Awful Bliss - Guided By Voices - Bee Thousand - 1994

So I have a really awful story to go along with this song. Like a really, really embarrassing and shameful story, but frankly, it is what I think about when I hear this song and will be what I think about when I hear this song until the day I die...so I pretty much have to tell this story.

The song itself is relatively simple. One of the small handful of GBV tracks sung by reedy voiced "Classic Lineup" guitar player Tobin Sprout, it clocks in at barely over 1 minute long. It's a sad, acoustic ballad in the middle of an album of Pollard's bombastic triumphs. And it's really just one verse and a single line repeated a few times as a chorus, but epic song lengths were not GBV's forte.

So...about that story...it was the weekend before Thanksgiving of 99. I was living my last year in Cincinnati, saving money to move to NYC the following summer. My girlfriend at the time was visiting her family in Ecuador, and I decided to go grab a bite to eat with one of my friends. As there is jack-shit to do in Cincy, we ended up at the TGI Friday's in Kenwood drinking and eating Jack Daniel's Chicken Strips (Cuisine was not high on Cincy's list in the 90's...though my mother assures me it's gotten better). After a few we headed our separate ways.

Cut to Tuesday night by which point both myself and my friend have easily the worst food poisoning either of us have ever, ever had. It was so bad in fact that I couldn't drive to my family's thanksgiving celebration, because I was in the bathroom every 20 minutes AROUND THE CLOCK. And it's this around the clock thing that really brings us back to this song.

Now, I don't know if you've ever gone a few days straight sleeping only in little 15 minute bursts...but let me tell you, you start to go a little loopy. You live in a fog where the whole world is strange. It's like the worst drug you've ever EVER taken. I remember laying on my couch, Thanksgiving Day, trying to watch the Macy's Parade and drifting in and out of consciousness between trips to the toilet. (Again, I apologize for the scatological nature of this post)...and for some strange reason for that whole period, I just had that one single line "And I wouldn't dare to bring out this awful bliss" running in my head...over and over. I'm fairly certain it's what madness feels like. Like maybe Manson just kept hearing "Helter-Skelter" in his head, just like that...granted I wasn't homicidal...if anything I mostly just wanted to die...but still...

Anyway, by Friday I had to go to the ER and be rehydrated and given some anti-biotics. It took me about a week after that to get back on solid food, and I will honestly say without fear of exaggeration that nearly 10 years later...my stomach has never fully recovered...and I will never hear this song again without thinking about that just awful, awful 4 days.

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.

Atom Eyes - Guided By Voices - Under the Bushes Under the Sky - 1996

Tobin Sprout's songs on the Guided by Voices albums that came out during the reign of the "classic" line-up are always a bit of an enigma. It seems inconceivable that an ego as outsized as Bob Pollard's could allow another songwriter, even a minor one, to have his moment in the spot light. Beyond that, Sprout's songs, while rarely bad (And this, along with Alien Lanes' "Little Whirl" is probably one of the two best), are generally pretty mundane affairs. Typically the fall into the niche of sub-REM mid-90's indie rock. Eschewing the arena rock gestures that always elevated GBV's lo fi days, Tobin's songs were...nice, and little more. And by and large they were interchangable, offering little sonic variation.

So again, the question is...how did they make it onto GBV albums that were already overflowing with tracks? I have no good answer...there is a temptation to say that Bob put them on the record to showcase how much they were inferior to his work...but that is hardly being fair to Uncle Bob. Also arguable is that Bob, always the coneisseur of the classic rock move, decided he needed a George Harrison to his Lennon/McCartney, a Spiral Stairs to his Malkmus...which isn't outside the realms of possiblility. Or perhaps Bob just liked Tobin's songs...we don't have an answer...instead, they just stand as interesting side alleys on albums already full of experiments, both succesful and less so.

Asphyxiated Circle - Guided By Voices - Half Smiles of the Decomposed - 2004

Jesus, is every song on Half Smiles...in the A's? Such a glut of GBV. This is one of those mid-tempo rockers that crowded most of the later GBV albums, giving them the appearance of being more "even" but in reality they just replaced the weird tracks with boring, if competant tracks...I'm not sure that's a step up.

So we woke up early on the final morning in Scotland. Kick off was at 8PM and we wanted to make sure we could make it back to London with plenty of time to drop off the car, check into the hotel, pick up our tickets, and hopefully get some pregaming in before we had to be to the stadium. We were actually on the road by shortly before 9, which should have put us back at the car rental place by 4...

