Currently viewing the tag: "Guided By Voices"
First installment of my ramblings concerning Détective‘s recent tour with Guided By Voices is now up at The Believer Magazine‘s tumblr, which is called The Believer Logger. You can read it by clicking the link here.
More to come as soon as I finish writing it.
(cross-posted from Détective Music)
Hi, so my band Détective is going on tour, first stop Tempe AZ before we join up with Guided By Voices in Athen GA on September 18. I’ve agreed to write a sort of tour diary for The Believer magazine’s tumblr, so if and when that happens, I’ll post the link here, and probably cross-post over at our music site Détective.
In the meantime, we hope you’ll be come out to one or more of the shows, which are listed on the Détective site, except for Houston TX and Columbia MO, which have been canceled due to I dont know why. We might try to find replacement shows for those two, but at this late date it’s unlikely.
Anyway. Watch this space, by which I mean literally stare at this blank space on the internet for hours on end, forgetting to eat, drink, or sleep, and maybe something cool will happen.
Okay, so this new band Détective has a new EP, called Basket of Masks, set to release on limited edition (300) 12″ 45 r.p.m. vinyl in late May. You can pre-order it now by going here. If you pre-order before it ships, we’ll include as a bonus the limited edition CD of our previous EP, Very Fallen World.
The digital version of Basket of Masks will be released on April 17. You can also pre-order it now, and all pre-orders will get a free download code for Very Fallen World, and a hidden bonus track (download only).
You can do all or none of these things by clicking on the link here.
Today I am playing a trick on you. Ha! Good one. The next Guided By Voices album is finished, and it’s (obviously) great, and you can’t hear it until I believe May. It’s called Class Clown Spots A UFO. Which is an old song made new again through the magic of R. Pollard. And despite the fact the the band is getting ready to finish recording the next next GBV record (either my ears are going bad or Bob told me the working title is Bears For Lunch, or both, or neither), you STILL HAVE TO WAIT. Sorry. I just work here.
What I can and will do for you is re-present another example of an old song made new again, in the form of “Walls And Windows,” a very early (1983) Guided By Voices song that Bob would later re-write and recontextualize and appropriate and whatever all else words you want to use for when he goes back to an old song and turns it into a new song, in this case called “Hardcore UFOs,” appearing on the album Bee Thousand.
The catch to the latter re-presentation is that I am not only going to post that song, but another song, called “Streets and the City,” by my new band Detective. Or, if you prefer, Détective, because it’s named after the Godard film of that name. Upon being told which a certain film director of my acquaintance called me “pretentious.” To which I replied, “Yeah, next thing you know I’ll remake a Tarkovsky film.” Because he actually did that! See? I threw it back in his face! Burn. He replied “No one would be stupid enough to do that,” which at least shows that he can joke about himself, unlike me. I have no sense of humor about myself. I take everything very seriously and carry grudges forever and… oh, wait, that’s Steve Albini. Never mind.
Anyway. So. Alors. At least I didn’t write this whole post in French, which I could have done. I just sold my novel The Failure to the French publisher Gallimard for like a billion dollars in my own translation (I had help). It’s called L’Echec in French. (Okay, I had a lot of help. Still.)
As a result, I am in a festive mood. Click here to hear the result of my festive mood.
The link will take you to a page where you can hear “Walls And Windows,” probably for like the thirty-thousand and one third time, as well as “Streets and the City,” should you so wish. God gave you free will and so do I. That’s basically what God and I have in common. That and perfection. We have those things in common. We’re both perfect. Other than that… oh yeah, omnipresence. I have that. So, just the granting of free will to every human being, perfection of body and spirit, and omnipresence. Feels like I’m forgetting something. Whatever.
Also, I would like to present:
And finally, because I’m pretty sure you like to click on things, a very special surprise awaits you if you click here.
It’s been a pleasure. No, really. If you are at all inclined to “like” things or “tweet” about them or “share” them on any of the popular social media platforms, that would make me happy enough to consider posting more unreleased Guided By Voices rarities and maybe even someday tell you the story about why the hell I started another band and furthermore why we are playing the Empty Bottle in Chicago on February 29th or Atwater Crossing in Los Angeles on March 8th and wherever elese we decide to play in the future. THANKS FOR LISTENING.
