Tag: guided by voices

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Guided by Voices – Live at The Brightside, Dayton, Ohio 2020 (Also, on the Internet)

Some of my very best live show photography.

I enjoy writing my Robert Pollard-Mania! series, but due to its chronological nature, I’m always rummaging through Pollard’s past and I don’t get much chance to talk about his fascinating present. Right now, my modest li’l project is up to the year 2000. Yep, I’m here gabbin’ about twenty years ago while Pollard and maybe the most powerful line-up of Guided by Voices ever is putting out epic masterworks such as Zeppelin Over China, hyperactive tornados of song such as Warp and Woof and juicy cuts of Midwestern psych such as Surrender Your Poppy Field right NOW.

So let’s talk about the present for once, goddammit. This killer live show sent out to the internet in the Age of The Pandemic is a perfect excuse.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #54: HAPPY MOTHERFUCKERS AND SAD CLOWNS

King’s Ransom
Happy Motherfuckers and Sad Clowns
2000, no label

I have no idea why this top-notch Guided by Voices double live LP is credited to the name King’s Ransom. If you know Bob, ask him for me, please. Thanks.

The name “Guided by Voices” is nowhere to be found on the surface. Even in Pollard’s opening words to the crowd, he jokingly introduces the band as Sebadoh. Also, there’s no tracklist. No credits. Just some simple pasted-on sleeve art and two records of one fearsome show (plus a 7″ of three live rarities from two years earlier because GBV are allowed to be scattered and crazy like that).

This is the return to the mock bootleg style of For All Good Kids and Jellyfish Reflector. It wasn’t announced. It wasn’t promoted. Nobody talked about it. It just fell out of the sky and into the bins at your better, vinyl-friendly record stores one day in autumn of 2000.

It had been about four years since one of these came out and things were different. In fact, the whole band was now different.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #53: BRIEFCASE: DRINKS AND DELIVERIES

Guided by Voices
Briefcase: Drinks and Deliveries
2000, The Fading Captain Series

If you’ve heard every Guided by Voices album, you’re a fan.

If you’ve heard every EP and B-side, you’re obsessive.

If you’ve heard all of the solo albums and side projects, you’re far gone.

If you’ve listened to all of the Suitcase box sets, you’re dangerous.

If you have all of the Briefcase LPs, you’re in the scariest category of all: You’re a collector.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #52: SUITCASE: FAILED EXPERIMENTS AND TRASHED AIRCRAFT

Guided by Voices
Suitcase: Failed Experiments and Trashed Aircraft
2000, The Fading Captain Series

Guided by Voices had stacks of great songs when they became popular in the early 90s, but they had something else that was also unique.

They had a past.

They had a long past. A convoluted past. Most new indie sensations are young people. They don’t have pasts, yet. Robert Pollard’s real peers in 1994 weren’t Pavement and Superchunk, if you ask me. Rather, they were outsider oddballs like R. Stevie Moore and Billy Childish, seasoned DIY soldiers who’ve been at it forever and who produce so much music that they look half-crazy (or all-crazy) to the square world.

GBV’s subterranean self-released albums from the 1980s and early 90s (yanked from obscurity in 1995 on BOX) told some of that story, but there was more. There was a shitload more.

By the time that Guided by Voices made a blip on the cultural radar, Pollard had been writing and recording songs for about twenty years, maybe even longer. In interviews, he claimed to have thousands of unreleased songs at home. Years and years of songs. Songs that not many outside of Dayton, Ohio city limits had ever heard.

And he kept those tapes in a suitcase.

THE Suitcase.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #51: THE WHO WENT HOME AND CRIED

Guided by Voices
The Who Went Home and Cried
2000, MVD Music Video

“So Jason, are you going to write about the GBV DVDs?”

“Dear Sir or Madam, will the DVDs count in your Robert Pollard-Mania! series?”

“What’s up, Sexy Pants? Hey, I’m just curious, will items such as The Who Went Home and Cried  and The Electrifying Conclusion rate a mention in your survey of Robert Pollard’s ouevre?”

Absolutely no one has asked me any of those questions, but the answer is YES.

Yes, we will talk about the Guided by Voices video releases. It’s not a giant pile. It’s a modest amount, but it’s more than most indie bands have put out. Also, there’s good stuff in there. Some of ’em are on the oddball side, not typical concert discs or documentaries, but pieces of madness that complement Pollard’s vision.

Pollard’s body of work is Route 66 and in this series we intend to drive as much of it as we can. We’re gonna spend a night in every old motel. We’re gonna peruse every bottlecap museum in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico. We’re gonna sample the fudge at every truck stop. It’s not going to be perfect, but we are going to TRY.

