Guided by Voices
Bee Thousand
1994, Scat Records
My favorite story about discovering Bee Thousand came from a guy who claimed that he hated it the first few times he listened to it. The lo-fi didn’t bother him. The songwriting simply didn’t hit the mark for his ears. Fair enough. This music isn’t for everybody. He wrote off the album and moseyed on his way. However, over the next week, he kept getting these catchy hooks stuck in his head and he couldn’t remember where they were from. He was your regular music geek, always picking up new stuff and wasn’t sure exacty where he heard lines like…
“Tower to the skies! / An academy of lies! / And what goes up surely must come down”
Or “She runs through the night as if nobody cares / She screams and she cries and ignores all the stares / She wants me to come / But I’m never going there“…
And “Give me the cost of the albatross and wear it around your neck for size“…
In time, he figured out that they were ALL Bee Thousand songs. These psychedelic tunes grew on him without even him even playing them, haunted his head whether he wanted them there or not. He eventually gave the album another chance and then bought up the whole catalog. He had a new favorite band.
That’s what I was told years ago, at least. Me, I liked this pretty much instantly and I spent the summer of ’96 (that’s when I bought it) cruising with it in my tape deck.
This is the album to which all Guided by Voices and all Robert Pollard records in general will be compared forever. It came out at a time when the world was ready for lo-fi rock and unconventional indie stars (every article and review mentioned that Pollard was an ex-schoolteacher and the band were all pushing 40) and the songs were great enough to usher in a sensation. If Propeller got people talking, Bee Thousand was when Guided by Voices arrived. It’s the album that’s on all of the Best of the 90s lists. It’s the one that everyone says to check out first. It’s the entry point for most new listeners. This is the album that rings the bells.
If you ask me, Robert Pollard has since made at least a dozen albums that are its equal, but I can’t argue with anyone who puts this on a pedestal. Decades later, it’s still a twenty-story tower of melody. It gives me the warm fuzzies all day long.
Also, to its vast credit, it’s still fucking weird in 2018. It might be even weirder in today’s digital world, where analog consumer-grade cassettes, with all of their flaws and potential for mishaps, are no longer the budget rocker’s format of choice. Cassettes are part of this album’s character. Without cassettes, you don’t get the famous accidental audio dropout at the beginning of “Hardcore UFOs”. You don’t get that warm layer of natural hiss underneath “Hot Freaks” and “A Big Fan of the Pigpen”. You don’t get the inspiration to let seperate recordings collide in such crazy ways, inspired by accidents with tape machines.
The vision for this album, as Pollard says himself in the Matthew Cutter biography, is that it’s meant to sound like “a bunch of Beatles outtakes that don’t exist”. And Pollard came up in the age of the old school vinyl bootleg, live recordings and studio outtakes pressed to LPs from third-generation sources, sneaked to the outside world via tapes hidden up someone’s ass. Perfect sound is never expected. Totally trashed-out sound is forgiven as long as you can hear something going on in there. What’s a little tape noise and mushy dynamics when you get to hear an unreleased Beatles song?
The lo-fi production is also a sort of test for the listener. If you can get past the blatant audio goof-up not even a minute into the first song on Bee Thousand, you’re cool; if not, fuck off. You’re not worthy. Go listen to somebody else. What are you even doing here?
I love that mistake at the beginning of “Hardcore UFOs”. The main guitar line unexpectedly drops out. You can’t miss it, even if you’re tone-deaf and can’t tell a piano from a garbage truck. The first time you hear it, it’s disorienting. It might even turn you off. As you get deeper into the album though, and you’re playing it again and again, sinking into its world, it makes sense
When “Tractor Rape Chain” starts to sound like the pitiful end of that one old relationship that still bothers you (you know the one, the one with all that unfinished business), but beautifully rendered, it makes sense.
When you hear the bitterness in “Gold Star for Robot Boy”, it makes sense.
When you hear the triumph in “Echoes Myron” (and its wonderful Hollies-like harmonies), it makes sense.
When “I Am a Scientist” starts sounding as much like a confession and a mission statement as it does a great song, it makes sense.
There’s nothing lazy on this album. It’s immaculate in its own way. Sixty-five songs were under consideration and Pollard paced the floor over what do with them. Several wildly different sequences were put together–including a double album version that later came out in 2004 as a semi-novelty archival release and that we’ll get to eventually in this series–until they finally settled on this one (largely crafted by Robert Griffin, the head of Scat Records, and submitted for Pollard’s approval) as the top of the pops.
While no one would ever label Pollard a studio perfectionist, he’s a fierce perfectionist when it comes to the overall vision. The sequence. The cover art. Pollard won’t hesitate to leave off a prize song if it doesn’t work with the whole. If there’s an accident left on a record, it’s because Pollard enjoys the color of that accident.
Also, after eight years and seven albums, I think Pollard figured out that rough and ragged was how this band and his songs (at the time) sounded good.
Hey, it’s rock ‘n’ roll. Noise and distortion are okay.
So confident he was in his vision that Pollard left his teaching job for his new music career just before Bee Thousand came out in the summer of ’94, which is a monumental move for a 36-year-old husband and father. And it worked out for him. He had a fresh masterpiece under his belt and an already convoluted back catalog for the wave of incoming new listeners to seek out and puzzle over.
Every toe-dipper listens to this one. For a guy like me though, it feels like we’re still only at the beginning of the story, not only because there’s been so much music out since Bee Thousand. but also because Pollard has never once seemed haunted by this album.
Some bands make one or two classic albums and then spend the rest of their career trying recapture that mojo as the spotlights dim. They go on tours where they play their classic album in its entirety. They make new music that attempts to hearken back. They exist under a shadow.
Robert Pollard has never had that problem. It doesn’t even seem to cross his mind. Even when the 90s line-up of Guided by Voices reformed in 2010 for an oldies tour (I went, I jumped around, I spilled my beer, I had a blast), Pollard pumped out new music away from the band at the same furious rate as always. When Pollard made new albums with that same line-up, they always felt more spontaneous than opportunistic. And when it had to end, he closed the book with a confident slam.
Pollard has always moved forward.
And now, we move forward…