Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand

by Marc Woodworth

  Fiction, Man & Hardcore Facts

  Part Three

  Hip appropriators of Bee Thousand, the ones who picked up this unexpected music and wore it as a badge of cool only to discard it once the band moved on to new and markedly different work, in some cases did so even as they misunderstood the real nature of the record. Perhaps even they didn’t understand their own response, with its tiny tang of condescension, or their projection onto it of a postmodern aesthetic certainly foreign to its makers, at least in any theoretical way. It’s possible that such “fans” only exist in Robert Christgau’s description of the album’s advocates as “porno smarty-pants too prudish and/or alienated to take their pleasure without a touch of pain to remind them that they’re still alive,” but even though this characterization comes from a review that gets just about everything else concerning Bee Thousand wrong, it has the ring of truth. It’s a shame that Christgau missed the central fact that the power of the music has nothing to do with hipness, but, still, I imagine there were dark-clad Brooklynites well-versed in the vagaries of porno irony who were all too happy to champion a band of oldsters from the hinterlands precisely because they were a band of oldsters from the hinterlands who made music that was an acquired taste that these hipsters could imagine they’d acquired without really tasting anything at all.

  I was not among those in 1994 who caught onto the album for whatever reasons, right or wrong. The first Guided by Voices record I heard was Do the Collapse and the first album I loved was Isolation Drills. It took me a while to find my way to Bee Thousand and even then the fragments sounded forbidding, the recording quality a challenge to my usual ways of absorbing rock. Although my limitations as a listener at first prevented me from experiencing the full effect of the record, I returned to it again and again, unable to leave it alone. Unlike Christgau’s masochistic alt-rock hipsters, I didn’t hear the record as ironic or postmodern, though I can see how someone might have mistakenly imposed those qualities onto it. Instead, I felt more akin to the band as a thirty-something myself, a partially lapsed rocker, who like Pollard and company, grew up listening to big rock in big arenas during the seventies. I imagine that shared experience, that generational connection, is what drew me to the music in the first place, even though other parts of the equation—obscure art-rock, cutting edge post-punk, experimental German improvisation, out of the mainstream British psychedelia—were largely beyond my experience (and therefore made Guided by Voices’ music more alluring to me, something of a mystery). Along with Christgau’s pomo prudes, there were also listeners whose sophistication allowed or required them to “appreciate” music that was “unsophisticated,” even as they sublimated a feeling of false superiority to the artists they championed. Perhaps for some there was an element of irony in their attraction to the record—a kind of looking down from a height of cool—that made their enjoyment of Bee Thousand possible even as they reveled in what’s human and common, those things long thought dead in the hipster soul. I imagine them thinking or not quite thinking: Here are these old guys from nowhere, these amateurs, making music without once looking over their shoulders to see who thought anything of what they were doing. Who could claim that kind of self-containment and disregard? In such a response there may be a little awe and a little envy that a band of outsiders could blinker itself enough to do what they did without the crippling self-questioning of the initiate of the church of rock. Who but a hick stuck in the wasteland could care so little for what was happening, what was allowed and disallowed, what was cool and what wasn’t?

  But Robert Pollard is no Dayton Jethro who got lucky one day when he was making scarecrows in the pasture out of hay and chicken-shit and instead turned out a living, breathing man. Guided by Voices were never primitives in the way a secluded painter who read only the Old Testament and set out his visions in exterior latex paint on the side of a barn is primitive, and they were never less primitive than when they created this fearless album, however “simple” it might sound at times. The band fully engaged their own times, including popular music from the early sixties on, and chose to reject certain developments in favor of what they took to be real and good, a process, when described this way, that sounds far more theoretical and self-conscious than it was. The resulting record is one whose artistic maturity is indicated not by a slick and knowing professionalism or a self-conscious kind of song-making meant to court an audience—and certainly not by a postmodern brand of irony—but by a willingness to unmake itself before us and a confidence that leads to a disarming openness for all its “obscure” lyrics and musical experimentation. Falling in love with Bee Thousand never required a certain quotient of hipness or an advanced degree in postmodern theory. It’s a record that liberates us from irony and cool even if the music, for a time, despite itself, became an emblem for those very things.

  The music on Bee Thousand is never defined by an impulse to please, not the “pomo smarty pants,” not anyone. It’s music made with a kind of confidence and authority that’s anything but immature, though it’s certainly not jaded or ironic, for all its accomplishment. Anyone can simply let things go, artistically speaking, but only those who are gifted and deeply practiced can turn letting go into art. Think of poet Robert Lowell’s dismantling of fifties formalism to find the savage truth of “direct” poems like those in his most celebrated volume, Life Studies, thought by many at the time of their publication to be contemptibly artless but clearly as artfully made as anything he ever wrote. Like the power of Lowell’s best poems, Bee Thousand’s strength is not the result of a sloppy, lucky amateurism but of a hard-earned artistic self-confidence, one that made the band unafraid to experiment, to be imperfect, and to be willing to express themselves in ways they couldn’t have earlier in their career. To make the kind of music we hear on Bee Thousand in the way it was made is the product of a decision and practice rather than luck—not to mention unslakable need. We’re not going to play what sucks, you can imagine the musicians thinking, even if what we play might sometimes suck. Better to be authentic, even if it means turning out something no one else likes than make inauthentic music that everyone does.

