Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand

by Marc Woodworth

  Even if we can see a song like “Pigpen” as a kind of aesthetic statement, there’s no sense that it was written as a manifesto. Unlike most darlings of the rock literati, Pollard rarely writes in a way meant to force a lyric’s potential on us. Suggesting it’s a statement, however much sense it makes to do so, seems beside the point; why compromise the energy by naming it at all? There’s a purity in the way the song both articulates its sense of what makes art work in the lyrics and then—strange sparks flying and a voice reaching us through a tin megaphone a hundred yards away—becomes the embodiment of its implicit credo.

  There’s a sense in which every tendency in the writing of this off-the-cuff ditty serves to illustrate the idea that the downward movement leads to something alive and “real,” that the nature of Bee Thousand’s art is to discover the diamonds of being in the dirt of the pigpen.

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  It’s not clear to the uninitiated how ardent Guided by Voices fans can sustain themselves on such a regular infusion of songs which can, to the skeptical ear, sound like the half-baked ramblings of someone with a severe case of arrested development, clinical attention deficit disorder, and a head incapable of coherent thought. However cartoonish or juvenile some of the images in a Guided by Voices song might seem (and Pollard himself is a little abashed at the pre-adolescent tendencies of his early work, even including those evident in some of the songs on Bee Thousand), the way Pollard’s language emerges in the songs is almost unfailingly interesting. These songs send out a vision of the world almost as strange and unexpected as the world itself. They do it without betraying any desire to replace experience with a maxim or anything falsely pretty. T.S. Eliot wrote that Henry James had “a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” Though it would be hard to think of a pair of writers who differ more than Pollard and James (Pollard doesn’t think of himself as a writer in a literary sense; James’s identification with the highest reaches of literary ambition was absolute), Eliot’s praise nevertheless applies in the case of Guided by Voices’ songs. The world comes through in the songs—whatever world it is—without a package, without an idea or a false order to tame it, to make it safe or even understandable. Reality comes through mediated by the songs but not violated by them, not by ideas, not by the writer’s intentions.

  The progression of images, at its best, replicates the way consciousness works so that it’s true to the movement of the imagination while, at the same time, transforming that real process into something artful. “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory” is a song Pollard wrote as the result of an acid trip. He “was looking into the mirror in the bathroom” when his face “changed into [his] son’s face.” He continues: “I saw my son in my face and it moved me to tears. That’s what inspired me to write that song, although the lyrics have nothing to do with that experience.” The displacement of the obvious connection that a different songwriter might have made between the emotion (“tears”), the conflation of the father’s identity with the son’s, and the psychological category suggested by “looking into the mirror” to come up with a song that has “nothing to do with that experience” is a potent example of the kind of songwriting that resists the obvious to access the authentic. There’s a fluid movement between the physical (“cold hands touching my face”), the symbolic (“don’t hide the snake can see you”) and the emotionally direct (“old friends you might not remember fading away from you”). There’s no obvious connection between the different states that we go through when listening to the words, but the movement is a record of the mind, or what Buddhists might call “raw mind,” experiencing the world and articulating that experience through language. The intimacy of the touch of cold hands on the face morphing into a quasi-biblical parable of experience and transgression then becomes an image of the speaker moving through the halls of glass. It’s a progress that is as unlikely, strange, and resistant to “meaning” as the unrepeatable and unexpected action of experience itself.

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  Pollard’s lyrics are often described by critics, when they’re described at all, as a brand of tossed-off surrealism, as if his verbal sensibility is somehow incidental to the songs themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth, yet when Pollard describes how he takes notes during meetings of the Monument Club, his group of Dayton drinking pals, and uses their phrases, slips of tongue, or his own creative misunderstanding of what they say as prompts for songs, he encourages just that kind of easy, half-dismissive response. Anyone could write lyrics that way, right? Or so Pollard’s story encourages us to believe. How are we supposed to think of his lyrics as anything but incidental when the author himself tells us his work involves little more than mixing and matching snippets of casual talk?

