Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand

by Marc Woodworth

  “Hot Freaks” was a revelation to us. I was singing a lyric over one of Toby’s instrumentals and he used a Memory Man to get a vocal sound that for the first time we both thought was really sharp and allowed a better performance. That’s when Toby and I truly started collaborating. It became more than me telling him that I was going to play a guitar part at a certain point or asking him to try to make something sound a certain way. “Hot Freaks,” “Greenface,” and “Queen of Cans and Jars” were the first songs we taped in the basement where I thought the recording of a full band sounded good enough to be on a record. You can record an acoustic and a couple of other instruments on four-track and make it sound all right, but it was difficult to get everything to sound good when you’re recording a full band with drums. Once we started to get a sound we liked, we would record every little idea we had. Some people thought we recorded too much but my philosophy at the time was that since we could get a sound on the four-track that we liked we should record as much as we could. For an album like Bee Thousand we might have recorded a hundred songs and if twenty percent of them were good, then we’d have a solid album.

  Mike Lipps, a friend of mine, said the ingenious thing that we did was to record everything. We’d have a name for everything, a cover for everything, and we’d record everything—we’d think of skits and record them, tape the sound from the television. We were constantly recording and not worrying about what the recordings sounded like. We just wanted to get as many ideas down on tape as we could. And we would always have a name for everything we did, every place we recorded. We called Toby’s basement Collider XL. We called my basement The Snakepit and one time The Public Hi-Fi Balloon. We called Kevin’s basement Laundry and Lasers. We had to name everything. We would have jam sessions but not in the usual sense of a jam session. We’d have all the titles and lyrics ready beforehand. We called them “controlled jam sessions.”

  I’m impatient. During the time of Bee Thousand, I liked how quickly you could record a complete song. Two or three times a week, I’d have five or six songs and we’d get together at Toby’s or in Kevin Fennell’s basement. We wouldn’t rehearse. There’d be no practice at all. I’d teach Kevin the song, playing it on guitar, while Toby mic’d the drums and then my amplifier. As I taught Kevin the song, we’d record it. Once I thought it was good enough—and it didn’t necessarily have to be perfect—once it captured the idea of the song, then we already had the drums and the guitar down. All we had to do was overdub bass and a vocal and it was finished. The whole process took a half an hour per song.

  It was important to me that we capture a song in the least amount of time from when I conceived it to when we put it on tape. That’s the way to capture the purest essence of a song. When we were recording the songs for Bee Thousand, spontaneity was important to me. When you don’t establish a set of ground rules and you don’t care about mistakes, it’s easy. Some of the best music is recorded exactly the way that it’s conceived and created—it’s all happening simultaneously. At any rate, there has to be a point when you say, “that’s good enough.”

  Imperfection

  There’s something charming about imperfection and the human element in art. Humans are imperfect. I can see what’s been lost when I’m making collages. The older the magazines are, the better the images are. The sixties and earlier stuff is cool. Then you see seventies stuff and it’s not quite as interesting in color and tone. And the images from the eighties lose even more. I choose not to enter the realm where things have become so much less human and warmth is being lost. I choose to play acoustic guitar and write songs and record them on my little solid-state boombox. I’ve been doing it that way since the early nineties, even before Bee Thousand, and since then I’ve written every song on this little tape recorder that a friend gave me. I’ve beaten the hell out of it. The knobs have fallen off. Every once in a while the sound will go out. I have to hit it to make it work sometimes, but it just keeps going. When you’ve been writing that many songs for that many years and you’ve been fairly successful you don’t want to change the way you do it. It’s important for me to keep working in that primitive way. And I actually like the way it sounds. It’s got a built-in condenser mic and sometimes it captures sounds good enough to throw on a record.

  When I made album covers, I used to meticulously rub off letters with a burnisher but I wouldn’t measure things out because I didn’t want it to be too exact. It’s the same thing musically. On an album cover, you see that one letter’s slightly off, but you can tell that someone put effort into it. That’s related to what we used to do with the music in the early days—mistakes would happen because we didn’t know how to play very well. Those accidents made my songs more interesting. Whether I was doing it alone or with my brother, or Toby or anyone else, we’d say, “OK, if you fuck up, repeat the fuck-up in the next section the same way.” A lot of times when you come up with something unique it’s an accident. We called them “happy accidents.” You can try to get cool-sounding things and sometimes you’re successful but in recording over the last twenty years I’ve found that we got the coolest stuff accidentally. One time I started beating a guitar with a recording microphone, just hitting it. Or we might stick something in a dryer and record it. There’s something interesting about the patchwork quality of just throwing onto one record material with very different recording qualities so each thing sounds like it’s recorded in a different place. I can attribute that way of working to John Dodson and Nick Weiser. We wanted to start a band, but we never did, so we formed a songwriting guild. The first time we got together I took a couple of songs to them and then they played me a cassette of their four-track recordings. It was a tape of all these unfinished songs banging into one another. I thought it had a really appealing effect. So that inspired me to make records that had the same kind of feel. Bee Thousand is a result of that aesthetic.

