i wanna ask you a question: what is the best song in GBV's Alien Lanes?

as we go up we go down

(tho i could pick probably 12 other songs here)

So many great songs! So I had to pick "Motor Away" right away before I'd had a chance to think about it and become indecisive.

i know this record quite well but still i can't really tell the tracks apart. feel it should be game of pricks though

Would go with "Watch Me Jumpstart" if the chorus weren't so much weaker than the verses.

Probably comes down to Game of Pricks / Motor Away. Hope someone throws a vote in for Salty Salute-- great opening track that deserves some love.

they used to open their shows with it,too.

Opening tracks for Bee Thousand -> Alien Lanes -> King Shit and the Golden Boys, all fantastic.

A Salty Salute is the only song on this album that I like.

For me, this album and Bee Thousand are like two long songs. I would never put any of these individual tunes on a mix because I would sorely miss the song that would have come after it. How can you sing "the club is open...yeah the club is open...hey the club is open...cmon cmon the club is open..." and not immediately start singing "I am breathing / yet I see no sky..." right after it??

These albums - along with Propeller - are my idea of perfect records.

That said, even though "Game of Pricks" will probably take this quite easily, I'm going with "Salty Salute," because it signifies the beginning of, err, my favorite, 45 minute GBV song. Unfuckwithable.

That was the one thing I didn't really like abt this album; it seemed so cluttered because every song just immediately turned into the next song without any pause.

Love "Motor Away." I'm a terrible beginner guitarist, but one day I impulsively taught myself to play it, and I was floored how much the band gets out of so little, in this instance.

"Motor Away" by miles & miles: it is what is left when you boil these songs for hours, the absolute essence of the band & absolutely essential.

'Game of Pricks' is easily my favourite but picking a second would be really tricky. Maybe 'Closer You Are' (love the 'lookout rock' bridge bit) or 'My Son Cool'. Always amused by how much Pollard sounds like Liam Gallagher on that "Decide now!" (I guess they're both channelling Lennon).

pimple zoo

"Pimple Zoo!!!" Yes. Good choice. I love how it sounds like it's just two different recordings of the same tune with just that acoustic passage in the middle to distinguish them...

Like I said, if I'm a nerd for any record, it's this one.

yeah, i really think every cut here is fantastic. it's magic. this is their best record.

jim greer has a great story about the recording of "Game of Pricks" here: http://jamesgreerbooks.blogspot.com/2010/02/reconstruction-of-old-guided-by-voices.html
song is just pure goodness.

little whirl = best tobin song

i think you might be right! i was *this* close to voting for it.

watch me jumpstart

i am not trying to be awkward here but always thought the 28 seconds of HIT were the pinnacle

Sorry. 23 seconds, coming into town with the giggling faggots

little whirl = best tobin song

― mookieproof, Sunday, July 18, 2010 4:09 PM (35 minutes ago)

that would be "awful bliss"

I SPEAK IN MONOTONE: LEAVE MY FUCKING LIFE ALONE

i am wayy down with "hit".
i love this opening couplet from "auditorium":

post punk x-man parked his forklift
like a billion stars flickering from the grinders wheel

This band are in my top five ever, without a doubt. Maybe even top three.That should please them.

Get to England again, you old fucks and make another old fooker blissfully happy

come on come on the club is open

Had to vote for the winner but prob would have gone for Hunting Knife or Motor Away otherwise. Or Chicken Blows, love the Beatlesesque vocal harmonies there. Contrary to article upthread i prefer the Tigerbomb ep versions of Pricks and Hunting Knife, heresy i'm sure.

I jumped in there a bit quick. But "Pricks", in terms of sheer songwriting, is probably the best thing he ever wrote.

― tom d: he did what he had to do now he is dead (Tom D.)

"Game of Pricks" was covered by American pop punk band Jimmy Eat World and released on the deluxe edition of Bleed American.

"Game of Pricks" was also covered by British post-Grunge band, My Vitriol.

