Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand

by Marc Woodworth

  On Bee Thousand, it’s the robots, elves, and queens against the judges, the textbook committees, and the captains. There’s always an undercurrent of conflict between the imaginary and adult responsibilities. Pollard says that “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” rather than what it had been before: “an alternate universe” Pollard “had created for [his] own musical fantasies and inadequacies.” Reality, and language that’s in league with it, threatens that fantasy universe. As we’ve seen, some later Guided by Voices songs like “From a Voice Plantation” imagine that threat as it developed when Guided by Voices became much more than a mostly private obsession. A recent iteration of a “reality” that threatens the imagination is articulated in the unusually forthright song, “The Word Business,” from Five, a 2005 album by Circus Devils, the name for one of Pollard’s collaborations with Todd Tobias. Here, the “word business,” according to a comment by a former manager that appears in the song, is “about commerce baby / not art, my friend.” The song depicts a “hack” writer who’s drowning himself with drink and is not “coming back / to the word business” who may or may not be the same figure as the critic who “used to give shit reviews” to Milko Waif (a Pollard-created character/pseudonym credited with six songs on the box set compilation Suitcase 2).

  Everywhere you look in this brief song, from the failed writer to the small-minded critic and the dismissive speaker (his response to the claim that the hack’s work “coulda been good” is “the fuck it coulda been”) language is no transport to ecstasy but something fouled by commerce and personal failure. There’s not a moment of fancy or pleasure here; the song itself embodies what happens when reality pushes too hard against the imagination. But Robert Pollard, a writer whose language play is his chosen form of escape, still understands his calling as an artist even as he’s become all too aware of the pressures of the word business: “Come on like something sacred / come on like no one real,” he sings on “A Blue Shadow” from his 2006 collaboration with Tommy Keene (Keene Brothers’ Blues and Boogie Shoes). These lines could serve to define the writing that distinguishes Bee Thousand, a manifestation of language that courts the sacred in its escape from the real.

  Listener Response #9: Matthew C. Flamm

  “Tractor Rape Chain’s” lyrics continue with a stream of dream etchings, as though Shakespeare had ingested valerian root with his wine and was inventing a new form of verse; some kind of doggerel dyslexia which happens also to be poetic without descending into the simply drugged muck of a Burroughs or a Bukowski. The chorus of “Tractor Rape Chain” is semantically impenetrable, but without being meaninglessly postmodern because it develops from opening verses offering poignant commentary upon a lover, doubted for her “cynical eyes.” This is a pet device of the lyricist: build a visceral emotional image into an expectation of hope or sentimentality, then resort to a random collage of found images to convey the vastness of rhetorical choice. The closing refrain “Speed up, slow down, go all around in the end” has that Ferris wheel-in-a-parking-lot joy only Pollard can express.

  Listener Response #10: Judith Schaecter

  What a horrible crime if “Hot Freaks” never got written. It was just in the collective subconscious—or whatever the hell you want to call it—waiting to come out.

  Listener Response #11: Ryan McCulloch

  … the machine world with the things that touch your ear-lobe—it’s always nice when they come around. Don’t forget the wedding cake!!

  Bee Thousand Word Cluster

  FAUNA

  horse / bee / chicks / buzzards / crows / cats / fly / snake / bear / beast / pig / bugs / horse / jellyfish / albatross

  A SONNET

  —MADE FROM BEE THOUSAND FRAGMENTS (THEMSELVES OFTEN FRAGMENTS)

  With the same old fears and frustrations waiting

  for a contact, you chose a giant step

  down from broken-down buildings, the cup

  of wisdom a little worn and bearing

  the sweet milk of the new church to sustain

  miraculous recovery. The end

  is better than ever. Skin-tight old friends

  join him in the red wing, nothing to gain

  but the word to signify fertile land.

  Now here’s the plan: to face their dreams of gold.

  Heart, love the most sad, incurable old

  fears and all of a sudden understand

  nothing else can lift us up to taller windows

  like a siren or a simple hello.

  Guided by Voices Narrative #4: Robert Griffin

  The secret of Bob’s talent is that his process is completely organic. When he was young he immersed himself so deeply in records that the language of the music he liked, after it had filtered through his personality, became his language. There’s a whole vocabulary that he particularly likes. He has his words: circuses and pies and queens. And he’s incredibly spontaneous—you give him two or three words and he’ll just start singing a song. The words he uses have the right number of syllables to work with the music and the melody immediately lodges itself in your brain. There’s always something just vague enough that listeners can read themselves into a lyric. What Bob does is so intuitive and natural that if he could have stopped himself from writing songs and playing music as he planned to do after Propeller I don’t think he or the people around him would have been very happy. He has a restless imagination that he has to use. That restless quality seems integral to what he does. He has the ability to create quickly, not overthink it, and then go on to the next thing before it becomes boring.

  Maybe working like that is part of the reason why Bee Thousand succeeds as a record. At the time, some critics wrote that there were too many fragments and that the songs were too short. They complained that there weren’t enough full songs to make Bee Thousand a great record. I have a feeling that the people who bought the album really liked those fragments and short songs and wouldn’t have cared about a more conventional record with ten three-minute songs in the same way.

