Auditorium - Guided by Voices - Alien Lanes - 1995

Following our child heavy adventure at the aquarium, we took a seat at an outdoor bar in Quincy Market to get our drink on. The day was getting hot and our walking and museum going had left us a little parched. Quincy Market is basically the same as the South Street Seaport here in NYC, designed for tourists, dominated by over-priced chains, and full of people that you are deadly certain that you are cooler than...but it still has it's seaport town charm. And you can't knock a margarita on the boardwalk on a hot day.

After we finished our drink we walked back to the hotel. Though Anand and I weren't particularly interested, Skip, the younger Singh brother was curious to see the Cheers bar (Which is actually called The Bull and the Finch) so we walked back via Commonwealth Ave. After a bit of circuitous walk we found ourselves in front of the famous sign only to find a line of people coming out the door. Both Anand and I had been to the bar on previous trips, and assured Skip that A) it was just a bar and B) the inside looked nothing like the show, and that C) there was no way we were going to wait in line to get into a bar on a Saturday afternoon.

Finally, we swung back to our hotel for a brief late afternoon respite before our evening plans would kick in...

Back in 1995 Uncle Bob Pollard wanted to record arena rock, and by God if the powers that be were not going to let him do it on their terms he'd do it on his own. Auditorium is one of the charming mid-90's lo-fi attempts at said arena rock that GBV would make a name for themselves on. Of course, 4 years later, Pollard would get a chance to record this type of music the way he wanted to and we'd all come to realize that we preferred it when he had to improvise with a cassette recorder in his garage. Just think of what a shitty movie Jaws would have been if Spielberg could have gotten that fucking shark to work.

Attack on Love - Yo La Tengo - Electr-o-pura - 1995

Barring an amazing late career resurgence, the span between 1993's Painful and 2000's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out will probably be regarded as YLT's heyday. But it is important to remember that even during this period, Hoboken's finest could still turn out some total crap.

YLT are at their best when the tension between Ira Kaplan's undeniably explosive talent is tempered by the unbelievable discipline of his wife Georgia and bass player James McNew. Together Hubley and McNew are probably the tightest, most versatile, rhythm section in all of indie rock...and without them Ira is just a middle aged Jew masturbating on a guitar or organ.

Case in point, Attack on Love.

AT and T - Pavement - Wowee Zowee - 1995

Can't use an & in a title I guess.

So I had to go pick up a package at the post office this morning. I got to the door at 845 only to discover that my PO had changed their hours and wouldn't be opening until 9...so I got a cup of coffee and waited for it to open. There were a couple of people in front of me, and shortly a line formed behind me.

When 9 rolled around I was walking in the door and I saw an older man with a cane waiting to go in. I stood back, held the door and offered him to go first. Then I got pushed in the back. The guy behind me starts giving me shit for letting the old man go first. "Come on man, I don't have time for this, I got places to go!"

What the fuck is wrong with people...if I had blown by him they would have yelled at me for being an entitled white dude and not respecting the older generation. I hold the door for him and I'm wasting people's time. It just doesn't pay to be kind, I guess.

Anyway, I used to think of Wowee Zowee as a bad misstep from Pavement...but in later years I find it to be their most enjoyable, most fun album. I've never held them in the reverance that so many do. But I like them well enough, and this song brings enough rock and very little of the hippy tendencies that tend to infuriate me about the band.

As We Go Up, We Go Down - Guided By Voices - Alien Lanes - 1995

The drive through England was not exactly what we planned. The sun set 2 hour into the drive, meaning the site of the English Country would have to wait until the return journey. Rance got car sick about 1/2 an hour in, and all three of us were hung over and tired.

Anand and Rance both napped when they weren't driving...as the non-driver, I stayed awake through both shifts. I've never been very good at sleeping in cars, and I felt like somebody needed to keep the driver company. Driving on right is odd for several reasons...the American driver tends to want to hug the left side. As such the car was constanly drifting left, sometimes into the lane or traffic that was over there. If you are in the passenger seat, you have the odd sensation that you should be driving. I can't tell you the number of times that Rance or Anand started to drift into the car to the left of them, only for me to reach for a wheel that wasn't there, or press down on non-existant pedals. It just feels wrong to be on the left hand front of a car and not be driving.

