He told me that night that he was part of a songwriting troupe with John Dodson and Nick Weiser. They would get together on weekends and toss around a lot of song ideas but focused more on their songs than his. I said, “Why don’t we start playing? I’ve got some drums.” After that, he started playing some of his songs for me and I was just blown away. I was really excited—I still get excited just remembering it. Of course I could hear the British Invasion influence in the songs, but there was something about their structure and Bob’s ability to put the words and phrases together that really made them sound unique. I hadn’t heard anything like that from anyone around here. When Mitch and I came along, then Toby and Pete Jamison, we always showed a lot of enthusiasm. We were true admirers. The only musicians that Bob wanted were people who had a really deep respect for the music. He knew when a person’s heart was truly in it or if someone was a poseur who was just hanging around.
Even though we were both into the music, our relationship could be pretty turbulent. Bob and I got into a big fight before Forever Since Breakfast. We fought a lot back then. There were even fist fights. Those early years were rough. Bob was unpredictable. There were a lot of faces there—you didn’t know which one you were going to get. Part of the difficulty was because we were so frustrated as a band. We’d take a lot of that frustration out on each other because we didn’t have anyone else to lash out at. When people are saying that you’re no good, you can’t help but take it to heart—and, believe me, we heard that a lot. People would yell, “Get off the stage—you guys suck.” It’s hard to keep going when you’re hearing that kind of response. Nobody liked us. We were trying to come into our own and trying to figure out if playing music was something we could do. Were we just delusional about our ability to make music? Did thinking we had talent just come from a warped sense of ourselves? Those were the kinds of things we were always questioning. We all knew what it was like to be rejected. That had been going on for a long time before the recognition of the Bee Thousand period started to happen. We grew up in a very strong Appalachian Midwest blue-collar kind of town where listening to Molly Hatchet and Lynyrd Skynyrd was the norm. Everybody was into Southern rock and whatever they heard on the radio. They weren’t open to anything different. People didn’t have any way to understand what we were trying to do. It was so foreign to their ears that they couldn’t help but hate it. We were somewhere else—and thank God for that. Being somewhere else was how we kept our sanity. In the end, I think rejection made us strive that much more. It didn’t matter that no one was hearing the music. We’d have our own record release parties down in the Snake Pit. We were full of ourselves. Sometimes people would get carried away and smash a few of the records up against the brick wall. That was how we expressed our enthusiasm when no one else cared at all about what we were doing.
By the time Bob decided to call it quits after Propeller, I hadn’t played with him for a while. In ’92 Bob called to say there was the possibility of a deal with Scat and he wanted to record. I said, “Holy shit! Of course I’m in.” When we were recording Bee Thousand, not only were we together playing music again, but everything sounded so much fresher than it did before. It was like Bob had been given an artistic shot in the arm. The songs were great. As a band we were all in love. It was fun. No one had a bad idea. Even if you had an idea that wasn’t going to work, Bob had a way of rejecting it and still making you feel validated. We recorded some of the songs in my basement on four-track. I had a big English Tudor-style place built in the twenties. The basement was a little too nice so we Guided by Voiced it. The acoustics were great down there because the walls were cement, so that gave the recordings a certain hardness. One side was the laundry area where the furnace was and then you had to go through a door to get into the garage. We converted that part into a studio. It was nice weather during those few days we were down there, early summer days in May or June. We were really burning through the songs, getting them down in one take. Some days we would knock out five songs in four or five hours. In three days we were done.
It was very spontaneous and very satisfying, in part because the music was so damn good and also because we had room to do what we wanted, creatively speaking. I’m not a lyricist and I’m no songwriter, but I like to create music and Bob never dictated to me how to play a song. He trusted my interpretation of how a song should be played, so in that respect I was able to create through percussion. That’s what kept me hooked in and satisfied artistically. When I heard the title “Kicker of Elves” I thought it would be cool to put the bass drum in there. Bob didn’t envision having any percussion on that song, but I suggested using just the bass drum—it is “kicker of elves” and you do kick a bass drum—to give it a little drive. The idea seemed a little cheesy at first, but we tried it and it worked. On the break in “Echos Myron” I felt that playing the bell of a cymbal was the right thing to do at that moment. If I had an idea, I could try it out.
The drums were usually the first tracks that we recorded. Bob and I would sit down and he’d teach me the song. Five minutes later whoever was playing bass and I would record the rhythm track on the first take. We did it so fast that you couldn’t get tired of it. Everything else—instruments and vocals—was overdubbed on top of the drums and bass.
Most of the time Bob would come in with songs he’d already written, but sometimes we’d make something up on the spot. That’s what happened with “Her Psychology Today.” We were in my basement and Bob said, “Start playing a drum beat,” so I just started playing a drum beat. Then he told Mitch, “Play guitar over that drum beat.” It was a repetitive beat and Mitch started playing guitar over it. Within twenty minutes, we’d come up with the music and recorded it. It was completely natural for us to do something like that. I had played in bands with Mitch since we were twelve years old. I knew what he was going to do before he did it and he was always in the pocket and rock solid. “Her Psychology Today” blows a different air into the record. It takes on a different feel during that song and then it jumps back on track. I’ve heard a lot of criticism of that song because it strays so far from what the record is doing up until that point. People talk about records needing to sound consistent but I don’t necessarily agree. I think it’s healthy to pull off something totally uncharacteristic. It adds to the variety of the record and makes it exciting.
