Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand Read online

  Guided by Voices Bee Thousand

  Also available in this series:

  Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes

  Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans

  Harvest by Sam Inglis

  The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller

  Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice

  The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh

  Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli

  Electric Ladyland by John Perry

  Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott

  Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

  The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard

  Let It Be by Steve Matteo

  Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk

  Aqualung by Allan Moore

  OK Computer by Dai Griffiths

  Let It Be by Colin Meloy

  Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

  Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno

  Exile on Main Street by Bill Janovitz

  Grace by Daphne Brooks

  Murmur by J. Niimi

  Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli

  Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

  Endtroducing... by Eliot Wilder

  Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese

  Low by Hugo Wilcken

  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper

  Music from Big Pink by John Niven

  Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy

  Doolittle by Ben Sisario

  There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis

  Stone Roses by Alex Green

  The Who Sell Out by John Dougan

  In Utero by Gillian Gaar

  Loveless by Mike McGonigal

  Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti

  Forthcoming in this series:

  The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck

  Court and Spark by Sean Nelson

  London Calling by David L. Ulin

  Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

  People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor

  69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol

  Use Your Illusion I & II by Eric Weisbard

  Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy

  Bee Thousand

  Marc Woodworth

  2011

  Continuum International Publishing Group

  80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

  The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  www.continuumbooks.com

  Copyright © 2006 by Marc Woodworth

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents.

  First published 2006

  Reprinted 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Woodworth, Marc.

  Bee thousand / Marc Woodworth.

  p. cm. – (33 1/3)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-4847-6

  1. Guided by Voices (Musical group). Bee thousand. I. Title.

  ML421.G853W66 2006

  782.42166092’2–dc22

  2006023345

  Contents

  Persons of the Play

  A Man Discovers His Coat Has a Pocket

  Listener Responses #1-3

  Love & Purity

  Listener Response #4

  Fiction, Man & Hardcore Facts Part One

  Four-Track Tape

  Guided by Voices Narrative #1: Robert Pollard

  Listener Response #5

  A Correspondence with Lewis Klahr

  Fiction, Man & Hardcore Facts Part Two

  Listener Response #6

  Guided by Voices Narrative #2: Don Thrasher

  Fiction, Man & Hardcore Facts Part Three

  Desire & Its Limits

  Guided by Voices Narrative #3: Kevin Fennell

  Listener Responses #7 & 8

  Spatial Representation #9 of Bee Thousand Action Motives

  The Diamonds of Being in the Dirt of the Pigpen: On Robert Pollard’s Lyrics Foreword by Bart O. Roper, LLD

  Excerpts from an Unfinished Dissertation by Nolen Twinn-Johnson

  Listener Responses #9-11

  Bee Thousand Word Cluster: Fauna

  A Sonnet—Made from Bee Thousand Fragments (Themselves Often Fragments)

  Guided by Voices Narrative #4: Robert Griffin

  Bee Thousand Word Cluster: States (Of Being)

  Fiction, Man & Hardcore Facts Part Four

  Guided by Voices Narrative #5: Dan Toohey

  Listener Response #12

  Dayton Ode

  Listener Response #13

  Kicks

  Guided by Voices Narrative #6: Greg Demos

  Bee Thousand Word Cluster: Generation

  Tobin Sprout’s Tascam Portastudio 1 Four-Track & Electro-Harmonix Memory Man

  Guided by Voices Narrative #7: Tobin Sprout

  Listener Responses #14-16

  Fiction, Man & Hardcore Facts Part Five

  Acknowledgments

  For Calla

  “Sitting out on my house …”

  A Man Discovers His Coat Has a Pocket

  Think of a man who one day discovers a pocket in the coat he’s worn for years. When you meet the man, he’s holding out a couple of items—a plastic spaceship, a crayon, an angel—but he’s smiling because there are other things in the dark of his pocket that you can’t see and that you will never know about. Because of what’s hidden, the plastic spaceship, crayon, and angel start to glow and you can’t help but stare at them. You stare at them for exactly one minute and fifty-six seconds. For one minute and fifty-six seconds you can’t move your eyes away, but then the man abruptly turns around and walks down the road in his pointed cap and patchwork coat, leaving you with a pang of longing but also oddly pleased, cooing like a baby fed on the selfless sweet-and-sour milk of a true mother. Here’s what you remember hearing while you were staring:

  Count the days that we have wasted from the start

  Eat the words, build a playground in your head

  And then it all comes clear: you’ve got to build the playground in your head because you can’t play on the real playground anymore—rust has eaten through the elephant slide and the monkey bars’ thinning aluminum is too cold to grip, not to mention that you’re not allowed to go in there anymore, old man. So you build not a playground but a song that contains everything you love to imagine and love about imagining—being amplified to rock, drawing pictures, eating up language. You build a place out of parts and signs and objects where you want to be.

