Guided by Voices. Of all the members of Anacrusis and GbV, the only one I still have contact with is Tony Conley. Tony has honed his skills as a writer on his blog, Rock Guitar Daily, and is currently working on a forthcoming book, Paul McCartney: With The Beatles. He graciously consented to fill in some of my gaps in knowledge, especially about the origins and history of Anacrusis.
I remember the beginning of Anacrusis much better than the end. I had been hanging out learning to play guitar for a couple of years with a fellow by the name of Wendell Napier. Wendell could play guitar like nobody I had ever met, and to this day I've not played with many musicians who were more natural than he. We had gotten pretty good at playing together, so we decided to form a band and do a show. All in the same week.
My own call to join Anacrusis came around the time I was about to graduate in 1977, and I went to a rehearsal with the band. I think I told somebody something dumb like I really enjoyed singer-songwriters. That was true, strictly speaking, but I also had a fondness for jazz, fusion, and progressive rock (as anyone who's read my blog at length can attest). At the time, the band wanted to play hard rock, but not too much metal, and punk was just getting rolling in America in 1977. We dug right in, rehearsing a relatively short set list of covers, including artists like Ted Nugent, Cheap Trick, Blue Oyster Cult, UFO and similar stuff. Beside Tony and Wendell, the lineup included Bob on lead vocals and Mitch Mitchell on bass. The latter two of course went on to become founding members of GbV.

I was skeptical about all of this at first, but the musicianship was actually quite high, well above the average local bands. We played the gig at a place called Brookwood Hall, which was located in an area no longer open to the public off Rip Rap Road between northeast Dayton and Huber Heights, Ohio. We were a huge success and this gig led to another at the same hall, as well as a booking at a small nightclub on North Dixie Drive called the Domino Club.

We had about a one-month residency at the Domino Club, during which we allegedly broke the attendance records of a male stripper named Jeremiah Shastid. It probably helped that our crowd was decidedly more diverse, gender-wise. We quickly built a devoted local following and had become a tight musical unit. Wendell and Tony provided a potent two-guitar attack. Wendell was the guitar god, but Tony was no slouch. (For a taste of what he can do, check out his impassioned playing on "Look at Your Life" from the later Moping Swans album -- easily my favorite guitar solo in the entire canon of GbV side projects.) Mitch and I held down the bottom end with gusto, while Bob was already a high-kicking showman.

After a while, the edges frayed. I recall that Bob and Mitch started getting into the punk and new wave that were emerging in '77. The Sex Pistols were big, and Bob got heavily into Devo when they first came out. I remember Bob talking about taking the band in that direction, but Wendell wanted very much for the music to stay as it was. Me? I wanted to gig and continue to grow musically. It felt to me like Bob and Wendell's disagreement was turning into a power struggle, and it seemed that the band's momentum had stalled. Tony provided some great insight into this. It may simply have boiled down to “our lack of knowledge concerning what to do next, and how to do it.”

Eventually, I looked around and hooked up with a band called Wharf Rat. That band played a few gigs in the fall of 1977, including the October Daze event at Wright State University, before also stalling. Although I remained loosely associated with Wharf Rat for a while, I also flirted with the idea of rejoining Anacrusis a few times. In fact, I came around to a couple of Anacrusis gigs, which more often than not seemed to be house parties.

As the clock ticked toward 1978, I began to realize that my aspirations to become a full-time musician were not going to pan out. I had delayed entering college to try to get a music career off the ground, and that simply wasn’t happening. Looking back, what Tony sagely pointed out about the band was definitely true about me: I didn’t know what to do or how to do it. Truth be told, my head wasn’t in the right place to dig in and figure it out, and I lacked the maturity and courage to resist the path of least resistance. I ended up enrolling at Wright State, but maintained my ties to both Anacrusis and Wharf Rat while doing some wedding and society gigs around town on weekends and jamming with different people in different styles, including jazz, funk and experimental music.

As for Anacrusis, they limped along for a while before eventually splitting up. Tony relates that Wendell had become increasingly dissatisfied with Mitch’s playing and wanted to replace him. However, Bob probably made it clear (I’m just speculating) that he and Mitch were a package deal. Whether Wendell “fired” Bob as Bob later claimed seems moot at this point. It was over. Bob, to his credit, detriment or both, just couldn't kick the rock 'n' roll jones. Within a couple of years, he had planted the seeds of what became GbV. Tried and true fans know that story well, and I'll leave it there.

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