Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand

by Marc Woodworth

  Unlike the careful and regular strumming of the earlier recording, the guitar playing and voicing on the Bee Thousand version of “Peep-Hole” is entirely different. Pollard percussively hammers out the progression on barre-chords, hitting the strings on the downbeat with a barely controlled intensity that is completely lacking in “Peep-Hole’s” precursor. There’s something desperate and compulsive in the performance and those qualities introduce real urgency, even as they sound raw in a way that the earlier version doesn’t begin to suggest. Along with the lyrics, the singing, too, is completely altered. Pollard isn’t interested in sounding pretty on “Peep-Hole.” He’s no longer keeping one eye on an imagined audience and the other on singers whom he wishes to be. The singing embraces in a brusque way the English-accented voice that brings out the most emotion in Pollard’s delivery as a vocalist. He’s relying on the voice he’s invented out of his love of music, the one that accords most closely with his realization of himself as a singer, as an emotional creature, as an artist.

  It would be incorrect to say this performance is more natural than the earlier one. It isn’t “natural” at all, though it contains and expresses real emotion. It’s the sound of an artist who has found a kind of self-understanding and self-reliance that allows him to create a very effective and authentic artifice. The result is a performance which conveys a living, breathing reality: his own. Between the early version of “Peep-Hole” and the song that appears on Bee Thousand a self-conscious apprentice has become a master. The change in the lyrics themselves argue as much—the perilous balance between literary precedent (“Give me the cost and the albatross and wear it around your neck for size” alludes to Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), unexpected turns (“I’m looking inside your brain / Christ it’s a cluttered mess / I love you I must confess”), and naked need (“promise me not to leave”) is the result of a confident mastery. Even the length of the song, cut down to 1:27 from the original version’s 2:39, argues for a decisive artistic maturity—convention is not consulted in making this version of the song, only the requirements of the song itself, and those considerations require it to be brief. The result of that understanding is a compression that maximizes its power and effect. Bee Thousand is not the naive or amateurish record that some imagine it to be. A song like “Peep-Hole” is not fragmentary because the writer couldn’t come up with anything else or because he didn’t possess the skill to flesh out the ideas he did come up with to create a “full” song. Its brevity is not a flaw to be overlooked in order to see its virtues, but is itself responsible for those virtues, inseparable from them, an example of Robert Pollard’s mature understanding of his form.

  Listener Response #6: C.E. Sikkenga

  Every time I play the disc, or my iPod spits out a track, I still hear something new. “Queen of Cans and Jars” and “Her Psychology Today” have recently stuck in my brain. As much as anything, that’s a testament, I think, to how well these songs are constructed. It’s easy to label them as toss-offs because they’re so fragmentary and so cheaply recorded, but there’s a remarkable amount of craft in these songs. I have this Miró print in my dining room. Its really, really simple on first glance, but every time I look at it, I see something new. Bee Thousand is the same way. That’s either dumb luck or very high art. I lean toward the latter.

  Guided by Voices Narrative #2: Don Thrasher

  When we recorded “Gold Star for Robot Boy” and “I Am a Scientist,” Bob was planning to release them on a solo 45. At the time, I hadn’t been playing the drums for a while. My son was a year old and I was working in corporate collections at Standard Register. I was excited when Bob gave me a call to ask if I wanted to record some new songs. Even though the current line-up of Guided by Voices hadn’t been together for very long, Bob wanted to try something different, to work with other people and try other things. We recorded those songs in Mitch’s garage. It was a standard, no frills, two-car garage—it wasn’t like there were sound baffles on the walls or anything. Amps were lying around because Mitch played there with his own band as well. He lived really close to 1-75, the highway that runs from Cincinnati up to Detroit. His house was right off the highway, not far from Bob’s house, but not actually in Northridge. I’m not sure why we recorded there and not at Toby’s.

  Even though we were recording at Mitch’s, it was essentially just Bob and I playing together. Mitch may have tuned a guitar or adjusted the amp, but he wasn’t playing with us. Toby was recording us on the four-track. Bob first played the songs for me right before we recorded them which was his way. He’d say, “Here are the songs we’re going to do,” then play them a couple of times. Bob has a short attention span and he likes to work fast. He doesn’t have a lot of patience for sitting around and finessing everything by playing songs over and over. I would take my cues by listening to the lyrics. That’s how I’d know where the changes were, especially because there wasn’t time to learn the song any other way and there was no bass to key on. I had never played on anything before that was just guitar and drums, so I just followed the lyrics and stuck with the chord changes to make my fills. When Bob was playing and singing the songs for me, I was really excited. The melody of “I Am a Scientist” was really strong, and even though I wasn’t exactly sure what the lyrics were about, I liked the imagery.

  At some point, Bob may have been insecure about whether other people would like his songs, but he never felt that way with us. We were hardcore fans even before we started recording with him so he knew that we had an appreciation for the music he was making and that gave him confidence. He’d say, “Here’s another hit” and play a new song. Of course, he was using “hit” ironically, but in his mind a song could still have that kind of power even if something was recorded only with guitar and drums in the garage. He was really easy to work with. He let you play what you wanted to play. I never had any problems at all with Bob—it was always really mellow when we recorded together. You’d run through the song a couple times, lay it down, and that would be good enough. You’d move on. I’m sure the recordings we made that night could have been better, but I think that the versions on Bee Thousand definitely captured something real. “I Am a Scientist” and “Gold Star for Robot Boy” would have made a good single but I was really happy to hear that those songs were going to be on the new album for Scat Records.