We cruised our way out of Glasgow, listening to Brits bitch on Talk Radio about how they were considering privitizing the royal mail, callers were calling in irate! Irate I tell you, that the government was considering taking away their rights as British Citizens. Now I'm all for greater government socialism in our country, but really, seriously...how gives a fuck about the mail? When was the last time anyone mailed anything? Privatize it, who cares?

Anyway, as soon as we were clear of Glasgow two things became apparent. The first was that Rance was going to sleep through most of the car ride in the front seat. The second was that Anand was going to drive like Batman. I sat in the back seat taking pictures of the Scottish/English country side and trying to pretend that I wasn't certain that we were going to die in a blaze of twisted metal.

The 7 hour drive from Glasgow to London was done in slightly less than 5 hours. I'm still not sure if Anand ever got a mountain of speeding tickets from the electric cameras, but he certainly broke every traffic law in Great Britain...but on the flipside, we got to London by 2PM.

Asia Minor - Guided By Voices - Half Smiles of the Decomposed - 2005

So we continue our glut of GBV songs with a slower, though not slow, little pop number. Like many of the songs on Half Smiles...it is more a case of "hey that's not so bad!" rather than a "This is F-ing awesome!" But after the catastrophe of blandness that was Earthquake Glue, it was better to see GBV go out with half way decent album than an almost totally forgettable one.

After we finished the tour of the Necropolis we made our way back down the hill and into town. We were walking down (and South) towards the Trongate area to see what was going on down there. Along the way we happened to find the oldest bar in Glasgow.

Unlike a city like Dublin, which prides itself on having several still functioning Medieval bars, Glasgow's bars were all more modern. The oldest they could come up with was The Olde Carriage House which dated from the mid-19th century and had many pictures of the original patrons to prove it. While it lacked the "bar from a Dungeons and Dragons Game" charm of say The Brazen Head in Dublin, it was quite interesting to see the pictures of the bar and to get a sense of what life may have been like in 19th century Glasgow.

As for the bar in modern day Glasgow, at 3 in the afternoon on a Monday...well, it was slow, as expected, and more than a bit surly. Four or five old men milled around the bar, and one middle aged dude with a pony tail and a distinctly Alan Moore vibe. We grabbed a pint each and sat quietly in the corner. The TV was playing a creaky World War II film from the fifties called The Frog Men...Richard Widmark was the only remotely familiar actor in the whole thing...but we got a considerable amount of pleasure quietly heckling the film with the Alan Moore dude. We finished up our pints and headed out looking for lunch.

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.

Are You Faster? - Guided By Voices - Mag Earwhig - 1997

A fairly routine GBV half song from back in the day when we used to wonder what would happen if Bob actually wrote a whole song. And then we found out and realized we generally liked the half songs better. Typically, the song stops right when you think it's going to get amazing. Bob knew the way to keep us in suspense was to never give us the pay off, or sometimes to just give us the pay off...this strategy worked for a good long time.

And My Unit Moves - Robert Pollard and Doug Gilliard - Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department - 1999

And now another song from this album. Sometimes a random assortment isn't that random. I guess that's how poker works. Sometimes you get numbers, sometimes you get a royal flush.

And yes, this song my very well be about Bob's wang. But with him, you just never know.

And I Don't (So Now, I Do) - Robert Pollard and Doug Gillard - Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department - 1999

So a friend of mine wrote me to correct me on one of my blog postings:

"Dude…
The Romans never conquered the Greeks. The Romans actually defeated the Macedonians in 197 BC, at the battle of Cynoscephalae.
(I know, I know -- I'm being a snot. Bite me.)
They had to do that because the Macedonians had come out of the north and conquered Greece in 338 BC, defeating Athens in the battle of Chaeronea under Phillip II and his son Alexander (who later grew up to be Colin Farrell). The descendants of one of Alexander's generals ruled Greece for 150 years, and not nicely.
Before that, the Greeks spent about 100 years tearing at each other likes rats in a sack, in a series of civil wars (Athens vs. Sparta, Sparta vs. Thebes, Thebes vs. various hillbillies).
The Romans were actually seen as liberators and guardians of the peace (think us with England and France, right after WWII). They even tried to withdraw from Greece several times, only to have different Greek political factions keep pulling them back in to settle weird little feuds (think modern Iraq). And the Romans were way better at math and engineering.
All this was under the Roman Republic, 200 years before the Empire.
I tried to let the Patton quote go, BUT NOW YOU'RE KILLING ME!
And I'm never drinking tea near you again.
Regards. "

So there you go.