We drove through Birmingham, which is not that different than driving through St. Louis. Due to the lateness of the hour we debated spending the night in Manchester and finishing the drive to Glasgow in the morning, but we had no Intel on Manchester, no idea where we should stay or where we should go looking for a good time on a Sunday night. Ultimately, we decided to just tough out the drive and at least have one day in which we did not have to travel.

Incidentally, we made this decision in a Burger King rest stop thing about halfway between Manchester and Liverpool...I also had Burger King on my last trip to Europe, during a moment of desperation upon realizing that all the restaurants in Dublin were closed and I was starving. This means I've had Burger King TWICE in the UK within two years...which is less than the number of times I've had Burger King in the United States in the same time period. Very odd. Also, they don't put ice in their fountain cokes over there...which is just plain wrong!

The drive north of Manchester was increasingly dark, as the sun had well and truly set. No street lights or lights from cities were there to be seen either, and the low hanging clouds obscured any moon or starlight. It might have been the closest to total darkness I've ever seen in the out of doors. As our Saab barreled down the highway into the blackness, it was almost like driving through outer space. For some reason we played "Wanted Dead or Alive" on the iPod and it became the running joke for the remainder of the trip.

We finally arrived in Glasgow a little before 11 and checked into the sweet room at the Marriot that my buddy Shani had hooked us up with. The people at the desk were wonderfully friendly and let us know where we could expect to find a drink at that hour on a sunday and with that we were back off into the night.

As I'm fairly sure I've pointed out before, Robert Pollard, at his mid 90's best was all about crystalizing the great moment in a song. Why bother to have a 5 minute song that leads up to (or has in the middle of it) a great moment, when you can write a 1:37 song that uses that great moment and then gets out before you have a chance to get bored? In this case "I speak in monotone, leave my fucking life alone" will do just fine for a great moment.

Army of Me - Bjork - Post - 1995

So, as of 2PM today I will be embarking on a little bit of a journey. My friend Anand and I will be heading off to Berlin for a couple of days. From there, we'll be flying to London and meeting up with our friend Rance. We'll try to catch the Arsenal v Sunderland match on Saturday. On Sunday, we'll be picking up a rental car and driving up the length of England, all the way into Scotland and stopping in Glasgow. On Monday (my birthday) we'll rock it out in Glasgow. Tuesday we'll head back to London and catch Arsenal v Roma...Wednesday I'll be back in the states.

This may be a pipe dream, but I hope to do some blog updating while on the road...if not, I'll come back with plenty of updates.

Anyway, this is in my opinion the best Bjork song...debate while I'm away.

Animated Airplanes Over Germany - Superchunk - Here's Where The Strings Come In - 1995

I realized that I spent a lot of last week talking about 9/11...which is something I'm usually not given to do. Generally, I hate talking about it, and hate when I go home to Indiana that there is always some relative that wants to hear the story again...but it would be impossible to not talk about it in the context of this song.

Granted, this song was recorded a solid 6 years before those events, but it's hard to not see a weird reflection of them in the story of this song. Mac McCaughan has never been that much of a storyteller with his lyrics. He tends to write in impressionistic blurbs that paint a story in the details rather than in events. (Think of the way that a nation of kids took "Slack Motherfucker" as an anti-capitalist rant when in fact it was the opposite, a screed against a lazy co-worker)...but in this song the events are fairly concrete. A man is taking a flight over Europe, the plane starts to go down, the man picks up the phone in his seat and calls his wife/lover to say that he loves her one last time. The plane pulls out of the dive and the man thinks about his life and how close he came to losing it.

