Hunting Accidents: Being The Further Adventures of Guided By Voices

[Editor's note: In honor of the publication of Experienced: Rock Music Tales of Fact and Fiction, I am going to re-post an excerpt from the Hunting Accidents anecdote I contributed to that fine compendium of rock ünd roll arcana. This is part one of what was originally a two-part post about the time Guided By Voices were courted by Warner Bros., who flew (some of) us to Los Angeles to meet various executives of that record company.]

By late August of 1994 Guided By Voices had determined that there were really only two serious contenders for our future record label: Matador Records, in New York City, and Warner Bros., all over the world but based, at that time, when major labels were not shriveled, powerless husks and record stores dotted the landscape like baseball diamonds or Starbucks, in Los Angeles.

This story is about the time Warner Bros. flew us to Los Angeles to try to convince us that they would be the better choice. I forget the legal technicalities, but because Matador at that time had a deal with Atlantic Records, and Atlantic was shaded by the same WEA umbrella as Warner Bros., it was not, unfortunately, possible for Warner to simply throw a bunch of money at us. You laugh, especially you in the third row, but this was a time when major labels were throwing a lot of money at unlikely prospects, because some band named Nirvana had made a very successful record and… well, you know the rest. If you don’t, go read one of the many helpful books on the subject, including but not limited to Artificial Light, which is kind of an alternative universe view of the alternative universe.

Upshot: there was some weird kind of non-compete clause between Matador and Warner Bros., so the latter could not woo us with money. What, then? Booze, cocaine, hookers? Please. There is not enough booze in the world to bribe Guided By Voices, we have mostly drunk it all already, and the rest is for pussies.

Food? That must have been the oblique strategy of Warner Bros., because I have never eaten so much food in my life as during that brief trip, and I have eaten a lot of food. The problem with this strategy is that when you bring Jimmy Pollard along, as we did, and you try to offer him anything other than cheeseburgers or pizza, you will have made (unknowingly, but still) an egregious error.

Whatever the case, we flew to Los Angeles — Robert Pollard, Jimmy Pollard, Tobin Sprout, James Greer — on an airplane, which despite Bob writing and singing so many airplane-related songs, and despite the fact that the Wright Bros, from Dayton, OH, invented the airplane (or possibly because of this fact) Bob hates to fly. He will do it only in extreme circumstances and then very reluctantly. We had to leave Mitch Mitchell and Kevin Fennell at home because Bob was wary of briar-related mayhem if he brought the whole band. That may or may not be the real reason. He then made us all drink Jack and cokes during the flight, because he had read that the Beatles had drunk Jack and cokes on their first American tour. None of us enjoyed Jack and cokes, especially Bob, but we were just following Beatles protocol, so, you know.

As a brief aside, you should probably know if you don’t already that it had been a life-long dream of Bob’s to be on Warner Bros. Records. He had hand-drawn the Warner Bros. logo on fictitious albums by fictitious bands in the fever dreams of his youth, so although they didn’t know it, WB had a big advantage simply by virtue of the fact that they were who they were. They had an equally big disadvantage for the same reason — because they were a major label, representing potential major change, Bob worried that they would in various unknown (but for that reason all the more terrifying) ways mess with us, screw up our sound, force us to do all kinds of unseemly promotion, and even more serious, screw with our money.

We were greeted at the airport by the A&R guy from Warner Bros., a not unsmall person I will call Beowulf to protect his identity, because he may still be alive somewhere despite his really impressive eating habits, which included but were not limited to roasting and devouring babies. Beowulf was affable, intelligent, possessed a giant record collection and the obsessive record geek knowledge that generally comes from owning a giant record collection, and a Warner Bros. credit card. He also drove like a maniac, because everyone in LA drives like a maniac, but also maniacs drive like maniacs, and how are you supposed to know the difference?

We were taken first to the Hollywood Hills house of one of the people who ran Warner Bros. I am to this day confused as to which one of these people, generally named Mo, or Lenny, or Curly, was our host, but I guess that’s not important. I think we then went on a guided-by-Beowulf star maps tour, tearing around the narrow and bendy Hollywood Hills roads like Sacha Baron Cohen in Talladega Nights. We would stop briefly at an overlook: “There’s Madonna’s house.” “There’s the house where the Manson murders took place.” We were a little confused by the tour, and more than a little thirsty, when we were finally deposited at the Roosevelt Hotel, which I have always consistently mispronounced as the Rews-a-velt, when everyone knows it’s pronounced Rose-a-velt, and which at the time was the standard rock hotel for those bands not rich enough to afford the Sunset Marquis. I don’t know if this is still the case, but I must have stayed at that place one hundred million times in the 90s. I don’t remember what happened next, except that the Roosevelt has a bar, and we woke up the next morning.

Bob was in a foul mood because Jimmy had ordered a pot of coffee from room service, which cost something like eighteen dollars, and Bob was not yet aware that Warner Bros. was paying for our incidentals as well as our rooms. We then went out to visit Lollapalooza, a kind of floating circus in vogue at the time, and said hello to a few bands we knew, and saw Drew Barrymore, which is only one of several times we saw Drew Barrymore throughout the course of our career, though I was never really sure if she was aware of that fact. Beowulf then came and fetched us to the Warner Bros. corporate offices in Burbank, where we were given another bewildering tour, and glad-handed a few more executives. One of the selling points that Beowulf stressed was that Warner Bros. was very faithful to its artists, and almost never dropped anyone, case in point our friends the Flaming Lips, who despite (at that point) never having sold a single record in ten years were still on the label. This selling point was almost immediately undercut when we sat down with the head of publicity, another very nice and knowledgeable rock fan, who played us a song from Nick Lowe’s new album, which he declared “genius” before telling us that unfortunately the record would not be coming out on WB, as Nick had just been dropped by the label.

The publicity executive then made the mistake that resulted in Bob deciding not to sign with Warner Bros. There were other factors, sure, but this was to Bob’s mind the finishing blow. Bob had insisted to everyone, from the start, that Alien Lanes be released as is, with no re-recording, no re-sequencing, no fussing with of any kind. The publicity guy made some kind of joke about how the cassette he first got was defective, because it sounded just like mud. “I know this is supposed to be lo-fi, but this is ridiculous,” is what he said, referring to the defective tape. Bob didn’t hear it that way, though. Bob thought the publicity guy was referring to the actual recording, and though he laughed and nodded at the guy’s joke, I could sense a certain temperature change in the room.

After this gaffe-tastic meet-and-greet came the grand round of eating, and more eating, including one particularly disastrous trip to some kind of gourmet Chinese restaurant where the menu was in Chinese, and which took (it seemed like) four hours to drive to, and eight hours back, and then stuff with me and Jimmy in a hot tub afraid to take our shirts off and Bob convinced that we were all  going to Hell, for reasons which will have to be explained tomorrow, because this story is already too long, and I have other things to do. [Note: none of this will be explained tomorrow — that was then and this is now the time for you to buy the book wherein this anecdote is told in full, along with a fine assortment of wonderful stories, some fact, some fiction, all true, by writers who are not me. It's available both as a physical artifact and in the popular e-book format by clicking on the link above.]