I’ve told the story of writing and recording this song for the album-length EP Sunfish Holy Breakfast (Matador, 1996) before, but I’m going to tell it again now, for reasons that will become clear sometime early next year.

I take inordinate pride in being one of only a handful—not even an adult handful, more like a little baby handful—of people to have a solo writing credit on a Guided By Voices record. But it’s not my fault. The way it happened was this: we were in Refraze Studios in Dayton sometime in 1995, after the Albini session in Chicago and the aborted Memphis session that was meant to produce The Power of Suck concept album.

At Refraze we remixed a couple of the songs that Bob Pollard knew he wanted to keep for what would become Under The Bushes, Under The Stars, including “Don’t Stop Now” and “Official Ironmen Rally Song.” I say “we” remixed the songs, but in actual fact Gary King the studio owner/engineer and I remixed them. Took a lot of convincing on my part even to get Bob to agree to remix, or more properly, to mix the songs, since no actual mix other than a hasty board version existed after Bob abruptly pulled the plug on the Memphis sessions. His official excuse for cutting the session short—delivered with eyes downcast and feet shifting uneasily in the parking lot outside Easley—was that his son Bryan was playing in a basketball game in a couple of days and he didn’t want to miss it. He said that straight to Kim Deal’s face, or would have had he been able to look her in the face. She laughed, which was the only appropriate response. It was a dick move, but then Bob can be an asshole. Or, as he likes to say, “a nice asshole” There’s no way in hell Kim was going to have anything to do with the record after that <digression> she’d agreed to produce The Power of Suck for free, in exchange for 1) a portable DAT player, estimated cost approximately $700, and 2) permission to mash together two GBV songs she liked, “I Am Decided” and “Are You Faster,” into one new royalty-free song which she later put on The Amps album Pacer. Part of which was recorded in the studio time left over at Easley Studios after we bailed. </digression> so it was incumbent upon me to try to salvage what could be salvaged. One reason why this was difficult is because Bob does not hear music the way most people hear music. He literally doesn’t understand what the words “drum sound” (to be fair, an open-ended subject) mean. He doesn’t really believe there needs to be any bass guitar on a rock song, unless the bass is the main riff (e.g. “A Salty Salute,” “Large-Hearted Boy”). He only ever listens to the melody and sometimes the lyrics. When he listened to Glen Campbell’s version of “Hold On Hope,” he could not hear the thick coat of autotune the producer had for some reason chosen to apply to Glen’s voice. One way to describe this would be to say that Bob is colorblind, but in his ears. He has an uncanny ear for melody, obviously, but cannot or will not hear things that strike even casual listeners but especially musicians as bloody obvious. I think this is one of the keys to his songwriting genius. I’m just not entirely sure in what way.

The songs we did at Memphis showed up on a graphic EQ as a big lump of mid-range, dropping off on either end of the spectrum to nil. This was pretty much always the case with the recorded version of the band in those days, under whatever circumstances. Where a “properly” EQ’d song’s graphical representation usually looks like an undulant wave, our rough mixes looked like a big rock in the middle of the road. This effectively squashes all the instruments together into a kind of mush, over which Bob sang, well, like Bob, which is to say with impeccable timing and phrasing. That process worked well with the four-track stuff, because the natural compression occasioned by recording direct to a cassette (i.e. 1/4 inch of tape) doesn’t allow for a lot of subtlety, and Bob’s vocals stood out even better against the clattery, over-compressed background (i.e. music). On 24-track 2-inch tape, it doesn’t work so well. Bob’s vocals can get lost in the resultant murk, which is unfortunate unless that’s what he’s aiming for, which to be fair is sometimes the case. Over the years he’s gained a lot of experience and expertise w/r/t how recording works, but he would still likely only understand about half of what I’ve written here.

Thus, my main goal for the Refraze remixes was to elicit a little clarity and separation from the tracks. It took about two hours total, which was I think two hours longer than Bob wanted to spend, but he was mollified by a) the result, and b) by immediately thereafter recording a couple of new songs, at least one of which would end up on Sunfish Holy Breakfast (“Heavy Metal Country.”) We took a string section part from the middle of “Don’t Stop Now,” where it didn’t quite work, and put it at the beginning of the track, where it sort of did (I still think it’s kind of cheesy, even though it was my idea), and applied a lot of reverb/delay to the strings in the break (which Mitch Mitchell has ever since attempted without much success to replicate live on guitar. To be fair, it’s an eight-note riff, which is seven more notes than he likes to play.) “Official Ironmen” was a more difficult mix, because I had gone back into the studio the day after recording the basic track and spent the morning punching in my bass part to match each mistake Kevin Fennell had made on drums (mostly very small errors of timing coming back to the beat after a fill, which happens a lot even with the best drummers), which meant that I had to play in a few places deliberately bad, which is not fun. I had to do this because Bob did not want to spend any more time recording basic tracks. The errors were imperceptible to inexperienced ears. It sounded fine to him. The result was also not exactly the most awesome rhythm track ever, but it needed as much clarity and punch as we could give it, because it was the song’s engine. <digression> Almost all of the guitar on “Official Ironmen” and “Don’t Stop Now” is played by Bob. He’s severely underrated as a guitarist, in my opinion. </digression>

