Tag: 2004

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #91: BEE THOUSAND: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT

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.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #90: HALF SMILES OF THE DECOMPOSED

Guided by Voices
Half Smiles of the Decomposed
2004, Matador Records

And now an ending.

As you may know, this was the grand finale of Guided by Voices at the time. No more Guided by Voices after this. They were going out with an amicable break-up. Robert Pollard needed to move on. The news was everywhere. Maybe you read about it in Rolling Stone. Maybe you read it on some music news website or a message board.  Maybe you went to a record store in the autumn of 2004 and saw Half Smiles of the Decomposed snuggled in the new release racks with a sticker on the shrinkwrap straight from Matador Records that touted it as The Final Album.

If you were a fan, you likely felt an urgency to not miss out on The Electrifying Conclusion tour, which was a shorter tour than usual. No Europe. No Canada even. It officially began in August, wound its way through about two dozen reliable stops in the US, and had a hard ending. New Year’s Eve in Chicago.

The band whose show was always a party would end on the biggest party night of the year.

And then lights out. That would be it. So long, Guided by Voices.

Or maybe not.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #89: FICTION MAN

Robert Pollard
Fiction Man
2004, The Fading Captain Series

April 24, 2004. Guided by Voices played The Bowery Ballroom in New York City.

Robert Pollard often gets chatty on stage and this night he spilled the news to the crowd that Guided by Voices were breaking up. It was the first public announcement. The people in that room got the scoop before any music journalist did.

One of the few bands out there that seemed incapable of ending without an act of God stopping them was closing up shop. It felt weird, but it made sense, too. Middle-aged people will understand.

Pollard went on to say that night that the final GBV album, Half Smiles of the Decomposed, was coming out in August with a farewell tour to follow. The last show would happen on New Year’s Eve and he promised that the band would go out grandly. Everyone was getting along. Past GBV lineups went down in drama, but this one would get a happy ending.

(If you want to hear that announcement, you can. A recording of it came out on Meet the King: Asshole 2, one of Pollard’s later “comedy” LPs composed of excerpts of his stage banter. The track is called “Blaze of Fire” and it still plays as a heavy moment today.)

A little over two weeks later on May 10, 2004, Pollard’s next solo album, Fiction Man, came out. The break-up news overshadowed it, but Fiction Man was the secret beginning of the post-GBV era.

One of the charms of Fiction Man in retrospect is that no one knew this at the time, including, I suspect, the two men who made it. Every Pollard solo record back then was different. They had different moods and different collaborators. In ’04, Fiction Man was merely more of that.

It was a batch of new Pollard songs, but this time played, arranged, and recorded by multi-instrumentalist oddball and fellow Ohioan Todd Tobias.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #88: EDISON’S DEMOS

Robert Pollard
Edison’s Demos
2004, no label

When I wrote about Earthquake Glue six entries ago, I chose to not yet say a word about this limited vinyl-only LP of Robert Pollard’s solo demos of most its songs.

As sweet as it is, Edison’s Demos doesn’t add anything to my take on the album.

Also, the release of it came as a surprise the following winter. It got no advance announcement. It’s not a part of Pollard’s Fading Captain Series label (or any other label). Its artwork, which is almost as stark as a Jandek LP, makes it look like something that’s been sneaked out to the world in secret. In the tradition of past Guided by Voices live records, it presents itself as a bootleg.

So I decided to treat it that way, too. Edison’s Demos is something under the radar and from out of the blue. It’s something that you might miss if you aren’t paying attention. It’s something that no one was thinking about or knew was coming until it appeared one day in a puff of smoke.

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