Guided by Voices
Bee Thousand: The Director’s Cut
2004, Scat Records
As we get further away from 2004, this triple-LP set may become more and more confusing for listeners.
I’ve heard people dissect Bee Thousand on recent podcasts and it’s normal for them to not know what to make of this other version of the album. It’s mostly different songs in a different sequence and some people (understandably) don’t get why it even exists.
Also, since it’s called The Director’s Cut, someone somewhere on the globe, now or thirty years from now, might wonder if it’s the REAL Bee Thousand and the familiar one was a compromise.
I’m going to explain as much as I can here. Or at least I’m going to tell my own best version of the story.
As of this writing, The Director’s Cut is long out of print. It’s an extravagant vinyl set that sells for collector’s prices so I don’t expect a Blade Runner situation, where new audiences don’t know what edition is most essential, but on the internet things can last forever and that’s a long time.
I try to stay away from predicting the future because I’m always wrong about it, but I can talk about the past. I was there. For some of it.
So let’s get into it. Let’s dig into the who, what, when, where, and why.
Who?
Our story has three characters in it. Robert Pollard, Robert Griffin of Scat Records, and a fan on the internet who went by the handle Janus Pan (named after a song on Beard of Lightning).
Janus Pan and I used to argue a lot from our computer keyboards twenty years ago, when I had a hotter head and could be bothered with things like that. It all seems stupid now. Don’t get into big fights on the internet, kids. Nothing good comes from it. It’s a waste of energy. Unless you’ve read every good book ever written and can speak every language on Earth, you have better things to do with your time.
I don’t know his real name and our conflicts are now water under the bridge, but I do remember that Janus Pan was the one who made the suggestion, in a simple internet forum post, for what would become The Director’s Cut.
What?
One of Robert Pollard’s quirks is that while he’s not much of a recording perfectionist, he will pace the floor over sequencing and artwork. Sometimes he’ll put together an LP and then change his mind about everything. He might yank most of the songs and replace them with new songs. Switch out the cover. Change the title. By the time he’s done taking his latest record apart and then putting it back together the finished work might bear little resemblence to what he started with.
This was particularly true in the 90s and Bee Thousand was one of those fussed-over records. There were at least five earlier drafts that shuffled around a total of sixty-five songs. In a very Pollard detail, no single song consistently appears in every sequence, as Robert Griffin observes in his terrific liner notes here.
One of those early drafts was a double album and that’s Bee Thousand: The Director’s Cut.
When?
2004 was the tenth anniversary of Bee Thousand and Griffin’s initial intention was to simply put out a new vinyl pressing.
Where?
He posted on the Disarm the Settlers message board about his plans when Janus Pan chimed in with a comment about how cool it would be if the unreleased double album configuration somehow came out. Griffin thought it was a good idea. So did everyone else. I’m guessing that Griffin contacted Robert Pollard and he was down with it, too. The straight reissue was put on hold in favor of this exciting left turn.
Why?
The deep-diggers know why. When you’re buying five albums a year from an artist, it’s about more than the songs. You’re also hooked on their madness.
Almost every great, long-lasting rock act has their secret history of unreleased or bootlegged tracks that hide in clouds of mystery for decades. The Beatles’ alternate takes. Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes.
For Guided by Voices, it’s the many albums that Pollard has scrapped, rearranged, and gutted for parts, scattering most of the castoff tracks across B-sides, EPs, and outtakes collections.
There’s a whole blog about the Guided by Voices and Pollard albums that never happened. It’s called Shitcanned (by Dan Jircitano) and I recommend it for those who really want to turn over this toybox.
Robert Pollard isn’t just a killer songwriter. He’s also a fascinating and eccentric album craftsman. He’s like a great film director editing a movie, trying to achieve the perfect flow that moves you and surprises you. His attempts are inherently interesting, even the rejects.
Some of us want to hear it all.
We’re hooked on Pollard’s madness because we have plenty of madness of our own.
As for the record, I thinkThe Director’s Cut is as much of a masterpiece as the final draft. It’s manic and mysterious, full of trap doors and strange trails. Its thirty-three songs are a world to sink into. Guided by Voices are psychedelic gods here and had this version come out in 1994, it would have left deep cracks in the earth. no question.
BUT would it be one of those watershed albums that gets a slot on every Best of the 90s list alongside Radiohead and Pavement like it does now?
My gut says no. The Director’s Cut is too unwieldy, too crazy. It asks a lot of its audience. I don’t think Spin magazine was ready or would ever be ready. All four sides are brilliant, but it’s not the razor-sharp arrow that Guided by Voices needed to fire out in ’94.
The final version of Bee Thousand was largely sequenced by Robert Griffin. He heard Pollard’s earlier shots at it and then decided to make one himself. Griffin’s sequence crams in as much sparkle as it can for the first LP side and then it lets weird stuff run wild in the second half, yet it never wanders from the band’s grasp on melody.
Pollard touched it up a little, but he approved of what Griffin put together overall and that became the classic Bee Thousand that every rock fan needs to hear to understand how the wind blew in the 90s.
The more expansive Director’s Cut. by contrast, leans into weirdness right away. It starts with “Demons Are Real”, veers further left with “Deathtrot and Warlock Riding a Rooster”, and then trips out into other dimensions from there. A whopping ten of these songs turned up on King Shit and the Golden Boys (acid-rocker side 3 opener “Revolution Boy” is that record’s “Greenface” without the sudden cut-off). Others eventually showed up everywhere from Suitcase to Pollard’s first solo release (this album’s “Crayola” is the exact same recording as “Parakeet Troopers” from Not in My Airforce).
The double album version is such an odd creature that it doesn’t include some of the most popular Bee Thousand songs. It’s got no “Hardcore UFOs”. No “Buzzards and Dreadful Crows”.
“I Am a Scientist” and “Gold Star for Robot Boy” were also left off because Pollard, at the time, wanted them to be the two sides of his own solo 7″, which is an interesting thought.
For good measure, the third record in this set throws in those tracks as bonuses along with unreleased nuggets such as Tobin Sprout’s “Twig”, finely ragged band demos of “Shocker in Gloomtown” and “Break Even”, and a punchy take on “My Valuable Hunting Knife” recorded by Andy Shernoff and that few knew existed before this record. Perhaps to fill space on the final side, Scat also tacked on The Grand Hour and the I Am a Scientist EP, which is cool with me. I’m always up for hearing “Do the Earth” again.
It’s a great B-side that was among the handful of deep cut oldies that Guided by Voices were playing live on their Electrifying Conclusion tour when The Director’s Cut came out.
And this is how we close out Robert Pollard’s 2004, with a flashback. A strange one. A distorted one. Something that we remember, but is now different.
Bee Thousand: The Director’s Cut is not a replacement for the classic Bee Thousand, nor was it ever intended to be that.
I like to think of it as a dream of the past after Half Smiles of the Decomposed sang us to sleep.
💀👍🏾