[Editor's note: I'm re-running this piece from the vast North of Onhava archives in celebration of Guided By Voices' appearance on Letterman the other night, during the course of which bass player/lawyer Greg Demos fell on his ass. That's actually a quote from Greg to Mr. Letterman: "I fell on my ass." My point in re-running the piece is, as you will see, that it is not uncommon for members of Guided By Voices to fall on their asses. Or, in my case, to slice open their wrists while doing so. Enjoy!]
It happened in Philadelphia, which is a city on the Northeast coast of America, for those of you who don’t get out much. It features the Liberty Bell, which is famous for (inscrutable) reasons of its own but is best known for its cameo appearance in a Guided By Voices song called “Echoes Myron,” from the Bee Thousand album. We were playing a club in Philly’s Chinatown called the Trocadero, and a curious feature of the Trocadero was that it had two levels, on both of which you were able to buy beer in bottles (this was back when America was still a lawless and often awesome place, in other words in 1995). The show itself was unremarkable except in the sense that we were of course insanely great, as usual, and as a result, were called back for three encores. By the time we got to the third encore in those days there was often some discussion as to what we should play, because having released at that point only two or three albums that everybody knew, and learned not every single one of the songs on those albums for the purposes of playing live, our repertoire was somewhat more limited than that enjoyed by later iterations of the band, who were known for sometimes playing for three days straight without repeating a song. It doesn’t really matter: I remember the discussion, but I don’t remember what we played.
For whatever reason, my drink of choice that evening had been some kind of vodka concoction, consisting of vodka, ice, and a glass, and probably another ingredient I’m forgetting. It may or may not have been the famous “Pink Drink” surrounding which there has grown over the years some mythomania, mostly due to the song called “Pink Drink” that Robert Pollard wrote and had slated for inclusion on The Power of Suck album we never made, for reasons which have been detailed in earlier installments of The Further Adventures. It’s irrelevant, anyway. The point is, I was very drunk, all of us in the band were very drunk, and so as a consequence my memory in this instance has had to be padded out with the help of an obliging friend who happened to be in the audience that night.
What happened, in short, was this: between encores, our presence was requested back onstage both in the usual manner — by cheers and stomps and applause and the ritual chant “GBV! GBV!” that Bob inadvertently and artificially invented at the beginning of the album Propeller, and only slightly regrets — and by a shower of mostly-empty beer bottles rained on the stage itself, many of which shattered upon impact, so that by the time we shuffled back onstage for the third encore the stage was covered in shards of broken glass. Making that an inopportune time for Mitch Mitchell, in an admirable excess of rock’s natural spirit of excess, to awkwardly bear-hug/tackle me from behind. We both went down in a heap, and I cut open my right wrist on one of the bottle shards. It started bleeding. A lot. I noticed, but in a detached, third-person, kind of “huh” way. Pete Jamison, Manager For Life, also noticed and quickly found a towel to which he applied a quantity of soap (obtained where? obtained how?) and between songs I would go over to him and he would apply the towel to my wound in an attempt to staunch the wound. It didn’t work, because playing bass requires a lot of right-wrist movement, which obviated any amelioratory effects from the soaped-up towel. In my memory, I bled quite a lot, but I’m never sure how far I can trust my memory, which is sieve-like at the best of times, and through which entire events have sluiced under the effect of alcohol.
Here’s where audience member John Golden came to my rescue during a recent correspondence, through which it transpired that he had been there, and had been impressed enough by what he saw that the memory remains clearer for him than for me.
In John’s words (edited here because this is a family blog): “I was geeked enough to be right up front, but also clever enough to be sufficiently soused. The bad news is I have no recollection whatsoever regarding opening act(s). I don’t even remember if I saw them and forgot them, or spent that time working on the aforementioned sousing. The good news is that from the moment the first set ended and the encores began, the memories are indelible. To answer your question: yes, OH YES, I most certainly saw the blood. Everyone in at least the first 20, erm, rows (?) must have seen the blood. When I tell the story, I always say (I really do) that the blood was “pouring down (your) bass.” I also remember the meteor shower of beer bottles directed at the stage by an audience starving for another encore and reciting the obvious chant while putting said bottles into flight. One whizzed right past my ear — one of those delirious and dangerous moments that seem profound when one is young, drunk, and at a rock show. You know, in a no guts, no glory kind of way. So yes, you ambled back on stage, a stage positively strewn with broken glass, and Mitch tackled you from behind. You both went down, you both came up. You, with some major artery seemingly severed. The rest of the band came out. Bob launched into song. And you played, as I mentioned, with blood pouring down your bass. The other thing I often mention when telling the story is that at that point, it no longer mattered that I never saw a Kiss show back when they were in their prime.”
