Guided by Voices
Plugs for the Program
1999, TVT Records
If I ran the music industry, there would have been a big, fancy 20th anniversary Do the Collapse reissue in 2019. Two discs. three discs. Whatever it takes to get in all of the B-sides and stray songs and BBC recordings and demos and anything else good from the time that may be laying around unloved somewhere. A live set. A couple of 2,000-word essays in the liner notes. Stickers, balloons. Whatever trinkets usually come with these sort of things would be in there. We’d do it up big. It would be the kind of thing that you spend all day going through.
Because Do the Collapse has major reputation problems these days. When people on the social media beehives talk about it, they often begin by saying “I know that everyone else on planet Earth hates this album, but I guess that I’m a crazy lunatic because I like it!”.
I’ve seen this several times. It’s a cliche by now.
I think a little deluxe reissue action would get people to reappraise this period and stop apologizing for their enjoyment of a great record.
Also, it would be a terrific release that would be loaded with pop songs. Several top-shelf moments fell through the cracks at the time.
As of March 2020, I know of no plans for such a thing, or how that could even happen now that TVT Records has gone the way of the Tasmanian tiger. With the digital sorcery available today though, you can put together your own approximation of it.
One piece of the puzzle is the Plugs for the Program EP. It’s a CD that, at the time, was available only from the Boston-based Newbury Comics chain of stores or through mailorder via the TVT Records website. (Ten years later it also showed up tacked on to the Record Store Day vinyl reissue of the Hold on Hope EP–the only place that it’s ever been on vinyl, as of this writing–if that’s helpful to you.)
This disc is a modest affair. Three songs, only one which is truly unreleased previously (and it’s a real gem). It’s a sampler. It’s a promotional thing. It’s a little low-priced taste o’ GBV circa 1999. I’m guessing that Newbury Comics probably had a bunch of these by the counter back then like Snickers bars at the supermarket. So, if you were curious about Guided by Voices and you had another $4 or so to spend–and you happened to be in Boston–you might throw one of these on your stack.
It kicks off with “Surgical Focus“, this site’s favorite Do the Collapse single, but this time it’s in a new mix by Lou Giordano. It doesn’t change too much from the album version. The altered guitar intro is the most obvious difference, but I’m sure that there are other things raised and lowered in there that I’m too stupid to notice. It mostly sounds like the album version, to me. It sounds like the same great song that surgically focused its way into my little heart back in June.
It closes with the full-band demo of “Picture Me Bigtime”. It’s the most straightforward song on Do the Collapse in which Pollard addresses his ambitions at the time–with a righteous celebration of the uniting power of rock along the way–and while this take is slightly rougher, it still sounds complete. It still sounds like a weary anthem that belongs on the second half of the album, when you’re deep into it and you’re comfortable with both the band’s quiet moments and their loud moments and are okay with hearing them stretch out and do both. The demo shows that they knew exactly what to do with this song even early on.
In the middle of those is the creamy center, a sweet and exclusive ballad called “The Sucker of Pistol City”. It soars and swoons and gives you a little shiver. The lights are low and hearts are thumping. This is GBV in prom night mode, but I don’t think that Pollard intends to score the dance. No, like the Raspberries, I think he’s talking about the sex in the car afterward and, like the Raspberries, he’s doing it in the prettiest way possible. It’s one of the best GBV songs of the year.
Or maybe it’s one of the best GBV songs of another year. According to the internet’s real authority on Pollard’s music, the mighty GBVDB, he recorded it with Tobin Sprout and Kevin Fennell, which would date it no later than 1996. It’s more than a little crazy that a song that sparkles like this would go unreleased for so long (not the last time that you’ll have that thought as you follow Pollard’s music; just wait ’til we get to the Suitcase box set), but maybe not so crazy as releasing it in this obscure spot.
That’s part of the fun of following Pollard’s music, though. He takes EPs seriously. You’re rewarded for digging deep. Songs like “Sucker of Pistol City” earned Pollard the kind of crazy fans who want to hear it all and who want to collect it all and who, in the most severe cases, sit at home on their computer writing over 1,000 words about a CD with three songs on it.
SO, this little piece of plastic was the official closer to Pollard’s 1999. It came out in December.
Wild year.
It’s still one of the craziest years for Pollard’s music, for its breadth and its surprise and for the promise that the future held now that he had his own label and could be as madcap as he wanted. More side projects. More strange solo albums. More music from the archives. All of that was coming.
We’re at #48 in this series and I still feel like we’re just getting started. We’re in GBV Junior High right now. We’re awkward. We’re gangly. We’re still trying to figure out how to talk to that girl we like. We farted in class the other day and it was so embarrassing.
Also, we’re still not totally done with Do the Collapse. The waves from it and the exhausting tour will continue to ripple for a little while.
We still haven’t really talked about “Hold on Hope”, yet. I’ve been dancing around it like Mikhail Baryshnikov because there’s a “Hold on Hope” EP coming up and that’s where we’re going to turn over that toybox.
Every street is still dark and folding out mysteriously, but not for long…