Review: Guided by Voices' 'Live from Austin, TX'

Although I'd seen Guided by Voices live a number of times, and knew their routine pretty well, I was still shocked to see their performance on the concert series Austin City Limits in 2005. Well-known for lubricating his performances with buckets of Rolling Rock, Robert Pollard held nothing back for his public television debut. His slurring and capering and hilariously inebriated rants were not the kinds of things you usually saw on PBS. 

Review: 'Art Sleeves: Album Covers by Artists'

There have been many collections of album cover images, and the implication of all of them is that the album cover is more than a carrying case for music: it is a self-contained work of art. Specimens such as Peter Blake’s life-size collage for Sgt. Pepper’s or Storm Thorgerson’s striking Dark Side of the Moon prism support that stance, but another collection of such usual suspects would be pointless.

Review: Reissues of Robert Pollard's 'Kid Marine' and 'Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department'

As the twentieth century transitioned into the twenty-first, Robert Pollard was in a similar state of transition. In 1998 and 1999, he made his first hi-fi Guided by Voices albums, each with new line ups, each for different labels, and each with different critical consensuses (Mag Earwhig!: yay! Do the Collapse: nay!).

Bob’s all-new solo career was similarly unstable. He began it in 1996 with the promisingly haphazard Not in My Airforce, which he followed with the tight, almost uniformly terrific Waved Out in 1998. However, the possibility that solo Pollard might continue to progress fell apart with that same year’s Kid Marine. The music was not bad—a new backing band that would help him make the villainously underrated Do the Collapse provide polished performances— but the songs don’t display Pollard’s usual golden ear. The lack of structure can be expected from the guy who created all those fantastic fragments on Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. The lack of hooks is much less forgivable. There are some pretty good songs, such as “Far Out Crops” and “White Gloves Come Off”, but there’s nothing in the realm of the previous albums’ “Psychic Pilot Clocks Out” or “Subspace Biographies” to anchor it. “Town of Mirrors” boasts a big shout-along chorus perfect for band/audience communion in concert, but that chorus isn’t very catchy and the rest of the track barely qualifies as a song.

Then the instability continued as Pollard finished out the century by collaborating with GBV’s newest MVP wingman, Doug Gillard. Multi-instrumentalist Gillard recorded the instrumental tracks for Pollard’s songs solo before passing the tapes back to the writer, who fastened his own weird words, melodies, and voice to them. The results are probably Bob’s best non-GBV work. Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department uncaps a flood of fabulous songs, many of which would become live GBV staples. Those thirsting for the hooks absent from Kid Marine had their needs well quenched with stuff like “Frequent Weaver who Burns”, “Pop Zeus”, “Do Something Real”, “Tight Globes”, “Messiahs”, and the rest of a bloody beautiful disc that ranks majestically alongside GBV’s early twentieth century work.

Both Kid Marine and Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department were available in limited vinyl editions twenty years ago, but those are hard to come by today. So GBV Inc. is reissuing both in newly remastered editions on vinyl, as well as in FLAC and MP3 formats. I only had access to the digital files, both of which are brick walled to the extreme.

Review: 'Closer You Are: The Story of Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices'

A mark of a band’s legacy is the number of books devoted to it. A cursory search on Good Reads yields over 2,500 results for The Beatles (no, I am not going to account for how many of those are reprints or song books—that’s still a lot of books). A search for Elvis Presley yields only about 850, but there would probably be a lot more results if I’d just searched for “Elvis” and he’d been the only guy who ever had that name. The Stones: about 1,000. Hendrix: about 450. The Grateful Dead: about 350.

The kind of widespread obsession that accounts for such numbers trails off a lot when you start searching for books about nineties bands. Yes, there are over 200 results for Kurt Cobain (again we have term issues here because a search for Nirvana would unearth more, but tons of fiction and spirituality books would muddy the waters), over 150 for Radiohead, and over 100 for Pearl Jam, but barely a handful for such major artists of that era as The Pixies, PJ Harvey, and Liz Phair.