I have no idea who “Kiss” is, probably some local Philadelphia band, probably not as good as the Strapping Fieldhands (few bands were or are) but I appreciate his confirmation of my own impressions of that night. Here’s what I would add: in my memory, there was girl videotaping the show from just to the side of the stage, and I think she may have fainted. Bob didn’t notice that anything was wrong, because when Bob is in rock mode he notices nothing, literally, that does not directly impinge on his delivery of the song. I’m not sure what Toby or Kevin or Mitch noticed, because I was too busy trying to stop the bleeding and the urge to scream in pain. We made it through the three or four or eleventy-seven songs that constituted the third and last encore, and when I went backstage I was surrounded by well-intentioned people who urged me to go to the ER and have my wound (which occurred on the soft part of the wrist just below the hand, and was deep, but did not sever any arteries, obviously, or I would not still be alive) stitched. I refused, because there was still some alcohol left, and I believed, back then, it was bad form to go anywhere while there was still alcohol left. “I must have lost a pint of vodka,” I remember saying, and then tried to replace that pint as quickly as I could. Bob’s comment, when he saw the extent of my injury, was that “Guided By Voices don’t get stitches.”
Back at the hotel later that night, I began to regret my decision to leave my wound untreated, as I had trouble sleeping because of the throbbing pain in my wrist. And at the next show, in Washington D.C. (either at the Black Cat or the new 9:30 Club), I regretted it even more, because no matter how I bandaged the thing, the wound kept opening up, and Pete had to stand by the side of the stage and apply soaped-up towel after soaped-up towel to my wrist in a fruitless attempt to get the damn thing to stop bleeding. Luckily, that was the last show of the tour, and except for a taping of a few songs we had to do for a D.C. radio station, I then had two weeks or so to let the thing heal. And like all things eventually either do or do not, it did.
I’m left with a scar that will stay with me until I die, and what I guess is a funny, if gory, story. As for the bass — that poor early 1964 Thunderbird, I believe it suffered the worst. Try as I might, I could not get all the blood cleaned out of that thing. I took the strings off, and the pick guard. I used rubbing alcohol and q-tips, but the blood had poured down into the pick-ups and dried there, and I was not in the mood to open up the guts of my instrument and mess with its mysterious mojo. Somewhere, today, in the pawnshops or music stores of Dayton, Ohio, or possibly in the hands of a new owner — who if he or she knew its sanguine history would freak out at its indelible but essential grossness — you can find that bass, and in it, some residue of my blood. I am between happy and sad about that idea.
p.s. a late amendment via the aforementioned John Golden: “I directed my brother to your blog post. He was at the concert as well and, I can’t believe I didn’t remember this, the self-same Strapping Fieldhands opened the show, along with Portastatic. That was probably the first time I ever heard “Ussysses,” which remains a favorite.
Another fun note, the Trocadero’s usual policy is to allow drinking on either the upper or lower level, not both. They decide which based on the band (and their best guess at the audience’s degree of alcoholism). The both-bars-open policy that night was a concession I’ve never seen repeated.“
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.]
For those who might have missed the announcement, I urge you to jump on this, especially the 7″ ones, because they will go very, very quickly.
Via Rockathon Records:
“LET’S GO EAT THE FACTORY
Amazing new album from the reunited classic GBV line-up.
Available from Rockathon January 1, in stores January 16/17.
$16 lp/ $14 CD
LP includes digital download
THE UNSINKABLE FATS DOMINO /
WE WON’T APOLOGIZE FOR THE HUMAN RACE 7″
Double A-side 7″ single with “We Won’t Apologize For The Human Race.”
Out on Matador Records on November 22.