  I don’t buy the argument that we need to see through what the songs actually are or the production of the record to enjoy it. It’s not as if the album is good in spite of those things. At the end of the day the songs have to carry emotion and for that to happen the performances have to feel right. If we’d redone certain things because they had technical problems, the record wouldn’t have had the same spirit and the spirit of the songs is the bottom line.

  There are sudden shifts on Bee Thousand. There’s drama in the pacing as it moves from one part to the next. All of a sudden everything will open up. In that way, it’s psychedelic. The record has a very late sixties, early seventies feel, part psychedelic, part progressive rock. It’s dream-like. A door is opened and when you go through it instead of being in the room you thought you were walking into, you’re somewhere you don’t expect to be, in a different room altogether or maybe somewhere outside. It not only plays with your sense of where you are but also with your sense of time. What’s actually very short can feel long while you’re inside of it, but then your sense of time changes. Because things happen suddenly, the record can also feel like it’s moving very quickly. Its indulgences are not the sort that test your patience even if you don’t always know how you got from point A to point B. It’s a record that has a very short attention span and I mean that as a compliment.

  When we were mastering the album, Bob and Toby were really coming up with ideas on the fly: “let’s save this little bit here” or “chop off that part.” They were creating a sense of change and compression. The way they worked together seemed pretty open. Toby was quiet, but whenever he had an idea, Bob always listened to it. I think for Toby, who was already an accomplished painter, music was more of a hobby than it was for Bob. Toby was a really great foil for Bob. His songs were good enough to
stand alongside Bob’s songs and they really broke the album up. He certainly wrote plenty that all fans would put on their lists of best Guided by Voices songs. Bob is more wide-ranging as a writer and his songs sometimes leave the stratosphere, so Toby’s songs grounded the record even though in some ways his lyrics are more illogical. Bob’s writing can be very bizarre but you can always find some line through it, even if he wouldn’t agree with me about that, whereas I don’t know what some of Toby’s songs are talking about at all—and I don’t mean that as a criticism. Toby’s role was special, too, because he provided the means for Bob to get more fleshed-out versions of his songs onto tape. Bob had always recorded onto his boombox, just singing with a guitar, but with a four-track and someone who knows how to record with it he had so many more options. So Toby definitely provided the means as well as being the perfect complement as a songwriter to Bob.

  When we were mastering Bee Thousand, everyone stayed at my girlfriend’s place and we’d go out to this little Polish deli over in Tremont. We worked at Landmark Recording, which was a very professional studio for the time. I imagine they did a lot of commercial work. It didn’t have much in the way of ambiance. If you haven’t been to a lot of recording studios, it’s exactly what you imagine they’re like. I didn’t know the people there, but it was the one place in Cleveland that was set up to do what we needed to do. The engineers we worked with were professionals. They did their job. If they had any disparaging thoughts about the music, they kept them to themselves.

  We worked on the sequence of the album there. We’d had a lot of problems editing the record and I knew that it would appeal to Bob to have complete control over its flow. The way it flowed was a big part of what sold him on the sequence I suggested. I was especially interested in making the right changes in tempo from song to song. Side one consisted of more complete songs. Putting them in sequence, I knew, for instance, that if “Buzzards and Dreadful Crows” started exactly on the beat after “Hardcore UFO’s,” it would move in the right way. It was a bit like making a mix-tape for a friend. There was a lot of trial and error. I messed around with different sequences for a week or so before I came up with the one I thought worked best. There were some changes to that sequence—Bob put “Yours to Keep” between “Smothered in Hugs” and “Echos Myron” on side one and I had “Scissors” instead of “Mincer Ray” on side two. Including “You’re Not an Airplane” as the closing song was part of my intended sequence.

  Because it’s the opener, I wish that “Hardcore UFO’s” didn’t have the guitars dropping out, but the first time I heard the song I knew it should be at the beginning of an album. It’s such a great song. It’s about rock. That’s one of the things that I love about Guided by Voices and Bob’s songs. He’s one of the few guys who writes about rock in a way that’s authentic. He actually can sing about amps in a song and make it work. People who are enthusiastic about rock music connect with those lyrics. It’s another way that Bee Thousand works on listeners emotionally. So, we felt that “Hardcore UFO’s” would make a great opener despite its technical faults. When we made the master for the record we corrected the problem as best we could by bringing up the volume of the guitars for 4/10 of a second, but you only bring them up so much.

  We were making a lot of changes and edits, but the wasn’t any sense of pressure. Bob was already doing a lot $$$ interviews at the time, but the snowball was just gatherin speed … it was maybe a quarter of the way down the hill The process at that point was still very pure. Rather than pressure, I think everyone felt excited: “Wow, we can record songs and they will actually come out on someone else’s record label … let’s do this all the time!” And they did. When I first called up Bob about doing a single for Scat he said, “Well, you know, we broke up”—and this is literally how the conversation went: I groaned, “Oh, man,” and he said, “Well, we pretty much broke up … No, wait! I can get something together. I can put together a single.” A week later, I had it. When we put out that first single, there really wasn’t a buzz yet. I knew people only had to hear the band and they would like them. After I saw Guided by Voices live there was no question about it at all. After Bee Thousand I felt that for once I had busted my ass promoting a band and it actually worked.

