Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand

by Marc Woodworth

  Bob would bring in a piece and might say he wanted it to sound a certain way. We would play it a couple times, then, from that initial practice, the reins were off. The process was open and we were all trying to make the song better. It was really fun because you could really create as you were playing. The songs were made to be creative. I can’t control the way I play. It just has to come out. All I’m trying to do is make the song better by adding melody and bass at the same time without sacrificing either one. I started playing the trombone in high school and learned not to play the main melody, but a countermelody. Because I did that for so long it influences the way I play the bass. I’m not even conscious of what I’m doing. It’s almost like something takes over when I start playing. You’re using all of your knowledge—mental, physical, and spiritual—and hopefully you’re hitting the right notes.

  I always tried to play not just to the structure of the music—the way it was meant to be played—but also with a feel for the guys in the band. I wanted to be sensitive to how they were playing and to be complementary. I didn’t want to step on anybody’s feet because that’s just not my way. So, hopefully, that’s not what my playing sounds like. I remember the bass on “Queen of Cans and Jars” as being very melodic. It just felt right. That may have had something to do with playing with Toby on that song because we’ve always had an unusually strong musical connection. I mostly played higher on the neck without sacrificing the low end too much. I felt that moving from low to high added to the song. I remember thinking “this is going to be fun to play the song so melodically.”

  There are some songs from those days that may never see the light of day even though they also had a good feeling. The album went through at least four different incarnations. After the second one, I stopped paying attention until it was out. I learned that going through so many changes was somewhat normal for Guided by Voices, but it was unusual for me. I played on Propeller, but I was really an outsider then, so I didn’t understand that part of the process. I still enjoy the first version of Bee Thousand a lot. It seemed more consistent to me. I also liked certain songs that weren’t on the final version. I remember one particular song, “The Way to a Man’s Heart,” that really had a sense of humor to it. I think Jimmy was playing violin. I’m a pretty calm person but I was laughing so hard when I heard it that I fell to my knees. It was just one of the funniest things I’d ever heard in my life.

  I never thought about what might happen with the album when we were recording the songs. I couldn’t have guessed that the record was going to be thought of as really important. I just knew that at a point in time I enjoyed playing a particular piece. Recording was always a joy. Bob really loved it and we loved it. If you enjoy something and what you’re playing seems right, then the song develops a good feel. You didn’t have to force anything—it all seemed so natural. I think that’s why Bee Thousand started attracting people … because it was so natural.

  Listener Response #12: John Wenzel

  Nick Kizirnis, a bespectacled Dayton-area musician and clerk at Gem City Records, had been trying to pimp Guided by Voices on me since 1993’s Vampire on Titus. I’d walk into the store, he’d point knowingly to the listening station, and I’d don the headphones. No dice. It sounded like dogs being faxed through a cheese grater. But eventually I took the plunge and bought Bee Thousand when it came out, partly because I was familiar with the band name (“They’re from Dayton! And they’re fucking great!!” everyone told me) and partly because I was sick of hearing about it and not being able to form my own opinion.

  During that summer before my senior year in high school I was working on my dad’s farm near Spring Valley (about twenty minutes south of downtown Dayton). I’d stumble in from the fields, absent-mindedly put on Bee Thousand, and down lemonade and ham sandwiches while the sweat cooled. The one song that immediately grabbed me was “Echos Myron,” and then only because I thought it sounded like an inspired They Might Be Giants outtake. The recording fidelity made me nauseous. The song titles hurt my brain.

  Then, as often happens to budding/helpless GBV fans, the melodies and lyrics started to take hold. Call it lo-fi, indie rock, space-pop, or whatever; the slew of beautiful, hummable melodies stuck to me like hot glue. Each song became associated with a specific scene in my mind, like the pungent odor of blood and dirt that reminds you of the time you broke your elbow on the playground slide.

