Guided By Voices History
Part I: 1983-1994
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It's no use trying to write something new about Guided By Voices.
Nearly every detail of the band's history and methods has been ransacked. Robert Pollard’s transformation from fourth-grade schoolteacher to international rock star. His notoriously prolific and often brilliant output. The band's rise from total obscurity. The raucous, alcohol-fueled concerts. The liberation of song-structure and recording techniques. All of it.
But since Guided By Voices called it quits in April 2004, it seems only right to look back on its history. The following article will try not to tread any ground too well-worn, but rather fill in gaps of the band's chronology and offer insider perspectives from current and past members, friends and industry types.
Why? Because whether you love 'em or hate 'em, Guided By Voices is legendary. And for a band to be legendary in its own time is a feat. Along with a few notable others (Pavement, Sebadoh, Palace Brothers, Daniel Johnston), Guided By Voices broke the lo-fi movement wide open in the early 1990s. The band's cult status is mythological in itself, some fans regularly traveling hundreds of miles for concerts they've seen 20 times before.
Guided By Voices' Captain, Robert Pollard, has professed to having written 3,000 songs, and if you follow his voluminous release schedule you’ll agree. Guided By Voices' 1994 masterpiece Bee Thousand was named to several “Best Albums of the '90s” lists. In fact, Pitchfork gave it the #4 spot, beating out Nirvana’s Nevermind and a slew of other commercial monsters. In an August 2004 issue, Spin named Robert Pollard one of the Top 50 Rock frontmen of all time.
And all this from a band that broke up in 1992.
Robert Ellsworth Pollard’s Midwestern upbringing was not drastically different from that of his peers. He grew up in a small blue-collar suburb of north Dayton, Ohio, just off the burly Interstate 75 highway. His father (also a Robert) insisted that Bobby Jr. participate heavily in sports. The difference was that little Bob excelled at whatever he did.
During his ambitious school years in Northridge, Bob played basketball, football and baseball. In 1970 he pitched a perfect game at the Little League championships, garnering a whopping 17 strikeouts. In 1974, as a defensive back for the Northridge varsity football team, Bob broke a school record with seven interceptions. In 1975, he made the third team of All Greater Dayton high school basketball. As a pitcher on Wright State’s baseball team, Bob even threw the University's first NCAA no-hitter.
"I didn't know I was pitching one, because the other team scored a run on a walk," Bob would later say in CIN Weekly. "I struck out the last batter and everyone charged me. I didn't know what was going on."
Chalk up Bob's talent to The Family Way; brother Jim also played basketball well enough to score a scholarship to Arizona State. In fact, we might have seen Jimmy shilling for the NBA on Wheaties boxes if not for a knee injury he suffered in 1981, his freshman year. Jimmy had also been named Basketball Player of the Year by the Greater Dayton All Star Team, and Outstanding Area Athlete by the Dayton Agonis Club in 1980.
This pleased Bob Sr. immensely. Although he had dreamed of being a sports hero himself, the elder Pollard quit high school in 1947 as a 15-year-old sophomore. He would go on to work for 32 years at Delphi-Harrison, a division of General Motors. "My wife (Carol) and I keep busy going to all the grandkids' games," Pollard Sr. told the Dayton Daily News. "We have five (grandchildren) playing basketball."
Despite such promise in athletics, and almost as if in defiance of his father, Bobby Jr. grew hopelessly enamored with rock 'n roll. "When I was really young and the Beatles were young, I couldn’t have long hair because my dad wanted me to be an athlete," Bob said to Resonance. "Of course, no drugs, no smoking. Pretty much no sexual exploration."
Born on October 31, 1957, Bob had actually experienced -- on some level -- the first waves of The British Invasion. His older sisters introduced him to the genre, and his father let him select albums from Columbia Record Club. Like millions of Americans, he witnessed the Beatles' first performance on The Ed Sullivan Show and was immediately galvanized. Bob also picked up the nasty habit of singing in a British accent, due in part to his steady diet of Beatles, Kinks and The Who.
This left an indelible mark on the young Daytonian, planting the life-long seeds of melody and song structure in his fertile brain. Almost unconsciously, he would work through little song progressions until they sounded right. He wrote tunes that would last into his adult years (the melody for “Weed King,” from Propeller, was devised in grade school). Later, Bob would claim that he wrote a 500 acapella songs from age nine until high school.
He also kept busy creating fake band names and song titles, stapling notebook pages together and imagining elaborate liner notes for non-existent double-albums. He wrote a music column for his high school newspaper. He enlisted friends to craft album covers and shoot mock photo sessions. But neither he nor his friends could play any instruments. As Magnet writer Jonathan Valania aptly put it, being a rock star in Dayton was (and still is), “more a state of mind” than anything else.
Dayton is far from a bustling metropolis, despite its many historical credits. Named after Jonathan Dayton, a captain in the American Revolutionary army and the youngest signer of the Constitution, the city was incorporated in 1805. Known as "the birthplace of flight," Dayton was home to airplane inventors Orville and Wilbur Wright, (who maintained a bicycle shop near the Little Miami River), the noted poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, and actors like Martin Sheen, Rob Lowe and Jonathan Winters, among others. The city hosts the massive Wright-Patterson Airforce Base, which is rumored to harbor aliens in its infamous Hangar 18. Visionary 19th-century businessman James Ritty founded the company that would become National Cash Register (or NCR). And Dayton boasts more patents per capita than any other place on Earth. The cash register, self-contained refrigerator, parachute, pop-top can, parking meter, self-starting engine and stepladder are just a few.
But an economic boom in the 1950s was followed by violent race riots in the '60s, effectively splitting the city into East and West sides, boundaries that remain to this day. Its culture is still firmly rooted in the Midwestern Rust Belt - even with its improving cultural facilities - and manufacturing and printing remain its chief industries. Attempts to unify the local music scene are repeatedly thwarted by disinterest. Literally at the crossroads of America (Interstates 70 and 75) Dayton often feels like an overlooked, underdog city: Hard-working and smoke-stained, with one foot in the Appalachian foothills.
But that only motivated Bob more. In the early 1970s, his religious devotion to rock n' roll drove him to The Michigan Palace in Detroit for concerts by Kiss, Hawkwind, Kansas and Pretty Things. Although not old enough to purchase alcohol, he joined the Dayton metal band Anacrusis in 1975. He had just graduated from high school as a decorated athlete, and was preparing to start his freshman year at Wright State University.
