Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand

by Marc Woodworth

  An album, anyone’s album, good or bad, however coherent or fragmented, gives the illusion of a whole—here it is, in one package, all in two runs of grooves, Side A and Side B, one skein of code over which the laser passes, one spool of tape moving from cog to cog inside the brittle plastic of a cassette. If you go deep enough, though, there’s always more untidiness bristling beneath and behind an album than the pressing and the package suggest. On Bee Thousand that bristling energy is very close to the surface. You can feel how sharp it remains after more than a decade as you slip the vinyl onto the platter, push the CD into the vacuum, settle the cassette upon the heads. You can hear the underlying disorder and essential complexity that qualify the notion of “finished product” in the way the album sounds so exquisitely unfinished. Beneath the shimmering melody, the experimentation of sticking a microphone in a spinning clothes dryer. Next to the fleshy hook wrung from the Kay semihollowbody guitar, the sound of dropped amps so familiar to the various members of a family dwelling on the floor above dad’s basement music-lair. Within the almost-recognizable pop echo, the dense, somatic reality realized from a lifetime of processing sixties songs and what followed in their wake. This is the sound of transforming everyday realities—sticking gold stars on fourth-graders’ papers, shuttling the kids to practice, paying the interminable mortgage, friction with the folks—while always keeping those realities before us, however transformed they become in the process.

  The music we loved in our youth, some of us, insisted on its seamless perfection and its distance from the everyday. We didn’t see anything familiar in the mythic medievalism of a Led Zeppelin opus or the fairy stories set in downy beds of harmonically perfect guitar parts à la Queen II—and that was the allure: there was nothing familiar. We wanted to be transported from our American bedrooms, from the sounds of the school bus braking to a halt at our stop, from the mundane chore-lists, from cheesy advertising jingles, and repeated-weekly fare in the family kitchen. Music was a story—one that took place outside of the overly familiar coordinates of our sometimes numbingly uneventful progress—a story we entered greedily and which we elevated above who we were and what we did. An album—a “great” one—was a grail: holy, mysterious, radiant. And, as it turned out, often to some degree empty and false (I exempt Led Zeppelin here, and even Queen II). We were in the market for the polished chalice and we bought its plastic museum gift-shop reproduction without noticing how light it was, how it couldn’t hold water let alone wine. We invested in the myth, the unreality, desirable as the pristine surface of dad’s factory-fresh Olds 88 or the faux brushed aluminum that graced the face of the Clarinette II “stereo system” centered in pride-of-place on the scarred and peeling dresser. These records, it turns out, weren’t an escape from the commodity culture of our youths as much as they were a cleverly disguised set of products intimately if secretly related to everything we sought to escape by listening to them.

  Is that why, hearing Bee Thousand more than a couple of decades after those days of eating up and then voiding the myths of rock, I no longer felt so empty? This was rock as rock but rock as unlike that rock as rock could be which still hit all the major pleasure centers while finding a few new ones. Filled by its authentic, messy grandeur, grateful for the fine balance it achieved between artifice and reality, unwilling to dismiss what was there in favor of any story about where it came from or who made it, I heard Bee Thousand not as an example of a DIY, lo-fi movement or the unexpected victory song of long-delayed and now no longer young musicians, but as a record—as in a record of an event, the event of making music—of beauty and love and sad noise and confidence, carelessness and sweetness, humor and bravado, vulnerability and, even, yes, real greatness—of so many human states and emotional realities that no single story could define it or give it a calming, false name.