  “Hardcore UFO’s” was the way the insects buzzed about my ears while I lounged on the front porch after a taxing day. “Buzzards and Dreadful Crows” was a sweltering August afternoon, the shadows of scavenger birds darkening my field of vision. “Tractor Rape Chain” communicated more about Midwest culture in a single cryptic line than the entire run of “WKRP in Cincinnati.” “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory” was the weirdly quiet ass-end of a drunken night, a Camel Light hanging from my soured lips. And on and on. In fact, album closer “You’re Not an Airplane” was so instantly gorgeous to me that anytime I’d hear the sound of crickets (audible in the song’s background) it prompted me to start singing the song. And does to this day.

  Eventually my curiosity compelled me to seek out Guided by Voices’ live set that fall, and the band’s plainness and accessibility were intoxicating. That and the Bee Thousand songs found a satisfyingly muscular dimension onstage. Mitch Mitchell’s windmill chops transformed tinny stompers like “Gold Star for Robot Boy” into headbanging epics. Greg Demos’s punchy bass and Kevin Fennell’s thunderous drums bolstered the considerable sex-mojo of “Hot Freaks.” When Tobin Sprout stepped aside to let Kim Deal sing harmony on “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory” (during a Dayton show at Special Occasions on 9/30/04) I thought my head might explode with glee.

  These swarthy gents seemed to know intimately my wretched life. Every cracked, urine-stained corner of it. How could something so bizarre and visceral come from my hometown? These non-sequitur lyrics that sounded like Richard Brautigan on PCP, the Daltrey-aping stage antics and fake UK accent, the grand allusions to science and aerospace and incestuous royalty. How could this band possibly be from the Birthplace of Flight? I ask you!

  Over the last eleven years Bee Thousand has effortlessly stood as my favorite all-time album. It is perfect, in that same subjective and tautological way that all great works of art are perfect. Its quality cannot be overstated, but it can certainly be overanalyzed, and that I usually try to avoid. Let its mystery lie, like the alien corpses rumored to exist in Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s Hangar 18. Perhaps that’s where the album’s magic came from, some toxic alien blood infiltrating the water table of Northridge, somehow birthing a modern classic in the mind of a beer-fueled ex-jock schoolteacher.

  Dayton Ode

  Dayton, underloved Dayton, now our darling of the middle state, our barely discovered beauty.

  Holy Dayton with its premise of flight, its understaffed airport, the goings and comings of trippers who stop only for the next plane and render America false by moving on to either coast or even Cleveland.

  Dayton, you are now in our dreams, strongbox of memory and hope.

  Big Daddy Dayton, we total our purchased and unpurchasable pleasures on your novel cash register which rings with the liberty and clarity of its steel bell every time we bite the dental, two-beat syllables of your name.

  Nearby, the ghosts of the Appalachias haunt the haze rising from your sulfur lights, singing in a thin quavering trill the notes of ballads transplanted to hardwood forests by tooth-bare pioneers lost to Englands, old and New.

  Dada Dayton, we are singing in your pale streets, driving through your drive-through beer stores, remembering the hard glories of our school days nearly lost to us now through work, and love, and less than love, and age, and our bodies moving up and down through broken down buildings.

  In March, that liminal month neither winter nor spring, your wires hung low and wet and cold from their poles, and the pavements were washed with the spare grit from the sandpaper factor
ies, the streets abandoned as if there’d been a plague or a run of vice that left lovers to hide in their brown rooms.

  And even the abandonment was beautiful as we inhabited it to fill a tent risen like a cartoon approximation of a tent. The kegs and taps stood like a pale chorus of girls about to dance a slow, leg-lifting pantomime of desire, mechanical and fluid—and then there were people, fine or damaged, beautiful in their need or full of some strange self-love (it didn’t matter which): the white vacuum, omphalos and womb, filled by us instantly, slowly, our appearance a hallucination, and none of us, then, were alone.

  In Dayton, the music, Dayton drums and Dayton drunks, lifted us along with the streets, the tent, the taps into a second city that hovered and glowed above the first, the sound a stairway of glass risers and oxygen treads, an ineffable stairway that linked the two cities, the created and the conjoined, a stairway on which we invented the shape of our soul as we walked between these intersecting and distinct planes, both invented, both sublime, each as real and as unreal as the other.

