Guided by Voices
Dayton, Ohio-19 Something and 5
2000, The Fading Captain Series
On paper, this modest 7″ is one weird little insect of a record.
Then you listen to it and it’s still weird. And murky. And sad. The previous Fading Captain Series release, Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department, was warm and celebratory (for the most part) while this one is cold and defeated. The flowers are dead. The trees are bare. There’s no sun in the gray sky. Even good memories hurt.
This is a uniquely personal item in Pollard’s body of work. He’s written many personal songs, but this is a rare record devoted entirely to handing you a bucket full of fresh blood.
The quick description: The A-side is a recent live recording of a sleeper GBV gem; on the B-side are three songs that Pollard recorded all by his lonesome with only a guitar and a 4-track.
There’s something going on here, though. This record makes a statement. There’s meat on the bone.
Let’s break it down.
The headliner track is a live recording of the song “Dayton, Ohio-19 Something and Five” from January 22, 2000 at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia. The song originally came out three years eariler on Tonics & Twisted Chasers and it was easily among the highlights of that great album. Over Tobin Sprout’s music, Pollard laid down a quick and quietly powerful song about appreciating your world even if you know that it isn’t perfect (“Isn’t it great to exist?/ At this point in time/ Where the produce is rotten/ And no one’s forgotten“). Or as Pollard puts it when he introduces it on stage here, “This is a song about smoking dope, having cookouts and hanging out on the west side“.
I’ve always loved the title. “19 Something and 5″. The decade doesn’t matter. 1975. 1985. 1995. It’s all the same shit. Children are still playing in the sprinklers, junkies are still on the corner.
This is also a lovely version of the song, but a weird thing to release as a single, right?
There IS a point to it, though.
Flip over the record (and be sure to switch your turntable from 45 to 33) and you get three wounded solo acoustic moments. None of them is a pop song. Each is a poem set to Pollard’s own melodic guitar work. For his vocal perfomances, I wouldn’t be surprised if he winged them straight from his notebook, seeking and finding the songs in the raw moment.
In eight spare lines, “Travels” sketches out a story of infidelity. “No Welcome Wagons” is about being away and coming back to an icy reception (“No welcome wagons will be there/ When I get home”). Meanwhile, there’s a ray of light in “Selective Service” (“Give up the blues/ Let’s build something less fake“), but it comes at the end of a lot of frustration.
What does it all mean?
The A-side is a song about home performed by a band who are on the road.
The B-side is a collection of songs about the road performed by a guy at home.
Home can be a happy place. It can also be a miserable place. It can be a place that you miss, it can be a place that you dread. Sometimes, when the light is right, it can be both.
This is a record uniquely suited for the 7” format because each side is the conceptual and literal flipside of the other. As a collage artist, Pollard knows how to join two disparate elements to achieve a unique effect and that’s what he does here.
When this came out in spring of 2000, it was a real head-scratcher for me. I was still rocking Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department daily in my 1987 Chevy Nova on a dubbed cassette. I was still high off of the killer pop songs on the Hold on Hope EP. I wanted more hooks, more good times. I didn’t understand why Pollard then dropped this foggy, gloomy 7″ on me. I had no idea what it meant or what was happening here.
About a year later, when Pollard was doing press for the second Guided by Voices album on TVT Records, Isolation Drills, and openly talking about his divorce, this record suddenly made sense.
Before Pollard told Spin Magazine about it, he told a 4-track recorder about it. And then he told his audience about it. On this strange 7″.