Circus Devils: See You Inside
The 1980s and early 90’s found me backing up Tim on drums in the bands The Ghost Sonata (including younger sister Jenny Tobias on bass) and 4 Coyotes (with Chris Candio and Mark Kunz), the band in which Bob Pollard first became aware of the Tobias brothers. When the Coyotes petered out, I told myself I was done with performing. Tim went on to join Gem, playing the #2 front man on guitar and vocals. In 1995, before I joined the band, Gem had a song that made local radio (Doug Gillard’s ‘Suburban Girl’). At the end of the 1990s as the new millennium approached, I drifted along oblivious to the direction music had taken. My sole preoccupation was to lose myself in private worlds of sound. “If I ever have the chance to make music people will actually hear,” I told myself, “Then I’ll do my best to offer listeners an adventure instead of simply striving to give them what they think they want. “If ever,” became a tired refrain as the years passed by. Then one day I woke up and realized I was 33; an age when most people already have their butts in gear. Seeing Tim away touring with Guided By Voices brought the point home. Even though I was unaware of it at the time, Tim and Bob were up for the same sort of musical adventure that I was ready for. Tim says he doesn’t remember this being discussed in vivid terms between him and Bob. I hope Bob will pardon me for speaking on his behalf, but I suspect he wanted to pull the plug on all the characters waiting to speak through him – characters that needed a special kind of musical vehicle to carry them. Apart from that he probably just wanted to stretch out as a lyricist and singer and have fun flying out of bounds. At some point Tim passed Bob a cassette tape filled with my homemade noises. One of those noises ended up on the Guided By
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