  Like a lot of his answers to interview questions, Pollard’s standard response to how he writes lyrics is a harmless and not entirely impenetrable smokescreen. It’s much easier to talk about the genesis of what are among the most inventive, disorienting, and verbally alive lyrics in rock as some fluke—the sifted notes from another night at the bar—than to try to name the unnamable process that turns that source into art. And to do so, even if it were possible, is beside the point. The songs are the songs, complete and sui generis. Talking about them, translating and paraphrasing them, explaining them—none of that can touch their power.

  Sometimes Pollard speaks of his words as “poetry” and when he does, however thin the discussion of his process is, we’re a little closer to the truth, yet not all the way there: his lyrics are not poems in any conventional literary sense (nor do they attempt to be), yet they are—or can be—poetic. The words of a song like “From a Voice Plantation,” recorded ten years after Bee Thousand was released, are anything but a conventional pop lyric. It has the aura of a self-sustaining verbal artifact, but even this poem-like lyric requires the structure and sound of the music and the timbre of Pollard’s voice to achieve its full capacity. Which is as it should be: lyrics must work with the music. The absence of a pop song’s verse-chorus progression, the propulsive jungle beat, and the skittish guitar lines all contribute significantly to the mysterious and unsettling mood of the song.

  The album on which this song appears, Universal Truths and Cycles, once carried the working title “From a Voice Plantation.” Imagine a place where voices grow like crops. The fact that the voices grow on a plantation, with its associations of regimentation, commerce, and, perhaps, slavery, gives the song a sinister cast. Think of the different tone that would be produced were the title of the song “From a Voice Garden.” Growing voices in a garden would seem a bright, organic process, something of a lark. But on the “voice plantation,” such sunny possibilities are unrealized as we enter instead a dark and cryptic parable with no obvious lesson. What makes these lyrics rise to the level of the poetic is precisely their resistance to paraphrase. They’re slippery and suggestive, full of nuance and mood.

  Answering an interviewer’s question about how he writes so many songs, Pollard replies with a verbal shrug and a laugh, “I’m Guided by Voices, what can I say?” The name Guided by Voices (at least primarily) refers to the way Pollard is inspired by the voices from the history of rock. Songwriting began for him as an act of recovery—both the recovery of the kind of music he loved and the reanimation (to use Lewis Khlar’s term) of a lost moment when that music awoke in him a powerful feeling of pleasure as a child. To be someone who “no longer can listen” to those voices is to become, for someone like Pollard, less than human, an “it,” as the lyrics of “From a Voice Plantation” suggest. We see the not-yet-ten-year-old climb a hill to hear something only to find rats who “gang” and “topple” as well as “evil grids.” What are these grids? Impossible to say for certain. The image may have emerged from the idea of crops grown in strict fields—the “onion fields”—of a plantation. The image might instead or also bring to mind electrical towers on hilltops—part of the power grid. Whatever you see in the images merging the agricultural with the mechanical, the pro
duct that grows on this voice plantation is not easy to assimilate into a reading of the lyric. Pollard calls it a smoke ring from the throat of a ghost, something you choke on: this is not a welcome crop, whatever it is, but one that cuts off your voice. The lyric ends with the speaker driven to his knees “in terror,” a victim of the workings of the voice plantation. If the lyric alone is not as fully charged without the music and melody of the song—if it is not quite a self-sufficient poem—it shows a very sophisticated and self-possessed verbal intelligence at work.

