Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand

by Marc Woodworth

  We Created a World Where We Had No Rules

  When Bee Thousand was finished, Matt Sweeney and I took it over to Kim Deal’s house and we drank some wine and played it. Everyone was into it. For the first time I was really happy with one of our records, which is particularly gratifying because it was the first time we did it ourselves. It finally sounded how I wanted it to sound. It took a while to get there. Bee Thousand is our seventh full album. It was recorded entirely on a four-track and tagged “lo-fi,” a term I was not very familiar with at the time. There were bands like Sebadoh, the Grifters, and Pavement popping up, so I became familiar with the term, but we’d already done it that way in the mid-eighties. We’d already put out records that the indie rock public wasn’t aware of, like Devil Between My Toes. All lo-fi meant to me was that you didn’t have enough money so you had to record songs yourself in your own house. Doing it yourself became a movement, like the punk movement before it, but it went beyond punk because not only did you not have to know how to play your instruments, you didn’t even have to know how to record them. It was the final frontier of punk.

  Given where we were from, we had to do it ourselves. I think that’s true of Ohio in general and it’s even more pronounced in Dayton. There wasn’t much inspiration from outside—there weren’t many record stores or places to play and very few national acts would come through—so the only thing to do was amuse ourselves, be inspired by our friends, and try to come up with something ourselves. I know it’s different in bigger cities like Cleveland and Columbus, but even in those places people mostly confine themselves to the basement or the garage. And that’s what we did, too. Just before Bee Thousand, there was a small circle of friends who hung out at the same bar, The 1001. Actually, it was called Walnut Hills by then. Some people from Guided by Voices, the Breeders, Brainiac, and the Method would meet there. There’s one table there that we claimed as ours—Jim Greer, Kelly Deal, Kim Deal, my brother Jimmy, and me. There’s still a picture of all of us right above that table mugging for the camera. At the time, there was a spotlight on Dayton because there seemed to be something going on here with the Breeders, Guided by Voices, Brainiac, and a few other bands. I tried to tell people that there really wasn’t a scene just this bar where we’d sit and get drunk and then maybe go back to somebody’s house and bang away for a while. What was coming out of Dayton was not coming out of a scene but from somebody’s head—Kim Deal’s head or my head or Toby’s head.

  So we created a world where we had no rules. We coul make mistakes and it was cool. There was always a sense o freedom. If I thought a song was too creamy or poppy, ther. I would fuck it up. We’d put a drone through it or drench it in feedback. Or add a track of somebody snoring. Especially in the early days, Guided by Voices was about creating confusion in the listener. I’m sure I found the tide for “Tractor Rape Chain” in my notebook first. You have to make a song for a title like that—and you have to make it good. In an abstract way, that song had something to do with the raping of the land or ecological damage. I’m not exactly sure what the words mean, but the song suggests we’re all part of it—“let’s all get wet.” We can go down together or we can do something about it. So the way the chorus comes in changes the direction of the song. It’s disorienting. “Tractor Rape Chain” is an example of taking a pretty melody and giving it a really strange lyric that doesn’t jibe. Or you can fuck things up in the opposite way by giving a pretty, lilting lyric to a song that’s otherwise heavy or abrasive.

  “Big Fan of the Pigpen” encapsulates that lo-fi aesthetic we were into at the time. My brother, Randy Campbell, and I made that song up in my basement—we just started banging it out as an instrumental and then I went over to Toby’s and put the vocals on, just sang all the way through a lyric I had written down. My brother plays really good bass on that one. I think I played all the guitars. like the song says, downgrading a song makes it impeccable. I’m a big fan of the pigpen because the pigpen is not perfect. It’s low-down and dirty. I like the way an image can confuse the listener. The lyrics for “Hot Freaks” work that way. They were influenced by King Crimson’s lyricist Pete Sinfield. He was one of my favorites. I wrote the lyrics for “Hot Freaks” a long time after I heard King Crimson’s “Ladies of the Road,” but they were definitely influenced by it. I always liked “non-dairy creamer explicitly laid out like a fruitcake,” whatever that means.