Bob bought a cheap acoustic guitar with his graduation money and began practicing. He had been inspired by Hank Davidson, a high school classmate, guitarist and all-around recluse. Hank's long fingernails and tiny, deformed digits amazed Bob and motivated him to learn the instrument. More than ten years later, Bob would pay homage to Hank with the song "Hank's Little Fingers," and in interviews, Bob would even theorize that Hank was responsible for Guided By Voices. "He'd put a rubberband around his wrist and put a pick on the end," Bob once said at a concert, explaining Hank's unique method of playing.
As his athletic tendencies waned through college, Bob's father reminded him that if he ever quit sports, he'd have to get a regular job. So he did, as a dishwasher.
A student and dishwasher by day, Bob spent his free time in Anacrusis singing songs by Slade, Thin Lizzy, Blue Oyster Cult, Ted Nugent and Led Zeppelin. Mitch Mitchell, Anacrusis’ chain-smoking guitarist, had forged a close bond with Bob over the years, and now they were playing shows together at Dayton’s crowded, smoky Domino Club. They traded musical ideas like baseball cards, each feeding on the other’s enthusiasm. Mitch had of course been in a few bands before, most notably with Kevin Fennell, a drummer and fellow Northridge native that yearned for more than wanky hard-rock covers and disco.
Around this time the first strands of punk and progressive rock were infiltrating America’s heartland. Dayton was by no means the cultural center of Ohio, but like any town its size, it had its share of forward-looking music aficionados. In fact, some of the most forward-looking music was being made in Ohio. Devo and Pere Ubu had started garnering national attention outside of the Buckeye State.
Mitch Mitchell introduced Bob to Devo’s first album Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!, much to Bob’s chagrin. “I couldn’t believe anyone would put out an album that sucked so bad,” he said in Puncture. “But I was into that theatrical prog-rock stuff, so I kept listening to it and reading the lyrics, and finally I decided, ‘this shit’s amazing!’” Genesis, Wire and King Crimson soon followed.
At this point, Bob and Mitch were asked to leave Anacrusis due to the fact that they had shaved their heads and wanted to start doing Bram Tchaicovsky covers. Bob continued jamming with Mitch and Kevin in the basements and garages of Northridge. During his senior year of college, he married his high school sweetheart, Kim Dowler, a flag girl for the high school football team. He graduated from Wright State University and, on September 8, 1980, accepted a teaching position at High View Alternative School in Northridge.
Against his friends and family’s advice, Bob would lapse into phases of giddy musical experimentation. The backlog of '60s melodies in his head, coupled with the New Wave, post-disco zeitgeist of the early '80s, had produced a weird sort of restlessness. Bob needed to rock. The songs in his brain wouldn't stay put. They began forcing themselves into the world through whatever means possible.
Always the avid record collector, Bob continued to bone up on his favorite obscure bands. Besides the '60s bubblegum pop he loved as a child, he devoured, "Freakbeat bands of the post-Sgt Pepper '60s, like Wimple Winch, Tomorrow, the Nice, the Godz," Bob told Ptolemaic Terrascope. "Early '70s power pop like Big Star, Cheap Trick. Late '70s post-punk - Wire, XTC, Nightingales, Buzzcocks." Bob also worshipped at the altar of R.E.M., intrigued by their odd lyrics, Byrdsian riffs and mysterious origins.
At a softball game in Toledo, Ohio, Bob met Pete Jamison, a man who would become one of his constant companions. Also a Dayton native, Pete listened to some of Bob’s home-recorded music and found himself immediately enthralled.
In 1983, Bob began pitching band names to friends and club owners, including Beethoven and the American Flag, Mailbox, The Needmores and Instant Lovelies. "I know we actually played out as Instant Lovelies once at the Dayton Musician’s Co-op," Bob said. "(It) was typically for songwriters and acoustic performers. And it was Mitch and Kevin and myself. We asked the lady that runs it if we could play there just to see if we could do it. So she let us, and we were Instant Lovelies for one night, officially. After that we didn’t do anything for a while."
Bob tried to set up gigs at Dayton's Thousand and One club (now Walnut Hills), opening for national touring acts. "I used to go down and talk to the owner – even though I didn’t have a band at the time," he said. "I was going through and laying different names on (the owner), pretending that I had a band. That’s when I came up with Guided By Voices. I found it in the book and thought, ‘Wow, that’s kind of a cool name.’ I laid that name on people and everyone liked it – although no one liked our band.
"I think (Guided By Voices) is a good name," Bob continued. "I think it looks good. It’s symmetrical. It’s like seven letter divided by 'by' and seven letters. It’s easy to say too. It’s easier to say to me than 'GBV.'"
Bob practiced, wrote songs, and played a few live shows - the first in March of 1985. He spent his nights checking out Dayton’s other hometown acts. A few years prior, Tobin Sprout had been playing out with his band Figure 4, which included bassist Dan Toohey and drummer John Peterson.
“Bob, Pete and Jimmy used to come to the shows all the time,” Tobin said over the phone from his home in Leland, Michigan. “They were the only people around Dayton that were really paying attention at the time. I remember seeing them silhouetted — they had these long Dusters on — and eventually Bob introduced himself to me. Or actually, he had Pete bring me over and introduce me.” Tobin laughed and continued, “From that point on we just started hanging out and pretty much talking about music."
THE BASEMENT AND THE GARAGE
Music had become Bob’s secret passion. His insatiable appetite for new and experimental sounds was fed by friends and the hundreds of LPs he purchased at local record stores. Todd Robinson, owner of Luna Records, remembers Bob’s voracious intake of music. A 17-year-old right out of high school, Robinson worked at a Dayton record store Bob frequented.
“Bob was the first person to turn me on to a lot of different stuff,” Robinson said from Luna headquarters in Indianapolis. “He used to bring in Option magazine and talk about how they’d review anything — even a tape of him and me talking! He’d show me stuff he was looking for, and I’d try to get it. As time went on, we would see each other pretty regularly, usually on Fridays when he wanted to order records. Eventually he laid a copy of Forever Since Breakfast on me and told me it was coming out.”
Forever Since Breakfast marked the first in a long line of self-financed releases for Guided By Voices. With the help of his brother and Pete Jamison, Bob took out loans from Dayton Public Schools' Credit Union to manufacture the record. The title - typical of Bob's surreal sense of humor - was lifted from a Charles Manson quote.
In April of 1986, Bob had assembled Mitch Mitchell, Peyton Eric, and Paul Comstock to record the vinyl-only EP at Group Effort Studios in the tiny town of Crescent Springs, Kentucky. The seven tunes covered a range of genres, including the noisy, lilting acoustic ballad “Like I Do,” the jangly, R.E.M.-influenced “Sometimes I Cry” and the soulful mini-epic “Fountain of Youth.” Pete Jamison, now dubbed Guided By Voices' “Manager for Life,” snapped the cover photo of Bob & Crew looking sullen next to a jungle gym and rusty backyard slide.