  As the writer André Gide said, reminding us that some things an artist knows remain constant, century to century, “The ugly may be beautiful; the pretty, never.” It takes a mature artist willing to disregard the idea of an audience and instead listen only to himself to come to such an understanding of his medium. In keeping with this kind of understanding, Bee Thousand is the product of artists who elevate imagination above contrivance, the sublime over the willful, and prefer accident to control, the ugly over the pretty—or as Robert Pollard puts it, the “fucked up” over the “creamy.”

  “Demons Are Real” opens with shrieks of feedback that resemble more closely the warning-screams of wheeling prehistoric birds than the sound of a microphone held too close to the speaker of an amp—this noise assaults the ears for nearly a minute above the driving acoustic guitar and a scattered lead-line of distorted electric guitar. There’s nothing “creamy” here—it’s all “fucked up.” And there’s certainly nothing pretty, though there’s authority and intensity in this truncated performance that occupies a brief, rich moment between the stately, melodic “Esther’s Day,” sung with fragile patience by its author Tobin Sprout, and the most carefully structured song on the record, Pollard’s “I Am a Scientist.” Consider the crazed energy with which Pollard gives the order that begins the song—“Deliver this message to the one I love the most.” The delivery itself is unembarrassed, funny, and desperate, all at once. The fact that the scenario is willfully unreal doesn’t make the singer’s urgency any less emotive. The song builds its own stage and then writes into being the scene and the character who will bring it to life. We’re aware of the trappings of the set and the fact that we’re in a theater, but, like any great actor inhabiting a role, Pollard uses artifice to engage, enabled rather than inhibited by the imaginary construct. Instead of repeating the shop-worn trope of emo
tional directness—the usual first person account meant to make a connection between singer and listener—Pollard here, in full costume, finds a way to be naked before us. If “Demons Are Real’s” fifty seconds of squalling noise and shouted nonse-quitors isn’t pretty, it still offers a kind of beauty, completely self-possessed in its deployment of shattered noise and a cracked, unclean version of songcraft that is as demanding and absurd as it is intoxicating. It’s a shard of sound, an exorcism of our usually repressed fears, a jolt of daunting noise, a true performance. That performance is so continuous with the subconscious, even as it undercuts any seriousness, that we see ourselves in its desperate pleading. Its violence is as stagy as that of a comic book and just as scary, dismissible, and compelling. We feel its weird power even as it assaults our ears.

  When I listen to Bee Thousand, I still feel amazed that these sounds exist in a form that I can take in. It’s a response that combines pleasure, awe, and something akin to shame—it’s that intimate and unusual to witness or listen to work so unlike work, so obviously generated out of need and the depths of a person’s messy humanity and intuitive self-knowledge. Unlike what we experience when listening to the self-important bombast of so many of rock’s monolithic classic albums, with Bee Thousand there’s so little awareness on the part of the musicians of making music for an audience that a listener accesses the privacy and interior compulsion of the songs in an almost startling way. For a moment, listening to the skewed and recorder-tinged beauty of “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory” or the seedy swagger of “Hot Freaks,” we’re reminded that there can still be something true in the impulse to create that we’d almost forgotten.

  What comes out of this accomplished, stripped-bare impulse to make is something broken, often so fragile in establishing its connections that its simple presence on the record feels like a bare-bulb-lit miracle in some Bethlehem basement. How did this energy, this trace, arise in this world? It’s work that has come out the other side of desire and hope. When there’s nothing left, you can often give your best and truest self. When you’ve passed through hopelessness and then meet up with desire, the baby can be beautiful. Nativity, something divine emerging from something human, redemption in the unlikely province of humility—these are tropes we know well, a progress we long for. We find these deep symbols reanimated when we listen to Bee Thousand. If rock and roll is a kind of religion (Pollard sings in “I Am a Scientist” that “nothing else can set [him] free”), this album puts us at the beginning of the story, at the core of a myth become reality, sharp, rich, and intensely present, anything but a product of naive luck, on the one hand, or ironic postmodern affect on the other.

  Desire & Its Limits

  The two-beat lub-dub of Kevin Fennell’s bass drum synchronizes with the listener’s heart as it pumps blood through the body—diastolic, systolic—internal iamb, our living meter. The song throbs in the same way each of us throbs. And it is in the repetition of this simulated heartbeat that we become aligned with the music, aware that we are not separate from it, but part of it, intimately related to it.

  The connection between drumbeat and heartbeat is augmented by a feeling of yearning that rises from the vocal melody and harmony, both parts sung by Robert Pollard in a voice that sounds fallen and sad—as if he’s almost unaware he’s saying out loud the words of an internal reverie. Although the lyrics describe events as if they’re happening in the present—“Sitting out on your house, watching hardcore UFO’s”—the quality of the voice is reflective, ragged enough to suggest that what the singer’s relating is long gone, unrecoverable, a promise of connection that’s been unrealized.