  One way Guided by Voices’ career could have gone was to keep the smaller, devoted following that Vampire on Titus won for them by putting out an album every year that roughly the same three or four thousand people would buy. But because Bee Thousand was such a great record, their success went much further. It’s probably even more apparent now than it was then that in our culture there always has to be a story. The fact that Bob was almost 40 years old and hitting his creative stride after making all of these albums that nobody really paid attention to was a compelling story for the press. Because 1994 was pre-Sound Scan, no one could check the number of copies Bee Thousand had sold before deciding to devote four or five pages to this obscure band. Today, an editor would pull up the statistics on a computer before giving a record like that so much attention. People started hearing about Guided by Voices and pretty soon everybody was talking about them. As word got out, there was a lot of genuine enthusiasm.

  Maybe I loved it because I listened to the same records that Bob did. That’s how I thought about it—“Oh, he’s speaking my language.” Not everyone agreed. My girlfriend at the time said, “This record’s good but why does he sing with that accent? I don’t think this band is that great. I don’t think you should put them out.” And I told her, “No, no, this is it. This is the band. They’re going to do it”—and with Bee Thousand, they did.

  Bee Thousand Word Cluster

  STATES (OF BEING)

  bliss / cold / love / down / high / nice / right / lost / painful / sad / better / worse / safe / tight / good / sentimental / worry / awful / fine / sweetness / broken / cool / weak / armored / sane / pleased / worse / left out / fears / frustrations / pity / hateful / paranoia / doubt / cynical / shocked / removed / bored / disappointed

  Fiction, Man & Hardcore Facts

  Part Four

  Another well-rehearsed aspect of the Bee Thousand story concerns the way it shines as a beacon of DIY brilliance. This is true enough, as far as it goes, but to limit the album to an example of what was becoming in the early and mid-nineties a small movement within the world of independent rock is to see things too narrowly and miss some of the broader, more compelling elements of the record’s achievement. If DIY culture opened up around the time of Bee Thousand because of specific technological advances in the late eighties and early nineties—notably, the affordability and availability of multi-tracking cassette recorders and consumer-priced quality microphones—it’s also the late-season flower on a deep-rooted native perennial as old as the idea of the colonized American soil itself—the same ground over which a writer like Ralph Waldo Emerson looked for stalky specimens in the mid-nineteenth century and then praised them for their ability to thrive in an inhospitable climate. Bee Thousand is not only a result of its means of production—though those means determine and inspire to a real and identifiable degree the resulting music—or a recent and self-contained movement—whether DIY or lo-fi—but the result of a much deeper and more comprehensive impulse that Pollard, Sprout, and company embody as they harbor and release a particularly American kind of energy. It’s not contemporary politics I think of when I hear Pollard sing about Echos Myron’s endurance “like the Liberty Bell,” but the way that cracked emblem reminds us that Bee Thousand is a kind of declaration of independence, a recent example of a long-standing American tradition of self-reliance and personal freedom.

  But before considering in more detail the Emersonian dimension of the project at the heart of Bee Thousand, let’s take a moment to make an account of the process of self-production that led to the music on the record. There’s a dead-wrong sense that the DIY process enables anyone with half a notion and a four-track to make great music. Like the philistine at MoMA who looks at a Jackson Pollack and says
“I could do that; a kid could do that,” so the casual or foolish listener to a record like Bee Thousand might be tempted to think he could do it too. It’s much harder to make a messy masterpiece that carries the sense of how hard it is to make anything worth hearing while nevertheless making it worth hearing, than it is to make a competent radio-ready version of the music everyone else it making. Writing and recording a record that has the presence of Bee Thousand is incalculably harder than making a smooth, palatable kind of sound that listeners can simultaneously take in and ignore the first time they hear it. For all its apparent artlessness and unchecked force of being, music like this is the product of artists whose ability to disappear behind the seeming naïveté of their work is a trick no ordinary blokes banging around in the basement could pull off. That’s because it’s not a trick. It’s a rare form of apprehending reality by means of art, an example of true being, even a kind of spiritual accomplishment.

  Perhaps the strangest and most winning thing about Bee Thousand is that the recording process—or rather the recording processes given the range of ways the songs were committed to tape—serves to give life to the music rather than leeching life from it. In part, this success is a response to the new found self-confidence that the band exhibited during this period. “A noisy, weird record” by Pollard’s account, Vampire on Titus put Guided by Voices on some map, even if it was a map consulted only by a few people who weren’t going to take the main roads anyway. “We made this bizarre record that people loved,” Pollard says, speaking of Vampire on Titus,“so that opened a door for us to do whatever we wanted to do next. I was fearless after that. It was liberation.” And it’s that sound of liberation that defines Bee Thousand.