C or D : Guided By Voices.

He was among the early members (as was I)

raising my hands for the early postal blowfish roll call. the day i sent my first email to the group, maybe the day after, two total strangers who lived near me in brooklyn emailed me to invite me on a road trip to see gbv in philly, and i thought to myself "i'm not getting in a fucking car with two total strangers just because we like the same band. what if they kidnap me? or murder me? what if they make me drink warm beer and listen to nightwalker songs the whole way down?" it was matt & jon, the brothers who started spare me records, totally awesome dudes as i later learned, but i didn't know that yet. i passed on that particular road trip.

Ha, I did roadtrip early on with Matt and Jon, from nyc to Dayton...w/o having met them before except on PB. Their sister came too I think?

Got the whole tour and stayed at Don Thrasher's place.... we caravaned to a show at Southgate House in KY and then with the band to some greasy spoon afterward, a trip highlight for me as I prompted Bob to change the song Melted Pat to Patty Melt, and he obliged with a couple verses

I remember listening to The Shoes all the way back, and also Bob finishing Jim's fries and singing "cold fries for robot boy" as he did so

ha ha ha awesome.

later postal blowfish memories include michael azerrad starting a long, combative thread in which he argued, repeatedly and repetitively, that gbv's lo-fi recording aesthetic was a good thing because the lo-fi aesthetic was an essential part of their sound whereas pavement's lo-fi recording aesthetic was a bad thing because the lo-fi aesthetic was not an essential part of their sound and in fact detracted from one's ability to enjoy the music and therefore was not only bad, but evil, because music is an essential part of our lives and music can actually save our lives, like medicine, and anything that gets in the way of that, like an unessential lo-fi recording aesthetic, should be considered a crime. or something like that. this was before twitter was invented and, therefore, before the block button was invented, unfortunately.

I for one am grateful that some of my worst opinions predated the Constant Record

oh god me too

my PB memories are mostly the kleenex girl wonder dude trolling people

i love reading these memories, feel like the only band i was ever so fanatical about during their nascent years went on to do things that don't impress me much, so it feels very embarrassing.

Azzerad was on PB??

Azzerad was on PB??

indeed he was, for a short time in the early days.

Oone thing that kind of bothers me about Pavement's "lo-fi" distinction is that they recorded everything up to Crooked Rain at Gary Young's original studio that had a 24-track MCI console which if you are familiar with is approximately the size (132"x41"x38") of ~200 Tascam 424s (18"x14"x4") such as the ones actually used by GBV, Sebadoh, Silver Jews, et.al. Slanted & Enchanted is extremely hi-fi compared to Alistair Galbraith or The Grifters music from the same period.

I've come to the conclusion that Sgt. Disco might be one of the most underrated albums in Pollard's catalog.

it's so good, also the next two after that,Ataxia and Gringo

Kind of can't get over 'Society Dome' at the moment

Streaming show this Friday...from the official website:

"Full electric set from an empty venue to your living room. Professionally mixed and pre-recorded with 7 cameras on a big socially-distanced stage. Unlike a lot of other streams, this is not acoustic in the living room… It will look and sound amazing."

Which is a little disappointing because I think I'd prefer to see sad man in him room GbV.

what's the capacity of that venue?

Maybe it's out there somewhere, but I haven't been able to confirm what they mean by "venue". In true Pollard style, it should be a Dayton garage somewhere.

Occupancy: Brightside Bar Only - 130 Bright Bar + Vodvil Ballroom - 430

https://www.thebrightsidedayton.com/

What music or art have you turned to for comfort?

I read a lot. Mostly biographies, conspiracies, or metaphysical stuff. Alice Bailey, H.P. Blavatsky, that sort of thing. I have art books, and I like to occasionally examine the works of people like Ernst, Rauschenberg, Pollack, Jasper Johns, Basquiat, collagists like Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Hoch. Lots of surrealists. Of course, I listen to a lot of rock. Mostly Sixties and Seventies.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/gbv-album-styles-we-paid-for-robert-pollard-1033011/

Bob getting into theosophy is funny and awesome

Great article, thanks.

I think it was the alien lanes thread a couple months ago where people were convinced that Bob was a sports-bar-schlub, and I was saying that was an unfortunate (quasi-classist?) angle of their initial marketing (Scat/early-Matador) that stuck. The guy's obviously well-read and possessing well beyond average awareness of post-modern art.

I think I was arguing in that thread that you can be both

there's nothing to argue about
of course you can be both!

That particular intersection is much narrower than you guys are making it seem, ime/imho.

I was worried for a while that he might be a Trump guy, but then he was sending videos to Beto O'Rourke saying "we are with you in your anger" so I feel a little better now.

If a 'sports bar schlub' just means a guy who likes drinking beer and watching sport then that's not all that narrow an intersection tbh.

xp what in the world would ever make you suspect that?

Those Cash Rivers records leaned pretty heavily into his "it's politically incorrect and if you don't like it don't listen to it" shtick that seems to pop up here and there. Just a bad vibe. More than happy to be wrong!