  The Destroyer Tour in Dayton, the thousand and one dreams of Needmore, Dayton’s blue address, reinvented nightly, kiln and emporium, locus of salute, regression, and command.

  Damn it Dayton, when will you be worthy of your heroes? When will we be worthy of you?

  We are standing in the place where we live, each place, like this place, its own center and fulfillment, undone and remade by each raw second, unnamed, unnamable, replaced, irreplaceable.

  Dayton, you are home and we have come home to you, shining from the journey, broken back to bone and whispers, the crying streets and the smile of sweet disinterest.

  As we arrive, you disappear into your own live and inaccessible hit, playing it again and again, the needle running out the groove like a mind tracing to its end a spiral nebula in the ground glass of good optics, our subterranean telescope aimed at the hardcore originary event that we all share and recognize, Dayton, in yours and in you.

  Listener Response #13: Bela Koe-Krompecher

  “Hardcore UFO’S” was going to be the first in a series of singles. Bob came up to Columbus one Saturday and dropped off the song at Used Kids Records. He said, “This is the single,” and he left the store. It was on a cassette, of course, so I put it in the cassette player, hit play, and the machine ate the tape. Oh Shit! So I threw the cassette in the box at the back of the store and said to myself, “I’ll worry about this later,” thinking that I would just call Bob and tell him to send me another copy. Three or four weeks go by before Bob calls and says, “Bela, I need that tape.” I asked him why and he said, “I have another song, a better song that I want to give you for the single. We’re going to put ‘Hardcore UFO’S’ on our new record.” I asked, “Didn’t you make a copy of it?” Bob said, “No, that’s the only copy I have.” I never told him that it was eaten by the tape machine, but if you listen you can hear where it happened. Some people think that sound was intentional, but it was really caused by a cheap tape deck at Used Kids.

  Kicks

  At the end of a main set, or often as an encore, Guided by Voices, on certain tours, offered a mini-set that included a suite of Bee Thousand songs. Robert Pollard has called this the Bee Thousand set, as in, “Hey, kids—here’s the Bee Thousand set.” Not only is this set comprised of a number of Bee Thousand favorites, but, given the excitement of the moment, the nearly universal sing-along aspect of this portion of the show, the band’s increasingly unbuttoned energy, the pushing in gleeful aggression of bodies toward the stage, there are, during this Bee Thousand set, the most extravagant displays of Robert Pollard’s accomplished stagecraft—viz, single-leg high kicks, crotch-level microphone clutching, crisp military salutes, deadpan and dead-level gazing over the heads of the audience, Daltrey-esque microphone swinging. But it is the single-leg high kick that I want most to focus on, the one stage move that best exemplifies the ebullient and unironic beauty of Bee Thousand.

  1. The act itself: There is the planting of the other foot, the non-kicking foot. Video evidence is inconclusive, but the planting foot seems most often to be the right foot, in which case the preferred kicking foot is the left. Mr. Pollard plants the kicking foot by executing a small but powerful hopping motion, not unlike the one a diver executes on a diving board before leaping into the air.

  2. Once the planted foot completes its diver-like hop and braces against the floor of the stage, the kicking foot begins to ascend—the kicking foot at the end of a stiff leg that is locked from ankle to hip in a straight line. A bent knee would diminish the effect and has never, to our knowledge, marred even the most challenging effort at the high kick.

  3. The shoulders and head move forward as the leg and foot ascend, the motion a punter makes following through after he has kicked the ball. Where are the hands and arms? We hardly see them, but, if we focus on these appendages rather than the leg itself, we note that they are in the air, presumably to balance the body in the act of kicking, of forcing the foot to be at the opposite extreme from where the anatomy of a human body dictates it most usefully should be. The ascending leg and foot and the forward-moving shoulders and head create a bend at the waist, itself not a focus, in the same way the hands and arms are not a focus, for viewers of the event—the leg commands the eyes and the rest of the body becomes invisible as we watch the astonishing height of the kick. But the kick’s power comes from another unseen source—the core, as a dancer would say, the viscera, the guts, that generates this bodily movement even as it plays no visible part in the movement as visual spectacle.

