Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand

by Marc Woodworth

  For a lot of songs that made it onto records during that period the recording process was really simple. You’d turn the recorder on, play, and that was it. There was also a lot of stuff where the music was recorded first—it could either be a full band piece or an acoustic song—and then Bob would grab his notebook and somehow put an amazing melody on it the first cut. He can pop them out like no one else.

  Every once in a while, I’d get the call and show up to play. I like to joke that the upfront notice you get from Bob is about three minutes, but usually he would give me an acoustic demo of the songs ahead of time so I could make up a bass part or a guitar riff. The vast majority of the time, whatever I played he would be fine with. If I played something Bob didn’t like, he would say he didn’t like it and then I wouldn’t play it. There were also some times when he’d say, “I’ve got this idea for the bass,” and ask me to play it a certain way. For the most part, though, you had the freedom to take a song and put your own part on it.

  I went over one day to record “I Am a Scientist” and “Gold Star for Robot Boy.” Don Thrasher came over to play drums and I was supposed to play bass. I didn’t know the songs before I got there. I tried them a couple of times and screwed them up. I couldn’t get it right, so eventually Bob stepped in and played bass. The only Bee Thousand song that I’m actually on is the acoustic introduction to “Tractor Rape Chain” which we’d recorded a few years before when we were screwing around in Bob’s house. Somehow he found that on a tape and when he was working on Bee Thousand put it on as the introduction to “Tractor Rape Chain.”

  When we were at Toby’s, it was just a laid-back atmosphere. When you’re in the studio, even if it’s only somebody else’s garage studio, the clock’s running. You have headphones on and there are guys going around mic’ing stuff. You have to have everything mapped out ahead of time, like knowing you’re going to record a certain number of songs in a session. Even if those things are not effecting you consciously, you can become a little tentative and start to sound stale. When you’re recording on four-track at somebody’s house, nobody has to worry about any of those things. During those days, some of the sessions could be pretty beer-fueled. It wasn’t like you were in the studio paying money, so if something sounded like shit, you just rewound the tape and started over. During the time of those three mid-nineties albums, the songs weren’t done all at one time. They were recorded over a lot of different sessions and then pieced together. The appeal of Vampire on Titus, Bee Thousand, and Alien Lanes, the vast majority of which were recorded at home on either four-or eight-track, is that the informal atmosphere transferred to the tape. You had one or two chances to record a song. If it wasn’t completely off, it was good enough. There was a raw energy that came across on those records.

  Bee Thousand went through several different versions with different sequences and different songs. Bob would think he had the title and the songs and the sequence all set but then the next day everything would be completely different. We would be at his house and after playing basketball or watching a football game, we’d take the freedom cruise. We’d all get into the car, go to the drive-through to get beer, and then cruise around blasting whatever version of the album he’d been putting together. I remember that I heard “Echos Myron” for the first time on one of those drives and I just about lost my mind.

  Bee Thousand Word Cluster

  GENERATION

  breeding / nymphos / cocoon / milk / blood / fertile / bearing / wed / sweet flesh / summer / laid / get wet / lifeblood

  Tobin Sprout’s Bee Thousand—era Tascam Portastudio 1 Four-Track Recorder

  Question: Can you give us some four-track tips?

  GdByVoices: Never attempt any kind of noise reduction. Buy a Tascam Porta-studio One. And a Radio Shack wide-mouth microphone and a Memory Man effects box. And drink heavily.

  Guided by Voices Narrative #7: Tobin Sprout

  Bee Thousand was our last innocent album. It was the last album that we made before we started hanging out with rock stars. We had signed with Scat and we were just about to sign with Matador, but we were still these naive—I can’t say “kids” because we were pretty old at the time: we were just naïve. The music was still ours, as far as I was concerned. Writing and recording was something we just did for the fun of it, even though we had signed with Scat, which I thought was the biggest thing. That seemed like the peak. The Grand Hour and Vampire on Titus were the first records we did with Scat. Bee Thousand was the last album we did before we took that next step into the limelight. That’s what makes it really sincere. I noticed a difference between Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, which was the next notch up as far as recognition in the larger world goes. After Bee Thousand, I think we slowly lost it—not lost it, exactly, but it had become something else by the time we got to Under the Bushes, Under the Stars. By then, we were really out there in a different way.

  I remember the casualness of Bee Thousand. There wasn’t any pressure. Although some of the bigger band songs were recorded at Kevin Fennell’s, a lot of the stuff was recorded in my basement. The garage was underneath the house—you’d pull up under there and you could also walk up to the front door. The garage was on the first level and then the basement went back into the ground. It was cold and damp like most basements are. It was an older house—I think it was built in the 1930s—so the basement had that smell to it. And it would flood once in a while. There were washing machines down there, some storage areas, and the stairway that went upstairs. There was real dark wood, faded wood.

