Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand

by Marc Woodworth

  One of the distinguishing features of the Bee Thousand sessions—if events so informal and impromptu can be called sessions at all—was their inventiveness, even if, as we’ve seen, some of the songs had a history as they evolved through a long process of artistic maturation. Like Franklins launching kites, the musicians sent up song after song to see if any of them would be struck by lightning. This kind of recording was an experiment and like all experiments began in hope as well as with the real possibility of failure. Think of Franklin the self-taught polymath who pursued every avenue by consulting his own sense of things rather than deferring to established precepts and authority. No one else was standing out in the storm in order to test what seemed to his contemporaries a ridiculous hypothesis. As with Franklin’s experiment, the experimentation that led to Bee Thousand carries the whiff of something quintessentially American: self-reliant, self-taught know-how and invention compelling maverick souls to do what no one else thought to do. “After an hour or two hours, we’d have six or seven songs taped and ready to go through to see if they were going to be on the album or not,” Sprout recalls. “It’s the same thing that happens when I paint. You just get into a groove and time just flies by; you don’t know where it goes but that’s what happened when we worked with the songs for Bee Thousand, too.” In those lost and found hours, that time spent in a “groove” when the inner life accelerates and, at the same time, slows down enough to render itself real, the results often became conclusive: lightning struck.

  And it struck not only at Toby’s but also at Kevin’s and Bob’s. There were tapes taken out of the not-exactly-a-suit-case Pollard used to store cassettes once they were filled with music, tapes which contained instrumental jams or fragments of songs he had recorded years before on his General Electric boombox at home in the middle of the night while everyone slept and the neighborhood with its familiar layout of driveways, basketball hoops, and weedy lawns disappeared. Those initially private recordings which ended up on the first Guided by Voices record that a larger public heard are the purest examples not only of doing it yourself in the limited terms of its nineties alt-rock provenance, but of the more fundamental self-reliance that gives the music its force and authenticity. These tapes found a further kind of life as they were augmented at Toby’s, fed into the four-track and furnished with new tracks. “It was a revelation to me,” Pollard remembers, “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.” The final versions created a rich, alternate reality that combined the conscious work accomplished in Toby’s garage with the spontaneity of the most private consultation with the self, divulged only to the boombox.

  In “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times.” The use of the word “smooth” here is a testament to the continuity of the understanding, however differently absorbed, that is shared by Pollard and Emerson. In describing authentic achievement, Emerson’s “smooth” reminds us of Pollard’s “creamy.” Both words describe the same quality: what’s false and unaffecting because of the way it conforms to and reiterates received ideas. Society, Emerson argues, deriding the powerful and deadening influence of what’s smooth, “loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.” Emerson, like Pollard, Sprout, and company, loves realities and creations rather than names and customs.

  In this spirit, Pollard and Sprout are quick to disavow the labels DIY and lo-fi as merely convenient tags applied later to what they had done. “We were being championed as the pioneers of the lo-fi movement,” Pollard says, “[but] all it meant to me was that you didn’t have enough money so you had to record songs yourself in your own house.” Lo-fi, he remembers, was “a term I was not very familiar with at the time.” Sprout agrees: “There was no sense of doing something lo-fi. It was just the way we were recording. We were using one of the first Tascam Portastudio 1 four-tracks that had DBX noise reduction. … A lot of people were picking up these machines at the time because they were coming out and there was a market for them. Using a four-track became common enough that they had to find a category for it: DIY, lo-fi, whatever.”

  The record’s distance from the genre to which it’s been assigned is almost as great as its distance from the culture into which it emerged. Though it bears no trace of cultural or political motive, Bee Thousand is nevertheless a record that sounds like a reaction against the slickness of the mid-nineties, a time when two Elton John numbers from the Lion King were on the charts and Bill Clinton’s smooth politicking had (thankfully) replaced the deceptively bland faux-populist rhetoric George Bush the Elder used to forward a radical right-wing agenda. If Bee Thousand in this context sounds like a kind of revolt, however unconscious, against the reigning climate where kitsch, mock-patriotic bullshit, and market research were kings, it is also an act of conservation, an act that kept alive a kind of music and a kind of art-making that was increasingly absent and entirely antithetical to that which defined the mainstream. Along with DIY and lo-fi of varying qualities, there was a lot of new-school pretty on the ground and in the air in 1994, but there wasn’t quite anything as self-made, sublime, strange, full of memory and hard-won authority as Bee Thousand.