  Bee Thousand is made up of songs that were from all over the place. A lot of the full band songs were recorded in Kevin Fennell’s basement. Part of “Her Psychology Today” was taken from a tape of Mitch and Kevin just jamming out something really quick and then I made up the vocals for it. Other parts of “Her Psychology Today” were taken from a full song, “The Way to a Man’s Heart.” I didn’t like the entire song so I just used the drum part. The drumming came out of an experiment I tried with Toby. I asked him to record me playing the drums and to signal me every thirty seconds to change the beat. That’s how we mapped it out. I built the music over the drumbeat that changed every thirty seconds. It sounded kind of cool but it was chaotic. The part of “Her Psychology Today” where I sing “Hey, things will work out better” came from that experiment. Songs that involved just acoustic guitars or piano, the recorders on “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory,” for example, were recorded or overdubbed at Toby’s, usually while just my brother, Toby and I were there. Some of the stuff with even poorer fidelity comes from old tapes of instrumental jam sessions that we recorded in my basement. I’d find these tapes and we’d just record more music and the vocals on them. It was a revelation to me that I could find a tape of a live jam from the basement from ten years before, take it to Toby, put it on the four-track and then add guitar and vocals to create an entirely new song. “Second Moves to Twin,” which was on an earlier version of Bee Thousand, and “Big Fan of the Pigpen” were done like that.

  Making Bee Thousand never felt like recording with a band. We didn’t play live shows in those days. There were a lot of different people involved at different times. Whoever could come over would play. You play basketball in your yard and sometimes certain people come over and other times different people come over—that’s how it was with Guided by Voices. Sometimes I’d be with just my brother or my brother and Mitch or just with Mitch, sometimes with just Toby, sometimes all of us together, sometimes with Dan Toohey. Sometimes Greg Demos could come over and Don Thrasher. Sometimes it would be Kevin Fennell. It was just a bunch of friends who could occasionally ge
t together so it didn’t really feel like a band until later when we got a solid lineup and started playing live.

  Construction, Deconstruction, Reconstruction

  When we were putting together Bee Thousand I was also out of song ideas. After Propeller we’d been “discovered” and then we made Vampire on Titus. I was wondering what to do next, what direction we should take it. Then it hit me—and it’s a good thing that it did—that I should take all the best ideas that I hadn’t used over the years—segments of songs, pieces of songs—and throw them together like patchwork. When I write, I brainstorm ideas to the point of exhaustion then go back to the ones I think are worthwhile and work on them. I just file away the rest of the ideas. Going back through old cassettes I’ll find ideas for songs that I actually like better than the ones I worked on and put on albums. Some songs take a while to sink in or only become relevant later. What you come up with can seem a little strange to you. At first, you’ll think, “This is not something I can work with,” but when you come back to it, it can sound good. I can remember everything I ever wrote, so I combed through my brain files to get the best ideas and made Bee Thousand out of all these pieces. It was like fitting a puzzle together to make a complete picture. I only wrote a few new songs like “Gold Star for Robot Boy” and “I Am a Scientist”—that was about it other than a few things we recorded spontaneously. The rest of the album was bits and pieces of old songs I had from the time I was a kid that I put together to make new songs.

  I consider myself to be a deconstructionist. I take ideas, throw them together, then tear them apart again. I’ll do that with a collage. I’ll put a collage together then tear parts of it off so you see rip marks and white paper. Or I’d completely cover one of my collages with even rows of scotch tape. In fact, the collage I made for the cover of Bee Thousand had my trademark scotch tape going across it. The original cover had the two guys walking toward an eerily green glowing house out in what looked like a field. I cut the picture of the two guys out of a magazine. They were walking at Mardi Gras. There was the red room and the blue room. The back cover originally just had the boy raised by wolves crawling across it and two fingers coming out of the ground. The cover I gave Robert Griffin was a lot more surreal. It was a stranger cover. He redesigned it, trimmed it down and made it a little simpler. Because he thought the album had more potential than I did, he wanted to make it look slightly more professional. I like the cover he designed. At first I thought “What are you doing to my collage!?” but the more I looked at it the more I liked it. I also like the inside sleeve with all the images Toby and I sent him. That was the result of my prog rock inclinations; I always liked lyric sheets that had a separate image with each lyric.

  So constructing an image for a collage or deconstructing an old song work in the same way. I take all the ideas I can, patch them together and then start breaking them back down. If I have to put something back on, I’ll do that. It goes back and forth that way: construction, deconstruction, reconstruction. That’s the way Bee Thousand came together. I’d find an old lyric or come up with a general lyric, sometimes a nonsense lyric, and then I’d start adding words, maybe taking lines from a notebook and inserting them to make it work. Or I’d write a lyric and if something didn’t fit, I’d take it out and add something else. That’s how the tide Bee Thousand itself came about. We’d smoke a little bit of pot and write down song titles. We used to do that all the time. My brother had written down “zoo thousand.” I think he’d seen a mile marker that said Z1000 so he said “zoo thousand.” I thought that was interesting. Then I saw on the marquee of a drive-in—I guess they didn’t have a v so they used a u—Beethouen instead of Beethoven. That sounded to me like Pete Townshend—so there were all these little turns of events. “Bee Thousand” worked on a lot of different silly levels so we thought it would make a good tide for an album, especially one that’s really hard to pin down.