  I remember recording the vocals for “Hot Freaks” there because my wife Laura was having a garage sale out in the driveway. The driveway was right above the room where we were recording, and it was hot so we had the windows open. Bob had headphones on and all you could hear was him screaming “hot freaks!” every so often. People were walking up the driveway, hearing Bob and I screaming “hot freaks!” and rolling their eyes around. He was just singing, unaware that anyone else could hear him. I don’t think he would have cared anyway. That was the first time we got a good vocal sound using the Memory Man echoplex. It was one of the first solid state ones. Actually, the machine still has markings for the “Hot Freaks” sound so we could get the setting back again, but it never sounded the same as it did that first time. I had already recorded all the music for what became “Hot Freaks” and asked Bob if he had anything to sing over it. A lot of the time I had tracks that I’d tried to put a melody over and for some reason it just wouldn’t work so I’d play the recordings for Bob and he would see what he could come up with. “Hot Freaks” was one of the songs that I had all the music recorded and he just put a vocal over the top of it.

  There wasn’t really a band when we were recording Bee Thousand. Until we played the CBGB’s show and the Scat tours, we had no plans for playing out anymore. There wasn’t any sense in it. No one was paying any attention to us in Dayton anyway. But that wasn’t all bad. Because we were in Dayton there was a buffer zone. We were left on our own as to what we thought was cool. It was like the record store that has all the comics—an out of the way place where the nerds really do have the cool stuff. So there wasn’t a band, but there was a lot of dropping by. Who played what depended on who we could get together at the time. If Greg was there, he’d play bass, or maybe Dan Toohey. Otherwise, most of the time, I’d play bass. When I’d throw bass on a song, it was often just a guitar that I EQ’d to sound like a bass. Sometimes I’d use only the top strings. So you had a bass there, but it wasn’t real. Or Dan would leave his bass, so I played that once in a while. Bob and I would also have drum contests and use the best drums on a song. Kevin Fennell would play the drums when he was here and Don Thrasher played drums on a couple of songs, too.

  For the most part, though, it was Bob and Jimmy and I in my basement. It was always easy for the three of us to work together. We’d talk for a little bit before Bob would get his lyrics out. Either he would have a song he wanted to record or we would put someth
ing together. Sometimes Bob would say, “Give me some Big Star chords,” so I would play some Big Star chords and he would come up with a melody. We either wrote that way or I would have something like “Hot Freaks” already recorded and hand it to him for the lyrics and melody or Bob might bring over a tape that he’d recorded at home and I would run it from the two-track onto one of the tracks on the four-track. Whichever way it went, after an hour or two we’d have six or seven songs taped and were ready to listen to them to see if they were going to be on the album. It’s the same when I paint: you just get into a groove and time flies. I usually know with the first couple of brush strokes whether a painting is going to work. That’s what happened with the songs we were recording, too.

  I was the only one who knew how to record, so I was pretty much the guru there. Bob was responsible mostly for the lyrics and the vocals. I had come to the point where recording using the four-track was second nature. I’d record something, then bounce tracks, record something else, bounce tracks. If we needed another track, I knew what I could do to get it. I don’t think we ever came to the point where we said, “Look, we can’t do it because we’re stuck,” or “We can’t get what we need because we don’t have enough tracks.” We always managed to find the tracks.

  Sometimes recording was challenging because there was usually a party going on. So I’m trying to get microphones set up while everybody else is scrambling around and kicking things over. Getting everything together was my thing. I was right there at the front of what was going on. I didn’t like going to big studios later on because I lost a little bit of control over the situation. Working in the basement with the four-track created a very intimate sound; it limited the fatness of the sound that you could get, but it was really intimate. Because we felt comfortable with everybody there, we were free to do whatever we wanted to do. You’re not second-guessing. But there was no sense of doing something lo-fi. It was just the way we were recording. We were using one of the first Tascam Portastudio 1 four-tracks that had DBX noise reduction. It didn’t even have an effects loop, so all the effects went straight in. A lot of people were picking up these machines at the time. Using a four-track became common enough that they had to find a category for it: DIY, lo-fi, whatever.

  When I was doing “Hardcore UFO’s” I made a mistake. I had the track that has the guitar going all the way through it but I left it on “record” when I was doing something else. I caught it right away, so it’s not out very long, just long enough to notice how much more pleasant it is to listen to without that guitar there. Then it comes back in and you realize the guitar definitely needs to be there. Some things we didn’t do intentionally came out better than what we’d intended to do. There were other ways to make a song less “creamy,” like throwing in some really nasty guitars. GBV had an edge to it. You didn’t want it to get too soft like “we don’t want to get too sentimental here.” Sometimes it seemed to me like we were afraid to put our feelings out there and really bare our souls. I tried to do the opposite with Moonflower Plastic, where I didn’t throw in nasty guitar at the critical moments and just relied on the melody.

