Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand

by Marc Woodworth

  LK: I have two ways of looking at this question of emptiness. In one, it’s my worst nightmare and in my most despairing moments something I’m waiting for the world to label my art with. This is the great danger in this kind of exploration and where “nostalgia” gets its bad name. Then there’s the positive side of “emptiness” in which the unreachability, the inability to re-create (in my case re-animate) is a big part of the point and experience. In my art it becomes the subject, or rather time and what the Dalai Lama calls “impermanence” does. For me, it’s an essence of life. I don’t know whether this is true for Pollard or applicable—I certainly doubt most of what we are discussing is conscious in any thought through way nor does it have to be to be articulated in the work.

  If one compares my art or Pollard’s to what is being imitated, one sees an immediate, profound difference between source and copy that places the latter in a position of recollection. The difference of degree is in the faithfulness. For Pollard and me there is an importance placed on getting something of the essence. These imitations are not in the digital sense of copying but more like Warhol’s brilliantly Zen-like serial repetitions (soup cans) through printing processes that are mechanical but not identical. They produce variations. They demand you study their small differences to engage the work. I think we are at an early stage of experiencing and understanding this kind of media absorption—it is not clear where it will go or what ultimate value it will have or whether it will survive for very long.

  But the ultimate question remains: is a source mulched up and digested and spit back out a new type of integration? Is this a question more important to an older set of aesthetics that we grew up with than it is to the present?

  One of the most significant ways both Pollard and I are very different than our sources, as I wrote before, is the truly domestic reality of our creations—this enhances the authenticity of their compression. Isn’t that a kind of wholeness?

  Still, I wouldn’t say these ideas of wholeness or originality don’t apply to my art or Pollard’s music. The idea of originality has shifted drastically in terms of importance, however. There is a lot of bemoaning of the end of originality or at least a dearth of it. A feeling that everything’s been done—formally a lot of things have been explored that were straitjacketed and not allowed before modernism, especially in the fine arts. But in one sense this can be liberating—as my friend the filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky says, now one only has to be concerned about making things that are good. A different standard of value than originality.

  Wholeness is something that is either striven for or not—though often what operates in my art and even more so in Pollard’s music is a drive for completeness which is a Sisyphean, illusionistic labor. An impossibility that prolificness smashes itself up against. When I first made my work in my twenties I believed in catharsis—I was soon disabused of that notion. But that’s not to say that I’m repeating myself endlessly either—there is change and often for the better, which one can call development and control.

  What’s in flux often with these drives is the degree to which different aspects are emphasized in a given time period. In our present era I would say that due to the technologies that have become dominant, imitation and copying have become foregrounded in a way they rarely have in art making before.

  Fiction, Man & Hardcore Facts

  Part Two

  Making something from what we remember—making art from the memory of art that we love, making art from our own lives and imaginations—is not incidental to our being, but central to it. When Robert Pollard writes the song “Bee Thousand” with falsetto harmonies inspired by “Happy Jack” (1967), he is remembering the Who—in one sense simply recalling what he has listened to before with pleasure and, in a more complicated way, putting together again the parts (re-membering) in his own way a work of art that is still alive in him. The title of the song is further enriched by the fact that the words bee thousand bear the same rhythm as, and nearly rhyme with, the name Pete Townshend, the Who’s songwriter and guitarist.

  We could do worse than calling this process of creating a new name and song out of the memory of an old one an example of being “guided by voices.” Liberated from the connection to the name of a band, the phrase guided by voices resonates afresh, providing a succinct description of the process that all artists, led by memory, desire, love, and an unnamable compulsion to create new work, find at the core of their activity as makers.