“People occasionally ask me the loaded question,” Todd Robinson said, “which is ‘did you know GBV were going to be this great band?’ And I always reply with, ‘as soon as the double-tracked harmony kicks in on ‘Fountain of Youth,’ it was totally like, ‘This is the real fuckin’ deal’.”
The album sold poorly and lost money for the band, but Bob remained married to the idea of self-producing and releasing his albums. Although mostly ignored, Forever Since Breakfast did gain a handful of positive reviews. Nick Weiser, a music critic for Dayton’s now-defunct Journal Herald, was one of GBV’s few early proponents. Publicizing a show that GBV were to play with The Lyres, he wrote: “Guided By Voices is still developing, but I believe the group’s material is strong enough right now to land a major recording contract. Lead singer Bob Pollard is an excellent singer and songwriter. There’s more than a hint of the mid-'60s influence in Pollard’s writing as well, particularly in some of his melodies.”
Despite this minor recognition, Guided By Voices was relegated to opening-act status much of the time, even signing up for a local Battle of the Bands. A June 13 show at Gilly's jazz club with Fig. 4 fell through because - according to rumors reported by Nick Weiser - GBV had broken up. "(Bob Pollard) is such a fine songwriter it would be a shame if his songs went unheard," Weiser wrote. Local act Pleasures Pale took GBV's place.
Bob continued to work on new material and dutifully play shows through the rest of 1986. He began losing confidence in GBV's ability to sustain itself. He remembers a typical exchange with the owner of Gilly's: "He was like, 'We’ll give you two free drink tickets a piece, and the privilege of playing.' So we would lose money, 'cause if we blew an amp it was like $500. We just decided at that time it’s not worth playing live."
After a little time and distance, Bob realized he wanted to go in a more experimental direction, and began work on the album Down in the Valley, Guided By Voices’ first full-length.
“When Bob found out I took photographs,” Todd Robinson said, “he wanted to know if I’d shoot some stuff for Down in the Valley, which of course became Devil Between My Toes. The game plan was that Bob would come down to the record store and pick me up on a Saturday. It was a rainy day and I thought, ‘Well, since it’s raining, and I haven’t heard anything from him for a week, I guess it’s off.’”
Bob had not forgotten, nor did he care about the rain. He tracked down Todd, piled him and Peyton Eric into Mitch Mitchell’s rusty Cadillac, and drove around East Dayton scouting locations. The band posed on riverbanks and in front of bars, looking jaded and innocent at the same time, cigarettes dangling from their lips, long hair flapping in their faces.
“A lot of those photographs ended up in ‘The Official Ironmen Rally Song’ video,” Robinson said. “We had stopped at Pete (Jamison’s) mom and dad’s house, which had these really cool gargoyles. It almost looked like a Victorian mansion, it was a huge place, and we just shot a bunch of photos there.”
In late 1986, GBV began recording Devil Between My Toes in the 8-track garage studio of Steve Wilbur. This time, Tobin Sprout, Kevin Fennell and Bob’s brother Jim contributed their talents. Of the 14 songs on the album, two were instrumentals, betraying Bob's prog-rock tendencies. R.E.M. remained a strong influence, but Bob’s songwriting had come into its own with eccentric, hook-laden numbers like “Hank’s Little Fingers” and “Hey, Hey Spaceman.” The lyrics took an increasingly Richard Brautigan-esque turn, and Bob’s backlog of melodies began to seep through.
“Pollard’s deep, tremulous vocal on ‘Old Battery’ and falsetto delivery of ‘Discussing Wallace Chambers’ were clearly patterned after R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe,” later wrote GBV’s notoriously on-again/off-again critic Dave Larsen in The Dayton Daily News.
Mitch Mitchell shot the cover photo: a blurred, black and white close-up of a rooster that lived next to the Pollards. Bob had originally bought it for his son Bryan as an Easter present, but as it matured it grew crazed and angry, so the Pollards gave it to their aging next-door neighbors. Nicknamed "Big Daddy," the rooster had to be confined to a dog pen because of its bloodlust for the Pollards. Bob would later write about it in the song "Don't Stop Now."
Devil Between My Toes sold few copies and was widely ignored, but Bob’s enthusiasm could not be stifled. He arranged another photo session with Todd Robinson, this time to include guitarist Tobin Sprout and drummer Kevin Fennell.
“We were driving around the country in North Dayton, and there was this older gentleman walking around on the road,” Robinson said. “So we pulled over in Mitch’s Cadillac and all had our pictures taken with him.” The photograph would eventually end up on the inside of Fig. 4’s album, and as the cover of disc 1 on GBV's Suitcase box set.
Scraping together money from friends and credit union bank loans, Bob got to work on Guided By Voices’ second full-length, Sandbox. The band rented equipment and aimed for a harder, more rocking sound than Devil Between My Toes, one that would bring to mind power-pop bands like Cheap Trick and Big Star, two of Bob's favorites. Bob, Steve Wilbur and Jim played guitar on the album, with Mitch Mitchell on bass and Kevin Fennell on drums. Between sessions, Bob and his entourage continued to frequent local concerts.
Don Thrasher, a Dayton musician who had taken a passing interest in Guided By Voices, remembers meeting Bob in 1987. Thrasher drummed for The New Creatures, a group that included guitarist/singer Greg Demos and bassist Bill Hustad.
“We were playing at The Building Lounge with Die Kruezen, this early Touch & Go band,” said Thrasher. “It was packed. Bill had broken a string, and while he was changing it Greg started playing ‘Nature’s Way’ by Spirit, just kind of messing around. I was sitting back and catching my breath. Then I heard some guy singing harmony and looked up. It was Bob. He had just kind of jumped on stage and was singing along.”
Thrasher and Greg Demos met Bob and Pete Jamison after the show. “We became friends pretty much immediately,” Thrasher said. “GBV was recording Sandbox around this time, and we were interested in recording an album. So Bob said, ‘We’re doing ours on this eight-track in this guy’s garage. You should check it out.’ And we did. We recorded our album there, and it was right after Toby had recorded the Fig. 4 album there too. The (studio) was just a few blocks away from Bob’s house, so he and Jimmy were there hanging out all the time. Bob ended up doing some backing vocals on our record,” (most notably “Nature’s Way”).