  Guided by Voices did not exist in any conventional way as a band when Scat Records head Robert Griffin proposed to release a Guided by Voices seven-inch in 1992. “That would be great,” Robert Pollard told Griffin, who’d called with the offer, “but the band broke up.” Even that simple answer can send us in the wrong direction, offering the possibility that the band was identifiably and properly a band at any recent period prior to the fateful phone call from Broadway (Cleveland’s Broadway, that is) where Griffin ran his independent label. Of course, there were already records—five LPs and other assorted releases—put out under the Guided by Voices name and a number of musicians who formed the core of a group, though the players, excepting Pollard, frequently changed or contributed to the recordings in different combinations. But despite recording a number of songs for Propeller, the 1992 LP that piqued Griffin’s interest and which his label re-released shortly thereafter, as a more or less conventional band in a conventional studio, there was little else to suggest the familiar tale of an inseparable gang of driven musical brethren slugging away night after night with determination and grit while the world largely chose not to notice. Of course, nearly everyone chose not to notice—that part of the story conforms to the tried-and-true plot—but it wasn’t exactly as if Guided by Voices was wearing itself boldly in the eyes of the world. “The band broke up” becomes a more complicated statement than it would at first appear, our first glimpse of the complexity of the atypical ingredients that went into Bee Thousand.

  Back to the conversation: Pollard pauses for a moment, reconsidering Griffin’s offer, then makes what in retrospect seems a momentous decision. “No, wait,” he tells Griffin, “I can put something together.” Of course he could. He was always putting something together, musically speaking: late nights singing into the General Electric boombox’s surprisingly rich-sounding built-in microphone; spur of the moment meetings in a garage or basement with one or another of his friends to make some noise (always recorded, it would seem). “I can put something together” sounds like a piece of dialog out of a hackneyed biopic—split screen, color by Panavision, Pollard on the left, uncertain, Griffin on the right, expectant. Cue music: the first Scat seven-inch, “The Grand Hour,” containing the song “Bee Thousand,” a tide that would eventually be applied to the final version of a full if relatively short album of songs released a year later. No fewer than 65 songs were recorded and considered for the album Bee Thousand, which in final form featured nineteen tracks and became a touchstone of uncorrupted brilliance quickly labeled a “do-it-yourself” or “lo-fi” masterpiece. The album that nearly never was by a band that never really was became a much-loved collection and a signal influence on a new generation of musicians. It’s one of the great long-shot stories of rock and roll, no matter how you punch down the hyperbole that’s risen around it like so much leavened dough. But, for me, and, perhaps, for many of its admirers, Bee Thousand isn’t defined by its role in rock lore or indie history: there’s something else, something more far-reaching about its achievement that isn’t contained by its immediate context as a rock record that rose to the surface of the alternative pond, where it made a beautiful, unexpected splash as it rose from the water.

  4. Track TAPE

  Guided by Voices Narrative #1: Robert Pollard

  Freaking Out

  Around the time we were putting Bee Thousand together, I was freaking out. We were giddy because we’d made music for so many years while no one gave a shit and then all of a sudden they did. It was a very exciting time, but a confusing one, too. A year before that, right after Propeller, I realized that we didn’t have enough money and couldn’t keep financing these records. We were done. It was settled. There were people who told me I should focus more of my efforts on teaching, that I shouldn’t be using money on music when I should be spending it on my family, so I finally thought I was going to have to become—as some people put it—“responsible.” But just as I had settled on not making any more records and made the decision to put more time and effort into teaching, Guided by Voices became the darlings of the underground. When we put out Bee Thousand, some people considered it to be a masterpiece. It’s
still funny to me to call something thrown together so haphazardly a masterpiece. After working on music for over ten years while people had been telling me I needed to quit doing it, I was finally rewarded. I felt a little bit like saying to some people, “See? I told you so,” but I never did. Those were inspirational times. Not only did I feel free creatively—that this wide avenue had opened up where I could do whatever I wanted—but I also received recognition for what we did, critical praise, and the acceptance of people like Thurston Moore, Kim Deal, J. Mascis, and Pavement into a more respectable circle of rock when we were never part of anything before.