  As our culture (whatever such a proprietary and inclusive category might presuppose), as all culture becomes further focused on what can be mass-produced, sent to and consumed efficiently by millions of people separated only by geography, the presence of what’s homemade, intimate, rough, human, and resistant to lowest-common-denominator transparency becomes more and more important—an affirmation of what is still possible on a human scale, that what is defined by “neighborhood,” or “hometown,” or “friendship,” still carries the clarifying charge of reality—a kind of presence we forget exists as we slowly or not so slowly give in to the notion that what is mass-made, generic, and universal offers the only kind of reality because it has nearly eclipsed other, fuller forms of the real. Listening to Bee Thousand we remember the scale of life implicit in the rasp of breathing left on a recording or the creaking of a door behind the strumming of a guitar because someone—somebody—is coming in or out of a room (to bring in news from upstairs: a family squabble of who owes whom—or perhaps a visit from a friend who was in the neighborhood: “Hey. Brought some beer”).

  The person who is recording this moment of making music does not choose to separate art from life so radically that he must keep the incidental sounds apart from the intentional ones. Instead, noises made by people alive in a particular space where they are making music remain audible, are even, in some cases, added to music that did not originally include non-musical sounds. The effect of creating songs this way is not only to make them less “creamy” or “smooth,” but also to assert the presence of human beings in the process of making art. When we hear the sound of breathing or the opening of a door, we are listening to the product of the will and desire of a person, alive and making noise, artful or accidental—“Here I am going to add the sound of snoring throughout the song.” Sometimes the act is a joke, but even so, as in Alien Lanes’ “Ex-Supermodel,” it is nevertheless essential, a live example of following a spontaneous impulse that always leads toward life and flux and openness: because the rhythm of the snoring fits, somehow, with the rhythm of the song, it is artful and also assertive, even as it remains funny. Because I am creating music for my own pleasure, in my own basement, to satisfy my own sense of what I am making, I’m adding the snoring here—a thought never expressed or even formulated as a thought, but instead finding expression as an action. It’s surprising, even disruptive, to hear an unexpected noise, but in the surprise or disruption is a resistance to art that is made mostly to court an audience.

  Three years after the release of Bee Thousand, Gui
ded by Voices included the song “I Am Produced” on their 1997 LP Mag Earwig!. A plaintive fragment timing out at one minute six seconds, “I Am Produced,” cowritten by Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout, the architects of the band’s mid-nineties ascent from utter obscurity to vanguard acclaim, relates in a coldly descriptive first-person voice the process of becoming “product.” Although the writers don’t abandon the sound-driven impulse that creates their characteristic verbal surrealism for anything like direct polemics, “I Am Produced” expresses the dehumanizing and even violent nature of what it means to make a product and, more to the point, be a product, even as it retains the non-commercial format, relatively speaking, of a fragment aggressively cut short from what might have been a longer, “finished” song:

  I am pressed, printed, stomped

  And strategically removed

  I am everybody

  Insane without innocence

  I am trapped, tricked, packaged

  And shipped out

  I am produced

  I am produced

  Pressed, printed, stomped, tripped

  Trapped, tricked, packaged, shipped …

  Are Sprout and Pollard imagining themselves as a record? Are they recounting the way a “real” studio can “strategically remove” a stray note or an off-key vocal line? The process is violent: the speaker is tripped, tricked, trapped, and stomped. Being produced and being beat up seem identical. The speaker is “everybody.” No one escapes a bruising in a climate dominated by product. In the wake of the acclaim for Guided by Voices following Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes,“I Am Produced” reveals the fear of losing “innocence” as a result of getting caught up in commerce. The process can make you “insane.” When Bee Thousand is most at risk of seeming crazy—consider its cast of freaks and queens, robots and renegades, it abortive jabs of noise, the sometimes maniacal energy or arresting melancholy—it comes closest to providing a record of an imagination that’s robust and healthy. The utter sanity of Bee Thousand derives from its independence from being mere product in a culture of mere product.

  “Dispense with the popular code,” Emerson writes. To refuse to follow the usual rules, he continues,

  demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself…. If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics.

  Or, in Pollard’s more personal account, “There were people who said I still shouldn’t quit teaching, because I’d been doing it for fourteen years and had benefits and a family to think about, but I knew this [devoting himself to music] was something I needed to do…. My decision caused difficulties later on—being on the road eventually led to a divorce—but I still can’t regret making that decision to take a chance because I got to do what I sometimes feel I was meant to be doing.” Here’s a real example of pressure to reject what you yourself know to be right in order to follow a socially sanctioned course. It’s not that Emerson’s advocacy of individuality is without its costs—we see in Pollard’s example the cost of losing a marriage—but for all the costs and despite the complexities that attach to this vision of self-reliance, Pollard’s story is real and moving, the result of his decision to look inside himself. “For the first time,” he says, “I was really happy with one of our records, which is particularly gratifying because it was the first time we did it ourselves.”