  Even with a song like “Smothered in Hugs” which is relatively free from the more extreme verbal effects that often define the lyrics of Bee Thousand, we are both drawn to a possible understanding that gives us a sense of the lyrics’ original occasion—whether an instance of familiar language (“something eating everyone”) or a recognizable feeling (“I really don’t know”)—even as we find it impossible to insist on any reading as the verbal ground shifts beneath us. We can readily see the outline of a relationship—“I believed you … I’m gonna leave with you”—but the language disarms us repeatedly, an aspect of the song that, instead of leaving us cold, serves to draw us closer. Even once we know that Pollard was a grade-school teacher and the compound noun “textbook committee” becomes more accessible given that context, the strange list that precedes it—judges and saints—lifts our imaginations. The left-turns that cause the lyric to swerve from simple declaration—“In the summer that you came / there was something eating everyone”—to unanticipated images that bear no easy relation to what the words have so far established—“the watchers of the floods were busy in their chambers”—fill us with emotions, in this case those of regret, self-pity, and anger.

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  If the immediate precedent for the rejection of intelligibility in Pollard’s writing is the music of sixties British rock, there’s also something deeply American about it as well. Some of the lyrics on Bee Thousand are a clear—and in some sense terminal—extension of an older American tradition of songwriting, one that doesn’t recreate the lines of the visible world, but finds emotion through indirection and what’s deeply idiosyncratic. Pollard’s songs push the limits of what a given lyric can contain without coming apart, although sometimes it is the coming apart that they seem to crave most. The instinctive drive of an artist to reject logic and meaning in favor of the energy, delight, and speed of unlike and unexpected images sparking off one another is, however unconsciously, deeply rooted in the American song-making tradition.

  Writing about the songs on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), Greil Marcus defines the “folk-lyric” song as one “made up of verbal fragments that had no direct or logical relationship to each other”:

  Just as it is a mistake to underestimate the strangeness of the cultures that spoke through folk-lyric fragments …, it is also a mistake to imagine that when people spoke through these fragments, they were not speaking—for themselves as contingent individuals. What appears to be a singer’s random assemblage of fragments to fit a certain melody line may be, for that singer, an assemblage of fragments that melody called forth. It may be a sermon delivered by the singer’s subconscious, his or her second mind. It may be a heretic’s way of saying what could never be said out loud, a mask over a boiling face. . . . .

  In this mood, in this weather, the most apparently commonplace fragment … cannot be meaningless …

  For all our celebrations of its quirkiness (and Marcus’ overdetermined insistence on the strangeness of American folk culture) we nevertheless underestimate the accomplished individuality of Pollard’s writing because of the presence in the songs of familiar rock tropes (electric guitars, 4/4 rhythms, British Invasion-influenced melodies, fat hooks). There’s also the way a string of “nonsense” words seems to occur only to give flesh to a melody when it is the melody that calls forth language. And it’s tempting to make a connection between what Kevin Fennell calls “a very strong Appalachian Midwest blue-collar” sensibility in Dayton and the Appalachian folk culture that informs so much of American traditional music. Pollard even jokes that Guided by Voices is comprised of “lo-fi British Briars” defining “Briars” as what “we call redneck hillbillies around here.” It’s a telling if elusive combination of influences—British psychedelia, local Dayton life, and “hillbilly” America.

  What’s most germane about Marcus’s ideas as they relate to the writing on Bee Thousand is his assertion that what may seem to be anonymous writing—the putting together in new ways of received fragments—is not anonymous but a means of expressing the identity of the artist, however complicated the representation of that identity becomes in the songs. We’re often content to let the language of a Bee Thousand lyric lie but there are moments when we can hear in it “a sermon delivered by the singer’s subconscious.” The songs on Bee Thousand have a way of saying what otherwise could never be said, serving as “masks” through which the voice, modulating from stage whisper to hammy menace, can emerge from the depths of the singer.