  But now that it was becoming real, I was also scared. I had to do actual interviews. I couldn’t hide anymore. Here was my dirty laundry—if indeed it was dirty (and some of it was). I was embarrassed by titles like “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory” and “Fourteen Cheerleader Cold Front.” I thought some of my titles and ideas were ridiculous, especially in the early days before people really knew who we were. Later, I found out a lot of people liked those kinds of songs best and that I did too. I was full of second-guessing. Before we’d received any attention, I’d made probably a hundred and fifty album covers because that’s what I did when I couldn’t find anyone to form a band. It was an alternate universe I had created for my own musical fantasies and inadequacies. The album covers were really elaborate. I would even jokingly put the Warner Brothers logo on some of them. Once we were “discovered” I threw them away because I was afraid of being revealed as being some sort of talentless freak, a fear that I think was born out of the general lack of support at the time.

  Around the time of Bee Thousand, Eric, the singer from New Bomb Turks, said he thought Guided by Voices was pretty good but he didn’t know about “all that star spangled elf shit”—and that’s understandable from a punk rock viewpoint. But that’s where I was at the time. It was the crossover period when I was teaching fourth grade and getting ready to do music full time so some of the lyrics were inspired by what the kids in my class would say or draw. I was around ten-year-olds for seven hours a day so at that time I had the mind of a ten-year-old. I was reading them Grimm’s Fairytales, coming up with rudimentary science projects. There were robots and there were elves and there were witches. My kids were around the same age then, too. I’ve always been inspired by whatever’s around me. There are people who wish I still wrote the way I did around the time we made Bee Thousand when there were all these far-out images and everything was recorded on four-track or live. I’m not going to do that for anyone. People ask, “Why don’t you write more songs like ‘Echos Myron’?” and I think, “Because I already wrote ‘Echos Myron.’” As a songwriter, you’ve got to please and challenge yourself.

  So I was very confused about a lot of things at the time, but I also wanted to explore the possibilities. There were people who said I still shouldn’t quit teaching, because I’d been doing it for fourteen years and had benefits and a family to think about, but I knew this was something I needed to do. I’d rather give it an effort and fail than later regret that I didn’t have the balls to take a chance on doing what I really wanted to do. My decision caused difficulties later on—being on the road eventually led to a divorce—but I still can’t regret making that decision to take a chance because I got to do what I sometimes feel I was meant to be doing.

  The Possibilities Are Unlimited

  A number of songs on Bee Thousand reflect what I was going through then. “Echos Myron” was like our call to arms. Myron embodied Guided by Voices itself and its many years of perseverance: “Echos Myron like a siren with endurance like the Liberty Bell … we’re finally here and shit yeah it’s cool.” I thought it was funny and a little too boastful and over the top with tongue-in-cheek pride. What became “Echos Myron” had been a really creamy love song before we charged it up with a double-time drum and a forceful forward march bravado. It became a chest-beater—“hey you, step aside”; “lo-fi, move over.” “Towers to the sky”—the possibilities are unlimited and whatever.

  I wrote “Gold Star for Robot Boy” when I was in the process of making a decision about whether I should continue to teach or quit to become a recording artist. “Gold Star for Robot Boy” was a way of putting that question to myself. What should I do? Should I go for the gold star just like some of the kids in my class do? I became the robot boy. And “Smothered in Hugs” was in its way autobiographical, too. It was about watching interesting possibilities slip away. I had to be on the textbook committee at school at the time—the phrase becomes a little more interesting in the song than what it actually describes. And I also got to the point where I was angry about the apathy of people, especially my family. You can hear that in the lyrics about the judges and the saints and the textbook committee deciding “you should be left out—not even mentioned.”

  Then there’s “I Am a Scientist” which was the first song I wrote that I felt showed some maturity in my ability as a songwriter. I wrote it and recorded it very quickly—it was one of only a couple completely new songs that ended up on Bee Thousand. I really like the structure, the way it builds to the climax—and I think it’s pretty. It’s somewhat self-deprecating and uplifting. I like songs that are melancholic. I never take a lot of time on a lyric but I took a little more time on this one and thought of some occupations that could be associated with my state of mind at the time. What am I? What exactly am I? It’s a kind of self-analyzing song. I’m a scientist studying myself. I’m a journalist recording and reporting what I find. I’m a pharmacist prescribing a medicine, a drug I could ingest to do something to help me find out. In the end, rock and roll’s the religion, the source of redemption. The way out. With all the confusion of not knowing which direction to go in or what I really was during that time, rock and roll seemed to make it a little clearer. What am I going to do? Rock and roll’s what I’m going to do. That song was the answer. That song was the decision.