I also can't help but think about the person on the other end of that call. I think of the scene in David O Russell's Three Kings were Marky-mark calls home while he's chained up in an Iraqi prison. His wife is doing the dishes, tending to the baby, having a normal crappy day and having no idea how to respond to the fact that her husband is in so much more of a dramatic situation. Or for a more comedic example, there is John Landis' American Werewolf in London...when David Naughton, knowing that he's losing out to the wolf, calls home only to get his bratty 12 year old sister...who has no idea why her brother is tripping out and telling her he loves her. But with both of those scenes, and the scene depicted in this song, it's hard not to personalize it. To think of how confused and sad and horrified I'd be if my girlfriend called me to tell me that she loved me and that she'd be dead in a matter of seconds. Jesus.

The Angels of Sleep - Portastatic - A Slow Note From A Sinking Ship - 1995

When I was a little kid I used to try and catch my guardian angel. As a pre-schooler I had been subject to really traumatic nightmares. So, my sweet, caring, hopelessly naive grandmother had convinced me that I had a guardian angel watching over me and keeping me safe at night. This is probably what led to my weird religious phase.

But anyway, I believed that every time I closed my eyes the angel would appear...so I'd spend hours laying in bed trying to suddenly open my eyes in the hopes of catching the angel off guard. Two things about this story, first of all it speaks to the human need to prove that there is something beyond our experience in the world...that we are constantly looking for some proof that there is still some magic left in this science based world of ours...even when all signs point to there being very little.

And secondly, what kinda second-rate slacker-ass angel did I think I had if I thought it could be punked by a 7 year old boy. Clearly I already had shitty self-esteem if even my imaginary guardian angel was a fuck-up.

Anyway, here's the mighty Mac McCaughan (if you haven't noticed, the man is one of my personal heroes) with one of his earlier, low-fi Portastatic tracks, letting the quality of the song overcome the production, the playing, his nasal voice, etc...and still being absolute gem.

Always Crush Me - Guided By Voices - Alien Lanes - 1995

This is one of those tracks on Alien Lanes that most people think the album would be better off without. There's plenty of GBV weirdness to this track for connoisseurs: the sort of...Orientalism feel to the guitar track, like the attempt to play the sound track to a Charlie Chan movie, the "up two octaves past his range" last verse, and of course the gold mine of mid-period Pollard lyrics to be found within.

Alright - Guided By Voices - Alien Lanes - 1995

Ok, so shortly after bitching about how few GBV songs I've gotten to write about thus far in the project, this will be the second of three that have come this month.

The true genius of Bob Pollard is in his ability to capture great little moments from the canon of rock music and make an entire song out of them. Granted this can lead to some horrible frustrations, or the feeling that Pollard could have done more with his little gems...but few songs capture this more than "Alright".

Pollard seems to have said "you know that bit at the end of your random arena rock song that makes people wave their lighters in the air and sing along? What if that bit was THE WHOLE SONG!"

Genius I tell ya.

All The Umbrellas In London - The Magnetic Fields - Get Lost - 1995

This is one of the few Magnetic Fields songs that I can still stand to listen to (the still durable Charm of the Highway Strip excluded). Even when I loved TMF, Get Lost was always something of a dud of an album...except this song. Stephen Merritt actually manages to find an appropriate setting for his melencholia and the right melody to go with it.

Alice Childress - Ben Folds Five - Ben Folds Five -1995

Back in the summer of 1998 I had a couple of friends move down to Bowling Green, Kentucky. I went down to visit them a few times that summer, as even they realized pretty quickly that Bowling Green is one of the more hellish places in this country. I was in the Ben Folds phase then, so this album as a whole and this song in particular always make me think of that summer. Sitting on the porch in the ungodly southern summer heat, sweating out the beer you were drinking, and waiting for the grill to get going. There was really nothing else to do.

It had it's charm, of course, but I like my life to have more gears than 1.

The Abandoned Hospital Ship - The Flaming Lips - Clouds Taste Metallic - 1995

Not that I would ever change much of anything about The Soft Bulletin, but I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Ronald Jones hadn't freaked out and quit the band. Take no credit away from Wayne's song writing or Steve Drozd prodigious talents, but no one quite plays a guitar like Jones...for better or worse.