thedailytimes.com : Your 24/7 news source

When indie icon Doug Gillard moved south from his home state of Ohio, his intended destination was Charlotte, N.C.

He didn’t realize he would be spending so much time in East Tennessee that local band Stewart Pack and the Royal Treatment would make him an honorary member, asking Gillard to join them on a string of opening dates for the Superdrag reunion tour.

The partnership between the band and Gillard, long-time guitarist for indie icons Guided By Voices as well as a host of lesser-known, but-no-less-accomplished bands like Cobra Verde and Gem, came about when Gillard was recording his most recent solo album, “Salamander.” Superdrag bassist Sam Powers recommended Pack to Gillard for Pack’s design skills. (Pack had worked on a number of Superdrag’s albums.) As it turns out, Gillard decided to make use of Pack’s instrumental prowess as well.

“At the time, I was still living in Ohio and was in Nashville, getting ‘Salamander’ mastered, and I drove over to Knoxville to meet with Stewart,” Gillard told The Daily Times this week. “We’ve been friends ever since, and some time ago, Stewart and I talked about recording something together. He has a program on his computer, and he’s been recording my next record, pretty much. We do a lot in his basement, and we go over to work in Asheville (N.C.) some.

“It’s been a good experience, and the record is coming along. When John Davis from Superdrag asked Stewart to open some of the shows for the Superdrag reunion tour, Stewart asked me to join in. So I said yeah, because it sounded like a lot of fun.”

With Pack serving as engineer, the new album is an organic outgrowth of “Salamander,” Gillard said. The albums are similar, but the new material relies more on atmospheric sounds and less focus on acoustic guitar. Pack — a prolific artist in his own right, who offers his albums as free downloads on the local Lynnpoint Records site — helped shape the sound of the new album, Gillard said, by serving as a counter-balance when it came to the guitar work.

“He and I work on different voicings and different chords, and his knowledge has come into play well when we’re punching in parts of solos or this and that,” Gillard said. “On one song, he added some pedal steel behind it for some ethereal-sounding stuff, so it’s been really helpful that he’s been behind the board on this project.

“I’d like to finish it up as soon as I can. It’s been kind of tough with the long distance — there’s been a lot of approving of mixes via e-mail, but I think it’ll be great whenever it gets done. We’ve already done a couple of songs for compilations that are coming out, including one out of Minneapolis that’s being put out to benefit the recovery from the bridge disaster up there.”

When he was 16, back in 1982, Gillard joined up with Suspect Device, a band that played around the Cleveland scene. A string of other gigs followed, from the underground rock/punk/psychedelic band Death of Samantha in the mid-1980s to Gem, which formed in 1992, to Cobra Verde, the glam-rock outfit that started up in the early 1990s.

However, it’s with Guided By Voices, founded by Robert Pollard, for which Gillard is best known. He joined that band in 1996, playing on six official albums as well as a number of singles, EPs and other projects. Given the band’s far-reaching influence into the underground and indie scenes around the nation (many cities named an official “Guided By Voices Day” during the band’s final tour in 2005), it’s the work for which Gillard is best known, even if it doesn’t begin to encompass everything that came before or followed.

“I was in the band for almost nine years, and I was probably the longest sustained member, arguably, besides Robert,” Gillard said. “Besides, it’s the thing for which I’m best known. The things Cobra Verde were doing in the 1990s, while very cool, aren’t the things a lot of people would know about. They were kind of under the radar, even then, and they certainly are now. Everything was pretty much the underground scene back then — all those bands I was in were, and they didn’t really tour a whole lot, either.”

Gillard and Pollard still talk, he added, even though, artistically, they’ve gone their separate ways. Since 2002, Gillard has composed film scores and soundtrack music, most recently for the feature-length documentary “American Cannibal: The Road to Reality.” He’s performed as a guest guitarist on records by everyone from The Mice, Bill Fox, Yuji Oniki, Richard Buckner and Knoxville’s own Mic Harrison. And he still makes time to pursue his solo career.

“There’s a band here in Charlotte that I play out with as my backing band — the Fence Lions — and there are a lot of great people here in the rock scene in Charlotte,” Gillard said. “It’s very much sort of a community, and I haven’t witnessed a lot of backbiting. There are no real local heroes as far as attitude goes. For me, that’s kind of refreshing. Knoxville has that kind of vibe as well.”