“Cocksoldiers And Their Postwar Stubble” was a Memphis track that ended up on SHB, too, but we didn’t bother to remix that (I had tried the last reserves of Bob’s patience), which is a shame, although if you want to hear what “Official Ironmen” and “Don’t Stop Now” would have sounded like had we not remixed them,”Cocksoldiers” is a pretty good example. On a personal note, I mourn the loss of my bass line, which was the melody from the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” for the most part, but which fit the chord progression nicely, or at least I thought it did.

As we were leaving Refraze that evening, Bob gave me a homework assignment. “I want you to write a song,” he said. I don’t know why he wanted me to write a song. I think part of him always wished that we were the Beatles, with three good songwriters, but where he was obviously John, his favorite. At most we were never more than the Who, with one predominant songwriter and two or maybe three songs allotted Toby Sprout, who wrote more than showed up on the records, partly because Bob wrote so many great songs, and mostly because it was Bob’s band, and he chose which songs made the cut. I didn’t have a problem with that, and I don’t think Toby did either. Many would-be Toby songs ended up as Bob songs after Toby presented completed instrumentals to Bob, who then put vocals over the top. “Hot Freaks” is a good example of that. Actual songwriting collaboration happened to my knowledge only once in Guided By Voices, on “14 Cheerleader Coldfront” from Propeller, where Toby had an unfinished song and Bob sat down with him and they finished it together.

<digression>The revived version of Guided By Voices is actually more collaborative in that respect than it was in the past. Toby got five or six (depending on what you count a “song”) on the new record, which has twenty-one songs. That never would have happened in 1995. There are also more co-writes than back in the day, a result of informal sessions at Greg Demos’ house and Mitch Mitchell’s garage (the same one where we used to practice!) that Bob sifted through to find pieces of gold with which to work. </digression>

Anyway. I took my homework assignment seriously. I went home and wrote a song, and the same day recorded it in Kim’s basement on my own Tascam PortaStudio 4-Track. It’s a bit murky (the mix, I mean), because I was over-ambitious, double-tracking an acoustic and electric guitar on rhythm, a bass, a guitar solo, and both lead and “harmony” vocals. Also, see above for inevitable result of cassette tape compression. I would have put drums on there but I can’t play drums. I can only imagine how bad it would have sounded if I had gotten someone to put down drums. I don’t have Toby’s magic touch with the four-track, and the whole thing is too mid-rangy and squashed (hey, that sounds familiar), but the result, I thought, was good enough to put on a cassette and give to Bob. I wanted to show him that I had, at least, made a good faith effort. To my great relief, he did not sit and listen to the cassette in front of everyone, which was my biggest fear.

I guess he liked the song, because he put it on Sunfish Holy Breakfast, and left it on there even after I quit the band a few months later, for a complicated set of reasons that I have neither time nor inclination to explore just now. I don’t remember Bob saying anything one way or another about my homework assignment except that he liked the lyrics (because at one point we were going to put the lyrics to all the songs on the EP, so I had to write them out and give them to him). Of course, he sequenced the record so that my paltry effort came right after “If We Wait,” one of Bob’s best songs ever. I mentioned this to Toby, who just rolled his eyes and said “Get used to it. He does that to me all the time.” Toby also told me “Trendspotter Acrobat” had a kind of Kinks sensibility, which I understood as a polite way of saying that I can’t sing. But I already knew that. If I could sing, I might have been a songwriter. Which I am emphatically not: though I have written a fair number of songs over the years, I prefer not to inflict them on the world. There’s enough of that sort of thing going on already.

Here are the lyrics to “Trendspotter Acrobat.” The song is a little bit about my then-current disgust at the state of whatever you want to call music journalism (now dissipated in a salt-water bath of nostalgia), and a lot about my still-current self-loathing.

Trendspotter Acrobat

Trendspotter acrobat, got no falling room

Choking on an ego the size of one of Jupiter’s moons

Slowly shrugs on his coat, walks out in the rain

Dismayed to see it hasn’t rained in days

I will buy the drinks, if you promise not to ask me what I think

Pop culture diplomat throws up on his shoes

Burping up an epigram while blood flows from his wounds

Slowly shrugs on his coat, staggers through the shine

A million bedtime stories on his mind

I will buy the drinks, if you promise not to ask me what I think

(Guitar solo!)

(Key change!)

Trendspotter acrobat, broken-hearted clown

Falling apart is as easy as sitting down

Slowly shrugs off his coat, throws it on the floor

Nothing really matters anymore

I will buy the drinks if you promise not to tell me what you think

And here’s the song itself if you haven’t heard it. Please go easy on me.