$6
DOUGHNUT FOR A SNOWMAN 7″
Sugary song with 4 non-LP B-sides. Out on Fire Records on November 28.
$6
CHOCOLATE BOY 7″
Bittersweet pop nugget with a non-LP Tobin Sprout b-side “Girls Sing Downing.”
Available from GBV Inc. in December, in stores January 17.
$5
as always, if you order together they will ship together. I recommend ordereing the 2 7″ together, then order your Chocolate Boy with Factory. That’s going to be your best bet!”
Slow News Day is not a bad band name. It’s also not a good band name. It’s kind of a middling-to-fair band name. Glad we cleared that up. Here are some Slow News items, beginning with another band name:
First this. Which is particularly weird given this.
Then this, which is less weird than embarrassing.
Oh, and that big magazine cover above? You can pre-order the issue, which contains within in it not just that picture but a couple thousand words I wrote down that Bob Pollard said to me, here.
Apparently I wrote an article for the 1,225th Anniversary issue of Spin Magazine, which occurred in May of 2010. I mean, I did write an article, but I totally forgot. And I have never in my life paid for a copy of Spin, so. Luckily, an obscure internet startup called Google has taken it upon itself to scan everything ever written by me (and possibly other people) into its data-collector-device. I have embedded, or hope I have embedded, the article below for your reading pleasure in case you don’t have the twenty-five cents or whatever the going rate is nowadays to go buy your own copy.
The piece probably discusses the circumstances surrounding my leaving the magazine and joining the rock band Guided By Voices, but I can’t be entirely sure, because that would mean reading the whole article, and in addition to never having paid for an issue of Spin, I have never in my life read an issue of Spin, and I am if nothing else consistent. What I will say is this: man, did I used to be fat! (Related: why am I the only one drinking in this picture? Not realistic.) The title of the article and its sub-hed or “dek” were not of my own device. I mention that only because both are clumsy, misleading, and humiliating. Reminds me of the days I used to edit that magazine. Shudder.
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.
Yeah, right. I mean, I could do that, but that would sort of be unweaving the rainbow, and everybody (and Keats) knows better.
And now, something from the archives:
I was so much older then. We went and played Maxwell’s in Hoboken after this taping, and ran through the entire list of songs we had learned at that point, somewhere around fifty (I know because I was in charge of the list). But the set-up at Maxwell’s was (and probably still is?) such that you had to go through the crowd to get offstage, and that seemed difficult even after two hours of playing, so we tried making a song up on the spot, which didn’t turn out very well (it had, to be fair, been a long day’s journey into New Jersey), so we did the logical thing: we started the set over again, from the beginning.
Final GBV Show, Hopscotch Music Festival, Raleigh NC 9/9/11, Photo: Daniel Coston
I apologize if the air of secrecy around what some people are given to call “Greer’s blog deal” has caused anyone breathing problems, but certain things are worth waiting for. I hope you’ll agree. According to MOJO magazine, Guided By Voices has recorded a new album of 21 songs called Let’s Go Eat The Factory. I’m sure the announcement will appear in several other outlets, too, in the next several days, but it will be more or less the same announcement. It will say nothing about plans for future touring because there are no plans for future touring. As with all things Pollard-related, that could of course change. But it’s not the likeliest outcome, frankly.
I’m not going to add much to what you can read in the announcement on the MOJO site, but I can say that I’ve had the honor and privilege of listening to the album for a few weeks now, and that it can best be described as… uh… hold on… let me think… okay: flipping genius. I understand that January 2012 seems like a long time from now (partly because it is), but it will arrive, and sooner than you think, so you should probably pre-order the thing as soon as it’s available for pre-order from Rockathon. I don’t know when that happy day will arrive but I presume soon.
Further details will be revealed in due course, but for now, if you’re any kind of fan of Guided By Voices in any of its many incarnations, I’d say this is cause for celebration.
[Editor's note: I have taken down Angry Pillows, which is not as much fun as it sounds. I hope you enjoyed it while it was there.]
