Guided by Voices
King Shit and the Golden Boys
1995, Scat Records
In 1995, the fourth weirdest thing about Guided by Voices was that they put out a great album last year that got attention from high places even though it sounded to most people like it was made on a Fisher-Price cassette recorder.
The third weirdest thing was that they were in their late 30s in an indie rock scene full of 25-year-olds.
The second weirdest thing was that Guided by Voices had already made a pile of records going back to 1986 and most of which nobody–not even the hippest, most annoying, know-it-all record collector jerk-off you knew–had ever heard about. That’s not even mentioning the blizzard of 7″ EPs in 1994, of which not many people in 1995 had a complete collection.
And the weirdest thing of all was that on top of the nearly fifty songs that the band put out the previous year (and their forthcoming new album in the spring), the band still had more great unreleased stuff, enough to fill a whole other LP.
They called that LP King Shit and the Golden Boys.
Sounds like a masterpiece to me.
Originally released in February 1995 as part of the Box set of the band’s early independent albums (and then finally on its own twenty years later as a vinyl reissue), King Shit is the kind of record that bumps up a casual interest in a band into a full-on, pants-wetting devotion. There was a world here to explore. How many great songs does this band have, fer Chrissakes? This collection of outtakes was the mainstream’s first accessible hint (it was on CD and you could find it in the racks at Best Buy) at the depth of the well.
This was not an upstart band. This was a scarred and seasoned band dragging a strange treasure chest across almost ten years of desert like Franco Nero in Django. It’s a chest so full of riches that they can throw away nineteen tracks from it on the very last disc of a 5-CD (or 6-LP) box set.
I think that King Shit is about as good as Bee Thousand. Everything that you like about it is here, too. It’s got fun melodies (I want to hear Micky Dolenz sing “Fantasy Creeps”, Mike Nesmith sing “Indian Was an Angel”, Peter Tork sing “Tricyclic Looper” and Davy Jones sing “Please Freeze Me”). It’s got some real rockers (“Greenface”, one heavy acid trip down to the abrupt ending, cut off like a pair of old jean shorts). It’s got some weirdbeard what-the-fucks (“At Odds with Dr. Genesis”, some Peter Gabriel bit of business, but done lo-fi style). It’s also got noise, mystique and lots of raw beauty.
In short, it’s got everything. This collection is nothing but triumphant shouts from the basement seemingly made with no idea of how lovely it all is. Guided by Voices are just doing what they do and not even thinking about you and me. From it, you get a portrait of a band who live for rock ‘n’ roll and songwriting. They’re ready to go with any idea, no matter how silly or weird it might be. It’s all worth trying out. Life is short. These songs are shorter. Write as many as you can. And nobody’s listening. So you do whatever you want. Sounds like freedom.
This brings me to what I think is one of the reasons why freaks like me maintain such a love for the band and for Robert Pollard’s vision:
Pollard understands, is inspired by, and embodies that WEIRD side of being a fan of rock music.
Any real rock fan digs noise. They’re also usually interested in the oddball outtake. They like B-sides. They sometimes think that the tossed-off demo of a song is better than the released version. They’ll listen to a shitty-sounding live bootleg if they love the band and if that sort of recording is rare.
There’s the OFFICIAL story of a great band and then there’s the SECRET story of that same band, as revealed in the music that they never intended for you to care about much, or to even hear at all–and Guided by Voices have about five tons of that. The story of Guided by Voices is full of hidden rooms and long hallways, lost songs found, forgotten things discovered. It already felt vast in ’95 (today, it’s the Atlantic ocean). Pollard would later devote entire box sets to the band’s mythic pile of unreleased songs, but that approach starts here.
Guided by Voices records at this time already sounded like bootlegs and demos anyway. To the band, this was the most efficient way to make records up in their Dayton, Ohio zone of perpetual uncoolness. To the listener, it sounds like a whole other world. Slip into your headphones and sink deep.
That’s not tape hiss, that’s ambience.
That’s not a mistake, that’s character.
That’s not bad sound, that’s real life.
And that’s King Shit and the Golden Boys.
A few of these songs came up later in the Guided by Voices saga.
“Don’t Stop Now” was re-recorded shortly after for the Under the Bushes Under the Stars album in a spiffed-up version that emphasized its luscious chorus.
“Postal Blowfish” went on to a long life in the band’s live show. It’s a big riff-rocker for the kids.
“Crocker’s Favorite Song” was tweaked, and improved, almost twenty years later as “Class Clown Spots a UFO”, the title track of a Guided by Voices album in 2012.
And that’s just as of this writing. When Pollard reveals his outtakes, it’s never finished work. He could re-write any of these songs any day now. They’re all works in progress. He’s letting us peek inside his notebooks. He’s letting us look behind the curtain even if what’s behind it is in rough shape.
Because that’s the weird shit that the big fans want to hear.
He and this band sound obsessed. If you like the songs, you might get obsessed along with them.