In light of that, the fact that Guided by Voices have now been the topic of three books makes it seem as though they have a relatively decent legacy in terms of nineties indie rock. Matthew Cutter’s Closer You Are: The Story of Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices is the book that brings the GBV bibliography up to three. In some ways, it feels like the first though. Jim Greer’s Guided by Voices: A Brief History and Marc Woodworth’s Bee Thousand (one of the very best entries in the dodgy 33 1/3 book series I’ve read) are both terrific, but they’re short and lean too much on both the collage-like nature of the band’s music and band involvement—Greer was in GBV for a while for Chrissakes.

Cutter is apparently a Guided by Voices insider, and there are extensive interviews with most of the major members of GBV’s vast cast of characters, but his book is the first proper, objective, anything-but-brief biography of the group. It may not be as formally thrilling as the other two books, but it is much, much more informative. And beyond normal fan interest in any beloved band, this really is a fascinating story completely unlike any other in rock. What other artist besides Bob Pollard achieved “fame” when he was nearly 40, has a discography of over 100 madly eclectic albums, or puts so much hand-crafted care into making and packaging them? Who else can drink like that? The lack of support Pollard received from all but his most devoted drinking buddies also makes Closer You Are an exceptional tale of overcoming adversity. By default, it is also the definitive Guided by Voices biography, and since it’s probably going to be a while before a Good Reads search for “Guided by Voices” or “Robert Pollard” yields 350 results, it will probably hold onto that honor for the foreseeable future.

Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Guided by Voices Songs!

Thirty years ago, Robert Pollard’s Guided by Voices released their first album. This year, Pollard released his—brace yourself—100^th album. Let that sink in for a second. That’s quite a discography for a schoolteacher from Dayton. Pollard recorded those 100 albums with and without GBV, but today, we’re just going to focus on his biggest claim to cult fame, because even I could not keep up with every single release by Go Back Snowball, Lifeguards, Boston Spaceships, Circus Devils, and whatever other Pollard side projects have slipped through my grasp. Hell, I can’t even keep up with Guided by Voices anymore, so you may notice that this list only extends to the end of Guided by Voices’ first official run in 2004. Plus, anything later than that violates Psychobabble’s unbreakable retro code. As you will see, there was still plenty to choose from amongst the countless albums, EPs, singles, and compilations released during their first two decades. As you will also see, I am no GBV snob. I love the fan-fave lo-fi stuff as much as I love the fan-loathed hi-fi stuff, so maybe you should brace yourself for that too. So here goes Psychobabble’s very personal and subjective 100 Favorite Guided by Voices Songs!

100. “Land of Danger” (from Forever Since Breakfast)

We begin our blatant doom trip with an appropriate number since “Land of Danger” is the very first track on Guided by Voice’s very first release. Or is it appropriate? After all, these masters of mixing their multitudinous influences are really just aping R.E.M. on “Land of Danger”. Don’t mistake that for bad news, though, because R.E.M. is awesome and Guided by Voices supply one of the catchiest, most powerful R.E.M. songs that R.E.M. never got to supply themselves.

99. “Perhaps We Were Swinging” (from Hardcore UFOs)

Psychobabble’s Perfect Guided by Voices Box Set Recipe!

Among rock critics’ most tiresome clichés is “Bob needs an editor.” The Bob in question is Guided by Voices’ guide-in-chief, Robert Pollard. The body of work in need of editing is Guided by Voices’ consistently stellar LP catalog. Really? What would you snip off Bee Thousand? Or even the track-stacked Alien Lanes? Or even even the critically and fan maligned Do the Collapse, which is actually an incredible assortment of polished yet still fairly weird pop from start to finish (and, yes, that does include the beautiful Lennon-esque ballad “Hold on Hope”).