"My Valuable Hunting Knife" was covered by Motion City Soundtrack.

"A Good Flying Bird" was covered by Milwaukee punk rock band Crappy Dracula.

watch me jumpstart

Pricks was also covered by Owen Pallett and his violin
xpost

also by me about once a day

motor away

don't especially love this album, which is weird as it's the first GbV full lengther i heard.

My Valuable Hunting Knife

this is hard, but it's gotta be "Motor Away" for me too. Also agree the love for B1000 sometimes seems to overshadow what a great record this is, arguably better...

haha, I considered doing a similar poll a week ago, only I would split it in two separate polls for each side of the album with exclusion of GOP, just to make the results a bit more interesting

since Game Of Pricks is way too obvious a choice, I think I'll go with Pimple Zoo so it will have at least one point, though it could easily be something else

I voted for "Game of Pricks" in a Best GBV song poll (back when there weren't limits on poll options) so I voted for my Favorite Tobin Sprout GBV song, "Little Whirl."
I once got an enthused and inquisitive caller at the radio station after playing it. "What was that song?!" Gotta love it.
I don't care what you do anymore.

A Salty Salute is a great opening number, too.

tbh i had no idea before this poll that game of pricks was the obvious choice. gonna vote little whirl just to even it out. xp !

So many I love, but Motor Away.

it always was "as we go up, we go down", i think nowadays it's "little whirl"

closer you are

I love so many of the songs and Game of Pricks is probably the best song here but I gotta give props to Blimps Go 90, such an effortlessly breezy melody with great lyrics.

"Often times I'm reminded
Of the sweet young days
When I poured punch for the franchise
And thus was knighted
Got so excited"

One of my favorite albums, and a pretty much impossible poll to vote on. The songs that deserve to win probably will, so maybe I'll just throw in for "Chicken Blows". I've a soft spot for that pretty, odd little choon.

I am srsly incapable of doing this.

I was a total gbv fanboy in the 90's and went through a prolonged period of trying to create some distance from these records (incl. Bee Thousand and Propeller) for fear they would never justify the ridiculously high esteem I held them in...

Anyway I went back to this and Bee Thousand and Propeller a month or so back and was just completely kind of...overwhelmed...by how fucking amazing these records are. The whole notion of Pollard from this era getting lumped in with other lo-fi acts or even with other melodically adept indie rockers just seems so completely blinkered fifteen years on.

I think Pollard was harnessing real genius here — as opposed to expertise or peak craft or whatever — that he was actually touched with some kind of open-channel thing allowing him to create these perfect self-enclosed and fully formed universes which were only very rarely more art than pop or vice versa.

FWIW as much as I love this record for me the first side of Bee Thousand shatters to pieces just about anything having the misfortune of bumpered listening and I incl. in that estimation hallowed Zeppelin, the mighty Fall, Dylan and maybe even my daughters' laughter.

I voted Motor Away due to it's immediacy when I was first getting into them in the summer before college 12 years ago and my friend made me a GbV cassette and I was literally motoring down an icy street. But it was followed closely by Hit, which was my roommate in college's favorite song (ever).

The Tigerbomb version of "Hunting Knife" is my favourite GBV song ever, but I gotta go with "Salty Salute".

I hate "As We Go Up We Go Down". I got in a teenage fight with a friend who was a GBV hater. Her proof was the flimsiness of the "We see the truth, yeah, it's just a lie" lyric, she thought that if anybody would make a chorus that bad, then any other moment of lyrical resonance must've just been accidental.

My Valuable Hunting Knife

dunno, i love how gloriously dumb "we see the truth yeah" is -- it just sounds soooooo good. xpost

if you have ever been around these guys, the wider, "Dayton mafia" circle...I mean I love them but it really is the way you imagine it to be and there's nothing remotely ironic about it

I, um, lived in Austin for a couple of years too so I am not surprised by this kind of thing.

