The Releases: Mag Earwhig! (LP—Matador, 1997) / Guided by Voices/Cobra Verde (Split Single—Wabana, 1997) / Bulldog Skin (Single—Matador, 1997) / I Am a Tree (Single—Matador, 1997)
When and where one first interacts with the catalog of an artist is likely to play a significant role in how they come to appreciate said artist—and this is probably true regardless of era. Growing up as I did in the nineties, CDs were generally expensive—non-sale prices at most of the stores in my town started at $14.99, and it was not abnormal for the album that you coveted to be selling for $18.99. Armed only with the resources of a teenager, buying a CD represented something of a commitment—one generally not made without having a pretty good idea that you were going to like it. Sure, a trusted act with an established track record—say R.E.M.—could definitely count on me purchasing their new release as soon as I had the money, and most any artist that I already liked could expect the same if I enjoyed the first single from a new record. But for new-to-me bands, I either needed to really like the song that I heard on the radio, or I would have to wait for more evidence—a solid second single, or an endorsement from a trusted friend—to take the plunge.
If an artist merely got good press but remained off of the generally conservative airwaves of Northern Arizona, I was intrigued; but unless I could find a cheap used CD, my intrigue stopped short of laying down upwards of twenty bucks, sight unseen. Thus, in the mid-to-late nineties, this was the ultimate fate of bands like Built to Spill, Fugazi, Archers of Loaf, Belle and Sebastian, and Stereolab. I heard of all of these groups while still in high school, but it was several years before I actually heard their music. In some cases, they eventually ‘clicked’ for me every bit as much as they would have in my teenage years; but in others, while I definitely liked what I heard, there’s a significant part of me that knows they would have resonated far more if I had heard them at an earlier age.
A generation later, as the proliferation of file sharing and streaming services took hold, an altogether different challenge has emerged for music listeners: the doubled-edged sword of abundance. No longer is a music fanatic limited by the constraints of radio or—for the young—a weekly allowance. Now, virtually the entire history of the medium can be accessed with a series of clicks. And in order for an artist to transcend the lack of focus that such widespread accessibility is bound to trigger, it would seem as if their appeal—at least that of their most frequently-recommended material—must be immediate. Recently, when commenting upon a typically-satisfying meal that didn’t quite hit the spot, my wife mentioned that she wished a restaurant was always as good as the first time that you ate there. But that got me to wondering: how many great meals have I missed out on, simply because I happened to first try a restaurant on an off-day, and thus never revisited it?
Like those restaurants, I occasionally wonder how I might feel about certain artists had I not actually taken the time to give them a fair chance. There are those whose radio hits gave little indication of the parts of their catalogs that I would eventually come to love: Blur, Devo, The Flaming Lips, Bruce Springsteen. There are those that I personally picked odd starting points for: Charles Mingus (Presents), Sonic Youth (Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star). There are those for whom others exposed me to the ‘wrong’ (as defined by my tastes) records: Beastie Boys (Licensed to Ill), Pink Floyd (The Wall), Joanna Newsom (Ys), and Hüsker Dü (the live album, The Living End, for some reason). There are even some, like Tom Waits, whose best work (Rain Dogs) I started with, but for whom there were more ‘appropriate’ entry points (Closing Time, quickly followed by Swordfishtrombones), at least for me.
Guided by Voices arrived to me at the closest thing that I could identify as an equilibrium point between the very different eras that I described above. It was a time in which technology had allowed for access to a lot of music, but not yet too much of it. While I first heard of GBV in the late-nineties—I can definitively remember reading this feature in Guitar World in 1997, and thinking that Robert Pollard looked like an ‘old dork in sweats’—it wasn’t until the spring of 2003 that I finally listened to my first Guided by Voices album. Arriving to me by way of my friend Jack, on CD-R, that first GBV record that I ever heard was Mag Earwhig: arguably the most transitional release in the band’s catalog.