  Pollard is called a “genius” so often that the category ceases to mean anything. Emerson’s definition of “genius” helps to show just how appropriate that overused term is: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.” After a long immersion in his chosen means of expression, Pollard had come to believe in his own thought and the value of what was in his “private heart.” The most direct expression of this inward turn, the realization that what’s essential comes from the self, appears in “I Am a Scientist” where Pollard writes, “I seek to understand me.” It’s not surprising that this is one of the two songs on the album that was both written and recorded during the period when Bee Thousand was made. If Bee Thousand is the result of Pollard’s newfound confidence—“this wide avenue had opened up where I could do whatever I wanted”—“I Am a Scientist” is the song that most directly embodies that achievement. Pollard writes that “nothing else behaves” like him. There’s a direct line from mid-nineteenth century American Romantic individualism to Pollard’s understanding of what it was necessary and possible for him to do as an artist. The attempt to discover the contours of this self might be like digging a hole that is “bottomless,” but “nothing else” aside from such a process of self-discovery can “set” Pollard “free.”

  In making music in the way they did, the musicians who recorded Bee Thousand discovered the power that was in them. You can hear this discovery in the delicious friction generated in “Echos Myron” as the ascending chord progression rubs against the lyrics about bringing low what’s high. There’s joy in the leveling of the “tower to the skies” and the “academy of lies.” In the midst of a “mighty blowup” that brings the walls down, the observer says serenely and rather pedantically, a Scouse schoolmaster providing perspective for his young charges with a superfluous “surely”: “what goes up surely must come down.” The song ends with a communal affirmation that “we’re finally here” as the song celebrates its final destination—“shit yeah, it’s cool and shouldn’t it be.” But to what place, exactly, have we come? The vertiginous towers and their institutionalized lies have come down in the mighty blowup. There’s no need to consult what the institutions think is right—they’re all false and falling down. Emerson writes, “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion.” Pollard, Sprout, and company find that conviction as they joyfully dance in the rubble of the fallen monuments to received wisdom. In its place is Myron’s credo of individual intuition: “when it’s right you can tell.” It’s the new founding truth, the fact that allows you to discover your real identity. You don’t need towers to the sky, institutional lies, or men of wisdom to tell you what you feel and know to be right.

  It took time to arrive at this discovery—“we’re finally here …”—but by the time of Bee Thousand Guided by Voices had learned who they were. They’d learned to “watch that gleam of light which flashes across the mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages.” Go dark, Brothers Davies and Pete T.; to the other side of the moon Syd Barrett (you’re already there); in eclipse, Davey Jones, you little satellite; keep turning away, slow planet of Genesis. What Guided by Voices saw, shaded from the luster of rock’s glowing firmament, what they enacted, was new; however much the music had evolved out of the love they had for the work of the fabled greats of the pop-rock pantheon, the process by 1994 had moved inside. Most of us may be pleased with the same old song, but Pollard and Co. were not among that majority. There’s no need to travel to New York or LA to find yourself—or even outside of Dayton. You don’t need to leave your basement: Let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. This has been Pollard’s choice for a long time now: to be at home with the cause. Remaining in Dayton, choosing to stay away from it only as long as absolutely necessary, he trusts his instinct to remain where he is most himself, least subject to the authority of the tall towers looming over the capitols of culture. It’s an understanding that comes from experience and self-knowledge: nothing else behaves like me. You only have to discover your own giant, as Emerson called it, the colossus in the room who’s always been there but, for all its size, remains invisible until you find a new perspective, a fresh way of seeing that emerges from self-reliance, “when you have life in yourself
.”

  Guided by Voices Narrative #5: Dan Toohey

  When we were recording Bee Thousand, Toby would be sitting down at the four-track not more than ten feet in front of the drum set. We were all crammed into Kevin’s basement playing together and he would be down there working very hard. I don’t remember if he was sitting on a box or something else, but he was a lot lower than he would have been if he’d been sitting in a normal chair. He’d lean down over the four-track, really focusing on getting a good sound.

  Toby had the ability to help each musician really see the potential of the music. He was able to make us into more of a group. For Bee Thousand there were many people playing in different combinations and at different times, so it was more challenging to bring everyone together. It’s in Toby’s nature to be able to fit into a lot of different areas and situations. He was a songwriter, so he knew music from that perspective. He was also good at recording with the four-track. He could play guitar, bass, piano, and drums, but he wasn’t just a musician in the band because there were so many other ways he contributed.

  What was fun about the Bee Thousand period was that everybody in the band was pretty much on the same page. I think it might come down to the fact that each of us found a purpose. It was like a team. I really function well in cooperative relationships—I guess we all do—and it was that kind of situation at the time, more so than it was later. For some reason, the mix of personalities just worked. There was that atmosphere where almost anything could happen, especially considering how we typically recorded and how free it was in most ways. We were all excited and that excitement made everyone bring a lot to the table.