Bob has gotten a lot of press for being impatient and needing that kind of spontaneity when he works, but as a band we liked doing it that way, too. We didn’t want to labor over everything because that has a tendency to make the music stale. The songs sound best the first few times you play them when everyone’s enthusiastic. Bob wasn’t one to go back and listen to his old songs over and over. By the time they were released, we were onto the next project. Maybe that’s why he wrote so much. He got tired of his old stuff and it was his need for new material that inspired him to write so furiously and so fast. I hated recording Under the Bushes, Under the Stars because it was just the opposite of how we made Bee Thousand. We labored on that record and it seemed to drag on forever. We started out recording with Steve Albini, then we worked with Kim Deal for a while down South, and then we came back and recorded some more here in Dayton. It went on for months and months. By the time it was over we were sick of it. That isn’t the way it should be.
Even though there was a lot of partying—Bob and Mitch liked to drink and so did some friends who came around in the early days—there wasn’t much drinking going on when we were recording. Partying and playing music were separate. It wasn’t like people would get blotto and try to play. When it came to the music, suddenly there was a more serious turn. The music itself is anything but typical party music. It’s got nothing to do with mindless ranting. Even though he drank, Bob never made dumb, drunken music. By the time I was twenty-two, I was a full-blown alcoholic. I knew that it was either quit drinking or something very bad was going to happen, so I checked myself into rehab in 1980. By the time Bob, Mitch, and I first started playing t
ogether, I had been clean for awhile. The three of us would go to clubs and because I wasn’t drinking they knew they could depend on me to drive. I was always the stable one who held things together. When I relapsed in ’95 things got really crazy for me. I saw things differently when I was the one who was struggling. But during the time we were recording Bee Thousand even though I was detached from the party, musically we all really came together.
It was all about the music. It couldn’t be about anything else. I’m glad that we got to enjoy a little bit of recognition and it’s flattering that people actually like the records that we made, but the best thing for me was that I always liked them. That may sound a little selfish—maybe it is—but that’s really when it was the most fun, when we were playing for ourselves, when it didn’t matter what anyone else really thought. The music was fresh and we were having fun making it. And it turned out to be a record that people really connected with. I’m sure there are bands that go through their entire careers and never have that magic happen—and it is almost magical.
We were on tour with the Grifters after Bee Thousand came out. A seventeen- or eighteen-year-old kid came up to me half an hour before a show to tell me that he had tried to commit suicide and had spent months in a mental ward. He said that Bee Thousand was what brought him out of his depression. Because you’ve heard stories like that before, it almost seems like a cliché, but this kid was telling the truth. You could tell that he had gone through some serious pain. After he talked with me, I watched him shoot some pool, interact with his friends, and I could see he was a kid who had struggled. Hearing his story filled me with a lot of emotion. It was sad yet it was also uplifting. If music can help to pull someone out of a depression or bring joy or happiness in any way, what better thing could it do? I didn’t share that story with anyone. I didn’t want anyone to make a joke out of it or say, “That guy made it up.” I didn’t want it to be tarnished.
It was important to me that we finally found some people who appreciated what we were doing, because there were always—and will always be—a lot of people who can’t. My true hope had always been that eventually someone, somewhere, would really connect with the music we made. I always hoped that body of work would get into the right hands because I knew it was special. It would have been such a shame if it remained unheard. There are lots of people who don’t get it—and they’ll never get it. We used to joke that if you’re a GBV fan, then you are Guided by Voices, not only our voices, but the voices that came before us, and the voices that will live long after us. I don’t think you can make someone get it—you’re either Guided by Voices or you aren’t.
Listener Response #7: Josh Chambers
My two freshman roommates and I played the album on repeat continuously, loudly, literally twenty-four hours a day, leaving it playing even as we all left to attend classes. We played it full blast as we slept, and would wake up to it. I’m serious, no hyperbole here. We saw it as a way to bring on more vivid dreams, and as a way to understand a new and rigorous waking world.
Some of the fall-out of our obsession included an irrational fixation on the squeaking water pump sound in “Demons Are Real.” We became convinced that whoever R. Pollard was (we had no clue as to his back story; he was completely cloaked in mystery) had harnessed a vision of “demon agriculture,” and was capable of inducing madness in the listener. The next song, “I Am a Scientist,” became an admission of his powers of hypnosis and psychic manipulation.
One evening, after repeated listens to this particular track, one of our crew disappeared into the night. She went missing for days, and weeks later we finally got a call from her in a mental hospital, where she had checked herself in. She told me (and has refused to talk to me since) that “Demons Are Real” had driven her insane and that she was afraid that the power of this music would end up destroying us all.