  4. The return—a form of recoil—is sudden and therefore becomes a blur, though it is no faster than the upward movement and therefore, somatically speaking, no less visible than the ascending kick which we seem to witness with perfect clarity. The downward motion of the leg and foot is the necessary but post-climactic result of the leg having risen so high, so quickly. The kicking foot reaches the ground—the stage—with a matter-of-fact reentry that is—as quick as it is—unspectacular. The one-legged high kick is complete.

  As with all movement on a stage, the kick takes place within a cultural context and becomes an allusion—most often cited are the kick’s connections to arena rock posturings, its opposition to the stage demeanor of so-called “shoe-gazing” musicians, its freshness when considered in the context of the anti-theatrical rock of the early nineties when Robert Pollard’s particularly well-executed kicks debuted in New York in the years just before Bee Thousand was released.

  But if the kick’s meaning as an allusion is derived from its context, what keeps the kick from becoming simply an allusion is also its context. We witness a man (Robert Pollard) and a band (Guided by Voices) who do not dress in the manner of the arena rock showmen who brought such stage moves to the peak of their visibility and popularity in the seventies. The difference between the most famous and mass-audience uses of the kick and the way Mr. Pollard employs it might suggest his use of this move is meant to be ironic. The kick minus the trappings of the arena rock stars of an earlier decade, in this way of thinking, becomes a comment on that excess that points out the distance between the domestic values of homemade do-it-yourself simplicity and the bombastic artifice of another genre of rock music. But this way of thinking of the kick—as irony—is wrong, just as the idea of Guided by Voices music as a comment or implicit criticism of a certain kind of mass-market arena rock is wrong.

  The kick in the form that Robert Pollard executes it is not an ironic act, but one of pleasure and, in part, homage—to the musicians that Mr. Pollard grew up listening to, seeing live in venues like Hara Arena in Dayton. For Guided by Voices fans of various ages, the kick is likely to be a very differently charged piece of public performance. Stripped of excess—silk scarves, quasi-medieval tunics, revolving stages, mundane melodies of love or pseudo-philosophical treatises-cum-lyrics, skin-tight pants, etc—that marked the ascent of the arena rock gods who employed such stage business to the delight of their teenage acolytes, the ki
ck becomes for Mr. Pollard’s contemporaries—give or take several years on either side—a plausible reiteration of a move that would not be plausible were it accompanied by the paraphernalia of the seventies. Without the accoutrements, the kick is unembar-rassing, somehow pure, even “natural.” Of course, it is an unnatural movement—hence its power to excite and represent a surge of emotion—but conducted in, say, a pair of neutral colored corduroys and unexceptional athletic shoes, it seems as natural an expression of joy as such a contrived and freighted gesture can be. For a younger viewer, however, the kick may evoke a lost time—a time before the viewer was alive, a time discovered by means of photographs, books, recordings, and hearsay. For such a viewer, the kick is a link to this lost time. Depending upon the viewer’s relationship to the music and theatrics of the arena-rock past—guilty pleasure or genuine love or ironic appreciation—he will respond to the kick in different ways. In some younger fans, the kick will trigger what is perhaps the most evocative of nostalgias, the nostalgia for what it was never possible to experience first-hand.

  Guided by Voices Narrative #6: Greg Demos

  Bee Thousand is obviously a great record, but as far as I’m concerned, all the records are great. I always thought the music was just too good not to break out at some point. It would have been an absolute crime if those songs were only listened to by fifteen guys sitting around drinking beer. For some reason, Bee Thousand gets the fanfare. That may have to do with the timing of it. It was the record that broke Guided by Voices. In part, it’s revered because of its lo-fi quality. That struck a chord with writers and reviewers more than it did with Bob. Making a lo-fi record wasn’t really a choice, but a necessity. It was cheap to record that way. Somehow, though, Bee Thousand is the record that is Bob’s legacy.