  “Buzzards and Dreadful Crows” is a little scary, too, one of the fear of death songs I sometimes write. “Buzzards and Dreadful Crows” was from the period around 1990 when I wrote a bunch of songs with my brother for Same Place the Fly Got Smashed. I had a microphone and a PA and he had a guitar and an amp set up in the basement. I had what I thought were really good lyrics and we went down and made most of Same Place the Fly Got Smashed but there were some songs we didn’t put on that record, like “Buzzards and Dreadful Crows.” The version we recorded then was completely different than the one that ended up on Bee Thousand, which is more of a soul-pop song, really Wilson Pickett-like. It’s soulful and the lyrics are scary and strange—death’s coming to get you, waiting like cats.

  Mixing Worldliness and Otherworldliness

  I’m conscious of the way I’m combining different elements when I write lyrics. I’ve been discussed in underground circles as this literary guy—which I’m not. I’m not really a writer in that sense, but I am conscious of what I want to do. I like mixing worldliness and otherworldliness, what we have to deal with externally and what we have to deal with inside our minds or within our spirits. I don’t like to go too far in one direction but want to combine those two elements. In “Her Psychology Today” there’s the main lyric—“her psychology today” is / to play the crying game”—then there’s also the story of a dream my brother had that I’m telling in the background. In his dream, he is climbing the Eiffel Tower and then he falls backwards in slow motion through the clouds until he finally hits the ground and makes a ten-foot deep indentation. As he’s lying there on his back, people come running over and look down at him and someone says, “He’s dead,” but as they walk away he crawls out of the hole and everyone starts yelling, “He’s alive” as “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” starts playing while Jimmy crawls from the hole victorious over death. I like those kinds of dreams.

  “Demons Are Real” is seemingly nefarious but actually absurd. The second line is “I lost all my money / to a three-hundred-pound ghost.” It’s really a funny line based on one of my very good friends, Gary Phillips, a big guy we call “Family” not because he’s so big but because we were drunk one night and he got all sentimental and was saying, “I love you guys—we’re family.” Anyway, at one point in his life he was going through some rough times and he owed people money so he disappeared. Then we started calling him “the three-hundred-pound ghost.” I always like the way that song opened with the rhyme “Deliver my message to the one I love the most / I lost all my money to a three-hundred-pound ghost.” He’s also the guy snoring on “Ex-Supermodel.” Originally “Demons Are Real” was supposed to be an opener for Bee Thousand and it would have been a good one. I like the picking out of the Beatles-esque minor chord. It’s an ensemble piece. That’s me playing the guitar—the acoustic, I think. Toby might be playing the lead in the background. Kevin’s playing the drums. The really amusing part is the strange squawking noise my brother’s making. He’s creating feedback by playing the microphone and the amp, manipulating the volume and treble. He was the noise specialist. He had the freedom to do whatever he wanted. I like the way the song is an otherworldly take on a simple, real event.

  I was interested in the crossover between what was mythology and what was reality. I was interested in what’s true internally and what’s important externally. “Yours to Keep” is a song about what’s really valuable to you. It could be anything. It could be a necklace of fifty eyes. Is that something you like? The necklace of fifty eyes allows you to see all around. What’s valuable to a person inside a
nd what’s happening on the outside may be different things. In “Peep-Hole” your house is beautiful and orderly but the inside of your head is a mess. It’s a love song: I love you anyway—“Christ, it’s a cluttered mess / I love you I must confess.” It came together in a way that made me cry. It wrapped itself up in a melancholy sense that makes you sad and happy at the same time.

