Guided by Voices
Crying Your Knife Away
1994, Lo-Fi Recordings
I’ve been writing about Guided by Voices in 1994 for four months. What the fuck is wrong with me?
Anyway, that year they put out five, six, or maybe even seven records depending how you’re counting the 7″s. In fact, there’s one record from this year that I, Mr. Fanboy Weirdo himself, don’t have: a split single on Anyway Records with Belreve. The GBV side is “Always Crush Me”, a song that turned up the next year on Alien Lanes, so I don’t feel much urgency to get it though I’d certainly buy it if I ran across it at a good price.
In any case, I think we here at The Constant Bleeder have this crazy year’s output covered well enough.
And now, a party…
June 18, 1994. OJ Simpson was all over the news. Ace of Base were all over the radio. Kurt Cobain was two months in the grave. Words like “e-mail” and “website” were juuuust starting to slow-leak into the mainstream. And Bee Thousand was coming out in three days. Robert Pollard had just left his teaching job after the spring semester and was now a full-time rocker at the tender age of thirty-six. The band were about to go on their first cross-country trek, a two-week Scat Records showcase called The Insects of Rock. Slots on the then-huge Lollapalooza tour (the headliners that year: The Smashing Pumpkins, with the likes of The Beastie Boys, The Breeders, George Clinton, Stereolab and Nick Cave in the mix) were coming later that summer, as well as a healthy stack of fall dates that were a mix of headliner gigs and opening for Pavement and The Grifters. (All of this information, by the way, comes from the godly GBVDB.com.)
Oh, and the band were being courted by labels big and small and would eventually sign with Matador in November.
Before Guided by Voices hit the highway though, they got warmed up and well-lubed in Cincinnati for their friend Bela Koe-Kromprecher’s 26th birthday party (he ran the aforementioned Anyway Records). They partied. They drank. They played a show for an audience of their friends.
And it got put on vinyl for posterity, with a crystal-clear recording that’s an essential document of an exciting time.
In an old interview (I don’t remember where it came from; hopefully, I didn’t dream it), Robert Pollard says that you can classify most rock bands by what drug they stand for. For example, some bands are acid bands, some bands are marijuana bands, some bands are heroin bands… and Guided by Voices are definitely—no question, five out of five doctors agree—an alcohol band. They embody all of the slips, trips, bravura, and camaraderie of the inebriated state.
Exhibit A is this fine double album.
By professional standards, this thing is a trainwreck. It’s more raw than a fresh gunshot wound. GBV come off like a pure-blood garage band, not always in tune, but ferocious nonetheless. The band’s performances are fine for the most part, but the record also preserves the stuff that happens in between the songs when the Birthday Boy jumps up on stage and the amps give off feedback and the in-jokes start flying.
I’ve read some writers criticize this record for that very thing. They feel like this record is more a big fuck-off than a showcase. They find it unbecoming. They came here to listen to music, not listen to a stupid drunk party in which the band butcher some of their best songs.
Me, I say that rock music SHOULD be stupid and noisy and sometimes careless. Every now and then, a great song gets all fucked up. It happens. Collateral damage, I believe is the term.
If you like rock ‘n’ roll, you’ve got to like noise, too. Otherwise, you become one of those people who think that Steely Dan is the greatest thing ever.
Let’s also mention that this record is meant to take after the spirit of the old school 70s vinyl bootleg (it even has the very retro detail of putting side 1 and 4 on the same record and side 2 and 3 on the other record, to better accomodate old-fashioned record changers) . It’s NOT a bootleg, in the traditional sense. It wasn’t sneaked out illegally by some outlaw rapscallion with a tape recorder up his ass. It was put out by people close to the band and is the first of several live recordings unleashed in similar fashion. Mysterious. Few details on the sleeve. Artwork that goes for an amateur’s aesthetic, a little more clumsy and blunt than the wild collages that Pollard usually creates for his cover art. It was also a vinyl-only release in a year when vinyl was dead as Dillinger (a CD came out four years later on Simple Solution Records, who also put out the Nightwalker/Freedom Cruise 7″). Anyone who was interested in Guided by Voices and found this in a record store cool enough to stock it at the time, had to have given it a look and wondered what the fuck it was.
(You couldn’t just pull your phone outta your pocket and hop on the internet and find out anything you wanted back then. In the 90s, you were just confused and you accepted that. Constant confusion was part of being a record fiend and you liked it, I note in case people in 2087 are reading this. We here at The Constant Bleeder think about the future.)
Well, I’ll tell you what the fuck it is.
It’s a ragged but right live record by a band who come off blisteringly confident despite being out of tune. They’re so confident that even before their new album comes out, they’re already performing several songs from their NEXT album, Alien Lanes, which at the time was going to be called Scalping the Guru, so says this record’s insert which provides a handy, comprehensive discography circa 1994.
They open with “Postal Blowfish”, an unreleased song at the time and a fast riff-rocker in which the band get close to, but valiantly avoid, totally ripping off “He’s a Whore” by Cheap Trick. Pollard seems to have never been happy with any recorded take of it so it never came out on an album other than an outtakes collection in 1995. Meanwhile, “Postal Blowfish” still became a live staple for years, across several line-ups. It was how I first heard it (on a later live release) and this album might be how many others first heard it. It’s a song too fierce for the studio, I guess. Only the stage can do it justice.
The next two songs are more then-unreleased lovelies (“Closer You Are” and “My Valuable Hunting Knife”) before the band dials it back and pinballs across their last two years of records. No pre-1992 songs here.
It all adds up to five future Alien Lanes songs, six Bee Thousand songs, one Vampire on Titus song, six Propellor songs and six songs from the various EPs and singles. Then there’s the unlisted voice-and-guitar cover of The Breeders’ “Invisible Man” at the end.
Guided by Voices and The Breeders, both Dayton, Ohio bands, were sort of in bed together for awhile in the mid-90s. The Breeders covered GBV’s “Shocker in Gloomtown” for an EP that came out that same golden summer of ’94 and they even made a video for it that played on the MTV. I’m guessing that Pollard was merely returning the favor with his cover here, though it would only appear on the vinyl pressing. On the CD reissue, “The Invisible Man” disappeared.