Thrasher and Greg Demos were fascinated by Bob’s do-it-yourself ethic and prolific output. They quickly became avid fans of Guided By Voices music and collaborators with Bob. Considering the amount of musicians Bob had already worked with, a small musical collective was seemingly in the works.
Upon its release in 1987, Sandbox faired about as well as past Guided By Voices efforts, which is to say, not very. The few positive reviews were there. Guided By Voices was cast as a band that wasn’t “wrapped up in the circle-jerking of the alternative record pseudo-industry in Dayton.” But overall, no one listened. Bob, on the other hand, seemed unconcerned. He acted as if the whole world were watching, creating a fake record label (Gotham) and publishing company (Needmore Songs, named after the road behind his house) and writing a thank-you list on the back of the album that included all of GBV’s supporters and friends.
“The fact that even the three of us in New Creatures were excited meant a lot to Bob," Thrasher said. "Because really, nobody gave a shit. And that was essentially the reason GBV quit playing live, because going to see them was like anybody else — nobody really cared. But we listened to GBV all the time, to the point where it would drive my wife crazy. We would play stuff for people and they would be like, ‘It sounds like you recorded it in a garage,’ which of course they did. People just didn’t get it, but I loved it.”
As 1988 rolled around, the various members of GBV worked on other projects as Bob wrote more songs. Bob had been taping on one and two-track recorders in his basement (aka "The Snakepit") all along, tinkering with the rough, unpolished sound that would eventually be known as lo-fi.
This inclination reared its head on GBV’s 1989 album Self-Inflicted Arial Nostalgia. Sonically it was GBV’s most uneven album, and one of its most exciting. Bob’s lyrics, which had been influenced as much by the whimsical children he taught as the flight imagery of Dayton, became even more other-worldly, and his melodies increasingly honed and infectious.
Bob assembled the usual suspects for the recording sessions (Mitch, Kevin, Jimmy, Peyton Eric) in the usual location (Steve Wilbur’s garage) and cranked out songs with names like “Short on Posters,” “The Future Is in Eggs” and "Chief Barrel Belly." Early Genesis and Wire influences figured prominently, but something indefinable had begun to implant itself in Bob’s writing style. “Dying to Try This” may have been the most schizophrenic and utterly original thing Bob had recorded up to that point, a sped-up one-track recording that was as naked as it was infectious, and “Paper Girl” played like a slightly battered refugee from the Land of Perfect Melodies.
As expected, the album sold almost no copies. By this time, Bob had been conducting record-smashing parties where he and his drunken high school friends would creatively destroy the fruits of GBV’s labor by flinging them into concrete walls.
Todd Robinson can’t help but name Self-Inflicted Arial Nostalgia as a candidate for his favorite GBV album. “It changes daily, but I just love that album. Every time I hear it, it makes me think of The Brothers Pollard,” he said. “For some reason those two are such a dynamic duo.”
In the larger context of the band, Jim Pollard had been the most consistent and prolific member of Guided By Voices – besides Bob – since its inception. Jim had always been there with his older brother, collecting song titles and collages, contributing ideas and music, and generally supporting the free-form creative endeavor that was GBV. Mitch Mitchell and Kevin Fennell left the band for a time after the release of Self-Inflicted Ariel Nostalgia to pursue their project Fathom Theory.
“I guess they just wanted to play out,” Don Thrasher said of Mitch and Kevin’s restlessness. “Bob was not playing out at all, so they just kind of faded out and did their own thing. When it came time for him to record some more songs, he called Greg and I to see if we wanted to do it.”
Along with Jim Pollard, Bob would employ Greg Demos and Don Thrasher to record the darkest and most bizarre GBV album yet, 1990’s Same Place the Fly Got Smashed. Greg played guitar, bass, and co-produced it with Bob, while Don handled drums and Jim added more guitar. And as always, Bob sang, played guitar and held primary writing credits.
“When we were first becoming friends and just getting into the music, we never thought we’d be playing on his records,” Thrasher noted. “But that was obviously a thrill. Even though nobody knew who GBV (was), to us, it was a big deal. There’s some really good stuff on Same Place The Fly Got Smashed. The production’s a little questionable and it was rushed, like everything, but I think it’s overall really strong.”
Unlike past work, the band rehearsed songs before committing them to Steve Wilbur’s eight-track recorder. Gathering in Bob’s basement, the foursome would down copious amounts of beer, tell jokes and rock out as if playing CBGB. “It was just the four of us, and then Toby came into town (he lived in Florida at the time) and did a lead guitar part on ‘Blatant Doom Trip.’ He just came in and did it right there, never having heard the song before,” Thrasher said.
Pete Jamison, GBV’s manager without much to do, also tinkered with the sound of the album. The tonal chaos hinted at on Self-Inflicted Arial Nostalgia finally came to the forefront. Bob’s lyrics and structures no longer conformed to any kind of accepted pop paradigm. Sound quality was random and widely varied.
The album exploded with the jarring, psychotic “Airshow ’88,” an introduction to the mind of a small-town alcoholic. For the first time, Bob had crafted a concept album. Successive songs told the story of the man’s downfall and death in a carnival-esque atmosphere of blood, rain, oil and ambergris. Bob had outdone himself lyrically, and the quality of the songs matched. “Drinker’s Peace” and “When She Turns 50” were gorgeous, melancholic acoustic numbers that looped repeatedly in the listener’s head. “Pendulum” featured an upbeat, almost humorous vocal delivery with wonderfully crisp drums and crunchy guitars.
“Bob was into all that Sub Pop shit before Nirvana and any of that stuff,” Thrasher said. “He was into Tad and Cat Butt and all those fucking weird Seattle bands.” (An enigmatic, nearly indecipherable line in “Pendulum” mentions Cat Butt.) “Nobody knew what that meant,” Thrasher explains, “unless you knew who Cat Butt was. That’s why Bob thought it was such a great line. He loves that kind of shit.”
Through 1991, Bob continued writing and recording, drinking with friends, and boning up on XTC, Big Star, Pavement and The Soft Boys. He regularly trolled record stores in the Ohio River Valley, including Wizard Records in Cincinnati. Wizard's Brian Baker would hold stacks of records for Bob under the counter, waiting until Bob could return with his weekly paycheck. "He never disappointed," Baker said in Cincinnati's Citybeat. "He always came in with cash within two or three days, always bought everything he had under the counter and always picked the kind of records we'd want for ourselves."
Bob's teaching job wore on his soul, and GBV's relentless obscurity chipped away at his resolve. Bob's students were at least somewhat supportive of his music, but ultimately it didn't matter. Happily married with two young children (Bryan and Erika) and approaching his mid-30s, Bob decided that Guided By Voices' next album would be its last.
