Guided by Voices
Briefcase 2: The Return of Milko Waif
2005, The Fading Captain Series
It’s nearly always a bad idea to emulate the perceived lifestyles of your rock ‘n’ roll heroes. You might could fill a cemetery with those who died too young trying to be Keith Richards.
But if you’re looking to cut and paste an artist’s personality onto some void within yourself, I guess that Robert Pollard isn’t so bad of a role model.
Let’s see, you’ll have to…
1. Drink light beer.
2. Wear regular dad clothes. A Who T-shirt and some khakis are as wild as it gets.
3. Be able to do a high kick in your 50s and 60s (this might be the most dangerous thing on the list).
4. Write a few thousand songs.
5. Collect vinyl records.
That last one influenced me for years. I bought my first turntable (late 1996) partly because of Robert Pollard. GBV had many vinyl-only releases that I needed. I also loved interviews where Pollard talked rock. Pollard’s knowledge and his enthusiasm for music, some of it unfashionable (namely prog-rock, deeply unhip in the 90s), made my record stacks a little bit larger. And it had to be vinyl. It was cooler. It was what Bob collected. It was also much cheaper than CDs back in the day, which helped a lot.
Meanwhile, Pollard’s own crazy body of work was, and is, a product of how collectors think. We’re into tunnels and secret passages. We don’t want to merely listen to our favorite bands. No, we want to put together puzzles and figure them out. We want to defend the difficult. We want to follow the secret histories of our favorite artists as told through B-sides and bootlegs.
We want madness on our shelves.
That’s where the Briefcase LPs come in. Does an abridged Suitcase on a single vinyl record serve any practical purpose in the world? Other than the obvious (the money made when the limited pressing sells quickly), probably not.
But who’s into rock because it’s practical? Briefcase 2 does exactly what it needs to do.
It brings madness.
You could describe each Briefcase as a summary of a quadruple-CD collection, but I think of them more as summaries of Robert Pollard’s personality.
They’re eccentric and scattered. There’s a chance that your favorite song from the new box set might not be on it, but some ragged piece of noise from it probably is.
This one kicks off with “Headache Revolution”, a song that didn’t mean much to me at the time in this solo acoustic form, but Pollard clearly liked it because he recorded it again, to great effect, with Boston Spaceships a few years later. The rest of the LP dances the Watusi across the Suitcase 2 box set. It grooves on its weirdness. It’s wired up on its strangeness.
It’s got two exclusive tracks. “Lion W/ Thorn in Paw” is live and ragged and it reveals the 1980s origin of an iconic GBV sound clip (“Is anybody ready to rock?!” “This song does not rock”, from “Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox”) before it becomes an instrumental early draft of “Sheetkickers”. Then there’s “Superwhore”, which the deep-diggers will recognize as “The Who Vs. Porky Pig”, but with a different vocal approach and back when it leaned more punk than psychedelic.
The tracklist is odd overall and I still remember the people on the forums who were seriously annoyed by it. Why does Briefcase 2 devote precious vinyl real estate to “What About the Rock?”, which could be the most “why does this exist?’ GBV track ever made. It’s a babbling answering machine message from Matador Records’ art director Mark Ohe, possibly drunk and complaining about his woman problems, Scotch Tape’d onto a junior league prog instrumental. (Ohe’s message was also sampled on the closing track of Pollard’s Choreographed Man of War LP.)
Why is that fucked-up thing here and not beauties such as “Color Coat Drawing” and “Telephone Town”? Some were confused. Some saw it as contempt for the audience.
Never bothered me, though. In 2005, I was a little crazy myself. I lived in cheap record bins and thrift stores. That was my life and my way of hiding from life. I was hooked and I would buy anything.
Every weekend meant dragging home a comically large and sloppy stack of vinyl. Children’s records. Soundtracks to movies I’d never seen. Any Christian vanity press LP that looked halfway interesting. The Three Suns. Narvel Felts. Bobbie Gentry. Ruth Welcome. Rod McKuen. The Quick. Buffy Saint-Maire. Silver Convention. 1910 Fruitgum Co.. Yma Sumac. Jack Van Impe’s end times sermons. Rusty Warren’s comedy. I was looking for so many things. Beauty. Energy. Fun. Secrets. Madness.
In my world of dusty record grooves and forgotten things, Briefcase 2 fit right in. Even “What About the Rock?”. Close your eyes and forget that you ever heard of Guided by Voices. Briefcase 2 is something you found in the bins in between Enoch Light and a K-Tel disco hits collection. In that context, it sounds amazing. When it came out, it brought all of the otherworldliness that I craved.
I remember the negative reaction to this record so much because… I LIKED it. To this day, I still enjoy negative opinions of Pollard and am unlikely to argue with them. For me, he’s a patron saint of scattered weirdness and the more that he confounds people, the more I love him. Every record he makes is a curious find in the thrift store in my soul and I never expect everyone to understand.
Record collections are interesting things. I used to see them as reflections of how cool you are, but now that nobody needs any plastic discs to hear the music that they enjoy, I see them as a reflection of how CRAZY you are. A record collection today is a product of pure obsession. The world says that it’s unnecessary, but the collector begs to differ. I understand.
I write this in January 2024. I’m 47 years old and in some ways I’ve never been weirder. Collecting vinyl isn’t so important to me anymore. Flipping through thrift store records bores me today (I’ve tried, can’t stand it). Today’s collector bait vinyl releases that you must buy RIGHT NOW or it’ll be sold out tomorrow are uninspiring and I never bother (collecting records used to be relaxing, not stressful!), though I understand that it’s the reality of the present state of the music business.
I’m still a collector, though. What do I collect?
These articles. These reflections. These attempts at figuring out what Robert Pollard’s songs did for me over the years and continue to do for me over time.
Pollard has talked to me for so long and now I need to talk back.
I collect these articles. And now I have 99 things in my collection.