Guided by Voices
Hardcore UFOs: Revelations, Epiphanies and Fast Food in the Western Hemisphere
2003, Matador Records
Around 2001, a rumor blew in the wind that a new Guided by Voices box set was in the works from John Fahey’s Revenant Records. To my memory, the plan was to collect the elusive and out-of-print mid-90s 7″ EPs in one place (finally!) with some mysterious extras. Revenant had just made a big splash with a lavish 5-CD Captain Beefheart rarities set, Grow Fins, along with a vibrant catalog of lovingly reissued old blues, folk, and jazz. The prospect of them working with GBV and maybe presenting them in the context of weird Americana was exciting.
That box set never happened, but another box did happen on Matador Records a few years later. Were the Revenant rumors true? I don’t know, but I do wonder if Hardcore UFOs ascended from its ashes.
It’s a six-ring circus celebration of Guided by Voices, partly from a Matador perspective. It’s NOT a collection of the old EPs (that were released by a variety of labels, which makes gathering them in one place complicated legally), but it does neatly collect many non-album moments and a lot more.
In the big picture though, the five CDs, one DVD, and great liner notes of Hardcore UFOs take their own unique shot at telling one of the oddest success stories in American indie rock.
I report to you from June of 2022 and the early 1990s are now another world. It’s Jupiter. It’s way out there. We didn’t even have the internet back then. Isn’t that crazy? There are parts of the Guided by Voices story that future generations who get into them may not understand at all.
Why would a band do almost nothing to promote themselves and yet lose money pressing up vinyl records (six of them!) for pretty much no audience? Why was that piece of plastic so extremely important? The babies born in 2022, many of whom may never touch a piece of “physical media” in their lives, might have trouble figuring that out.
Also, the idea of record bins and live shows being the ways that one found music is already antiquated and will likely be completely alien soon. The internet is all but a part our anatomy now. If you want to hear a new band in 2022, you look up some clips online and then decide if you want to go see them (by contrast, it was normal in the 90s, depending on where you lived, to check out indie-rock bands by going out to see them in a club for $10 and that was the first time you heard them). Also, record-shopping is more expensive now than it was before. It’s too pricey for many people to take a lot of chances doing it. I don’t want to say that the old-fashioned record bin is dead as a portal to discovery, but it sure as hell isn’t what it used to be.
By extension, the idea of finding a great band and then dealing with their mystery is totally gone. If you were one of the cool ones who stumbled upon Propeller in a record bin in the pre-internet jungle of 1992, you might spend a whole year or two not even knowing what the band looked like and have no clue about their other records. Your copy of that LP was a like a Polaroid picture that you shot of a UFO. It’s all you’ve got. You know nothing else about it and your imagination catches fire.
In 2003, the traditional record business was a sinking ship and Hardcore UFOs is aware of how old stories can be forgotten as things change. So, it seeks to preserve them. There are many flashbacks to earlier times, but Hardcore UFOs grounds itself in the 90s.
If it was a movie, Hardcore UFOs would start in 1992 in a New York City blizzard.
That’s the first story in the sleeve notes and it’s a real snapshot of the time.
Matt Sweeney writes about the day he trampled through a city snowstorm to buy a copy of Propeller (at Kim’s Underground, the only local record store who had it, to his knowledge) after hearing it at a friend’s place the night before. It wasn’t on CD. It wasn’t mass-distributed. It was an undiscovered exotic bird out in the wild. Guided by Voices were unknowns. Sweeney remained obsessed enough to sleuth out Robert Pollard’s address (with help from some Columbus, Ohio friends) and write a fan letter to him months later in March of 1993 and that’s here, too.
The booklet alone makes this maybe the best-packaged Guided by Voices box set. It’s loaded with cool photos that you’d probably never seen before (from all eras of GBV), but also the written pieces in it are, interestingly, not critical essays. Rather, they’re personal reflections, mostly from people who discovered the band well before the rest of the world did and none of them get too sentimental about it. 90s indie-rockers didn’t do sentimental. Back then, at least.