What I’m saying is that we’re a little odd and so is The Who Went Home and Cried.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #50: DAYTON, OHIO-19 SOMETHING AND 5

Guided by Voices
Dayton, Ohio-19 Something and 5
2000, The Fading Captain Series

On paper, this modest 7″ is one weird little insect of a record.

Then you listen to it and it’s still weird. And murky. And sad. The previous Fading Captain Series release, Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department, was warm and celebratory (for the most part) while this one is cold and defeated. The flowers are dead. The trees are bare. There’s no sun in the gray sky. Even good memories hurt.

This is a uniquely personal item in Pollard’s body of work. He’s written many personal songs, but this is a rare record devoted entirely to handing you a bucket full of fresh blood.

The quick description: The A-side is a recent live recording of a sleeper GBV gem; on the B-side are three songs that Pollard recorded all by his lonesome with only a guitar and a 4-track.

There’s something going on here, though. This record makes a statement. There’s meat on the bone.

Let’s break it down.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #49: HOLD ON HOPE EP

Guided by Voices
Hold on Hope EP
2000, TVT Records

Back in the video store days, if you wanted to rent sleazy B-movies you had to pull the tape or DVD off a shelf and take it to a cashier, who then got a good look at exactly the kind of creep who rents Erotic Gladiator or Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers—and that kind of creep was ME.

Today, I’m old and wouldn’t give a damn, but back then I was young and fragile and hideously self-conscious (especially if a girl was working the counter). I also wasn’t very bright and I somehow felt less embarassed if I mixed a “respectable” movie or two in with the garbage that I really wanted to see.

So, on an average night at the video store, I might go up to the counter with Bikini Slave Girls II and a movie like Gandhi. 

Looking back, I’m not sure what statement I was making with this. Maybe the cashier would think that I was really there to rent Gandhi, but Bikini Slave Girls II just happened to tumble off the shelf and land in my hands?

“What’s this? Bikini Slave Girls II? How did this get here? What a strange turn of events! You know what, though? I’ll be a madcap and rent it anyway! Please, seriously, go to no trouble to restock. I don’t want to be a problem here. It’s not your fault that this movie accidentally fell down on me. This building clearly needs foundation work. Bikini Slave Girls II. Fine. I’ll watch it. Maybe it will have some interesting mise-en-scene. Here’s my $6 and please don’t think that I’m a weird pervert.”

I was hoping to make up for the embarassing thing with something that’s not embarassing.

And that’s EXACTLY how GBV give us “Hold on Hope” on this record.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #48: PLUGS FOR THE PROGRAM

Guided by Voices
Plugs for the Program
1999, TVT Records

If I ran the music industry, there would have been a big, fancy 20th anniversary Do the Collapse reissue in 2019. Two discs. three discs. Whatever it takes to get in all of the B-sides and stray songs and BBC recordings and demos and anything else good from the time that may be laying around unloved somewhere. A live set. A couple of 2,000-word essays in the liner notes. Stickers, balloons. Whatever trinkets usually come with these sort of things would be in there. We’d do it up big. It would be the kind of thing that you spend all day going through.

Because Do the Collapse has major reputation problems these days. When people on the social media beehives talk about it, they often begin by saying “I know that everyone else on planet Earth hates this album, but I guess that I’m a crazy lunatic because I like it!”.

I’ve seen this several times. It’s a cliche by now.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #47: SPEAK KINDLY OF YOUR VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT

Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard
Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department
1999, The Fading Captain Series

At the heart of Robert Pollard’s crazy body of work is just a guy writing about his life and the world around him.

A real writer writes about his or her own life. The things that they see and experience and think about. It can be buried under the surface. It doesn’t have to be “Dear Diary” confessional bullshit. You can write about Space Wizards from the 9th Dimension and it can still be about your life in a way.

Even a Space Wizard from the 9th Dimension might have a few personal problems to talk about.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #46: TEENAGE FBI

Guided by Voices
“Teenage FBI” b/w “Fly Into Ashes” and “Tropical Robots”
1999, Creation Records

I’m the last person who should give advice about how to promote anything. This site’s view statistics are evidence of that. I couldn’t sell cocaine to Fleetwood Mac in 1975. 

I’m the opposite of a good salesman; I’m the dumbfuck who gets convinced to buy stupid shit.  

So maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about when I say that I don’t get why TVT Records didn’t pick ONE song on Do the Collapse and then pound their money hammer on that. They didn’t choose a single champion horse. They never figured out which new GBV song smelled most like teen spirit in 1999.

The album gave them two obvious singles that were groomed for radio. There was “Hold on Hope” if they wanted to go ballad and there was “Teenage FBI” if they wanted to go bubblegum catchy. WHICH TO CHOOSE?

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