  “Hardcore UFO’s” is a good example of an older song that I reworked or deconstructed. It was called “Walls and Windows” in the mid-eighties. In those days, I played guitar in Guided by Voices and we would perform “Walls and Windows” live. For Bee Thousand, I wanted to rework songs I really liked but had decided not to use before because they were too flowery lyrically. I was into some kind of pseudo paisley thing with “Walls and Windows.” I changed the lyrics and it became “Hardcore UFO’s”—we wanted to play up the Dayton connection with flight because it’s the birthplace of Orville and Wilbur Wright. You heard about the history of the Wright Brothers all the time, but as a kid I didn’t really care. You also saw a lot of planes flying overhead because Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is here. It was part of where we came from. Toby actually had his pilot’s license so I guess it was legitimate to use flight imagery in the same way that it was legitimate for the Beach Boys to write songs about surfing because at least one of them surfed. We had songs like “Hardcore UFO’s,” “You’re Not an Airplane,” “Striped White Jets.” I always thought it was attractive when a band projected an image that could be associated with its origin. “Hardcore UFO’s” was recorded in Kevin’s basement and I think Toby mixed it in his basement—that’s where the guitar dropping out of the mix happened. I had no problem with the guitar dropping out. It sounded like a hardcore UFO phasing in and out.

  “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory” was a lost song. It was at the end of an unmarked cassette. There’s a lot of music on this particular cassette that I used for Bee Thousand or Vampire on Titus. After that music ends, there’s nearly five minutes of silence and then all of sudden a song comes on right at the very end of the tape: “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory.” I had recorded it when I was on acid. I’ve only done acid a couple of times in my life and I didn’t do a whole lot but enough to have an “experience.” I was by myself and I was looking into the mirror in the bathroom. My face changed into my son’s face. I saw my son in my face and it moved me to tears. That’s what inspired me to write that song, although the lyrics have nothing to do with that experience. I must have taken the first tape I could find and recorded the song at the end of it. I found the song a day or so before we were going in to master Bee Thousand so it almost didn’t make the album. I took it over to Toby’s and said, “There’s one more song. Let’s add a couple of things to it.”

  The demo for Bee Thousand was the final take. Later when we started to record in big studios we had to make demos that were much better in quality than anything on Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes. Around the time of Bee Thousand I wanted to make albums that sounded like Beatles bootlegs, like outtakes from the White Album or Sgt. Pepper. I missed Beatles music. It was a case of “If I can’t hear in music what I want to hear, then I’m going to have to make it myself.”

  When we were mastering the album, we discovered cross-fading and editing. I was taking pieces of songs—like the acoustic introduction to “Tractor Rape Chain” that wasn’t on the original four-track tape—and adding them during the mastering process. I found the introduction that Toby, Greg Demos, and I had recorded, and it happened to be in the same key so we threw it on at the beginning of the song to see how it would work—and it did nicely. There was a lot of that kind of experimentation while we were mastering the album.

  We would send the songs on cassette to Robert Griffin at Scat and he put would put them together. I remember that he was sequencing side one of Bee Thousand when he told us “this is the one,” that it was going to be a really well received album. He had the foresight to see that. And I guess his assessment has stood the test of time. People are still saying it’s our masterpiece. I wouldn’t have guessed it. So you can never tell. That’s why I always go on to the next project. I write songs. We record them. If they’re not as good as the ones on Bee Thousand, Under the Bushes, Under the Stars, or the last one we put out, I’ll still go on to make another one. That’s all you can do: move forward. It’s not that I don’t worry about what people think, but I’m more concerned with keeping it flo
wing. I don’t get writer’s block because I never stop. It’s not work. It’s what makes me happy.

  Robert Griffin sequenced side one of Bee Thousand by himself. He said, “I’m not quite sure about side two yet, but side one, man, I’ve been working with it and playing around with it and it sounds great to me.” It’s funny that it happened that way, too, because I’ve always prided myself on sequencing. That’s what I do best. So at first I felt like saying to Robert, “I do my own sequencing, thank you,” but then we listened to what he did and I thought the continuity was perfect from “Hardcore UFO’s” to the closer “Echos Myron.” Sometimes you get to the point where you really don’t know what’s best anymore because you’ve been living with what you’ve done for too long. You need to step back and get someone to give you another perspective. That’s what Robert did with Bee Thousand. He’d sequenced side one and then we went up to Cleveland to master the album. That’s when we came up with the sequence for side two. One of the things that makes the album work is the way it was put together as a two-sided LP. Sequencing is a really important element that’s oftentimes not given proper attention.