While Mag Earwhig arrived to me at one kind of equilibrium, the album was the product of a band in flux. After all, Earwhig was largely recorded after the departure of the so-called “classic lineup,” but it still has several tracks that included the likes of Mitch Mitchell, Kevin Fennell, Jim Pollard, and Tobin Sprout. These are offset by songs that featured GBV’s short-lived “Guided by Verde” lineup: formed when Robert Pollard essentially hired the Cleveland-based glam rock group Cobra Verde to be his backing band. And interspersed among its twenty-one tracks, Earwhig makes room for a handful of the kind of homemade four-track sketches and oddities that filled out the track lists of GBV’s most celebrated albums.
But while Mag Earwhig was the product of a band in transition, it also (oddly) may be GBV’s own ‘equilibrium’ record. Whereas the albums that came before could mostly be classified as lo-fi, and the next few that followed found Pollard embracing a polished studio sheen, Mag Earwhig presents itself as a decidedly ‘mid-fi’ record; and thus encapsulates both the rough-edged charm of the band’s earlier work and the precision and force of its subsequent releases. And consider this: Robert Pollard always displayed outsized ambition and the desire for rock stardom, but he also found his true artistic voice in an embrace of economy. Wouldn’t the record in which he most obviously tries to have it both ways make for something of a definitive statement? What if it were—as Pollard has claimed—the first GBV album to fully display the presence of Pollard’s oft-cited “four Ps”: pop, punk, psych, and prog.
Mag Earwhig doesn’t just touch upon all of GBV’s stylistic cornerstones in some sort of superficial manner; it has genuine highlights in a wide variety of modes. There’s the supercharged power pop of the Doug Gillard-penned “I Am a Tree”: an anthemic blast that aptly demonstrates what the Cobra Verde lads brought to the table. Nearly as excellent is the swaggering first single, “Bulldog Skin,” which finds Pollard making a barely-veiled reference to the Propeller standout “Quality of Armor.” Harkening back to that same era, “Jane of the Waking Universe” is a glorious last hurrah from the “classic lineup.” And “Learning to Hunt” is a surprisingly tender and nuanced track that could have fit on any record in GBV’s back catalog. Throw in gems like “Sad If I Lost It,” “Now to War,” “Portable Men’s Society,” and “Not Behind the Fighter Jet,” and you have an album that can stand alongside anything released outside of GBV’s vaunted 1992-96 peak.
And to a new GBV listener in 2003, Mag Earwhig was a true find—if not exactly an outright revelation. It lit a spark that would quickly lead me to Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, and I would buy that fall’s Earthquake Glue—you never have to wait too long for your first ‘new’ GBV record—with genuine anticipation. Yes, Mag Earwhig led to real fandom: the very kind that would eventually undertake the project that you’re reading at this moment. It has remained a favorite of mine, despite the literal dozens of Guided by Voices albums that I have since acquired.
But listening to Mag Earwhig with a greater sense of its place in the Guided by Voices/Robert Pollard story casts this genuinely excellent record in a decidedly different light. It was an album born of an immensely complicated breakup: one long-time member (Kevin Fennell) had been dismissed due to his backslide into substance abuse; another (Mitch Mitchell) left after struggling to accept a perceived demotion from lead guitar to bass guitar. And the lineup that recorded the lion’s share of Earwhig fell apart nearly as quickly as it had come together. After a semi-disastrous tour that left many of Pollard’s admirers—and at least some folks inside of his inner circle—genuinely worried about his well being, the Cobra Verde ‘ringers’ were summarily dismissed in a perfect storm of distrust and hard feelings; only Doug Gillard would stick around.
And that, I suppose, is yet another thing that makes Mag Earwhig—warts and all—a near-perfect encapsulation of this most unique of artistic enterprises, and a fine introduction to the world of Robert Pollard. It is Guided by Voices in a nutshell: ever-changing, and ever the same.
Ratings: Mag Earwhig! (8.3) / Guided by Voices/Cobra Verde (★★★1/2) / Bulldog Skin (★★★★1/2) / I Am a Tree (★★★★1/2)*
*Singles are star-rated by their A-side; albums and EPs use the “Russman Reviews” scale.
Bob-ism of the Week: “But this is you and this is war / It makes me drink even more / And I’ll have fun then / I’ll make a mark on you / I’ll tell you all that I am / How simple feet will walk for free / Until you injure me again” (“Now to War”)
Next Week: “Picture me big time,” says Robert Pollard, as Guided by Voices make their grand play for the masses.