  Bee Thousand ends with “I Am a Scientist,” “Peep-Hole,” and “You’re Not an Airplane.” That’s a really sad conclusion to the record, but still uplifting, somehow. Bee Thousand ends that way after going through all the emotions—there are angry songs and there are happy songs and there are sad songs and songs that give you a sense of melancholia. A lot of the lyrics I was writing for Bee Thousand had to do with feeling childhood slowly slipping away, especially now that the musical aspect of my life was no longer just a weekend fantasy but was becoming something real. That combination of melancholy for what was fading away and hopefulness about what was happening with Guided by Voices runs all through the album. So Bee Thousand has a really sad ending but it’s still uplifting. That could be part of its appeal.

  Listener Response #5: John Papier

  “Yours to Keep” to me is about selling out to the rat race. “And go where the whistle blows … and go where the captain knows”—with this line I envision a long line of workers reporting to a factory or steel mill or coal mine where the foremen are taskmasters. “To train the bear to not get up”—this represents the brainwashing of workers to do their meaningless jobs and give up their dreams. “To slay the beast & win the cup”—this means to win at all costs for personal material gains at the expense of others. “A necklace of fifty eyes. … Is yours to keep”—after selling out all you have is a gaudy, expensive piece of jewelry.

  In the summer after I graduated from high school in 1986, I played bass for a garage band for three months. Since then I have always dreamed of starting my own garage band and recording self-made albums in a basement studio. I am currently a credit manager at a bank and have a wife and two kids, so now I live this dream vicariously through GBV and Bob. This is the appeal of the album and why GBV fans are so into it. It’s the album they would record if they had talent and the balls to do something outside of their boring day jobs.

  A Correspondence

  with Lewis Klahr *

  MW: One of the basic questions I have has to do with the compulsion for making new forms out of forms from the past, how that process combines nostalgia with its attendant sadness and a desire to recover what’s lost. Can you put into words the motivation you feel for working that way and how you think it connects with Robert Pollard’s method?

  LK: When I first heard Pollard and Guided by Voices (the first music I encountered was Bee Thousand) I was immediately struck by the way it grappled with this experience of being touched so deeply by a childhood art absorption that it felt absolutely necessary to recreate it in some way. Pollard and I are about the same age and I could tell that he was coupling two transformative experiences—sixties British Invasion (childhood) with Punk (late adolescence, young adulthood). But the more I listened to the CD the more the punk top layer (think permafrost here) fell away until its only significant remaining aspect became the speed of some of the tunes. The British Invasion emerged in the foreground especially in terms of melody.

  I could identify with his quest—most of my art details the experience of then and now—lived time—that sense of the gap in time between what once was and what is that gives nostalgia its uncanny, stomach-churning power. It can be equal parts queasy and ecstatic. I understood Pollard as a fellow traveler, someone who had to deal with his love of a past era in whatever he made in the present. For me there was an important sense of making the time live again—I do collage animation but don’t consider myself an animator as much as a collagist; perhaps the best description for what I do is re-animation. Pollard I sense is doing that too. A perpetual seance, so to speak.

  An important aspect of all this and why GBV is original—how they made the British Invasion their own in Ohio decades after it ended—is domesticity. This music for them was primarily a home experience—records and TV. Their attempt to recreate it comes in their home or basement recording studio—one of their prime innovations is lo-fi—using the inadequacies of their consumer recording equipment as an important positive quality of their sound—ie, tape hiss, obvious cuts etc … This is a domestic pursuit. There is a strong sense of reduction in scale already implicit in the undertaking. No matter how large your ego might be—and Pollard’s is clearly huge—it gets swallowed and tamed by the music, humbled. The scale of Bee Thousand as a domestic studio rather than a commercial studio creation makes the music a miniature—a reduction of the original source. This shows up in the cut-and-paste brevity of the songs, the emphasis on juxtaposition and dynamic alternation of tempo, the prolific output. After all, the past is never really conjured for more than a moment, so the obsessive quest must continue. All of the above applies to my work in different ways—I’m conjuring my version of Hollywood as well as my childhood. My version of cutout animation is low-tech where mistakes become important expressive additions. As soon as I realized that it was impossible to be faithful to the source and gave up the idea of faithfulness, aimed for essence instead, the reinvention of the absorbed experience began to get power. For me this became an interest in elliptical, associative narrative. GBV doesn’t stay faithful to their sources either, which I think is most evident in the lyrics, especially the kind of nonsense metaphors that are surprisingly accurate about feelings and as descriptions of contemporary life.