  Most of the songs that I wrote myself, I recorded on my own. It was just easier to knock them out that way than to find Kevin and set his drums up. I was too lazy or too impatient to try to find everybody to put a song together. And a lot of times I was happy with the recordings I made that way. “Awful Bliss” was about a woman: be careful what you want because you might get it. I’ll start off with a couple of lines that will give me an idea. Then the next line will come and the song changes and writes itself as it goes. “Esther’s Day” was about a woman stifled by life, whatever her life is, who works in a diner and just wants to get away. She has dreams of leaving, driving off, away from her life into a better life. Sometimes I can see an image of what I’m writing about. I could see the people in “Mincer Ray” struggling to get from point A to point B, but there are cliffs they could fall from and holes they could fall into, danger all around. You just have to have hope that you can get to the other side. Mincer Ray—“ray” like a “ray gun”—is an antagonist and Richer Day is the optimist. They’re speaking to each other. The light that comes down is guiding them through. I like the idea that the first thought is the best thought so I usually go with that. I rewrite a little bit, but not a whole lot. Once I get to the point where I think there’s an image there that I like, I leave it. If it feels right and everything is where it should go then it feels finished.

  I recorded “You’re Not an Airplane” in my home. I got my pilot’s license in ’93 and flew for a couple of years and then my son was born. I haven’t really flown in ten years. I might go back to it. I’ve always been into airplanes. That’s why I got my pilot’s license, finally. I used to go to the Air Force museum all the time. I don’t remember exactly when I wrote that song, but at one point I moved the piano so I could look out the window when I played. The house was right on the outskirts of the city. I could see toward Dayton. I barely had a view of downtown. There was a park across the road with a tall bell tower in it. I could see that and trees. I’ll write a song on the piano or the guitar, whichever one is in front of me. I’ve taken a lot of songs that I’ve written for a band and played them just with the piano. It’s interesting to hear how they work in simplified form. It seems that a lot of times the melody stands out a lot more when you’re just playing with a piano than with a band.

  We went with Robert Griffin to master Bee Thousand at a studio where they were just starting to use computers. Now that everyone records and edits using computers, I couldn’t imagine it being any other way. At the time, though, it was new to us, but I never really thought about whether we should be using the technology or not. It’s just what we were doing. Bob had sequenced the album already so we tinkered with things a little bit, just tightened them up. We could do things like drop in “You’re Not an Airplane” right at the end. We did add some things at that point like the conversation in “Mincer Ray.” That’s Bob and Jimmy talking about their dad calling them up, saying he wants money, a tape recording of them in everyday life. We added the part with “Jimmy was a fly” to “Esther’s Day” by dropping it in using the computer. The technology we used then—cross-fading, editing—seems pretty sophomoric now, but at the time it was the big thing.

  We weren’t conscious of creating a lo-fi trend or anything, so using computers to edit what we’d recorded on a four-track didn’t seem like a contradiction. We were just making the type of music that we liked and had no idea that it was going to go anywhere. I don’t really know why it took off. Music goes in cycles. In the sixties there was an influx of pop that sounded real. Then the cycle continues and music gets to a point where it becomes superficial because it’s over-produced. At that point, real-sounding pop music drops back into the underground until it rises up again. It’s rising up again now to a degree, but in the sixties and then in the eighties that kind of pop definitely came to the front with REM and some other bands. So we happened to be at the beginning of a new cycle. It wasn’t like we were doing something that hadn’t been done before; we were just rehashing what we really liked about pop music from the sixties and seventies. We were doing what we loved to do and there was no way we thought it would become what it became.

  And, anyway, I thought I was over the hill when I first met these guys. When we started I was probably twenty-eight. Even back then I thought, “I’ve got to get my shit together. I can’t play in a band and run around anymore.” When I left the band, I was forty. During the time we were making Bee Thousand, I was getting married, and then my son was on the way. I was actually on tour in Vancouver when Turner was born. That was a wake up call. It got to the point where I had a choice to make. I knew these guys wanted to go on and I didn’t want to say, “No, you’ve got to wait for me.” So that was the reason I left. There wasn’t a big falling out like you hear about; I just went my way and the Voices kept going. I was also painting at that time. I had left graphic
design and after that my paintings just took off. All of a sudden I was making a living as a painter. The touring also took me away from that: another reason I left.

  By the time we started touring, Bob’s kids were maybe in seventh and eighth grade, about the same age as my kids are now, so they were growing up quite a bit which makes it a little easier. I remember his daughter was in diapers when I first met him. When your kids are little, you don’t want to leave them at all. Now that I’ve been through the experience of being a father, I can understand better what it must have been like to do what Bob did with Guided by Voices and have a family at the same time. I finally got to the point where I did what I thought I should do and it was the right choice for me. I think in the long run I’m always going to be happy that I left when I did. I’ve gone back and forth about that choice for a long time, but if I hadn’t made it then I would have missed seeing my kids grow up. Still, sometimes you can’t help but say, “God, I wish I had stayed.” It would have been nice to go on with it, but I couldn’t both do the music and be with my family. I loved that era from Vampire on Titus to Alien Lanes. After I left, I couldn’t listen to Bee Thousand for a long time. We’d played it out so much and I knew every nook and cranny on it. But lately, I’ve put it on. I’m pretty impressed with it sometimes. Just the feel of it. It takes me back to that time. It was a great time.