  On Bee Thousand this voice most often reveals Pollard’s sense of loss and his desire for escape. It becomes not a mask over a boiling face, but a mask over an alternately dreaming and sad one. (I once listened to a Buddhist monk talk about his mother who’d died when he was a child; his face recorded the changing emotions that his story brought up with the pure responsiveness of a sheet on a line moved by the wind—Pollard’s language records the movement of consciousness in a way that reminds me of that monk’s face.) The desire for imaginative freedom is not only evident in the obvious escapist elements of fairy-tale and the fantastic in these songs, but also in the way the language insists that it can do whatever it likes, go wherever it wants to go. The lyrics are both a means of recording the desire for freedom as well as enacting it. The need to create language like this is not secondary to the need for escape, but inextricable from it, causal, as essential to writing as food is to the body (in “Hardcore UFO’s” there’s the imperative “eat the words”—a necessary preliminary to building a playground in your head—and in Universal Truths and Cycles’ “Wire Greyhounds” (2002) we hear another command: “sit up and beg for slivers of language that the night may offer”). The other side of this desire for the kind of language on which Pollard thrives is a fear of a more purposeful use of words that thwarts freedom. “Her Psychology Today’s” lyrics offer an example of what happens when language is not used in the open-ended, art-for-art’s sake spirit that Pollard favors. The subject of the song “launches her attack / In her opening paragraph”—that is, her language has a purpose, a point, desires a result: “To elicit a response / to determine every gain.” We imagine, perhaps, a domestic dispute, a premeditated and aggressive kind of talk meant to gain psychological ground against a partner or intimate. In Pollard’s universe, a “psychology” that employs language to “attain something” is an enemy of an imagination that thrives on free-play. “Her” intentional language is a destructive “attack” that causes the heavens, and what they might represent, “to split in half.”

  Pollard almost compulsively refuses to let words connect to the real world for more than a moment before opening them up to the artificial, the fantastic, or the grotesque. He knows that freedom from reality can only be as pleasurable as it is if we remember the thing from which we’re escaping, so there are essential moments when the language of a song comes down to earth: “I love you, I must confess,” “I’m here to stay,” “there was something eating everyone.” But the songs quickly complicate that reality once it’s announced. As “Hardcore UFO’s” suggests, this is an aesthetic of building playgrounds in your head, listening to angels calling, creating contact with a realm beyond the mundane and ordinary. Part of the appeal of Guided by Voices’ music has to do with its embodiment of a fantasy of escape. It rejects “responsible” linguistic representation as it rejects “reality” in order to recover the spirit of possibility we imagine was ours in childhood. The songs refuse to put away child
ish things and even as most of us have done just that, at least in the way we live our external lives, we’re able to relive for the space of a song or an album or a concert the primacy of imagination, fantasy, and freedom.

  Pollard’s status as an alternative legend is so large not only because of his songs and their capacity to transport their listeners, but because he himself embodies the escape from reality that we crave but aren’t single-minded or self-reliant enough to realize. We don’t, most of us, usually choose the basement over the family room, however much we might be tempted by a subterranean existence where cultivating our imaginations is our main activity. In these songs there’s the old dream (see “Rip Van Winkle”) of an escape from domesticity into the realm of “unproductive” fantasy and leisure, far from the demands of home. It’s telling that one of the few appealing female figures (if we assume the beloved in “Peep-Hole” is a woman and the speaker a man) on Bee Thousand has a brain that’s a “cluttered mess.” A disorderly mind is much more congenial to the open-ended imagination that the songs champion than the desire of the woman who wants the speaker to come with her in “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory,” the “with you, without you” partner of “Hardcore UFO’s,” or the exacting adversary in “Her Psychology Today.”

  At the opposite extreme from these figures who are impediments to creative freedom and distinct from she of the lovably cluttered mind in “Peep-Hole,” the female figure in “Hot Freaks” is a (male) escapist’s surrealist-inspired wet dream. She’s all fantasy projection, constructed entirely for purposes of sex and language, though not necessarily in that order. The song describes a woman who’s a “non-dairy creamer” with “a wet spot bigger than a great lake.” Far from using language to determine every gain, this woman is herself made out of a vivid, dream-like series of spectacularly unlikely metaphors. The excitement generated by the language-play in the song is the primary thing here—the sexual enters to provide a recognizable cognate for that excitement. Pollard is getting off on the way words go together and it’s more transporting and transformative than any erotic act that the song may or may not suggest. Language that succeeds in lifting the imagination turns him into “a new man.”