  MW: I’ve been thinking a lot, too, about how accurately the “nonsense lyrics” can convey real emotion, much more so, in many cases, than “straight” lyrics that are nominally “about” emotion.

  LK: When word or image combos are successful for me and have impact their power often resides in their ability to startle. These tend to be small shocks, since surrealism has long been digested by Mass Culture. In grappling with this in my own work I realized early on that creating a convincing context and consistent viewer engagement was necessary before a radical readjustment (pulling the carpet out from under one’s feet, so to speak) could be accomplished. I think these momentary glimpses of the uncanny where the rational is temporarily overwhelmed allows for the depth of feeling—is where the collage poetic resides.

  On Bee Thousand there are shards of meaning that I often come back to. They are lodged and replay in my inner sound system for different purposes than their original song contexts. One of my favorites is in “The Goldheart Mountain-top Queen Directory”: “And we look, and we pass, through the hallway of shatterproof glass.” What is startling to me is the specificity of the contemporary embedded in the setting—there is a kind of old world (ie, the joyously ridiculous “Kicker of Elves”) mythological tone throughout the album—the kind of stuff absorbed in elementary school, from encyclopedias and comic books (“Goldstar for Robot Boy” suggests Japanese anime meets fourth grade reward systems) rather than the kind of mythology you studye as a grown-up in college. The flutes on this particular section of “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory” have this childhood mythic feeling and are in juxtaposition to the harshness of the “shatterproof glass.” In my inner world this description has value for the force with which it images a realistic vision of the contemporary. Also, because it is the buildup to a climax, it suggests a launch point for release—interesting to me that I savor the buildup over the release—a kind of entrapment from which the female explodes into the liberation of the night (cued by the title, I imagine a deserted corporate park or school grounds with many tall trees where she runs) and her plea to Pollard to join her which he refuses. This mini narrative is quite rich in its twists and turns. Condensed and compressed is a greater sense of life lived outside this one night by these characters and how they know each other.

  In “Echos Myron” the lines “Most of us are quite pleased with the same old s
ong” and “We’re finally here and shit yeah it’s cool” are powerful, autobiographical glimpses into GBV’s reworking of the British invasion of their youth and mine, and their arrival at a place of greater visibility and recognition. I latched onto these as signposts of my own attachment to the past often at the expense of the present, (what I call when describing my work “the pastness of the present”) and when things are going better in my career there is that sense of arrival embodied by the Beatles and “A Hard Day’s Night” of what one hopes the world will produce but of course never does. The little bit of this that Pollard got quickly spoiled him. For me, well, I thought I arrived several times only to experience the disappointing sense of the limited way this was true.

  In “Peep-Hole” the lines “I’m looking inside your brain, Christ it’s a cluttered mess, I love you I must confess” are also favorites of mine. I love the way these lines echo the previous verse, where the narrator is looking into the orderly and nice house. The profession of love is surprising after the chaos of the look inside the brain—it’s like textbook anatomy images where there’s a cutaway of the scalp revealing the brain. I relate to the clutter, of course, as my studio and collage working method inundates me with imagery. My garage is overrun with piles and piles of collapsing stacks of images and books and mags.

  MW: Even while thinking about all that stuff in the garage, I’m wondering about what I’ll call emptiness. That is, given the impulse to make art in the way we’re discussing, does an attempt to recapture a lost past, a lost feeling, have at its center, no matter how interesting the work, something profoundly empty? Can it be—for you, for Robert Pollard—that art escapes the burden of this past to make something “new” or “whole” rather than secondary or partial? Is the idea of primacy and wholeness even desirable?