  You’re happy there—or you would be if you could actually live there (which you can’t because you haven’t really built the place itself but a reproduction of it: a work of art). The real playground is behind the school in a township called The Past where you can never go again (there are papers on file in the commissioner’s office about this prohibition against your returning which list the very solid reasons why you’re to remain in eternal exile). So sadness enters, but comfort, too: both sadness and comfort at once. Then you make another song, and another, build it in your head, again and again, a desire inexhaustible due to its subtle failures and temporary successes.

  It’s definitively human, this building of playgrounds in our heads, this making of songs. We like to inhabit the world the song creates, the place its words have set up. We like to imagine the tools of the builder by looking at the marks that still scar the structure, visible after it rises up in the emptiness, complete even as a fragment. We can see it in our heads even though the song feels intensely pri
vate, the record of something caught for a moment, turned in the light, and then returned to its author’s own pocket. It gets through to us more than a clearer, safer, reliably made song could ever do even though we ourselves did not sit out on the house and we did not see UFOs, hard- or soft-core. But we do love art and we do, sometimes, when not overcome with the usual and dull inhibitions against making it, love to make it. Who doesn’t? Or who, at least, didn’t, when, after Recess, we went back inside the building for Art? So this world, with its up and down dreams, its record of wasting days, and how all that dreaming and wasting is inextricable from the way we create and believe and love, is a place we want to be.

  Listener Response #1: J.D. from Princeton, NJ

  A few months after I got Bee Thousand, one of the guys I worked with was going on a road trip with his family. He was into music, a few years older than me, and somebody I really wanted to become friends with. He asked if he could borrow a few CDs from me—“new music”is what he was looking for. I gave him a handful of CDs, including Bee Thousand which was shaping up to be my favorite record that year. The day he got back, he left the stack of cds on my chair with Post-it note reviews attached to each. Most of them, as I recall, he liked and made comments like “Good stuff” or “Stones-ish.”Bee Thousand was on the bottom of the pile and his Post-It read simply “What is this shit?” We never really became friends.

  Listener Response #2: Ian Miller

  Just about everything that I found annoying about the album on first listen would later turn into my favorite things about the album.

  Listener Response #3: Rachel R.

  I NEVER had a problem with the 30-second songwriting. I always took it as pop song concentrate. To me, every song on Bee Thousand is like a canister of frozen concentrate of Hawaiian Punch. To most it would taste like shit without the water added, but to a sugar addicted kid it tastes like PARADISE!

  Love & Purity

  How do the qualities of love and purity rise from a particular work of art, one that resonates within and because of its discrete context, but transcends that context to become a fully human expression? The context, the medium, a mode (however circumscribed and separate from other kinds of art-making) replete with its own history, conventions, and forms, themselves rich and wide-ranging (“rock and roll,” early Genesis, progressive rock, Pisces, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Jones, psychedelia, “I Don’t Know Myself” live at the Old Vic, the sixties, “Waterloo Sunset,” Wire, pop, “Wichita Line-man”) both inform and enable the making of new art, of powerful art.

  There is no easy formula to trace the evolution from the very quotidian moment when a song is recorded (you go down to the basement, you may be hungover, you are dressed like someone who might be going to work out in a “fitness center” at a surburban mall though you are by no means going to a “fitness center” at a suburban mall to work out, you have a cheap guitar, there is an arc of grime just beneath the place at the center of the four-track’s record button where the finger lands, again and again, thus keeping the plastic there, and only there, smooth and clean over months and years of use) to the sublime nature of what is made in that moment.

  The stuff out of which we make art can be anything but exalted. Yeats: “Love has pitched His tent / in the place of excrement.” Hynde: “We are all of us in the gutter / some of us are looking at the stars.” When the whipsaw guitar, with its plangent, alloyed energy, stutters in and out of the mix at 0:53 seconds of the opening track—a song called “Hardcore UFO’s”—of an album—Bee Thousand—you wonder if this is a result not of a flaw in the original recording by the band-Guided by Voices—(most bands don’t allow such obvious mistakes to stand) but a problem introduced when you burned the CD from a friend’s copy.