Bob was a 4th-grade teacher,

Are you saying teachers can't be sports bar schlubs? But Pollard, the guy writes poetry, he's had exhibitions of his art etc, I'm guessing he isn't your run of the mill sports bar schlub.

xxp calstars I was just responding to what Albert wrote about the townie-sports schlubs-Bud Light narrative being a sort of mythology for marketing purposes, just saying that it's legit

which isn't mutually exclusive to an interest or proficiency in the arts! Just that there is some hardcore redneck action too

One of the time this most jumped out at me what at that Matador anniversary thing in Las Vegas, when like twenty or thirty of these (always suoper nice!) dudes would load into the buffet for breakfast

it was funny because you very clearly very easily identify ppl who were there for those shows as opposed to the regular hotel guests...and then there was this whole other, much smaller yet equally one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other crowd

I used to be able to type

I also remember the casino marquee said in massive letters at the top

KEVIN POLLAK

and underneath in much, much fractionally smaller letters "Matador 40th Anniversary Etc."

Man, Vegas buffets aren’t what they used to be

Xpost

I remember seeing Mitch hanging out and drinking with fans after in the hotel stairwell after their anniversary show set!

Bob Pollard was a jock in high school — haven’t any of you read Guided By Voices: a Brief History? Everything you need to know about Bob Pollard and his general worldview is in there. He’s not a mystery. He’s all of the above.

I read the Bee Thousand 33-1/3 recently and it does a pretty good job describing the millieu, the vibe. lots of insane hard-to-read overanalysis tho (sorry if the author posts here, overall I loved the damn thing)

yeah that was v good I think

I read the Jim Greer book about GBV, which I didn't like much, I hated all the stuff about Bob and boorish buddies boozin' it up in his basement tbh.

For some reason Bob Pollard finds them fascinating but fuck knows why anyone else should.

there are no snobs in heaven

I imagine that way he's always the star and the focal point.

no

If anything it's the opposite. There are ton of different reasons to love spending time with people you've known your whole life.

Jim Greer should write a better book next time then.

yeah that was v good I think

So how does the Dayton Mafia stack up next to The Memphis Mafia?

If anything it's the opposite. There are ton of different reasons to love spending time with people you've known your whole life.

― Yanni Xenakis (Hadrian VIII), Saturday, May 2, 2020 3:06 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago)

MM has political connects

This never really worked for me.

It's reliant on not moving very far from where you grew up.

Right. I have actually been living pretty close to where I grew up for the past decade and half, which caused some deal of anxiety at first, which I believed I touched upon last night in the group hang when it was mentioned.

xxxp yes the B1000 book

james I've had p much the same experience, by choice, but I can also appreciate the value in it

I listened to this album today and the whole lo-fi thing is, in retrospect, not so great - I don't really see what people saw in it, to be honest.

Did anyone read the recent Pollard bio? Or was this alluded to above in code? (Who's the Replacements fan?)

Jim Walsh.

I read and loved it but I don't know if I'm the most objective reviewer, it's great to have anything in-depth to read

their first NYC show (after a 6 year live show hiatus!)

a life-changing night. for me anyway. afterward, on the sidewalk outside cbgb, i bumped into stephen malkmus, who i didn't know, and he told me i should go see the ass ponys, who were playing somewhere else, maybe under acme?, at like 1:30 am, but i went home 'cause my life had already been sufficiently changed, but later i came to regret missing that ass ponys set. that was a good time to be alive and into rock music.

Lol I saw the Ass Ponys open for Afghan Whigs

I saw the Ass Ponys at Brownies once. The opening act was The Upper Crust and Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter were there to see them, I think. All I remember is what seemed to be a really long, drawn-out version of "Ape Hanger." I ended up being a huge Wussy fan in recent years.

I always found the Upper Crust to be a dependably stupid fun time

Yup.

lol if ever there was a song written for dulli to sing it is 'mr. superlove'

obv he did a great job with it

the upper crust rule