This track is one from one of Pollard's better solo efforts, though it also started a trend that would never again be a good thing for Bob. The trick works like this. Someone else gives him a tape of music they wrote. Bob then writes and sings the music. It worked with Gillard cause he was already a GBVer at the time...but some of the other attempts at this have been far less succesful. One of the great dissapointments of my life was the Mac McCaughan + Bob Pollard collaboration Go Back Snow Ball...it could have been awesome.

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.

Alone, Together - The Strokes - Is This It? - 2001

I moved to NYC when I was 25 (in the summer of 2000). And for the few years after, that was the clear line of demarcation for my life; pre-NYC and post...it was understandable to have nostalgia for the pre-NYC days, but the post days were my undeniable present...but 8 years down the line funny things have happened and my perceptions have changed. This album is an interesting barometer of those developments.

Not to drop an indie-cred bomb, but I was at the first Strokes show at Bowery, when they opened for GBV on Valentine's Day of 2001. (Does seeing the Strokes first show even count as Indie-cred anymore?). My girlfriend at the time lived a couple hours away and valentine's day was mid-week. All of my friends had in town girl friends, so I went to the show alone and watched from the balcony. My feelings about the album that band would go onto release went from "Huh, this is a fun album" to "Oh dear God, if I hear this album one more time I will go on a killing spree" to "Wow, I haven't heard this album in forever, it reminds me of that time in 2001 when..."

And all of the sudden I have nostalgia for a time I didn't even realize was all that long ago...strange stuff.

Anyway, the album actually holds up pretty well. It's not amazing, but it is what it is.

Alone, Stinking, and Unafraid - Guided by Voices - Unknown Late 90's Bootleg

It sort of amazes me that I haven't written about GBV more. Considering the sheer bulk of songs that have come out of the mind/pen/cassette tape of Robert Pollard and my willingness to buy about 75% of it, I figure that Pollard's music probably accounts for about 2.5% of the contents of my iPod...and considering that the current count is 10, 192...that's not inconsiderable.

A little bit of obscure anthropology for you. When one GBV fan meets another it must be immediately determined which tier of fandom the other exists at, because there are many.

Tier One: The Nostalgic - "Oh, I remember 'I Am A Scientist'...what a great song, that takes me back to my sophomore year..."
Tier Two: The Essientialist - "Yeah, I own Bee Thousand, it's one of the classic albums of the 90's"
Tier Three: The Indie Snob - "I own the albums from Propeller to Alien Lanes/Under Bushes, Under Sky/Mag Earwhig, but after he fired the band he was dead to me."
Tier Four: The Strict Constructionist - "I own all of the GBV albums (or everything since Propeller) but I don't mess with the solo records."
Tier Five: The Avid Fan - "I own all of the GBV records, and the well reviewed/well regarded solo work/side projects."
Tier Six: The Obsessive Compulsive - "I own ALL the GBV records, even the ones from before Propeller. I own all of the side projects and solo albums. I have an original press copy of Propeller from when they were on SCAT records. I saw them at Sudsy Malones on the Same Place The Fly Got Smashed Tour and I won a free dinner with Robert Pollard."

Tier Sixes exist to make us Tier Fives feel better about ourselves...."Well, I may have spent way too much money on Bob Pollard releases, but at least I'm not that guy. I have no need for the early records, or the current wierd side projects...but I do love Bob and all that he stands for.

Anyway, this song was originally released on the Lexo and The Lepers album (another of his bizarre side projects) which I do not own (I'm not that twisted) but it became a staple of the GBV live shows. Which is why having a bootleg version of it seems more appropriate than the anaemic studio version. The song does capture Bob's wonderful chip on his shoulder. He's a lone warrior standing bruised and bloody, yet defiant...defiant against what? and for what cause? are the questions to be asked...but answers are never the point with Bob...the defiant stance is the point.

Acorns and Orioles - Guided by Voices - Under Bushes, Under Stars - 1996

One of the few things I miss about the midwest is the sound of trains. I can think of few sounds more evocative than a train whistle blowing in the night, off in the distance. According to the GBV book, Hunting Accidents, Bob wrote this song after walking along the train tracks late at night smoking a joint. And as a fellow midwesterner, Bob captured it perfectly. The shimmery feedback- y noise in the back ground perfectly captures the sad foreboding that the of the song. And as usual, Pollard's trick of making a seemingly meaningless phrase heavy with implied feeling is wonderfully executed. By the time he's chanting "I can't tell you anything, you don't already know" you feel like the weight of 1,000, 000 fights rests on the back of those lyrics.

Truly a great, great song.