As much as I’d never imagine tampering with GBV’s proper albums, their equally plentiful assortment of EPs, outtakes, oddities, and B-sides collections is another story. Here an editor would be welcome to sift through the go-nowhere experiments and sub-par song sketches to cull only the most valuable gems, of which there are many. A small handful of these discs—King Shit and the Golden Boys or Sunfish Holy Breakfast, for example—are solid and require no culling or pruning. But for the most part, even the best of Guided by Voices’ collections—Suitcase or Hardcore UFOs, for example—could use a good set of shears.

In this second installment of Psychobabble’s Perfect Box Set Recipe, I humbly submit myself as shears-wielder. I’ve pored through a mass of the band’s CDs to rescue 141 tracks for the perfect four-disc box set of Guided by Voices’s best outtakes, exclusive singles, EP tracks, demons, painkillers, and pipe dreams. I did my best to assemble the tracks in roughly chronological order, though the sketchy info on some of the outtakes made this impossible, so I attempted to guess the relative era of each mystery track.

I also included a few longer EPs—the Hold on Hope EP, The Pipe Dreams of Instant Prince Whippet— in their near-entirety simply because they’re really good, but I’m rarely inspired to put them in the CD player… and because I had the extra space on these four discs to include so many of their tracks. Hey, this isn’t science, and unlike Bob, I am not a scientist.

As always, I insist that these playlists be burned onto actual CD-Rs and listened to on an actual CD player. To do anything else would make a sham of Psychobabble’s Perfect Box Set Recipe. This also means you need a box, so I hope you recently bought a pair of Keds or something. I should also warn you that the volume levels of these tracks can vary wildly. Just think of the constant volume-knob adjusting you’ll have to do as “engaging in active interaction with your music.” The days of lazily listening to your iPod on shuffle are over here, people. Get ready to work for your entertainment.

But enough jabberstroking! Let’s get to that recipe!

INGREDIENTS

Guided by Voices reunion at Terminal 5: 11/7/2010

When Robert Pollard broke up Guided By Voices after 20-odd years of 4-track experimentation, beer guzzling, wacko on-stage rants, and middle-aged scissor-kicking, he said he was interested in seeing how history might contextualize his band. Would GBV be squished into the upper-echelon with their idols The Beatles and The Who? Typically, Pollard never gave Rock & Roll archivists a chance to sit back, catch their breaths, and take a moment to reflect on his history with Dayton’s booziest sons. He never stopped releasing music at a dementedly prolific rate, whether as a solo act or as a member of The Circus Devils or Keene Brothers or The Moping Swans or The Takeovers or Psycho and the Birds. More importantly, he only kept the band broken up for a mere six years before reuniting to help Matador Records celebrate its 20th anniversary and taking the “classic” line-up of the ever-metamorphosing group on a short tour. Ostensibly, that tour came to an end last night. I say “ostensibly” because they just added an extra New Year’s Eve show at Irving Plaza in NYC. But that’s a typical GBV move. The tour is never really over. The night of drinking has never really dried up. The club is never really closed. And GBV— if we’re to consider their one constant member to be the band’s essence— never really broke up.

But, to some fans, they did, indeed, break up, and a lot longer ago than 2004. For the hardcore cultists that favored the group’s cassette-tape recordings, Guided by Voices broke up in 1996 when Pollard shit-canned Tobin Sprout* (guitar-vocals), Mitch Mitchell (guitar), Kevin Fennell (drums), and Greg Demos (bass) after making their final lo-fi freak-out, Under the Bushes, Under the Stars. Pollard then hired Cobra Verde to serve as his back-up band, and he cut Mag Earwig! the first fully polished GBV record (the band’s ‘80s output recorded in proper studios never really sounded that much slicker than the stuff they cut on home 4-track machines in the mid-‘90s). Those lo-fi fans felt just as betrayed as Sprout, Mitchell, and the rest must have when they received their pink slips.

* (See correction in the comments below...sorry, Tobin!)