Take the next piece from Tom Lax, founder of Siltbreeze Records, who states in his first sentence that he never cared for the very early GBV LPs, but then got wowed by Propeller and struck up a relationship with the band that lead to him putting out their Get Out of My Stations EP. He goes on to tell us about the time GBV played a Siltbreeze event in 1996 under the name The Burning Assholes with Lax’s own copy of Amon Duul II’s Yeti LP put up as payment for the show to Pollard.
Then there’s John Chandler’s account of seeing GBV play outdoors in the rain in Eugene, Oregon in 1994 and being there when Pollard got emotional over hearing someone cover his songs (that someone would be Stan McMahon, who’d go on to form a long-running tribute band called Giant Bug Village).
And I’ll never forget Byron Coley’s story of Pollard tearing up the first time he met Thurston Moore and J Mascis after a show at Amherst College. He couldn’t believe that guys like that were coming out to see his band.
Breaking up the tales of those who beat us all to the punch is Richard Meltzer, who briefly sounds off on how GBV made him “jump and shout” at the tender age of 55 when he first saw them at an unrevealed date and location.
Take in these stories and you might be rabid to dig into the music afterward. What’s THE DEAL with this crazy band?
Let’s get into it. Every disc is different.
Disc one. Human Amusements at Hourly Rates: The Best of Guided by Voices.
This is the alternate, chronological version of The Best of Guided by Voices: Human Amusements at Hourly Rates, released seperately on the same day as this box. It starts in 1987 and ends in 2003 and covers the changes in between like a classic Best of album does. It starts in the basement and ends with a professional rock band who have been through the wringer. For most people who paid $50 for this set, this is probably the least played disc. They don’t need a crash course in GBV. So why is it here? I think it’s about presentation. It’s the chandelier in the opera house. It’s not merely utilitarian. Its purpose is to beautify. Here, it’s a set of dreamy flashbacks that get us started and justify the epic ahead of us. Show some respect and dress nicely when you play it.
Disc two. Demons and Painkillers.
Talk about flashbacks! This collection of non-album recordings is raw, bleeding nostalgia for me. Just listening to it makes me feel like I need to study for my Biology 101 final. I originally heard most of these songs in a dorm room in 1996-97. When I play this disc, I remember discovery. I remember buying my first turntable and ordering Tigerbomb and Plantations of Pale Pink through the mail. I remember digging into B-sides and learning that great rock music often happens off the main path. Always look below the surface. The revelation for me in 2003 were the songs that only came out as Japanese bonus tracks. The best of those is “Finks”, which hits like garage rock Paul McCartney. It’s a beautiful piece of uplifting pop performed in a rush. The only thing left off of this otherwise comprehensive collection of Matador sleepers are the eight tracks from Sunfish Holy Breakfast (1996). No more room on the disc. Also, that EP was easy to find on CD in 2003 and still is, as of this writing, so I forgive it.
Disc three. Delicious Pie and Thank You for Calling.
This is the “unreleased songs” disc. Twenty-three tracks. Suitcase fans will know what to do. This is where you get comfortable and relax your critical faculties for a trip through time and early drafts. The first half is nearly all 1980s Guided by Voices, a period that ages well for me. While I was in elementary school in 1989, my future favorite songwriter was teaching elementary school and finding himself as an artist on quiet masterpieces such as “7 Strokes to Heaven’s Edge” (GREAT song) and “Still Worth Nothing” (dig the “Tractor Rape Chain” foreshadow that comes out of nowhere). Dead center in the tracklist, “Slave Your Beetle Brain” is a backward “song” that curiously teleports us forward into a set of more recent recordings dominated by demos of Pollard working with Doug Gillard to find Mag Earwhig! and Do the Collapse from his notebook pages. The song selection is nuts. Lo-fi demos of “Portable Men’s Society” and “Fly Into Ashes”! An early version of “Whiskey Ships” called “I Invented the Moonwalk (And the Pencil Sharpener)”! It works because Pollard makes messy and weird stuff work. It doesn’t need to make sense. On my shelf, I have a CD-R from 2000 that someone gave me in a trade. It’s a vinyl rip of Forever Since Breakfast (1986) and Do the Collapse demos (1998) on one disc. That makes NO sense, but that’s how rock history gets out sometimes. In broken pieces.