I didn’t know Beto was a GBV head

Re: his politics, I've never gotten bad or edgelord vibes except from some lyrics that use homophobic slurs and some pretty, uh, questionable lyrics that could be construed as misogynist...but the former instance is singular ('coming into town with the giggling faggots') and the latter is just sort of a thing that I think pervades most of cis male fronted guitar music.

he also said he would allow "no girls in the clubhouse" and that tipped me off to his particular brand of misogyny. most people at least pretend.

aw I don't think that's misogynistic—any more than the No Boys Allowed! thread. Just a bunch of married dorks watching basketball.

I think Tobin Sprout is a conservative

^^ he is
and i disagree Hadrian. the power dynamics are different with no boys allowed and i think that's pretty obvious.

not to mention "no girls in our band" is pretty weird when you make as much music as this guy does

every thread here lately

what a total drag this place has become

Personally, I hate that kind of thing—I'm a little skeeved by any puropseful gathering of just men or just women. But I do know men who do this and would be be reluctant to characterize it as misogynistic. My take on it is a kind of retreat to presexual boyhood—days of "cooties!" yore.

xp yes

whatever
if you think this is a drag for you, imagine what a drag it is for me
bye

aw I don't think that's misogynistic—any more than the No Boys Allowed! thread. Just a bunch of married dorks watching basketball.

― singular wolf erotica producer (Hadrian VIII)

hadrian i would strongly urge you to reconsider this notion

i am also not really feeling like explaining how they are different in detail right now

i'll just say that that doesn't accord with my experience as someone who has been in male-only spaces as well as female-only spaces.

I'm sorry, I don't think it's fair to accuse a bunch of guys who have known each other since they were kids of hating women...because they like to go into a garage and fart and watch sports together or whatever. I also think "no girls allowed" is too obviously stupid to be anything but ironic.

Not my trip either, but I'm not down with making character assessments like this.

to be clear—yes, I do understand the different power dynamnics and that the comparison is not equivalent.

I also know—and respect!—the fact that this *kind* of exclusivity allows for comforts, e.g. an arena to talk freely and more comfortably about personal gender and body stuff that might inhibit people on other kinds of mixed company.

"no girls in our band"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1_1ptzs0FM

Credited Musicians
Vocals/Guitar: Robert Pollard
Vocals/Drums: Kim Deal
Vocals/Guitar: Kelley Deal
Guitar: Tobin Sprout
Guitar: Jim Pollard
Bass Guitar: Jim Greer

Again, I'm grossed out by men-only stuff—including widely accepted therapeutic practices, retreats etc. that are meant to sensitize men, liberate them from stereotypes, etc. But I'm not willing to paint every gathering of "men only" as harmful to women. I mainly think it's embarrassing, but obv. for some people it's healthy

No chicks in the tree house! That’s what I told Kim Deal. We were touring with The Breeders, and Kim asked me, right after Last Splash, “Why don’t you let me play bass?” And I thought for sure she was just fucking with me, so I said no. And I probably would have let her, but then I told her that we have a policy that there are no females allowed in Guided By Voices. It’s like when you’re a kid and you have your tree house and there’s no girls allowed in it. Then she did an interview in some GIRL magazine and she called me over and she goes, “Explain your philosophy to her!” And I said, “No chicks in the fuckin’ tree house, OK?”

― brimstead, Thursday, June 22, 2017 3:23 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

here you go http://ink19.com/2001/04/magazine/interviews/guided-by-voices-9

― brimstead, Thursday, June 22, 2017 3:23 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglin

It’s like when you’re a kid and you have your tree house and there’s no girls allowed in it.

this is exactly what I meant by presexual retreat

in the annals of male slights towards women, "not letting" them into your AOR fanclub for alcoholics ranks pretty low imo

Kim asked me, right after Last Splash, “Why don’t you let me play bass?”

Lolllll, that's quite a subtle dig at her then-husband haha. I'm pretty ambivalent on GBV outside of 92-95, but Kim is the best.

Again, I'm grossed out by men-only stuff—including widely accepted therapeutic practices, retreats etc. that are meant to sensitize men, liberate them from stereotypes, etc. But I'm not willing to paint every gathering of "men only" as harmful to women. I mainly think it's embarrassing, but obv. for some people it's healthy

― singular wolf erotica producer (Hadrian VIII)

see, again, having been in some of those men-only spaces you are "grossed out" by, i don't find those spaces to be particularly harmful. it didn't do much for me, for reasons which are in retrospect glaringly obvious, but i think the _idea_ is not necessarily "gross".

Another life ago, when I was married, my then-wife would regularly attended a "ladies' night" party thing in the town where we had recently moved. And then their husbands started doing the same thing, on the same night, out of boredom or jealousy or whatever.

Anyway, I went a couple times and yeah I was kind of grossed out...they were trying their best to bro it up in a kind of forced way...and yeah, it just seemed really stupid and I found it embarrassing, maybe "grossed out" is too strong. I never went back.

On the other hand these were all very old friends who were able to comfortably talk about their erectile dysfunctions or whatever in way that no doubt some would not have been in the company of each other's wives. And I wouldn't begrudge them that.