Holiday Largesse

Since I have a lot of work to do, still, even though it’s Christmas Eve, and won’t be able to post anything here for a while, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share an old Guided By Voices song that has never been properly released: It’s called “Pantherz,” and it was meant to be a track from our long-lost concept album The Power of Suck. The song contains the line “If he comes round here again, I will have to take my teeth out,” which derives from one of Bob Pollard’s old friends, who had a habit of removing his false teeth before getting into a fight. On one such occasion he tossed his teeth to Bob (or possibly Jimmy Pollard, I don’t remember), asking him to hold them for him. The experience apparently impressed Bob sufficiently that he included it in a song lyric.

“Pantherz,” according to the concept story (which I wrote but have never published anywhere), was the name of the original band, a version of Guided By Voices from the years during which it toiled in obscurity, and perhaps wasn’t (at least to Bob’s mind) the best rock band in the world. The ascent to greatness would come later, after years of rejection, whereafter the band would rename itself “King Shit and the Golden Boys,” which as many of you will know is the band name-checked in “Don’t Stop Now,” also slated for inclusion on The Power of Suck. (And which Bob has more than once called “The Ballad of Guided By Voices.”)

The story was meant to be semi-autobiographical, but since at that time we had only just released Alien Lanes and ended the process of deciding on a label, Bob was undergoing a great deal of ambivalence toward his new-found higher profile. He wrote a bunch of songs about that — “Gold Star For Robot Boy” and “Game of Pricks” come immediately to mind — but The Power of Suck was meant as a kind of summation of the trip from cellar to penthouse, if you will.

So here’s the song. Enjoy. It won’t be available very long. [Editor's note: It's gone... but there's a whole new Guided By Voices album available for your listening pleasure, and while I doubt anyone reading this has yet to buy it, if there is, you should buy it.]