Another track from the (possibly) first ever recorded Guided By Voices qua Guided By Voices non-release Pissing In The Canal (1983). This one’s called “Angry Pillows (Gone Away),” and if it sounds like it was recorded underwater, well, maybe it was. To me it sounds like someone had an EQ preset called “river flange” and pushed it really hard all the way through the song, which furthermore exhibits weird panning effects, especially on the drums, a side effect of the sonic magic trick I pulled in transforming the track from left-channel mono to what I suppose you could call Beatles stereo. For reasons that would be even more tedious to explain than to read.
Instead of further explication, then, those of you currently undergoing Guided By Voices withdrawal (signs of which include but are not limited to unchained melody and unslakable thirst) following the conclusion of the year-long reunion tour can now satisfy your sugar cravings with one of the sweetest melodies Robert “Bob” Pollard ever wrote and never used.
A side note: there are some cynics, or better say skeptics, who don’t believe the end of the reunion tour is the end of the end of the reunion tour. Let me quickly and cruelly disabuse you of your hopes. It is the end of the reunion tour. But at the risk of breaching several implied (though not expressed) contracts, there are more things Guided By Voices can do than reunion tours. Like the protagonist of “Matter Eater Lad,” GBV could construct a factory just to see how it tasted. For instance.
For now: enjoy the past, and look forward to the future.
[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.]
The Los Angeles based creators of a weekly podcast called Hugs & Disses, which is a name I am informed they made up all by themselves, were kind enough to ask me on their program this week. I traveled to their sumptuous headquarters in Echo Park where they somehow managed to cajole me into talking about myself for almost two hours. Can’t think of a single reason anyone wouldn’t want to hear that.
Apart from me, that is. On the list of things I don’t like to do, “listen to the sound of my own voice” is very high, somewhere near “look at pictures of myself” and “eat glass.”
But if you’re interested in hearing me talk about whatever we ended up talking about, including but not limited to my novels, Guided By Voices, films that I have written, and enema porn, you can go here and satisfy your curiosity. While there, you should be sure to subscribe to the podcast, because it’s a weekly deal, and I’m sure all of the other episodes in the series thus far are more interesting than the one featuring me. Many thanks to the H&D crew for extending the invitation.
Wow. I didn’t know this footage existed, but I’m glad it does. Very rare live video of my Vox Teardrop bass (subject of a recent but now sadly unavailable Hunting Accidents post), and incidentally Guided By Voices tearing through “I Am Scientist” on May 19, 1995 in Seattle. According to GBVDB, this would have been at the Crocodile, but then it also would have been May 17. Either way, this would have been the private show we played for R.E.M., the subject of yet another Hunting Accidents post. [Sadly, neither of the HA posts referenced above are available, at present. But do not fret: you'll get to read them again, soon enough. Tout vient à point à qui sait attendre.]
Video by the incomparable Lance Bangs.
I have an announcement.
I always hate using that phrase because it’s not really Latin, but a corruption of fama volat, which is something that Virgil (sort of) wrote in his Aeneid. Over the years it changed to rumor volat because people got confused by “fama” and thought it meant “fame.” Thus when someone said fama volat it began to be mistranslated as “fame is fleeting,” which is also true, but not what fama volat means. Then some bright kid came up with rumor, which in Latin has a meaning related to but not exactly the same as fama, to make sure everyone understood: “Rumor flies.” (Or I guess more literally, “rumor has wings,” although how that’s more literal escapes my understanding. But that’s what the internet is telling me this morning.) Fascinating, I know.
All this is by way of saying that certain whispers and hints that I have let drop concerning a potential book-length compilation of my Hunting Accidents episodes from this site are true, or rather possibly true, but that nothing has been concluded yet. First, I will need to flesh out the episodes already collected here, and to translate them into readable English rather than the caffeinated hypertext (that is not the usual meaning of hypertext, thank you for noticing) in which they are usually written. Second, I will also need to add a fair amount of new material. While I have been talking to a/some publisher(s), and this/these publisher(s) have expressed interest, I have not made any kind of deal, and I likely will not for some weeks at least. I promise to keep you posted.
There’s also the question of bonus material, such as a CD or a DVD or a link to a download of… stuff. This is being discussed, but involves questions of logistics and rights and licensing and I don’t even know what else, so that may take a while, too.
In the meantime, please rest assured I will continue to churn out episodes of Hunting Accidents at an alarming rate to feed your insatiable appetite for stories about my public humiliation.
- James Greer's books on Goodreads
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