Listener Response #8: Brett Rosenburg
I was in the tenth grade when I first heard Bee Thousand. Late 1994, the dead of winter. I didn’t buy many records back then, so when I got something, it was a pretty big deal. I was listening to a lot of punk rock (Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Wire), the grunge stuff on the radio. Nirvana was probably my favorite band. Mostly just angry badass stuff; I was a closet Monkees/Beatles geek, but I thought that sort of thing died at the end of the sixties, and I kept it quiet to avoid getting my ass kicked at school. I read about GBV in Musician magazine—a little blurb that told me they were old, and that they sounded like Herman’s Hermits sometimes. I bought my copy from Records and Such in Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, NY. When I popped it in, the first thing that blew me away was the sound—it was OLD. I had no idea sounds like that could still happen. Always figured that recordings just aged and sounded that way, or something. And of course, there was an English accent happening. That got me real excited. When I was little, I had a fascination with all things British growing up, so much so that throughout third grade, I spoke with an English accent. These guys seemed to say, “That’s okay.” So yeah, it was like an old British Invasion record from 1964, but it was arty and full of weird accidents, like the White Album. You know, that weird edit that opens “Tractor Rape Chain”—the acoustic guitar with background noise, then the whole song kicking in at a slightly different pitch on some odd beat I can’t even count. The acoustic stuff made me picture these old dudes with acoustic guitars who rock out sometimes with a drummer. And I pictured four or five different lead vocalists. “Tractor Rape Chain,” “Hot Freaks,” “Yours to Keep,” and “Ester’s Day” all sounded like different singers … different writers. I didn’t read any indie media, I wasn’t on the internet, and I had no friends who even knew who these guys were. It would surprise me when, years later, I learned of their reputation for hard drinking, and Pollard’s dominance over the band. To my fifteen-year-old ears, they sounded like a hippy-dippy collective of Britlovin’, acoustic-guitar-wielding Ohioans hell-bent on putting rock back the way it was before the Beatles broke up.
I listened to it every day, several times. I started tuning into WSPN to hear more of this music. There wasn’t much else that sounded like it, even on the indie circuit. I bought Sebadoh’s “Bakesale,” which struck me similarly, and bought some other popular indie rock records of the nineties. But Bee Thousand was holier than all of them. One day, deciding I needed a break from GBV, I put on Slanted and Enchanted. It sounded so slick to me … the drums were loud, there was all this high end, the singer couldn’t really sing … I went back to Bee Thousand and did my math homework.
Basically, it turned me onto melody again, and it made me realize you CAN make great music in a vacuum regardless of the lame times which surrounded you. There was a lot of stupid music made in the nineties. A lot of guys who couldn’t sing, a lot of regurgitated slick eighties shit, pared down to sound modern and “organic.” And of lot of punk rockers trying to make pop music and turning out really boring, lifeless crap that doesn’t hold up. Bee Thousand was the sound of real guys making real music with no clock ticking and no pollution from the industry, which (ironically) as DIY spread to every genre of music in the nineties, became more and more a part of being a musician. GBV didn’t just do it themselves—they did it FOR themselves. That’s why it sounds so innocent. Knowing what I know now, it’s a guy who sings like the bass player from King Crimson writing crude Genesis rip-offs, being recorded by his elfin-voiced buddy with a free garage. To my virginal fifteen-year old self, it was a window to another world, and it was the only place I really fit in.
Spatial Representation #9 of Bee Thousand Action Motives
The Diamonds of Being in the Dirt of the Pigpen: On Robert Pollard’s Lyrics
Foreword
by Professor Bart O. Roper, LLD
The following excerpts, fragmentary and edited for clarity only where expressly necessary, are drawn from an unfinished dissertation undertaken by my late student, Nolen Twinn-Johnson, who was, at the time of his death, a candidate for the degree of DLitt. under my supervision at
Liverpool University’s Graduate Centre for the Study of Popular Culture in Liverpool, England. I believe his promise as a scholar will be made clear by the publication of this work, however preliminary some of it may appear to the reader, * in this volume devoted to the subject of his dissertation, the American rock group Guided by Voices. I have taken the liberty of using a phrase from the pages that follow as a title in place of the one my student did not have the chance to choose for himself.
It remains for me to describe the tragic circumstances of Mr. Twinn-Nolen’s death, the relation of which would be an affront to decorum did the circumstances of his demise not exemplify so well his devotion, however unconventional, to his research. In an attempt to better “enter”—as he termed it—the dream related in the Bee Thousand song “Her Psychology Today,” this enterprising student visited Paris (a trip that was not funded by a University of Liverpool travel bursary as has been erroneously claimed elsewhere) and attempted to climb the Eiffel Tower while listening to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” His desire to experience as fully as possible the context of the dream-narrative decided him, ill-advisedly, to attempt the ascent at night. As the monument was closed to the public at that time, he tried a route that proved to be his unmaking. It was a blustery spring evening with intermittent showers, a pair of facts included in the report made by Le Bureau de la Préfecture de Police de Paris which concluded that Mr. Twinn-Nolen’s fatal fall was accidental.
Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand Page 8