STAY PUT AND TUNE TO ANOTHER PLAN
The songs that showed up on GBV’s 1992 album Propeller were in some ways no different than those Bob had been writing all along: catchy, succinct pop nuggets with arena-rock aspirations and obscure lyrical imagery. But for many reasons, Propeller signaled a clear break from GBV’s previous work.
“Self-Inflicted..., Same Place, and Propeller were all kind of made the same way,” Don Thrasher, who drummed on most of Propeller, remembered. “There’s stuff Bob did on two-track, and stuff that was done in the studio, and Bob kind of pieced them together. I think it’s just a matter of which songs fit better at the time. He just kept writing songs and always recorded them any way that he could.”
For songs like “Unleashed! The Large-Hearted Boy,” Mitch Mitchell moved from bass to guitar, with Jim Pollard on drums. “Exit Flagger” and “On the Tundra” even featured Bob on drums. For many of the album’s 15 tracks, Bob traveled to Encore Studios in Dayton (now in Moraine, but at the time on Fifth Street in the Oregon District, underneath the building next to Ned Pepper's).
Underground icon Mike “Rep” Hummel would later "lovingly-fuck" with the recordings in Columbus, adding texture, grit and character to the hi-fi affair. The Columbus crew Bob had known through the years (Ron House of Great Plains and Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, and Jim Shepard of V-3) also lent moral support to GBV’s “final” effort.
The tried and true collaborators materialized on the album, with Greg Demos and Dan Toohey adding guitar and bass, respectively, and Jimmy Pollard contributing guitar. But one of the most important songs on Propeller would be “14 Cheerleader Coldfront,” a duet between Bob and Tobin Sprout. It was Tobin’s first vocal appearance on a GBV album, and one of the most subtly beautiful moments on Propeller.
Bob and his friends hand-crafted 500 different covers for Propeller, some of them intricate, Crayola-spiked collages and some (literally) beer packaging glued to cardboard record sleeves. Bob also renamed his record company Rockathon. Since the process was as important to Bob as the product, he saw this as worthwhile as any other GBV effort. But his family and some of his friends were less than encouraged.
“His wife didn’t care, his mom and dad didn’t care, his kids didn’t care. Nobody gave a shit,” Thrasher said. “The truth is, nothing was happening. Bob was like, ‘This is the last record I’m going to do. If people like it, cool. If they don’t, I’m not sure I can do it anymore.’ We all pitched in money to pay for it, because Bob didn’t have enough cash to fund the whole thing. He’d been taking out loans all along. Greg and I each gave a couple hundred bucks. I mean, it was obviously money well-spent. Bob even sold his Rickenbacher. For most of the '80s and part of the '90s, he didn’t even have his own guitar.”
Propeller found its way into the usual places: local record stores, friends’ turntables and a few music critics’ desks. The songs were some of the best Bob had penned. The epic “Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox” started with a canned crowd chanting “GBV! GBV! GBV!” and crashed into a stadium rock epic. “Weed King” employed one of the many harmonies Bob had written as a child and paired it with a viola and a melancholy, meandering guitar line. “Quality of Armor” recalled the crunchy power pop of Cheap Trick, while “Ergo Space Pig” showcased some of the most fucked-with vocals of any GBV song. The quilt-like “Back to Saturn X Radio Report” stitched together snippets of GBV’s many unreleased tracks, and “Lethargy” (by Mitch Mitchell’s former band) recalled a weird yet satisfying mix of the Stones and Black Sabbath.
Significantly, the overall tape hiss-to-clarity ratio was higher than on any previous effort. Bob had gone back and added noise and static to the studio sessions from Encore. For some reason, he felt that the noisier, the better.
“There were certain pinnacles in the Guided By Voices line, and the first one was probably Propeller,” Tobin Sprout said.
But it was too little too late. Propeller - named sarcastically because Bob wanted it to "propel" GBV to success - had failed. Bob dissolved Guided By Voices and accepted his losses. Over the course of six albums and several thousand dollars, Bob learned that his persistence and talent just hadn’t been noticed.
EXPECTING BRAINCHILD: GBV’s Coming Out Party
At this point, the story gets a little confusing. Somehow, Propeller made its way into the hands of some of the most influential underground American musicians and critics. All along, some of Bob’s friends and scattered admirers (including Greg Demos, Pete Jamison, Byron Coley and Matt Sweeney) had been sending out copies of GBV albums to people in New York, Chicago and London, including members of Sonic Youth.
But it would be Robert Griffin, head of the Cleveland indie label Scat, that would help break GBV to the public in a significant way. Ron House, a Columbus musician and partner at Used Kids record store, had recommended that Bob mail a copy of Propeller to Robert Griffin. It didn't take long for Griffin to contact Bob. He asked if Guided By Voices would sign with him.
“'We want to put our your records,'" Bob said, remembering what Griffin told him over the phone. "'Send me whatever boxes of your old records that you have and we’ll sell them.'”
Bob immediately said yes, called Pete Jamison with the good news and rounded up the band for a celebration. Bob's family, which had never been truly supportive of his music, reacted coolly. "They were saying, 'Well, at least you don’t have to pay for it anymore,'" Bob said. "Instead of like, 'Congratulations.'"
Now under a legitimate record contract, Tobin, Bob and Jim Pollard settled down with a four-track recorder. They belted out a slew of messy, fragmented songs that would become Vampire on Titus, a title that came from Bob’s street in Northridge ("Jim Shepard used to call me the vampire on Titus," Bob said). It was the band’s first experience with an analogue cassette four-track, and the machine became associated with Guided By Voices from that point forward. Tobin Sprout was responsible for recording and mixing the album, and his tinny, signature touch also came to define GBV’s sound for many fans. The four-track afforded a warmth, spontaneity and humanness that past studio efforts had stifled.
“The days I miss the most were probably Vampire on Titus,” Tobin said. “We were just hanging out and doing these albums.”
Tobin explains how little he and Bob expected to get out of the music. “When we signed with Scat I thought we had made it. To me, that was all I really wanted out of it, just to have some kind of small record deal where we could put out albums and have them distributed. I didn’t expect to make any kind of living out of it, just to be recognized to the point where someone thought our stuff was good enough to put out.”
Don Thrasher remembers the loose feel of the time period. “(GBV) still wasn’t a band at this point,” he said. “It’s like, Toby had moved back into town, he had his four-track, and they just sat down and busted out these songs.”