  The way we worked had changed somewhat since the time we had recorded Same Place the Fly Got Smashed and Propeller. The band wasn’t playing live at that time and Bob would call to say, “I’ve got a batch of songs. You guys want to come in and record?” That was pretty much the same. But for those earlier records we actually rehearsed. We’d get together in Bob’s basement and work on the songs quite a bit compared to the way it was done when we got to Bee Thousand and Alien Fanes. At that time, Bob was writing a lot of songs very quickly. Even when I wasn’t playing, I would sometimes be around for the recording sessions over at Toby’s for Bee Thousand. It was exciting. Dan Toohey would show up, sit down without even hearing the songs first, and lay down the bass on the first take. His playing was amazing. I also love Greg Demos’s playing. He had a distinct, very intuitive way of playing the bass. Both Greg and Dan played some very wild stuff that just really fit the music.

  Working with Toby was the first time that Bob recorded with someone who understood what he was trying to do and what kind of sound he wanted to get. Toby had a feel for what Bob liked. They worked really well together. Because of that mutual understanding, Bob could knock out as many songs as he wanted to without having to worry about money or any other constraints. I wasn’t around when they made Vampire on Titus but that’s when they worked everything out in terms of recording together. That album came out of the blue for me. When I heard it I was amazed: it didn’t sound like anything Guided by Voices had done before. And Bee Thousand was a huge leap forward from Vampire on Titus. Not only did it show how well they had learned to use the four-track, but it was also more of a band album. Even
though Toby still played all the instruments on some songs, there were others that everybody played on, which sounded much bigger. Robert Griffin played a part in getting that sound, too, because he wanted to release a record that kicked off with some really catchy full-band songs that would draw listeners in—and it worked.

  The other thing that had changed from earlier records had to do with the fact that Bob was glad somebody was actually paying attention to what he was doing. For the first time, he knew that people would actually hear an album he made. That provided a kind of release for him. The knowledge that he was gaining an audience didn’t make him self-conscious about what he was doing. He wasn’t thinking “maybe we should track that again” because people were starting to pay attention. Instead of making him self-conscious, the recognition he was starting to receive made everything even more free-form. You threw it out there and it was what it was. So the period that included Vampire on Titus, Bee Thousand, and Alien Lanes represents a definite difference from the albums that came before it and everything that came after it as well. After Alien Lanes there was a sense of trying to take it to the next level that didn’t exist during the Bee Thousand period.

  Toby’s house was on the edge of Oakwood, a ritzy suburb of Dayton, definitely more upscale than where Mitch and Bob lived. There was a big difference between Northridge, which was more blue-collar, and Oakville or Centerville where Toby, Greg, and I all went to high school. Toby’s basement was small. The laundry room was down there. You just had a little section with the four-track, a couple of amps, and a few guitars. In those days it wasn’t like you had an arsenal of instruments; there was that beat-up acoustic with the busted string hanging from it and maybe a couple of others. I don’t remember what guitar Bob actually used during that time. The crazy thing was that Bob was writing hundreds of songs and he didn’t even own a freaking guitar! He’d had a Rickenbacker, but he sold it so he could use the money to put out records. That’s how dedicated he was to making music. So there were just a few basic pieces of equipment and some random instruments at Toby’s. They didn’t have a lot to work with and what they did have was jam-packed into this small area of a cinderblock wall basement.

  When Bob called Greg and me a couple years after we met to ask if we wanted to play on The Same Place the Fly Got Smashed, we said, “Hell yeah.” That was a big deal for us because we had a lot of respect for the songs he wrote, the fact that he was doing it himself, and that he didn’t really care about what anybody else thought. Bob was making art totally for art’s sake. They would extend the loans and just keep recording so they could put these records out that they didn’t even send anywhere to be reviewed. We thought it was crazy, but at the same time, how cool is that? They make these great records and don’t even care if anybody likes them. There’s nothing more pure than that as far as I’m concerned. Talking to them later on, I learned that half of why they didn’t do anything with the music was because Bob was afraid that nobody would like it. I guess he was more insecure than we realized.

