King’s Ransom
Happy Motherfuckers and Sad Clowns
2000, no label
I have no idea why this top-notch Guided by Voices double live LP is credited to the name King’s Ransom. If you know Bob, ask him for me, please. Thanks.
The name “Guided by Voices” is nowhere to be found on the surface. Even in Pollard’s opening words to the crowd, he jokingly introduces the band as Sebadoh. Also, there’s no tracklist. No credits. Just some simple pasted-on sleeve art and two records of one fearsome show (plus a 7″ of three live rarities from two years earlier because GBV are allowed to be scattered and crazy like that).
This is the return to the mock bootleg style of For All Good Kids and Jellyfish Reflector. It wasn’t announced. It wasn’t promoted. Nobody talked about it. It just fell out of the sky and into the bins at your better, vinyl-friendly record stores one day in autumn of 2000.
It had been about four years since one of these came out and things were different. In fact, the whole band was now different.
The date is April 28, 2000 and the place is a club called Be Here Now in Asheville, North Carolina. It was the last show of the long Do the Collapse tour–and that’s another difference between this and the band’s previous live records.
With the exception of Benefit for the Winos, all of those other records are documents from early in the tour. Crying Your Knife Away was recorded three days before Bee Thousand came out. For All Good Kids was recorded six days before Alien Lanes came out. Jellyfish Reflector was recorded almost a month before Under the Bushes Under the Stars came out and yet still featured most of that album’s songs. For a band who made rough edges work for them, there’s a perfection in that. They were a band hopped up on the energy of things happening. Who cares if they don’t always hit the notes perfectly? When they were ragged it sounded right.
Happy Motherfuckers and Sad Clowns gives us a band who are on the flipside of that. Their sound is limber and sinewed from months on the road. They’re used to the sweat and the noise and the truckstops and the weeks that feel like months (“We’ve been on tour for three-and-a-half years”, Pollard quips at the start of side 3; indeed, the band at this point had been all over the US, all over Europe and to Australia and Japan). Tomorrow everybody goes home and the mood of this record is sorta… happy. Also, it rocks. It sets the house on fire.
Whether it’s an old GBV crowd-pleaser, a shiny new one from Do the Collapse (no “Hold on Hope” here, though) or a song from Pollard’s solo albums and side projects, the band’s attack is always confident. They brought that powerful Who sound that Pollard has always said that he wanted on stage.
And speaking of The Who, during this tour Guided by Voices began sneaking in classic rock cover songs. They were blasts of spontaneity, valuable opportunities to stumble for a band who might be getting a little too polished. These songs were barely rehearsed (if rehearsed at all), often abbreviated and Pollard sometimes either forgot or screwed around with the words. Some are goof-offs (quick takes on “I Am the Walrus” and “Wild Horses”, along with a version of “Happy Jack” sung as “Jimmy Mac” in tribute to GBV drummer Jim MacPherson), but the band manage to sell the likes of “Ziggy Stardust” and “Baba O’Riley” to us like genuine diamond rings.
I love the sprawl of the setlists during this time. Any song from Pollard’s body of work was fair game. Songs from Pollard’s Fading Captain Series records always made it to the set right next to new and old GBV. NINE of the tracks from Asheville are from Pollard’s solo records (counting Pollard and Doug Gillard’s Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department, represented here with three songs). The band also spare a few minutes for “Alone, Stinking and Unafraid” by Lexo and The Leapers.
Pretty much all of the shows from 1999 to 2004 were like that. Only a grinch would mind.
Asheville opens with “I Am the Walrus” and, four sides of vinyl later, closes with a roaring “Motor Away” and that’s exhausting enough–but there’s still more.
Tip over the sleeve and a 7″ slides out like a secret message with more live songs. RARE live songs. Three of ’em. July 11, 1998 at The Metro in Chicago because why not? (Also, thank you GBVDB.com for the hundredth time for the information.)
One side is “Just Say the Word” from Pollard’s Waved Out solo album. The song’s original oppressive basement vibes get aired out on stage–and it’s still weird and oppressive, but this time the guitar is an even more frustrated live wire.
The flipside then takes us back to the beautifully fucked Plantations of Pale Pink EP. If you didn’t already think that “Catfood on the Earwig” and “The Who Vs. Porky Pig” rocked in lo-fi basement form, these punchy versions could sway you. They’re some pretty slammin’ pieces of garage-psych.
On the surface, 2000 looks like a quiet year compared to the wild ride of ’99 and the coming deluge of 2001. Suitcase was big news–VERY big news–but it was old stuff. The next album in this series will cover still more old music. Little new music, by Pollard standards, at least, came out in 2000.
Makes sense to me. It’s all a part of the story.
Kid Marine was an LP from a guy who’s sitting around at home while he waits for the music industry to catch up to him (or at least offer him a good deal for his slick, completed, Ric Ocasek-produced album).
Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department was an album from that same guy, but this time he’s out there playing the game, working toward “the next level”.
Dayton, Ohio-19 Something and 5 deals with the mistakes made and the people who get hurt while one is out conquering the world.
In these artlcles, I’ve been talking about Do the Collapse and the circus around it for most of a year now, from the Waved Out piece on up to this, a record that I consider to be the conclusion to this “storyline”.
Things that happened during that time made waves that rippled into the future, sure. There’s even another live album from this same tour coming up down the road. Call that a flashback and call Happy Motherfuckers and Sad Clowns the closing of this particular curtain.
The final show of the tour. What more is there to say? Do the Collapse didn’t set the world on fire, but everyone is still standing. The band are a well-muscled horse. The crowds in the clubs still go nuts. In the end, you “motor away”. Guided by Voices here sound like a band who have everything that they need, including a future.
More on that future later.
(Note: I couldn’t find ANY clips from this album on Youtube, but I did find this version of “Ziggy Stardust” that the band performed later in the year in September in Chicago, when the band were still playing scattered shows, going out for a week here and there, rarely very far from home. It’s pretty not bad.)