Thrasher also recalls how excited Bob was about having an album released and distributed to people outside of Dayton. “Even though it was a small label, somebody was paying attention and somebody was going to do something about it,” he said. “I mean, (Robert Griffin) really helped a lot of people find out what was going on with Guided By Voices.”
But before Vampire on Titus was released, Bob and a condensed group of former GBV’ers put out The Grand Hour seven-inch EP on Scat. Half four-track and half studio-recorded, the album continued Propeller’s schizophrenic vibe. “I’ll Get Over It” kicked it off with a severely static-impaired acoustic guitar, detonating into the explosive “Shocker in Gloomtown.” A couple other songs would materialize later as album titles (“Bee Thousand,” “Alien Lanes”). Tobin again showed up on vocals (if briefly), and for the first time Bob ended songs with one or two verses, and only the hint of a chorus.
Around the same time, a German record label called Get Happy! contacted Bob about compiling the best of GBV’s first five releases. Bob consented and the limited edition An Earful O’ Wax was released. Joachim Gaertner and Jochen Riegler had somehow been listening to Guided By Voices in Deutschland all along. A handful of positive reviews appeared in the German press, and GBV seemed more on their way than ever.
When finally released in 1993, Vampire On Titus was greeted with polarized reviews and much local hoopla. Dayton had started taking off as a hotbed of independent music, with The Breeders’ Last Splash selling steadily and bands like Brainiac pushing the limits of experimental, spastic electro-rock. Acts from all over the Buckeye State, including The Afghan Whigs, Gaunt, Nine Inch Nails, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments and V-3, were benefiting from the major-label signing spree created in the wake of Nirvana. The lo-fi revolution broke in earnest as Pavement, Sebadoh, Palace Bros. and The Grifters (among many others) released hissy, scarred, well-received albums recorded on cheap equipment.
"Like the Replacements' Hootenanny or Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted, (Vampire on Titus) kicked off a several-album streak of brilliance that went unnoticed by the mainstream but collected quite a following in the underground," Bradley Torreano would later write in the All Music Guide. "With one of (GBV's) very best lineups, they explore the many aspects of their limited production skills without any pretension."
The Breeders began championing Guided By Voices, which drew even more notice. The noisy, complex Vampire of Titus could not be ignored. The album benefited greatly from the balance Tobin Sprout’s songs provided (“Donkey School,” “Gleemer”), leading some critics to write that Sprout was the McCartney to Pollard’s Lennon, a comparison that would not be shaken. And in another clever move, Robert Griffin made sure the CD version of Vampire contained Propeller as well, giving fans a contextual primer on Guided By Voices' recent history.
Suddenly, Guided By Voices found themselves in the middle of a national movement.
“The fact is, four-track recorders had been around for ten years or so at that time,” Don Thrasher said. “They were finally cheaper and more people had them. People were finally learning how to use them correctly.”
"The snake was ready to uncoil," Bob said. "There were a lot of lo-fi bands, almost some sort of a movement. There was the Grifters and Pavement and the Palace Brothers and Sebadoh. So we all of a sudden kind of fit in. But it was weird because magazines were taking more interest in us than those bands. We had a feature on MTV and everything. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that we had toiled around in obscurity for ten years and we were older, you know. That we somehow were almost forgotten. We almost slipped through the cracks."
The next logical step for Guided By Voices would be one of the hardest things the band would ever do: play its first live show in almost six years.
"Griffin said we should go play a show," Bob said. "You know, like up in New York they have this thing called the New Music Seminar, and might be a good idea for us to go do that. And I guess it was."
Bob immediately began polling his musician friends for their availability. “When it came time to play out, when Bob was putting the band together, he asked me to play drums,” Don Thrasher said. “It was like right before my son was going to be born, and I had a full-time job, so I had to decline. So Kevin Fennell was the guy.”
Kevin, who had been collaborating with Bob off-and-on over the years, would be the live drummer. Tobin Sprout and Mitch Mitchell would handle guitars and Dan Toohey rounded it out on bass. Griffin informed the band that its first gig in six years would be at New York's legendary '70s punk club CBGB.
Bob was terrified. He practiced incessantly with the reconstituted Guided By Voices. The previous band from the mid-1980s had featured Bob on guitar, but this incarnation was less “jangly and psychedelic,” in Thrasher’s words. Bob decided he would no longer play guitar on stage, freeing him up to develop his now-famous high kicks and Roger Daltrey-influenced mic twirling.
“The were one of the buzz bands,” said Thrasher, who drove to New York to check out GBV’s official live debut. “Mike D. was there, Henry Rollins, the guys from Pavement — the place was packed. Nobody knew what to expect because they hadn’t played in years. But they fucking blew people away. They were this big power-pop machine, and Bob intentionally went for that kind of sound. Once Mitch moved over to guitar it changed, because they were harder than anything on Propeller or anything like that.”
"From what I heard, they were expecting kind of a looser, more experimental approach to the live thing," Bob said. "They were expecting us to trade instruments and just do acoustic songs and bang away on pots and pans or whatever. They weren’t expecting what we did, which was all we knew how to do: going back to the days when we played live. We banged it out and played power chords. It was more of a rock thing. When we played at CBGB we did it out of nervousness, we did like 20 songs in 40 minutes. There was no break between the songs."
The July 21 show at the New Music Seminar also began Bob’s infamous relationship with alcohol at concerts. He was so nervous he downed several beers before hitting the stage. For better or worse, it did the trick, and GBV was suddenly the hottest band in indie rock.
NAVIGATING FLOOD REGIONS: GBV’s Wave of Releases
Over the next few months, Guided By Voices produced an unholy volume of singles and EPs. The all-too-brief Static Airplane Jive 7” got the German record label treatment (only 1,000 were made) and introduced songs like “Big School” and “Hey Aardvark” to the GBV canon. Clown Prince of the Menthol Trailer was released in England with soon-to-be live staples like “Matter Eater Lad,” “Johnny Appleseed,” and others. Engine Records in New York issued Fast Japanese Spin Cycle, an eight-song EP that offered reworked versions of Vampire on Titus and Propeller tunes, as well as the extraordinary “My Impression Now” and the all-too-short acoustic boombox jam “Indian Fables.” Two excellent split-singles on Columbus’ Anyway Records also debuted the songs “If We Wait” and “Stabbing a Star.”