Personally, I adore Mag Earwig! and the widely reviled Do the Collapse (produced by Ric Ocasek), and all those other “sell out” records that weeded out the fair-weather fans. Yet there is an incomparable magic to those records the guys made in Mitchell’s basement while sucking back Rolling Rocks and indulging in their weirdest whims. Records like Vampire on Titus and Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes sound like they were never meant for public consumption. Like they were just made for the guys’ personal use. They sound like bootlegs, like The Beatles Anthology albums, like the recordings you amateur songwriters out there used to record in your own bedroom on your own Tascam 4-track machine long before digital technology made even home-recording into an act as soulless as watching a feature film on your fucking cell phone. The Guided by Voices I saw last night at Terminal 5 in Manhattan was purely a product of an age before cell phones and Garage Band and MP3s. They were cassettes wound with crinkled tape and smelly basements and old dudes who kicked out Rock & Roll with way more genuine joy than the poseurs who followed them. Songs were as likely to be sloppy messes as they were to be powerful. Mitch Mitchell seemed so happy to be back on stage with the band that he wasted not an opportunity to shout inanities (some with a lack of political correctness that also seemed to creep in from a long-gone era) into his microphone or shred on his guitar in inappropriate place. He personally sabotaged Sprout’s dramatic intro to “Cut-Out Witch” with his overzealous riffing. After the rest of the group left the stage following each encore, Mitchell stuck around to tell the audience how much he loves them. When the band came back out, Pollard slurred his trademark banter with a complete lack of the sort of self-conscious irony that threatened to annihilate Rock & Roll throughout the past twenty-or-so years. Guided by Voices never played Rock & Roll because they thought the idea of a bunch of middle-aged dudes bashing out off-kilter tributes to The Who or King Crimson or Wire was cute or clever. They did it because that’s what they wanted to do more than anything else in the world. And that’s what made last night’s show a transcendent experience despite the raggedness and the flubbed guitar-lines and the poorly laid out, acoustically shitty venue (Terminal 5? Bleck). Robert Pollard really did seem to be thrilled to be back with the guys he played with before he “sold out” (Editor's note: Robert Pollard never sold out). And Mitch Mitchell seemed thrilled to be king for a day.

December 9, 2009: Psychobabble’s Wholly Subjective 20 Best Albums ofthe ‘00s

The Psychobabble agenda is retro at all costs. Of course, “retro” is a relative term, and as someone who gets nostalgic over things that happened last weekend, I have a fairly arbitrary definition for it: basically, anything that happened before I hit puberty. I’ve made a few exceptions here and there, but I try to stick to pre-mid-‘80s music and movies as best as possible. With the coming end of a decade, I’m making an exception to sift through some of the best (read as: “personal favorite”) items of the ‘00s. This week we’ll be running down 20 of the most worthwhile records to rock this dwindling decade.

20. Mountain Battles by The Breeders (2008)

So, The Breeders released two of the best record of the ‘90s, then ignominiously faded away as the two principal members—Kim and Kelley Deal—dealt with various addictions and personal problems. By the ‘00s they were pretty much a distant memory, vaguely recalled by most as ex-Pixie Kim Deal’s side project and the group responsible for the weird but enthralling hit single “Cannonball”. When The Breeders reformed to a small amount of hoopla and put out the fairly forgettable Title TK in 2002, they seemed more like relics of the ‘90s than ever. A six year gap followed; then Mountain Battles. Jaw drops, eyes bug out, hands begin drumming ecstatically on thighs. Sneaking out with barely a whisper of media interest, The Breeders’ fourth album in nearly two decades may be their best, covering as wide a range of influences and moods as Last Splash while dispensing of the instrumental filler and striking a more consistent overall tone. This is a mature album made by a wonderfully immature group. “Overglazed” sounds like a great lost Who single written after Townshend suffered a severe blow to the skull. “Bang On” and the sublime “Walk It Off” are jaunty, bouncy fun, as is the Tasties cover, “It’s the Love”. All of these could have been big college radio hits if such a thing still existed. “German Studies” could vie with any of the weirder tracks on Last Splash while outdoing most of them for groovy danceability. There are moments of haunting atmospherics (“Night of Joy”, “We’re Gonna Rise”) and Zeppelin-esque heavy rock (“No Way”) and country folk with harmonies like melted butter (“Here No More”), all proving that The Breeders are well worthy of rediscovery.