Disc four. Live at the Wheelchair Races.
Do I need to tell you that this is all live stuff? Thirty-two tracks. Thirty-two more broken pieces from 1995 to 2002. The live tape and CD-R trading scene at the time was jumping (well, okay, tapes died out around 2000). Before torrents and YouTube, people shared these things through the mail. I still have stacks of it. I think I have about thirty live tapes and CD-Rs with other peoples’ artwork and handwriting on them (and thirty is a modest number; some collectors have much more). It was great fun in retrospect and I hear this disc as a nod to the trader scene. It’s a “Best of the Bootlegs” collection. The sound quality varies as the selection pinballs through time and covers every touring lineup of the band, but it’s good and punchy overall. What makes it extra fun is that it leans into deep cuts that didn’t stick around in the set for long. “Look at Them”. “Far Out Crops”. “I Am Produced”. “Why Did You Land?”. “James Riot”. I could go on. All of them sound great, but my favorite might be “Pretty Bombs”, mostly for the kick of hearing Doug Gillard interpret the original record’s string section parts on guitar. In 2022, that’s some history.
Disc five. Forever Since Breakfast.
We’re now four hours into Hardcore UFOs and where do we end up? Back in 1986. Ever since Guided by Voices ascended to prominence, their debut 12″ EP was something that Robert Pollard preferred to keep hidden. When the early, subterranean years of GBV were reissued in 1995 as Box, he left out this one. The R.E.M. influence on it loomed too large in these seven songs. It didn’t sound like the psychdelic lo-fi that won people over in the 90s. Its 80s sound was outdated. If you had only read about it back then, you might have assumed it was a total pile of shit. That’s how it was described. Seriously. Was it REALLY that bad, though? NO! It’s no landmark, but it’s a fetching snapshot of what a lot of rock bands sounded like in the mid-80s. It’s very college radio. It’s all yearning and chiming guitar. If you’re into that sound, Forever Since Breakfast is a charmer, but Pollard for several years could only hear the flaws and the conformity. However, after Suitcase and Acid Ranch, I think he became more comfortable showing his scars and it was time to finally acknowledge this. And now here it is. It’s an important part of the story and in 2003 Pollard no longer cared about what anyone (including himself, maybe) thought about it.
Disc six. Watch Me Jumpstart.
This is the DVD and in some ways this thirty-six-minute documentary shot in 1995 might be the best introduction to Guided by Voices for the normie. That’s because director Banks Tarver never forgets that he’s making a movie that anyone on Earth might somehow see. Watch Me Jumpstart is not an insular puff piece that only indie rock fans will understand. It also doesn’t hammer us with facts like Tarver is teaching a class. No, Watch Me Jumpstart breathes and gives you life. It understands that the story of Guided by Voices is inherently interesting on a universal level. An unknown band of working class guys in Dayton, Ohio who’d been making offbeat rock for years got struck by lightning in their late 30s and became a new sensation. Who are they? What is their world like? How do they feel about this new place that they’ve arrived at in their lives? Those are Tarver’s subjects. He clearly loves the music, too, but he never geeks out about it in a way that takes away from the larger theme of what happens when a dream comes true and you’re old enough and smart enough to be conscious of all the ways that you can fuck it up.
Lastly, the UFO theme of the artwork is fun. Robert Pollard is like rock music’s (talented) Edward D. Wood Jr. when you think about it. He kept going and kept making music even while everything in his world told him that he should stop. His rare energy defines him as much as his songs do.
Also, I’m not totally convinced yet that he isn’t an alien.
So, you are interested in the mysterious, the unknown, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, a box set brings you the full story of what happened. It brings you all of the evidence based on the secret testimony of the souls who survived the early 90s. The incidents, the places. My friend, we cannot keep this secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about Hardcore UFOs?