  The song title—“Bee Thousand”—becomes the name under which the album Bee Thousand is released in 1994 (an album which does not include the song “Bee Thousand”). Along with a memory of the la-la-la harmonies of British mid-to-late-sixties pop (even as Pollard substitutes “wabba wabba wabba way” for “la la la la”)—which itself was a species of nostalgia (see the Kinks) for the British music hall of the 19th century—and the echo of Pete Townshend’s name, there is also a connection, however tenuous or unintentional, between Bee Thousand and the Ventures’ song “The Two Thousand Pound Bee (Part 1),” the “first single recording to use a fuzz-box guitar.” As Bee Thousand the album is often described—in praise or censure—as a radically noisy, fuzz-saturated recording, there seems a fatedness in its connection to that moment in 1962 when a soon-to-be essential kind of impure sound first appeared on a rock record. The Ventures’ fuzz-box guitar sound was a diverting novelty in its moment at the beginning of Robert Pollard’s favorite musical decade; the “noise” issued by Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand in the mid-nineties echoes and expands upon that introduction, offering both pleasure for and a challenge to the listener in the form of songs that incorporate and are sometimes defined by noise.

  But however many instances of inspiration by or homage to the larger musical culture that precedes it Bee Thousand contains, there is a more local series of memories—what we could call personal memories—which attach to these two unexpectedly twinned words that become the title of Guided by Voices’ “breakthrough” record. There’s the memory of Jim Pollard, the brother of the “band’s” main songwriter, noticing a mile marker on the side of an Ohio road that reads, or looks like it might read, “Z1000.” There’s the memory of Robert Pollard noticing a movie marquee advertising the 1992 St. Bernard dog-based Hollywood comedy Beethoven, a letter “u” pressed into service instead of the required letter “v” so that the film name mutates from Beethoven to Beethouen. And there’s the more slippery memory of a Dayton, Ohio nightspot once called The 1001 (though it had a different name—Walnut Hills—by the time the Pollards had a regular table there at the dawn of Guided by Voices’ celebrity) where the guys spent evenings talking and drinking with writer Jim Greer (who would go on to author Hunting Accidents: A Brief History of Guided by Voices) and the Deal sisters of the Breeders. The former 1001 club, a place that makes the myth of a musical “scene” in Dayton possible—a myth that gained currency, in part, because of the power of the record called Bee Thousand—is a place kept alive, however unconsciously, in that title.

  Before whatever personal, cultural, or social meanings attach to those two joined words bee thousand, before they become the familiar name of an album that can be assigned a place in a movement or a signpost along a particular aesthetic journey, the reason they became the titles of a song and then an album is because they simply sounded good to Robert Pollard, his brother, their friends. Sounding good is the bottom line—and it doesn’t require a complicated aesthetic explanation. Putting together words that work. We could simply call this process writing, though, as we can see from the mile marker, the marquee, and the bar it doesn’t require sitting at a desk, plumed pen in hand and deep thoughts running through your head. Written down or simply imagined, this kind of making requires memory and accretion—daily incident experienced, stored, and eventually finding expression. The formulation bee thousand, like so much of Guided by Voices’ work, contains an appealing tension between the unexpected and the familiar. There’s also an element of mystery and untranslatability tha
t distinguishes words put together that sound good in this band’s alternate reality, what Pollard sometimes calls his “dream domain.” Bee Thousand doesn’t mean anything beyond itself and doesn’t translate into something we can explain. It insists on its own unlikely reality. You might envision a thousand bees or you might imagine how the words and their sounds could be reorganized into something recognizable—Pete Townshend, Beethoven, Z1000—but nothing you try out in order to understand the phrase can change its real nature. As a lyric from one of Bee Thousand’s best-loved songs, “Echos Myron,” asserts, “If it’s right, you can tell.” The words that name this album are right; you can tell. And they resonate as an introduction to a record that is equally untranslatable, similarly an act of imagination and surprise, however much this act owes to memory, both personal and cultural.

  This name, this invented pairing of words, this response to seeing and mis-seeing the everyday, odd, and beautiful things of this world (a mile marker, a resourceful misspelling on a movie marquee, the former name of a bar) along with hearing the echoes of an artistic legacy (“Happy Jack,” the Who, Pete Townshend, the Ventures) serves to introduce a group of songs that are made out of similar materials. The songs on the album, like its title, become the living forms of this primary human gesture: to remember the sounds in our heads, the things that we do or see that comprise our lives, and to make something out of this experience, these memories.

