Guided by Voices
The Best of Jill Hives
2003, Matador Records
When I play this CD single (no vinyl for this one), I ALWAYS get stuck on the Cheap Trick cover. I play it over and over again.
A) It’s just a great song. 1977. High school parking lot. Friday afternoon. The jeans are tight, the hair is long, the girls are pretty and the night beckons. I was in diapers and had a bottle in my mouth in ’77, but I’ve seen Dazed and Confused. I’ve seen The Pom Pom Girls. I know those old records. They were easy to find when I was a dedicated vinyl freak. Your Cheap Trick education could be had for a few bucks and a little extra dust in your lungs. Maybe I wasn’t there like the men of Guided by Voices circa 2003 were, but I felt the vibrations decades later and they felt pretty good. The song survives.
“Downed” passes one of the great rock ‘n’ roll tests.
I love it, but I have no idea what it’s about. Never thought about it. Still not thinking about it.
B) Guided by Voices do it right. They play “Downed” like they ARE Cheap Trick. 1977. High school parking lot. Friday afternoon. Their version goes for the flashback. Nobody’s young anymore, but songs live forever. We all need to do our part to keep old songs alive. It’s easy. You want to do it. You love to do it. Whether you’re sharing a mix or passing around a Youtube clip or writing on a stupid website, this is what music fans do. We can’t help it. We’re fucking crazy.
Also, “Downed” stands as one of the very rare examples of Guided by Voices taking a break from Robert Pollard’s avalance of songs to cover someone else’s song.
To my bruised memory, “Downed” emerged from short-lived plans for a Cheap Trick/Guided by Voices split single. They were supposed to cover each other. GBV opened for Rick Nielsen and company for a spell back in ’99. That, I guess, lead to talk of the two bands doing something together.
Guided by Voices did their Cheap Trick cover, but Cheap Trick didn’t cough up their Guided by Voices cover.
Oh well. We still got a great B-side out of it and I will always salute that.
The other B-side here is another unusual turn.
“Free of This World” is Doug Gillard’s show. He writes, sings and, I suspect, performs it all. It sounds like something that simply didn’t fit on his beautiful solo album, Salamander, that came out the next year. It blows a misty fog our way and it ends up as a curious complement to the middle-aged angst of Earthquake Glue with a sentiment about wanting to be free of it all. The traffic, the mess, the stupid shit. There’s more to life than this. Right?
As for the A-side, like most great pop songs, “The Best of Jill Hives” doesn’t mean much of anything. That’s the art of pop songs, though. They get stuck in your head and become a part of your life while often being brazen nonsense.
The melody of a great pop song rounds its corners with a perfect sense of air and space and time. It reflects light just right and in your mind it all means something. You find meaning in it, even if the songwriter is merely stitching rhymes together. It carries you away. Sometimes I wonder if pop songs have a lot in common with hypnosis.
What I do believe is that Robert Pollard is a master of this and you can hear it in “The Best of Jill Hives”, the loveliest of the two singles released from Earthquake Glue. I’d even call it the prettiest Guided by Voices single ever.
In Jim Greer’s book Guided by Voices: A Brief History, Pollard struggles to explain it, which is perfect. I like that even he doesn’t know what it means.
The title, he says, came to him while he was in an auto mechanic’s shop that had a TV on at low volume. He was writing down things that he heard… or misheard. Someone on the airwaves said something about “the best of our lives”. Or “the rest of our lives”. Or “the days of our lives”. Or perhaps even “the breasts of our wives” or maybe “the pest of our chives”. Nobody knows for sure.
Pollard though heard “The Best of Jill Hives”. He took it down in his notebook and it stuck with him. He wrote a song around it.
He goes on tell Greer that it’s about “a woman that’s kind of fucked around with a lot of guys”, but he still doesn’t know who she is. She’s like a dream figure. He can see her and he can’t see her at the same time. But he does hear a gorgeous melody and a place for other odd phrases that he’s collected, such as “trifle in a crystal bowl”.
The powerful, well-toured Guided by Voices lineup of this period walks it home gently. The rhythm section drives this one. Tim Tobias’s bass, Kevin March’s drums. The band here are restrained power. They CAN punch your face in, but they’re picking flowers right now.