Guided by Voices
Box
1995, Scat Records
To me, music is about more than just the sounds that come out of the speakers. There’s the sleeve art and presentation, sure, but for a weirdo like me it goes beyond even that. Permanently linked to the music that I love are things such as HOW I first heard about that music and WHERE I bought it.
I still remember those rare amazing thrift store scores from back when I was into that sort of thing. I have fond memories of record stores that closed fifteen years ago. I’ll never forget listening to the local indie/underground radio show on Sunday night in Dallas (The Adventure Club on the old KDGE) in the 90s and writing down the songs I liked so I could buy the album the next time I had $12 to spare.
All of that is a part of “the music” for me. I still think that flipping through record bins and making decisions based on intriguing covers and titles is the #1 best way to discover music. I’m not saying that you’ll strike gold every time, but it’s more fun and more crazy and it puts more original thoughts in your head than streaming Pitchfork’s latest list of picks that are carefully selected to make them look still relevant.
Music for me is partly about the hunt. It’s about running into the inexplicable and unexpected all on your own and taking a risk. That’s how I’ve always done it, at least.
And speaking of things that have gone away, by 1995 Scat Records had lost Guided by Voices to Matador. Not counting repressings, Scat’s final major release for the band was this box set of their early, self-released records (with the exception of Forever Since Breakfast because Robert Pollard thought it sucked donkey dicks), plus the King Shit and the Golden Boys outtakes collection.
And I ain’t got shit to say about the contents because I’ve already reviewed it all here on Der Bleeder (as the kids in Germany call this site), but I will note that Scat Records did something pretty cool with this release that helped me out at the time. It wasn’t a huge thing. It was a very small thing, but I still appreciate it. Let me explain.
I bought Box in early 1997 with some extra college loan money that I had laying around and begging to be blown on pizza, beer, Camel Lights and music. The CD was easily available. Best Buy had it. Border’s Books had it.
But I was a dweeby college vinyl collector douchebag in the making with a cheap turntable that I bought with leftover funds from last semester’s college loan infusion and I wanted this on vinyl and the only store in the whole North Texas area that, to my knowledge, carried the LP edition was the infamous Bill’s Records and Tapes in Dallas (actually the suburb, Richardson, TX, at the time).
Bill’s was an amazing store, but also intimidating.
It opened in the early 80s in a space that used to be a four-screen movie theater. This was not a little cubbyhole like most records stores these days. Bill’s was BIG. It was a sprawling old school behemoth full of decades worth of amazing shit back in the pre-Ebay/Discogs days when a long-standing record store could be a Redwood Forest of cool. It had CDs, vinyl, cassettes, posters, imports, “imports” (bootlegs), buttons, stickers and T-shirts from the present day and from thirty years ago all casually thrown–and I do mean thrown–together. Bill’s was cluttered as fuck, but also somehow organized and alphabetized. If you wanted some specific thing and they had it, you could find it. You just might have to step over a box of vintage early 80s Echo and the Bunnymen concert posters to get to it.
To walk into Bill’s was not just to explore music, it was to explore the entire culture that radiated around the music over the past two or three decades. It was in the boxes at your feet, the bins at your waist and in the hundreds of posters and stickers that tattooed almost every inch of the walls.
It was a store that you could browse forever, but it had one devastating drawback.
Nothing in it was priced. You had to take your selections up to the counter, where the owner–white-haired king of the castle, Bill, in a cloud of cigarette smoke–gave you the total price clear out of his head and he did not deal in bargains. (Us broke college kids didn’t care much for Bill’s.)
More than once back then I had to walk away from Bill’s price, but Scat Records did something very helpful with their release of Box and included a sticker on the shrinkwrap that advised you to pay no more than $50 for it. It was as if they were doing me a personal favor. It was as if they knew I’d be buying this at Bill’s. For once, I didn’t have to guess what the price was. Bill read the sticker and played along. $50.
That was still a lot of money for me to pay for music back then, but it was less than what I suspect Bill would have charged me otherwise.
Today, Bill’s is still open in a smaller location in the inner city. I haven’t gone there. I’m still scarred, I guess, by the time in 1998 when I brought a Pixies live bootleg CD up to Bill and he told me it was $50 (had to pass on that).
I will never forget that old location though, in the middle of a regular-ass shopping center at Spring Valley Road and Coit. I’ve never been in another record store like it and my copy of Box still carries its scent.
Today, this set is out of print and fetches a pretty penny… UNLESS your copy looks like mine. It’s beat to shit. No collector would ever pay more than $5 for my fucked-up copy and I ain’t selling these wonderful records for less than $25,000. So, I’m stuck with it forever–and that’s okay with me.
I close this review with a brief photographic essay of my wrecked and trashed copy of Box.
Also this cool video that shows you exactly what Bill’s was like back in the day.