The Cum Engines (Featuring The Cannot Changes)
Live at the Athens Time Change Riots
2001, F ‘n’ E
By the time this LP came out around the holidays, I believe that Guided by Voices were were officially indie rock again. After two albums, they broke up with TVT Records. I’ve had bigger surprises in life.
For most of the year, Robert Pollard was already talking in the press about his vision for the next GBV album. It was going to lean prog-rock and it was going to be called Heavy River. The title would change a few more times until it finally become Universal Truths and Cycles, but Heavy River was what he was calling it early in 2001 as the spring birds sang (the earliest reference I could find to it still online is this Denver Post article published on March 25, 2001, over a week before Isolation Drills was out).
The not-so-subtle message: He was done chasing hits and it was time to move on and he was ready to do that right NOW. Isolation Drills was new to us, but it was old to him. Even if “Glad Girls” became the new “Losing My Religion”, Heavy River was still the next move.
Before that march forward though came this flashback, GBV’s sixth vinyl-only, bootleg-style live release. The recording was from awhile ago. It was the night of January 22, 2000 at The 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia, in the middle of the southeastern US leg of a long tour, with Australia and Japan coming up, and then another month-and-change of scrambling across the US after that. It was the same show from which the Dayton, OH 19-Something-and-5 7″ A-side came.
In a strange, non-linear, collage artist way though, this nearly two-year-old show comes off like a statement of purpose for the band at the time.
Most GBV live albums are double LP sets (with a triple-LP coming up down the road), but Live at the Athens Time Change Riots is a lean, mean single LP. According to the invaluable GBVDB.com, the band played forty-five songs that night, but this album razor-slices it down to a cool twenty songs, ten on each side.
None of the TVT singles made the cut–and the band played ’em ALL at this show. In fact, a lot of setlist staples aren’t on this. No “Tractor Rape Chain”, no “I Am a Scientist“, no “Game of Pricks”.
That said, other perennials such as “Don’t Stop Now” and “Shocker in Gloomtown” are here, but at least half of it are gems from the fringes, songs that were soon to be phased out of the setlist. There’s enough of that here that it comes off like part of the point of this. This record intends to show off some deep cuts. Cool with me.
The rampaging and cathartic “Big School” (from Static Airplane Jive) got played on stage for just a short while in 1999 and 2000 and it’s here. Two songs from Pollard’s Not in My Airforce solo album made it, as did two songs from his Waved Out. As of this writing, this LP offers the only officially released live performance of “Subspace Biographies”, which the band played a lot back in the day, Pollard singing the original recording’s keyboard part.
Meanwhile, a grand total of one Do the Collapse song shows up here. “Mushroom Art” may be about masturbation, but the band never let things get messy. They go at it with expert strokes and finish it off quick.
The message of all of this is simple:
Guided by Voices don’t need “Teenage FBI” and “Glad Girls” to blow the roof off the place.
Some bands lose their major label contract and they lose everything, but Guided by Voices were bigger than that. They had more going on.
The first words you hear on this LP are Pollard saying “We have a new album out called Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department” before they launch into a stinging performance of that album’s “Tight Globes”.
Here, Pollard claims Speaks Kindly (originally credited to himself and Doug Gillard) for Guided by Voices. He says what I keep saying, which is that all of these Pollard albums are one big thing. Sequential chapters in the same epic. Maybe it’s confusing, but I’m doing my best to lessen that confusion.
Speaking of confusing, for some reason this LP is credited to The Cum Engines (featuring The Cannot Changes). Both are from lyrics on Ringworm Interiors. The name Guided by Voices is nowhere on this, except for when Pollard introduces “Don’t Stop Now” as “the ballad of Guided by Voices”.
What more is there to say? It’s live GBV in the middle of touring their brains out. They’re tight and powerful and the recording is punchy enough to make your nipples erect.
And now this weary old series closes out the strange year of 2001 and moves on to 2002, which was every bit as wild and messy and fun.
Also, for YEARS, until this very moment, I thought that The Athens Time Change Riots was some crazy Pollard nonsense title, but it was actually a real thing. In Athens, Ohio in 1997, Ohio University students went total animal crackers over the bars closing early because of Daylight Savings Time.