  You’ve got to find some kind of outlet. Writing songs does that for me. You’ve got to touch all your emotions. Human beings are the only creatures able to manifest aspects of our souls through art. I feel stronger when I come up with an interesting image. It’s something that you’ve created that will be in the world after you’re gone. We want to make and keep those things that will be here long after us. I love poetry but I’ve always thought that song is more important than poetry. A song combines poetry and music. A song floats around in the ether where the human consciousness can gain access to it. Art—music, poetry, literature, and film—provides an escape. There’s so much turmoil in life and always some kind of confrontation. It’s hard to get away from those things. Some people can meditate, but I haven’t been very successful at that. Writing songs is my form of meditation and for me it’s essential. I’ve done it since I was very young, long before we made any records.

  The Best Songs No Matter How They Were Recorded

  For our first album, Forever Since Breakfast, we went into a studio and created a very mediocre recording out of a very sterile environment. I thought, “Fuck that. If we’re paying for it and no one’s listening to these records anyway, if we’re making them only for ourselves, then I’m going to put exactly what I want on them.” So after that I found tapes of us live and four-track recordings, a couple of studio things, and picked the best songs no matter how they were recorded. That became our aesthetic, what Guided by Voices was all about. We recorded a lot of Propeller in a big studio but we did some of the songs on a four-track. When we had the opportunity to record for a label and put out records for people who would listen to what we did, I kept the same attitude. Either people are going to like it or they’re not going to like it, but it will still be ours.

  With Vampire on Titus we really experimented on our own. We went back to Steve Wilbur’s studio and made this noisy, hissy, oddly recorded album. Steve had an eight-track studio in his garage—it was really a garage, with car parts and all kinds of shit in it. He had an analog machine with an eight-track
board. He’d smoke so many cigarettes that there’d be dropouts all over the place when we listened back to what we’d recorded. That happened so frequently that we just had to learn to live with them. Who cares as long as the song’s still there? What are we going to do, anyway? Record it all over or try to fix it? That, at the time, was not economically feasible. We didn’t have the patience or the time so I learned to live with the mistakes and pretty soon I learned to like them. Living with the mistakes became our aesthetic.

  I’m very proud of the approach we took on Vampire on Titus. It was our first opportunity to prove ourselves and we didn’t make anything that resembled a pop record. It was bizarre and noisy, and people wanted to hear it anyway, so that opened a door for us. It was liberating. Vampire on Titus could have destroyed us, but it didn’t. With Vampire on Titus, I realized that working this way could be successful. I was fearless after that. That’s why Bee Thousand is such a good album—because I became fearless, at least about the way we worked. We didn’t worry about production values or musical “correctness.” We didn’t consider perfect rhymes and typical themes. We were into deconstruction and reconstruction. Even though we knew some people would finally be listening to what we did, we didn’t gear ourselves toward what we thought they’d like. But it became obvious that they liked it when we made music the way we wanted to. So, for the record that became Bee Thousand, we just started cranking out songs on the four-track with the attitude that we could do whatever we wanted to do. That we were doing it all on four-track gave us even more freedom.

  At first we recorded on four-track as a matter of economics, then we came to like that sound better. Before Bee Thousand, we’d worked with a four-track many times with no success. I didn’t know anything about using it. It took meeting Toby Sprout for it to work. Toby had a good command of the four-track machine. I had all these ideas and my brother had all these ideas so all we had to do was convey them to Toby and he was able to translate them onto a cassette. He knew how to get the sounds. He had interesting mic’ing techniques. You had to be more creative with a four-track. There wasn’t much multitracking. I think the most tracks we could get by bouncing was ten. The task was in coming up with interesting amp sounds and drum sounds by experimenting with microphone placement, taking advantage of the physical environment. We were limited, but once we figured out that we could get a pretty good sound we took full advantage.