  Because we’re in the middle of Ohio where there’s just not a lot going on, musicians from this area, and Bob was a case in point, have an inferiority complex. We always think of Chicago, New York, and LA as so much cooler. Even Athens, Georgia is cooler. We always asked ourselves, “Why isn’t it like that around here?” When Bob was making those first GBV albums there was no regard for whether or not people in New York were going to like them because there was no way people in New York were even going to hear them. It’s hard to say how Bob’s music is a result of being from Dayton because there are really no other bands from this area that sound like GBV or even any bands that have taken a similar approach—it’s strictly Bob. But I do think what he does has something to do with where we grew up. One influence was classic rock, which was huge around here. You hear a lot of that influence in what Bob does. We were all into it long before punk made it to Dayton in 1979, three years past its expiration date. It also may be that isolation gives rise to a tendency to do what you want to do for yourself, no matter how off-beat it is. Take Bob’s lyrics. They’re never really straightforward. Just look at the song titles on Bee Thousand: “Kicker of Elves,” “Demons Are Real.” The imagery is part fantasy, part reality. If you try to follow the lyrics with any degree of literalness, they don’t make a lot of sense, but when you step back and take them as a whole, a theme can emerge from these great lines of his even if they never become obvious in terms of meaning. So there’s a lot of weird imagery, but, at the same time, Bob’s a romantic at heart. That quality comes through. He may try to obscure it, but there are a lot of songs that combine words and melody in a way that’s really very sweet.

  That romantic element gets downplayed, but it is responsible to some degree for the fact that his gift for melody is as strong as it is—and it is a gift, something he was born with rather than something he learned. I’ve seen Bob make up songs on the spot that I remember to this day, melodies that he would never remember unless somebody reminded him of them. He’ll sometimes use melodies from songs that he wrote when he was a kid. He will change the words and obscure their origins because he doesn’t want them to be too straightforward—he’s got a fear of being too obvious—but there they are: beautiful melodies he came up with when he was a child. He could easily put out an album with ten or twelve great pop songs, but he wouldn’t like it. That’s not the kind of record that he would listen to so it’s not a record that he’d make. I think that tendency to cut the pop with weirdness frustrated some people, especially when GBV was making records for a bigger label.

  Bob liked what we called “happy accidents,” stumbling upon something you wouldn’t normally play that sounded weird at first but gave the music a kind of charm. Those unique elements that complicate the pop sensibility definitely fit in with what he was doing during that period. But even with that tendency of avoiding straightforward pop, GBV still had more hooks than any of the other so-called “lo-fi” bands because Bob had a bigger affinity for writing them. For me, the strongest elements of Bee Thousand are its melodies and hooks. The record is full of them. And there’s something special about those hooks combined with Bob’s guitar playing. One of the things I like about the Bee Thousand period is that Bob plays a lot of guitar. I’m a real fan of Bob’s style and his touch. There’s something about his playing that grabs me, especially when it’s part of these great pop-influenced songs.

  There were a lot of changes to the album before it came together in its final form. Bee Thousand had several different titles and there were many different songs on the earlier versions: “Postal Blowfish,” “Scissors,” “Crayola”—really good songs that Bob eventually, as he would put it, “shit-canned.” I would come over to see what was going on and find out that the album was completely different from the last time I’d heard it. There’d be a new title. Half of the songs I heard before were gone and had been replaced by others. He’d done something like that with Propeller, too. We recorded that album in the studio with a full band, but then Bob kept writing songs and recording them by himself or with Toby, even playing drums on some of them, like “Exit Flagger,” and adding them to the record. By the time Propeller came out, “Circus World” was the only song on side two that we’d recorded in the studio. Bob just kept writing and he always likes the newest songs better than the older ones. “Gold Star for Robot Boy” and “I Am a Scientist” were his latest songs when we recorded them in 1994 and there were others like “Echos Myron” and “Hardcore UFO’s” that eventually ended up on Bee Thousand, which seemed newer than the ones Bob was getting rid of. Then there were also older songs that he was remaking. We had recorded a song for Propeller that was related to “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory” and used the “shatterproof glass” line, for example.

  Even though Bee Thousand came out on Scat and some people seemed to be interested in Guided by Voices, we didn’t really know if anybody would notice the record. Eventually there was a certain amount of buzz and some t
hings were starting to happen for the band. The first time I had an idea that things had changed was when GBV played that first CMJ show in New York. It became obvious that it had been taken to another level. Mike D from the Beastie Boys was there and he picked up copies of all the old records. I remember seeing him in the passenger seat of a car looking at all the albums as somebody drove him away. Henry Rollins was also at that show and members of Pavement. It was packed and GBV really rocked. That big rock sound was nothing like the records, especially Vampire on Titus and Bee Thousand. That night, they went from song to song without stopping, just like the Ramones. Bob would count it in and they’d go right into the next one.

  Seeing how people responded physically to the music told me that the days of obscurity were over. From that point on, everything was completely different. We always knew that the music was great—I remember listening back to what we’d recorded for Propeller and thinking, “man, this stuff is amazing”—but we didn’t think anybody else would care because nobody had cared about any of the previous albums that we’d made. The earlier ones had sounded great to us in their own ways, too. So it was amazing to see that people had finally caught on. After that, even people in Dayton would say, “Oh my god, you were in GBV?” When I was in GBV nobody gave a shit, but then all of a sudden people looked at me in a new way. After all those years of trying to make do, recording quickly because nobody had the time, juggling teaching and having a family, Bob was finally vindicated. A lot of people had thought he was wasting his time. It can’t be easy on you when everyone thinks you’re crazy and doesn’t understand why you’re taking out loans to make records nobody cares about. For a decade or more, aside from a few friends and musicians, nobody understood that he actually knew what he was doing. And even so, he gave his all to it. If anybody deserved that kind of recognition, it was Bob.