  In Banks Tarver’s short documentary Beautiful Plastic, Robert Pollard emerges from his basement, the so-called “Snakepit” which is full of records, collages, boxes of the uninventoried and/or rejected detritus from a life of unstoppable and eclectic creativity, with a bin of material from the early eighties, a little more than ten years before the release of Bee Thousand and twelve years before the film was shot. In it, the songwriter finds a notebook indicating entries—lyrics, song titles, prospective band names—from 1982-83. Pollard comes across a lyric written for a song that was the precursor to Bee Thousand’s opening anthem—“Hardcore UFO’s”—which was called “Walls and Windows” in the anonymous and insular days when music-making was shared with only a small group of friends and family. Pollard, reading from the notebook, sings the line “What’s the game, master John / Have you been through walls and windows” and his brother sings along, remembering every line as if they were singing the words of an inescapable single from the halcyon radio days of the mid-sixties—a Hermit’s Hermit hit, or, more to the point, the Hollies’ “Carrie-Anne” (1967) from which Pollard’s first-draft lyric takes part of its melody and some of its diction. The Hollies song begins with a sharp and melancholy question, “Hey, Carrie-Anne, what’s your game now can anybody play?” while “Walls and Windows” opens with a simpler inquiry: “What’s the game, master John?” A couple of lines later, Pollard replaces Carrie-Ann with Mary Ann (“What’s your angle, Mary Ann?”), clarifying exactly what he’d been listening to. So the song that appears as the first cut on Bee Thousand is a kind of palimpsest, “Walls and Windows” explicitly echoing and “covering”—as in making a version of as well as covering over—“Carrie-Anne” and, written on top of both “Walls and Windows” and “Carrie-Anne,” the final version, “Hardcore UFO’s.”

  Gone from the opening of “Hardcore UFO’s” is the word “game”—which explicitly linked the Hollies’ song (“When we were at school, our games were simple”) with “Walls and Windows” (“What’s the game, master John?”)—though, with Allan Clarke’s melody in our heads, we can still hear the points of contact between Bee Thousand’s opening track and its Hollies ancestor. The idea of games and play is deferred until the third line of “Hardcore UFO’s” when Pollard sings, “Drawing pictures, playing solos til ten” and is then revisited with the inclusion of “playground” which recalls the setting and action of “Carrie-Anne” (playing games at school) even though there is no mention of a playground in the Hollies hit. Pollard’s use of playground similarly places us in the realm of childhood memory and the spontaneous pleasure of school-day recreation and invention and, like the Hollies’ take on the same subject matter, reminds us that the past is gone, superceded by a more complex present reality.

  The verbal imagery of “Hardcore UFO’s” reminds us of the visual imagery on the cover of Guided by Voices’ first record, Forever Since Breakfast (1986). The cover depicts one of the early line-ups of the band posing in an otherwise empty playground next to a rusty slide and a weed-covered chain-link surround. The four men are mostly expressionless, as if lost in memory, looking out of place, staring past one another and, on the back cover, gathered around a slide shaped and painted like an elephant, that symbol of deep memory. In the background, appropriately, is a tree whose upper limbs have been cut off—pollarded is the arborist’s term for it—where new growth shoots forth in spindly profusion from the weathered trunks. The playground in “Hardcore UFO’s” resonates with the same sense of a lost past, offers a lament for a former self, long gone and unrecoverable. The note of melancholy introduced here returns throughout Bee Thousand, most affectingly on “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory” where “Old friends you may not remember” are “fading away from you.” The central question of “Carrie-Anne” “Where is your magic disappearing?” becomes more than an element of a song that inspired Pollard to write his own song. It creates a fertile and complex context for the entire album Bee Thousand.

