Guided by Voices
Vampire on Titus
1993, Scat Records
There’s a great Pollard quote in issue 82 of Magnet from 2011 on the occasion of GBV’s upcoming Let’s Go Eat the Factory album. Talking about his longevity in music, Pollard says:
One loses one’s innocence because of public acceptance. You become cognizant that the whole world is listening, and you’re not just writing for yourself. You have to maintain the attitude of a child… You have to make records for yourself… It means you’re not trying to make records for the whole world, and the record will be better because of that. I see people to this day complaining about how they keep sending stuff out and banging their heads against the wall and not getting anywhere, and it’s because they’re trying too hard. We don’t try too hard… We try not to try. That should be our motto.
That seems to sum up the journey of early Guided by Voices. They were a band learning in obscurity to not try. And they got a little better at it with every album. A little weirder. A little looser. To get more rough and ragged was their idea of progress. They were stripping everything down and they were serious about it.
Serious enough to make Vampire on Titus, the most fucked-up, wrecked and trashed Guided by Voices album ever, their most lo-fi cry in the night.
In a funny way, this album sounds like it was recorded in secret.
It sounds like Robert Pollard got together with his brother, Jim Pollard, and Tobin Sprout for beers and said something to the effect of “Look, I know that Propeller was supposed to be the last album, but somehow it got out there and people have heard it and they like it. Now, Scat Records wants to put out another one and I want to do it. I’m keeping this quiet. The last thing I need is my wife finding out. No one needs to know about this. I’m not even telling the band. I’ve got a bunch of songs. They’re all short. I think we can do ’em real fast–it doesn’t need to be perfect–and I think that the three of us can do everything. What do you think?”
And the other two agreed.
Now, that’s just a goof. I have no idea what conversations lead up to this record. I won’t pretend that I do.
Still, this is one of the most uniquely fascinating Guided by Voices albums. It’s a step forward that’s every bit as bold as Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia or Propeller because it’s the first full album on which Pollard and company decided to really run with the lo-fi thing. Don’t try to escape it. Embrace it. Make it your sound. Build a world on cheap tape and a shoestring. You can do it as long as the songs are there. There were a lot of lo-fi bands in 1993. What separate Guided by Voices from the pack were the beautiful songs that lurked in the murk.
I didn’t understand this album for at least a year after I heard it on the old Vampire on Titus/Propeller two-for-one CD that was common in the mid-90s.
As much as I loved the lo-fi otherworld of The Grand Hour, Vampire on Titus was too deep an excursion into the Black Lodge for my little nineteen-year-old mind at the time to grasp. It was noise. I didn’t have the ears and the heart yet to hear the songs. I skipped nineteen tracks forward on the disc to Propeller most of the time.
I needed to live a little more to get it, I guess.
These days, I am 100% rehabilitated when it comes to Vampire on Titus. It’s brilliant. There are eighteen songs crammed into this album’s mere thirty minutes and each one breathes in and out and is completely comfortable in its own skin, however strange that skin might be.
The album starts placing bets on long-shots from the very first track when “Wished I Was a Giant” starts up. It’s a gorgeous song that kisses you on the mouth in the live versions I’ve heard. On the album though, the riff is a fine blood-pumper–and then Pollard’s vocal starts up and he sounds like he’s singing in a tin tool shed while the microphone is in another tin shed about twenty feet away. It’s still a beautiful song, but it doesn’t paw at you like a puppy. No, you have to go to IT and meet it on its own terms. This is an album that’s willing to be friendly, but it’s not desperate to please you.
It’s a cat. All of these songs are cats. Aloof and elusive and confusing and beautiful, from the domestic menace of “No. 2 in the Model Home Series”, the melodic sorta metal of “Expecting Brainchild”, the bracing poetry of “Dusted” and the uneasy carnival barker rant of “World of Fun”.
That’s just side 1.
Side 2 starts with one of the happiest Robert Pollard songs ever, “Jar of Cardinals”, a quick portrait of blissful love apart from the rest of the harsh world. Just singing it makes you happy, though I’m not sure what cardinals have to do with it, let alone a jar of them. Unless the song is about birds. And maybe it is.
“Unstable Journey” is high melodic drama even if you can barely understand one word in it. On “E-5”, it’s 3 AM and there ain’t nothin’ goin’ on, except for this weird song.
“Cool off Kid Kilowatt”, all fifty-six seconds of it, is a personal favorite. Pollard sounds like he’s been through Hell and back on it, pulling his words from a deep well and painting a picture in less than a minute. “Picked to finish last/ I must steal my way past/ Like a psychodrama/ Like a skeleton man”. Been there. I think.
In the middle of the murk rises “Wondering Boy Poet”, a gently psychedelic cartoon theme song that really deserves its own show. It’s certainly short enough at just under a minute.
The affair closes out with “Non-Absorbing”, one of those minute-and-a-half wonders that’s a little bit 60s freakbeat, a little bit art-rock, a little sad, but also an anthem in that uniquely Guided by Voices way.
This was an important record for the band, at the time. It was their first LP not released by themselves. A whole lot of new ears around the world were about to get bent toward the noise going on in Dayton, Ohio basements. I imagine most bands might come out dressed to impress with a record that shows them more tight and punchy than ever.
Pollard, however, does the exact opposite here. He coughs up something real quick and flaunts, rather than hides, the rough edges. And he makes it work because, at this point, Pollard had become a ninja in the art of making cool music without trying (not to be confused with not caring, by the way. I have little doubt that he paced the floor all night over the sequencing and presentation, as he often does.)
There’s an inspirational message here about being yourself and maybe following that crazy creative notion in your head that most people you know would advise against. If your first idea doesn’t work, your eighth idea might.
The title, Vampire on Titus, comes from a line that fellow Ohio rock weirdo Jim Shepard used to describe Robert Pollard, who lived on Titus Ave. in Dayton at the time.
Be the vampire on your street. Maybe it could use one.
A great post. And I agree, it’s the most weird and fucked up of all of GBV albums. And all the better for it!
Quite astonishing that right at the point where they’re beginning to get some serious attention after so many years, and would be forgiven for tempering their sound, they produce this.