On March 18, GBV played to its biggest audience yet. Dayton's massive Hara Arena - home to many a car show and hair-metal concert - hosted an impressive Ohio lineup including Dayton's Breeders, Cincinnati's Afghan Whigs, and two Columbus punk bands: Gaunt and New Bomb Turks. The Breeders and The Afghan Whigs were flourishing on the airwaves and the packed venue reflected their commercial draw. The show represented bassist Dan Toohey's last live performance with GBV. Significantly, it was also the first time Dave Doughman (of Swearing at Motorists) had seen the band. He had just moved to Dayton that week before, and would later work extensively with the band.
John Shough, a veteran recording engineer at Dayton’s now-defunct Cro-Mag studios, remembers meeting Bob through Kim Deal in early 1994. GBV and Deal were working on a cover of “Navvy” for a Pere Ubu tribute album, and Shough had been working with Deal on Breeders’ material.
“I was standing in the doorway, kind of curious, because I was the only person in the studio not in the band,” Shough said. “I was trying to think, ‘Which one’s Bob?’ And then I saw someone walk in with cases of beer stacked up so high I couldn’t see his face. That was Jimmy. Then there was just this parade of guys with cases of beer.” Shough laughs and continues, “We took out about six trash bags of beer bottles in three days of partying to get that song done.” Ironically, the song was never released, but it began a relationship between Bob and John Shough that would last well into 2004.
BEE THOUSAND: An Indie Rock Classic Although Bob and the band were thrilled with the reception of their music, they had no idea of the visibility their next album would bring them. "It was kind of scary at the time, because I didn’t know how long it would last," Bob said.
Vampire on Titus had been GBV’s finest hour, but the next record Bob was working on would eclipse it. “At the time, Bob was just recording songs, and Bee Thousand had a different name,” Don Thrasher said. “He changed that record at least three or four times. He had some excellent versions. Some of the songs I don’t think have ever seen the light of day, some are on King Shit and The Golden Boys, (the comp CD of unreleased songs on Box). Some just kind of faded away.”
Although Thrasher’s contribution to the album was limited to two songs, they were two of the most memorable Bob had penned.
“I drummed on ‘Gold Star for Robot Boy’ and ‘I Am A Scientist,’ Thrasher said. “Bob was just going to do a single with (them). He’d always wanted to do a two song solo seven-inch. So we went over to Mitch’s and recorded them — he had just showed them to me that day — and we laid them down in a few hours. Bob played guitar, and there’s no bass on either of them. I think Toby did a guitar overdub on ‘I Am A Scientist,’ but that’s it. After they were done, Bob said, ‘These are too good to do a single, we’ll just put them on the record.’ I was just like, ‘Whatever, it’s up to you…'”
This would be Thrasher’s last appearance on a GBV record, although his drumming cropped up on “Beneath a Festering Moon,” a song Guided By Voices contributed to a benefit CD for Lounge Axe, a club in Chicago.
“I did another few songs that were never released,” Thrasher said, “outtakes from the Propeller sessions. One’s called ‘Becoming Unglued,’ and another is ‘Song of Below,’ but part of it ended up as the melody for ‘Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory’.”
Overall, Bee Thousand exuded an intuitive grasp of everything right with the last 30 years of rock ‘n roll. Bob's blind, off-handed confidence was as infectious as it was justified. Opening with the blared crunch of “Hardcore UFOs,” the listener was guided through a colorful, slightly inebriated version of rock history as imagined by some unholy genetic hybrid of Lennon, Bowie and Daltrey. The songs were as groundbreakingly original as they were reassuringly familiar. Instruments faded in and out without warning, songs averaged about a minute and a half and brilliant melodies flew by every couple seconds. “Tractor Rape Chain,” “Echos Myron” and “I Am a Scientist” seemed as casual and revelatory as sunlight breaking through dirty clouds.
Tobin Sprout sang four of Bee Thousand's 20 tracks, contributing his strongest material yet. “Ester’s Day” and “Awful Bliss” consisted of Sprout’s elf-like voice draped over a fuzzy acoustic guitar. And if you listen hard enough, you can hear crickets in the background of the album closer “You’re Not an Airplane,” a beautiful, lilting piano tune, the volume of which drops unexpectedly halfway through.
Bee Thousand was released June 20, 1994, on Scat Records, and distributed by indie giant Matador (at the time home of Pavement, Liz Phair and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion). Its impact on the underground music community could be likened to an atomic bomb. It received hundreds of reviews within weeks, with write-ups in Spin, Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone.
"Recorded on a four-track machine, Bee Thousand sounds like a favorite bootleg or a beloved old LP whose worn grooves now reveal only a blurry jumble," wrote Michael Azerrad in Rolling Stone's four-star review. "Amp hum, sniffling musicians and creaking chairs all inhabit the mix, but the homespun production only underlines the strength of the songs – lo-fi or not, there's no denying an astonishing rush of guitar-pop glory like 'Tractor Rape Chain.'"
Guided By Voices appeared on the covers of magazines and was mentioned on MTV. Sugar, R.E.M., Live and Smashing Pumpkins covered GBV songs in concert. The fan base swelled exponentially. GBV rarely played a show that wasn’t sold out. Excited manager Pete Jamison fed fans’ enthusiasm with armloads of homemade T-shirts and music-filled merch tables at shows. Bob scored a sponsorship from Converse shoes and was courted by beer companies to write jingles. But success and notoriety also meant strain and stress.
“There were some shows at Canal Street Tavern that were so full of energy, but I think a lot of that was because Bob was running on such adrenaline,” Todd Robinson said. “He would get up at 5 or 5:30 a.m., teach a full day of school, take care of after-school stuff, rehearse with the band and then play these shows. It was 17 hours of tearing through every single thing to get to the end goal of playing a show. That’s an awful lot to do. And some of the shows, in an offhand way, really benefited from that. There was so much going on in Dayton at the time, it was really special. The overriding feeling was that Guided By Voices were going to take over the world — and they had been there all along.”
Guided By Voices' live shows gained credibility by the day. Bob’s Who-ish stage antics and heavy drinking made him instantly legendary. Mitch Mitchell’s windmill guitar riffs recalled Pete Townsend's impassioned playing. Tobin remained the most sober and introverted of the bunch, while Kevin Fennell backed everything up with solid beats and stadium-sized drum rolls. An open-door backstage policy allowed fans to mingle and drink with the band before shows.
“As a live band, their strongest point is that they are everything a rock band should be,” said Rich Turiel, webmaster of Guided By Voices' official website. “Their live shows epitomize rock. It’s sweaty, drunken pure fun.”
Guided By Voices had become the poster boys of lo-fi rock. They symbolized it with unconventional recording techniques and cemented it with stacks of critical praise.