  There is a density to “Hardcore UFO’s” as palpable as it is invisible. This kind of layering, this kind of history, registers every time we listen to Bee Thousand. Contrary to one reigning sense of the album, part of the story that simplifies the reality, the songs on it are not examples of a primitive form of art-making, but of a highly evolved one. We hear the past—Pollard’s past as a nearly life-long maker of songs, his immersion in the music of others, and a memory of childhood pleasure and creativity made melancholy because it is no longer present with the same force it once had. This example of Pollard as a songwriter who works and reworks his songs over time complicates the sense of Bee Thousand as a product of unselfconscious spontaneity. The image of offhanded brilliance born in the heat of the do-it-yourself moment isn’t all wrong: we can hear the freshness produced by recording quickly using simple means and the energy of the musicians discovering a sound together (or, sometimes, apart) throughout the record. But there’s another element here as well: these songs are the products of refinement and a long artistic apprenticeship. Music this fresh and alive is the result of mastery rather than the luck of an amateur.

  Recalling the spirit of recording Bee Thousand, Pollard says, “It was important to me that we capture a song in the least amount of time from when I conceived it to when we put it on tape. That’s the way to capture the purest essence of a song.” A few songs on the record—“I Am a Scientist” and “Gold Star for Robot Boy”—were recorded in just this way, almost immediately after they were written, though even parts of those songs or certain phrases that ended up in them might have been circulating in what Pollard calls his “brain files” for a long time before coming together in these particular forms. But most of the songs on Bee Thousand were recorded or at least reworked years after the period when Pollard first conceived them. They could hardly have been further from their genesis when they were revised, recorded, rerecorded, or reassembled for Bee Thousand. As Pollard recalls, “I only wrote a few new songs [for Bee Thousand]. The rest were bits and pieces of songs from the time I was a kid that I threw together to make new songs.”

  So the album doesn’t always bear out the conventional understanding of how it came into being. Its combination of a few brand new songs committed to tape just as they were written and a larger number of songs reworked from older, often radically different versions, some from a decade or more earlier, some reaching back into childhood itself, gives us a sense of the disparate and long-lived ways of working and refining an artistic process that led to a record sometimes mistakenly identified as a sport of nature springing unaccountab
ly from the stony soil of Northridge. Rediscovering song ideas, melodic fragments, and nearly forgotten chord progressions on old tapes may have made the resulting songs feel new again, a feeling that translated into the freshness audible on the recordings, but many of the songs on Bee Thousand offer an energy that’s richer and denser than that of brand-new songs recorded immediately as they are written.

  The new versions of older songs on Bee Thousand are infinitely less conventional than their earlier incarnations. It seems logical to expect that music recorded earlier in the band’s career when no one was listening would reveal a sensibility more primitive and naive than that which Guided by Voices would offer on their first album likely to generate interest and hold out any promise for their “success.” But, instead, there’s very little sense of offering conventional pleasure to a listener here, and the result is, paradoxically, much more, and much less predictable pleasure for the listener. When you listen to the earlier versions of the landmark songs from Bee Thousand that have surfaced and circulated among the band’s completist fans, the earlier takes are always more staid, more predictable, less alive.

  There’s an early version of “Peep-Hole” which, along with lyrics that don’t begin to suggest the broken, nonlinear wordplay of the Bee Thousand version, offers a musical setting of two acoustic guitars, one, a cloying lead shimmering with reverb, the other an earnestly strummed progression that would not sound out of place on a Bread album. The playing here is perfectly competent, if too careful, the singing sentimental, almost entirely self-conscious. Pollard offers a straightforward lyric in the form of a lover’s regret—“Maybe I hurt you bad, baby / maybe I won’t come back / I’ve always loved you just as much / as I did at first …”—in a voice that doesn’t quite believe in the lover he’s written into being or his lament. The only glimmer of the broken and moving beauty that lifts the Bee Thousand version into one of the emotional epiphanies of the album, occurs when Pollard comes across the single example of language that is even mildly interesting—“carry on your carousel of pain.” It’s not language at the level of that which lights up the lyrics of Bee Thousand, but even this small leap of imagination, this hint of verbal music, spurs Pollard’s otherwise constrained performance. As he ad-libs on the phrase while the song nears its end, there’s finally something there, even if we have to listen hard to catch it.