  Above the beat, unchanging for nearly a minute, almost half the song, two distinct, interlocking guitar parts threaten to break up as they lackadaisically spar above the steady rhythm—lub-dub, lub-dub … The two guitars are mixed so that one is prominent on the left channel and the other on the right—a fact that underscores the song’s theme of separation and connection. Similarly raw and plaintive, each guitar is nevertheless distinct—eventually we hear a strangled repetitive pattern from the guitar mixed to the left while the guitar to the right continues its more open, chordal motive. They are the logical answer to the first verse’s question “Are you amplified to rock?” though these guitars rock less because of amplified volume or the energetic attack we might associate with a generic rock guitar sound than by virtue of their rawness. (We’re reminded here of the stage banter at the beginning of the album Propeller. One-time drummer Mike Tomlinson shouts to the crowd, “Are you ready to rock?” and Pollard, prepared to sing a ballad, responds, “This song does not rock.” The distance between expectation and reality, the rock cliché and the particular sounds offered by Guided by Voices in its place is an essential fact of this music). These guitars, for all their insularity, do not solo in a traditional rock manner—the Guided by Voices aesthetic and, perhaps, the absence of virtuosity, argues against the self-indulgence of a guitar solo: they are simultaneous yet entirely separate—with you, without you again.

  The only movement out of their tight and insular patterns occurs as the song intensifies just before it ends when one guitar makes an abbreviated and strangled ascent, the sound of passion attempted and not quite realized. It is a sound full of human import—a cognate for our attempts at reaching our aspirations and how those attempts are attenuated by reality. We hear desire and its limits. In this way, the song’s named longings—contact, art-making, playing music—are always qualified or kept in check by the control and close-to-home realities of the music itself, whether in the heartbeat bass drum that dominates most of the song or the two homely, beautiful, and thematically central guitar figures. Having arrived at this realization, the song becomes exuberant: the cymbals splash and a brief drum roll ushers in a frenetic beat that animates the last measures of the song.

  Guided by Voices Narrative #3: Kevin Fennell

  The first time Bob, Mitch, and I actually put anything down on tape was at the beginning of 1982 when we were recording on a boombox. There were probably fifteen songs on that first tape we made. “Walls and Windows,” an early version of “Hardcore UFO’s,” was one of the songs we recorded back then. I remember being pissed off because Bob wanted to wait until halfway through before the drums began. That was his way of making it build. “Hardcore UFO’s” is a much shorter song so I didn’t wait nearly as long to come in—I couldn’t have or it would have been over. As things transpired, the song changed from something heavily REM-influenced to the very different sounding song you hear on Bee Thousand. It’s been reworked in a major way. Bob did that a lot over the years. He would go back into the archives and dig out songs that had been shit-canned, songs that he didn’t feel were up to snuff or that he couldn’t do anything with and, after reworking them, turn them into something.

  When Bee Thousand came out, we sounded less professional than we did in 1982. The music by then was much more spontaneous. At the time of Vampire on Titus Bob really took a turn and said, “I’m just going to put something out—it doesn’t matter if the drumming’s off, it doesn’t matter if certain instruments can’t be heard. Piss on any kind of slickness.” With early records like Sandbox, even though we were making them on a shoestring budget, we still wanted them to sound somewhat accomplished and polished. We tried and tried and it seemed like the more we tried, the worse it sounded. It was frustrating for all of us but probably more so for Bob. He finally got to the point where he must have thought, “We’re just not going to do it that way anymore.” Being spontaneous and just putting it out there was how Guided by Voices found its true identity. I always leaned more toward that dirty garage rock sound anyway. I liked music that wasn’t highly produced. It felt good not worrying so much about every little detail. We thought, “No one may like this but who cares?” I grew up with a transistor radio listening to Beatles tunes that came through with so much static that you had to put your ear to the speaker to make out the lyrics. So the sound we had
in Guided by Voices during that period took me back to that time in my life when music was purer.

  Mitch, Bob, and I all came from Northridge. We had similar upbringings. We went to the same schools and knew all the same people, shared a lot of the same social experiences. I think our ability to endure for all of those years had a lot to do with our background. We’d gone to grade school, middle school, and high school together and then I lost track of Bob during the late seventies. We got together again at the beginning of the eighties. When we met up the second time around, his sister Lisa and I had started dating. One night Lisa said, “Let’s go over to Bob and Kim’s.” It was a Friday and the four of us were going to watch a game and have a pizza. Bob remembered that I had always played in bands and was into music, so I wasn’t there five minutes before he dragged me off to the basement. We left the girls upstairs and ended up spending the whole night down there in the Snake Pit, just the two of us. He was into music that normal people were not interested in. You can tell by a person’s record collection how deeply they’re into music and Bob was in really deep. The collection was massive. I started writing down the names of records I wanted to buy. He would say, “Oh, you gotta have this Sparks album,” and recommending other records that I wasn’t familiar with at all. I was always a record collector and I prided myself on being a pretty intelligent collector, but after seeing Bob’s records I thought, “What planet is he from?”