Tobin Sprout tends to downplay his role in GBV's popularization of home recording. “It wasn’t necessarily that we started the whole thing,” he said. “A lot of bands were doing it at the same time. Maybe we were the first ones to come to the forefront with it. But there were some bad byproducts of it, with people trying to make songs just as nasty and lo-fi as they could be.”
Tobin also notes how unselfconscious and gratifying the recording sessions could be. “I felt like we were really creating art. It wasn’t that we were trying to expand boundaries, we were just trying to make art out of the music,” he explained. “We were using the four-track as a medium. I mean, you can tell when something’s working. We would get together and crank these songs out, and then there would be this certain thing that would come over the session. The next thing you knew, there were five or six of these great songs and you couldn’t believe you did them in three or four hours. With the four-track, you had a spontaneity that you don’t get in the studio.”
By the summer of 1994, Bob began forging a living out of music, something he had dreamed of his entire life. He quit his job teaching, and his old room number, 309, was later retired. Mitch quit his job at a local sandpaper factory. The other members followed suit, committing all their time and energy to the band. For them, persistence had finally paid off.
“The whole process of creating music was what kept Bob going,” Don Thrasher pointed out. “That’s what amazes me. That’s pure art, because he didn’t care about anybody but himself — not in a selfish way — but just the fact that he had these songs in him and he had to get them out. It’s amazing to think of all that’s happened since then, because we never thought anybody would catch on.”
The band's disbelief at its own popularity occasionally turned into a liability. "Once we broke, (my friends) couldn’t tell me what to do anymore in my life, or that I was making bad decisions" Bob said. "There were two different kind of friends at that time. There were people that I had not seen in awhile that were coming around and congratulating me, and making fun of the fact that I was calling myself 'Robert' instead of Bobby, as they knew me. Then there were people I was hanging around with that were really good friends, (but) when we broke, some of them disappeared and I haven’t seen them since."
A few months later The Breeders covered GBV’s “Shocker in Gloomtown” and released it on their Head to Toe EP (Bob & Crew can be seen peeking in the windows of Kim Deal’s garage in the music video). Bob’s friendship with Kim had turned into a collaborative musical relationship. The two sang a beautiful duet of the hair-metal ballad “Love Hurts” for the soundtrack to Love and a .45. Guided By Voices even garnered a spot on the second stage of that summer’s Lollapalooza, where The Breeders had been playing the main stage. Bob's old friend Greg Demos, with his flamboyant playing style and tight, red-and-white striped pants, stepped into the bass player role.
“They were electric from the moment the curtain split open,” said Todd Robinson, who caught GBV on Lollapalooza’s Indianapolis stop. “It was one of those galvanizing shows where you’re like, ‘They’re just going to take over the fucking world. Get ready’.”
GBV’s collective athletic skills came in handy when the band played The Beastie Boys and Billy Corgan in a pickup game of basketball. “We fucking smoked them — it was unfair,” Bob said in a Magnet interview. “We were hanging around with Kim and Kelley (Deal) and The Flaming Lips — that was our group. And Kim and Kelley were like our cheerleaders, and Steve Drozd was riding his bike around the whole time. We were like a circus.”
Bob also tried Ecstacy for the first time on Lollapalooza. GBV had been playing their sets relatively late – around 11 p.m. – but the day of his first roll GBV was slated to go on at 1 p.m. The Breeders had been talking about doing it, and Bob liked the idea of being able to stay up and drink more, so he figured “why not?”
"We took it early, and I remember, about two in the morning we were still going, singing songs in the hotel room," Bob later told X-Ray magazine. "The Flaming Lips, The Breeders and Guided by Voices in a hotel room, making up songs – I thought it was pretty magical." The next time the Flaming Lips played Columbus' Newport Theater, Bob would even jump on stage for a spirited rendition of "Motor Away" with the Lips as his backing band.
More and more people were catching on to GBV every day, especially in the fertile college rock scene. Zealous fans like Charlie Meyer, a future SPONIC writer and photographer, traveled to Athens, Ohio in late September to see GBV play at The Union. "Bob was passing out beers to a lot of us, passing six packs into the crowd to be opened for him," Charlie wrote in a Postal Blowfish review. "...hugging the six packs to his chest and singing, swinging his microphone, doing Mick Jagger kicks, and letting some of his former students sing along with him."
As Guided By Voices rubbed more and more elbows, its group of admirers ballooned. Peter Buck, R.E.M.'s guitarist and one of Bob's idols, went public with his adoration of GBV. Jim Greer, a senior writer at Spin, showered the band with frequent, glowing write-ups. Luckily, Bob had an ever-growing catalog to match his band's reputation. A copious amount of singles and EPs were released during the remainder of 1994.
Get Out of My Stations boasted seven new songs produced by The Bros. Pollard and Tobin Sprout. The cover shot of light breaking through the dirty basement window of the Snakepit perfectly captured the lo-fi atmosphere of the recordings, which included the live staple "Melted Pat." A four-song split with the Grifters featured “Evil Speaker B,” the first and only GBV tune composed and performed entirely by Jim Pollard. “Always Crush Me” and “Chicken Blows,” two lo-fi pop gems that would show up on GBV’s next full-length, surfaced as compilation singles. The I Am A Scientist EP unveiled a live, super-charged version of the title track, plus three new songs. Banks Tarver, an aspiring film student Bob had met through Tarver’s Chavez band mate Matt Sweeney, even directed a video for “I Am A Scientist” (subsequently aired on MTV).
1994 also saw the release of GBV’s first official live album, the infamous Crying Your Knife Away. The concert, recorded at the now-defunct Stache’s in Columbus, was a birthday performance for Bela Koe-Krompecher of Anyway Records. Swearing at Motorists' Dave Doughman recorded and mixed the drunken affair. Although the show took place two days before Bee Thousand was officially released, Bob can be heard bragging about GBV’s already-completed next album, Scalping the Guru, from which much of the set list was taken. It’s also apparent how excited and nervous Bob was. He proudly announced the release of Bee Thousand on Scat Records, and then corrected himself several times with “Matador.”
“He probably said that because there were Matador people out there (in the audience) and he didn’t want to exclude them,” said Tobin Sprout. “There was a certain prestige to Matador too.”
JOHN WENZEL | John is a Denver-based writer and former editor of Sponic magazine. John currently works for The Denver Post and Rockpile and has contributed to such noble but non-paying enterprises as Shredding Paper, Aversion.com, and Erasing Clouds. He's obsessed with the Dayton, Ohio '90s music scene but likes to think he's keen on some of the new bands the kids are listening to these days. John also helps run the Friendly Psychics Music recording collective. Email.