  But other copies, you soon find, share this impurity, an imperfection that is from the source, and quickly becomes no longer heard as a mistake or a problem but as something essential, something transcendent. It is a mark of love, a brand seared into the skin of the tape onto which it was recorded, marking it as singular, inimitable, a little careless in its passion. The song then becomes its mistake, no longer a mistake, and what was its imperfection becomes not only a sign of the love that made the song appear on tape in the first place, but something, itself, to love. The song is like a lover who has eyes of slightly different colors or a certain pickerel smile and is not unlovely because of these qualities but more beautiful, more desirable, more worthy of your devotion. In its seeming impurity—the recording technique is basic, deeply limited, often a kind of sacrifice—this work of art becomes pure because of its truth, its unwillingness to forsake what’s human to a desire for perfection or reality to something plastic and kempt. In rising from the gutter it becomes a star. It opens up like a clear luminous tent out of the trough of waste that gives it life. It is this process, repeated in different ways through the thirty-six and a half minutes and twenty tracks of Bee Thousand, that gives us one proof that life can rise from art.

  Listener Response #4: Chris Slusarenko

  Bee Thousand creates the sensation of physical space as you listen to it. You hear so many strange ambient noises in the background—a screen door shutting, a car starting—made by actual people that you really feel the space that it was recorded in. Because of that quality, it’s a really intimate album. You feel like you are walking through an abandoned house where fifteen different bands set up one day. One band has the big living room. Another one is shoved in the closet. As you walk through the house you can hear them practicing all around you—the singer is screaming “hot freaks” in the garage, the kick drum from “Gold Star for Robot Boy” vibrates your legs from the basement, someone is playing “Kicker of Elves” in the kitchen. Upstairs you find someone has soundproofed a room so he can barely hear the others but before he starts singing you have to kick him out because that’s where you sleep. So he goes into the hallway and as you close your eyes you hear “Peep-Hole” drifting through the crack under the door. Not a bad place to live at all.

  Fiction, Man & Hardcore Facts

  Part One

  It’s tempting to make a myth out of the Guided by Voices story, to turn the reality (like any reality always more messy and vibrant than the tale that recounts it) into a by-the-numbers rise-to-glory narrative. But that would belie what Guided by Voices was—and, in doing so, betray what makes their music—and particularly Bee Thousand—worth caring about. The elements are all there to shore up a tall tale: the rise to a lofty place in the indie rock firmament on the wings of purity and passion; the decade or more toiling in obscurity on art that recommends itself as a fit occupation for its makers only at the eleventh hour; the workings of a rare inner compulsion so strong it’s hard not to ascribe to it the language of legend rather than allowing it to remain at its real, strange potency; the miraculous turn when labor and compulsion are rewarded with buzz and love and listeners.

  Given that all of the plot-points above are true enough, it would be easy to translate this version of the facts into a pretty story with Bee Thousand as epiphany, the work of “genius” finally finding a place in the world where its creators never expected to make a ripple let alone a splash. In a sweet and creamy version of this feel-good plot there follows the devotion of People Who Matter, the awe of musicians whom the band holds in awe, the adulation of a rock polloi who see themselves reflected in some “average” and “old” guys gone gold (or its underground approximation), or more charitably—and probably more truly—the adulation of people who simply loved what they heard.

  But, however true they appear to be, these are the elements that tempt the truth to stray in order to fill a formula. The thing is, there’s nothing formulaic about Guided by Voices’ music or their move from invisibility to relevance, a trajectory along which the release of and response to Bee Thousand is, unmistakably, an event, but not an easily contained one. Call it a Fourth of July for the skeptical citizens of some rock and roll county of the uncool, where dangerous homemade fireworks explode i
n stunted, asymmetrical shapes over the outskirts of a city in view of anyone looking up instead of gazing at his or her shoes. It’s an American tale of triumph, sure enough, but one, if we resist the temptation to make it a blockbuster, that has more to do with a vision of native self-reliance, one full of contrary impulses and willful individuality, rather than homogenized product or lowest-common-denominator marketability. Under the story, untouched by the story, is music that’s explosive, revelatory, playful, off-color, aggressive, tender, and untamed.