Guided by Voices
Devil Between My Toes
1987, Schwa Records
Reissue (via the Box set): 1995, Scat Records
When no one’s paying attention to me, I sit at home in pajama pants, drink Trader Joe’s wine and watch Youtube videos for nine hours.
When no one was paying attention to Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices, they wrote songs and made terrific, underrated records just for themselves pretty much.
Clearly, I have a lot to learn from Guided by Voices.
The one thing I do have in common with Guided by Voices circa 1987 is that neither of us get out much. At the time of this album’s release, they weren’t playing live. They weren’t seeking out a label or management. They weren’t auditioning for anyone or anything. They were working guys in Dayton, Ohio making music in basements and garages because that was how they got through the day. Pressing it onto vinyl, on their own dime, made it “real” and inducted them into the rock brotherhood, whether anyone heard it or not. The songs are the message, the album is the bottle, the outside world is the ocean.
Splash.
All of the early albums sound different from each other. Each has their own mood and purpose. They sound like a band starting over each time. Refining and changing, but not in a linear way. Guided by Voices don’t do the obvious thing and get more professional with each album. They don’t get more friendly and less mysterious. They don’t get more polished and less scattered. Guided by Voices don’t do anything like that. Even now. Theirs is a much stranger path.
If their first record saw them trying, in their inexperience, to ape another band’s sound, everything they did after was about nurturing what’s unique about themselves. If that meant getting deep into those basement shadows, embracing tape hiss and mistakes and not needing everything to be so perfect, then that’s what it fucking meant. And that’s what they were willing to do.
It helped that Guided by Voices had total freedom, because nobody was listening.
They started to get real on Devil Between My Toes, the weirdest of the early records, the most raggedly psychedelic. The Briar at the Gates of Dawn. It feels like its own world.
Or rather it feels like the real world. A little dirty, a little banged-up. Some good times, some bad times, with plenty of deep, dark nights in between.
There are three main kinds of songs on it:
1) Nifty rockers that don’t sound too far removed from Forever Since Breakfast, except that they’re a little looser in the joints. The R.E.M. facade is still there, but it’s giving way little-by-little to reveal the 1960s psych-pop underneath. That’s “Old Battery”. That’s “Dog’s Out”. The best of these is the yearning and gorgeous “The Tumblers”, buried toward the end, where you’ve got to dig to find it, but somehow that’s exactly where it belongs.
2) Dingy art-rock that sounds like it floated out of smokestacks at 3 AM–and I mean that in a good way. The five-minute psych nightmare “A Portrait Destroyed by Fire” tells us what might have happened had Syd Barrett been born in Ohio. Then there are all of the instrumentals, five of them, that each come off like someone’s unhappy midnight.
3) Straight-up goofy pop melodies. Borderline kid’s music. Some of Robert Pollard’s chewiest bubblegum. They’re silly and happy and they might just be the weirdest songs here. They don’t sound like they should be in the same room, let alone on the same album and from the same band, as dark clouds such as “Artboat” and “Bread Alone”. I don’t know if The Beatles would have embraced “Hank’s Little Fingers” and “Hey Hey, Spaceman”, but I think that 1910 Fruitgum Co. would have given them a shot and done them justice.
Then comes the final song, “Captain’s Dead”, the tight, hook-heavy rocker that soars like The Byrds and that clarifies that this band who sound like they’ve been fumbling around trying to figure out their identity for the past forty-odd minutes really does know what they’re doing. The patchwork IS their identity. It’s what they do. It’s their voice. “Captain’s Dead” is the perfect little bow on the gift.
If the band’s first EP had not much of a personality, this LP is stinking with it. It’s pure, beer-buzzed Midwest psychedelia, the kind that Robert Pollard has never really stopped making. You can see late night basements here, bottles strewn about, lyrics scribbled on notebook pages and nothing much else going on outside except for flies buzzing around the street lamps.
Don’t listen to anybody who tells you that the early GBV records are bad or only of interest for some kind of archival purposes.
These records are strange. These records have something to say. These records are not youthful cloddish missteps.
These records ARE Guided by Voices.
And if you want to understand this band, you need to hear them.