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19. Sunny Border Blue by Kristin Hersh (2001)

Throwing Muses were one of my favorite band born in the ‘80s. Fractured and furious, their music was demanding, but Kristin Hersh still had a way with a pop hook that held all of the mania together (as did little step-sis Tanya Donnelly, the “George” to Kristin’s “John and Paul”). Hersh’s solo records drop much of the shrieking and cacophonous electric guitars of the Muses in favor of raspy whispers and sparse acoustic backing, but that grit and fury are still very much present. Sunny Border Blue is full of spitting anger (she sounds particularly hungry for the jugular on “Spain”), but the melodies and instrumentation—unplugged guitars, keyboards, and percussion with the occasional trumpet—are beautiful. Hersh’s lyrics, reportedly inspired by marital woes, come off like pages torn from the more vitriolic passages of her diary, and her rendition of Cat Stevens’s “Trouble” (from Harold and Maude) may be the most inspired cover version of the past twenty years.

18. Beautiful Creature by Juliana Hatfield (2000)

Critics often dismiss Juliana Hatfield because of her girlish voice and penchant for sugary pop, but the former Blake Baby has just been strengthening and strengthening as a songwriter for the past 20 years. Her earlier solo albums (Hey Babe, Become What You Are) are refreshing fusions of grubby indie-rock and girl-group bubblegum that were sometimes marred by preciousness and juvenile self-analysis. Since these are the albums for which she is best known, many do not realize how much she has since matured. Her lyrics, while no less self-examining than they’d always been, are less cloying, her taste in backing musicians is keener, and her melodies are just as delectable as ever. It’s a shame that she was essentially forgotten by all but her most devoted fans at the turn of the century, because she simultaneously released two albums that revealed how worthwhile and varied her music remained. Total System Failure is a blow-out of hard Led Zeppelin-style riffs and Jesus Lizard noise that manages to be as catchy as any of Hatfield’s pure pop. Beautiful Creature is quiet, pensive, largely acoustic, and the best argument for Hatfield’s place in the canon of great singer-songwriters. “Choose Drugs” and “When You Loved Me” are heartbreaking love songs. “Hotels” is an infectiously atmospheric meditation on road-weariness. “Daniel” and “Don’t Rush Me” are more upbeat and poppy, but their lyrics continue the melancholic themes of the rest of the record. The one misstep is a pretty big one; as its awful title suggests, “Cool Rock Boy” falls back on the teen-cutesiness of Hatfield’s most unbearable early work, but the rest of the album is consistently fine, as are the ones that followed it.


17. She’s the Dutchess, He’s the Duke by The Dutchess and the Duke (2008)

There has never been a shortage of bands that draw gluttonous reserves of inspiration from The Rolling Stones, but it seems as though most of those bands either reference the early Blues-&-Berry Stones or the Sleazy-‘70s Stones. The Dutchess and the Duke are one of the few that favor the mid-‘60s Stones, when they were immersed in raw folk, baroque guitars, and jangly pop. “Reservoir Park” is a ringer for “Mother’s Little Helper”, “The Prisoner” swipes its riff from “Paint It Black”, the climbing guitar line of “Mary” is reminiscent of “Sittin’ on a Fence”, and “Strangers” gets off on the same C&W jive as “Connection”. They also possess an evocatively morbid lyrical bent that brings to mind some of the Stones most withering cuts, like “I Am Waiting”, “19th Nervous Breakdown”, and “Yesterday’s Papers”. Right now you’re probably thinking, “So, why would I bother with these kids when I could just dust off my copy of Aftermath and hear the real deal?” Well, smart ass, you should check out The Dutchess and the Duke because