The Release: Devil Between My Toes (LP—Ə Records, 1987)
There have been a lot of people in Guided by Voices. And I don’t mean this in a “Ha, Spinal Tap had five different drummers” kind of way. There have been a shit ton of people in Guided by Voices. Wikipedia lists twenty-four of them by name. Discogs ups it to twenty-five, but with a few who weren’t already on the Wikipedia page. RateYourMusic identifies thirty-four specific people that have served in GBV since its inception. Most relevantly, in a 2007 interview with MAGNET, Robert Pollard—the ultimate decider of such things—placed the total number of GBV alum somewhere between fifty and sixty. I’ll just stick with ‘shit ton.’
But now I’m curious if the combined weight of all Guided by Voices members over the forty year history of the band would add up to an actual shit ton. Let’s say 230 pounds per member, on average, to be safe—these are heavy-drinking midwestern men after all—multiplied by sixty (we’ll split the difference with Pollard’s 2007 estimate, but account for the subsequent lineup shifts). Problem is, I can’t find a consensus on what the officially recognized measurement for a shit ton is. The usually-reliable Urban Dictionary is no help, as it can’t even seem to agree if a shit ton is a measurement of weight or liquid volume—and for the record, I have no current plans to liquify any past or present member of GBV. Then there’s the debate over whether we’re talking metric shit tons or imperial shit tons. From what I understand, Ohioans are among the staunchest opponents of America’s conversion to the metric system (citation needed), so we’d probably have to go with the latter.
But alas, these questions—important as they are—will have to wait for another time. The point that I was attempting to make—at least before losing anyone who was “just here for the music, man”—is that there have been a lot of people in and out of Guided by Voices over the years. And as we shift from the band’s debut EP, Forever Since Breakfast, to their first full-length album, Devil Between My Toes, this is important for two reasons: first, it is evident that the revolving door of personnel was always part of the GBV story, and; second, Devil Between My Toes marks the first official appearance of some of the most important contributors and collaborators from the aforementioned list of dozens.
So let’s introduce some of these folks: at least the ones who were more than minor characters in the Guided by Voices saga. First, there’s Mitch Mitchell—not the same Mitch Mitchell who played drums in the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Mitchell was one of Robert Pollard’s earliest (and longest-serving) collaborators: first playing with him in a hard rock band called Anacrusis; then as GBV’s bassist during their formative years; and finally as a guitarist in the band’s “classic lineup.” Mitchell’s melodic bass lines had been a standout feature on Forever Since Breakfast, and his loyalty to Pollard—not to mention his instrumental versatility—would keep him at the center of the GBV universe as the group navigated their way through a local scene that, depending on the week, ranged from hostile to indifferent.
Next there was Kevin Fennell: the on-again/off-again drummer who happened to (at that time) be married to Pollard’s younger sister Lisa. Fennell and Mitch Mitchell had been friends since childhood, but where Mitchell’s relationship with Pollard tended to be steady and collaborative, Fennell and Pollard’s was far more volatile and rigid. Forever Since Breakfast had been recorded during a break in Fennell’s GBV tenure—a local Daytonian, Peyton Eric, had manned the drums—and even though Fennell was back in the band when the bulk of Devil Between My Toes was recorded, his absence from the debut was a lingering source of sore feelings. In Matthew Cutter’s 2018 Pollard/GBV biography Closer You Are, Fennell recalls, “I really was pissed off and hurt. I just told him, ‘Look y’know, it’s wrong what you did. I don’t appreciate it, I’m family now, you have to show me a little more respect than that.'” Peyton Eric would hang around long enough to record two songs for Devil Between My Toes, but Pollard would fire him—at least partially due to a dispute over covering his share of the cost for pressing Breakfast—and replace him with his brother-in-law.
The notion of GBV as a family enterprise was further solidified by the continued presence of Pollard’s brother Jim. While not listed alongside Mitchell and Fennell in the “GBV” section of the album credits—instead appearing among others in a “With” grouping—the younger Pollard was a regular contributor to the band’s early catalog, and this is particularly true of Devil Between My Toes‘ more experimental pieces. While most of the album was committed to tape in Steve Wilbur’s 8-track garage studio, several shorter, more spontaneous pieces were concurrently recorded by the Pollard brothers—and a rotating cast—in Bob’s basement studio, known as the Snakepit. While the full extent of Jimmy’s musical contributions to GBV remain the source of some speculation, the unwavering support that he offered Bob—and the unique language/humor that the two brothers shared—was nothing short of foundational.
It was also during the making of Devil Between My Toes that the person most responsible for defining the band’s sound—aside from Bob Pollard himself—would enter the GBV ranks as a recording contributor. Tobin Sprout was a known entity to the Pollards and Mitch Mitchell, as the three were regular attendees of shows by Sprout’s band, Fig. 4. In fact, Sprout had even briefly joined GBV in 1984, before returning to Fig. 4 to focus on his own material—and thus adhere to Bob Pollard’s expectation that GBV members only be in one band at a time. However, by late 1986 Pollard was convinced enough of Sprout’s talents to relax the “one band” requirement—especially as Guided by Voices had recently given up on live performances to become a studio-only project. Sprout would only appear on one track on the album—the ambitious centerpiece “A Portrait Destroyed By Fire”—and though his involvement in the next few GBV records would be similarly sporadic, his eventual full-time status would be a critical component of the band’s most-celebrated work.
As for the first release that these men—the Pollard brothers, Mitch Mitchell, Kevin Fennell, Tobin Sprout, plus the departing Peyton Eric and producer Steve Wilbur—created, Devil Between My Toes is probably the earliest GBV product that even a casual fan would immediately recognize as the work of Robert Pollard. Tellingly, in Closer You Are, Pollard shares the following reflection on his mindset going into making the record:
“I want to include everything that entertains me. Devil Between My Toes is strictly for me and me only. Because no one’s going to buy it, no one gives a fuck, but I’m still gonna do it. So I might as well put only what I want on it, for me. An album for me.”
With this determination to make an album on his own terms, Pollard exerted far more control over the sessions for Devil than he had earlier in the year with Forever Since Breakfast—the EP whose non-existent reception had gone a long way in forming his newfound cavalier attitude. Many of his artistic decisions were made with the group’s limited finances in mind: Closer You Are quotes Pollard’s standard reply—”We don’t have enough money, Steve.”—to Steve Wilbur’s continual requests to “Let me make this stuff sound good.” As such, one thing that sets Devil apart from Forever Since Breakfast is the presence of several audible mistakes: for example, Peyton Eric clearly drops a drumstick at the 2:14 mark of “A Portrait Destroyed By Fire,” but with the meter running on the $15 per hour session, the band plays through it. Pollard was encouraged to “embrace mistakes” on the advice of Tobin Sprout, and thus—partially out of necessity, and partially out of preference—a defining artistic attitude started to take hold.
Other decisions—ones that still reflected Pollard’s emerging preference for a Spartan aesthetic—were made with no regard to money at all. For instance, Closer You Are shares the anecdote that once Kevin Fennell had supplanted Peyton Eric, Bob Pollard insisted that his brother-in-law only record with a kick drum, snare, and hi-hats—however, the presence of tom-heavy tracks like “Discussing Wallace Chambers” proves that this was not necessarily a hard and fast rule. Nevertheless, in economy, Pollard was beginning to discover his artistic identity. And—just like the imaginary bands that he had once created for his imaginary album covers—Guided by Voices now had an ethos.
So with all of that backstory and context out of the way, what to make of Devil Between My Toes? Well, if you were to track down my GBV Catalog Crawl feature from 2021, you’d find that I placed the album at #31 out of the thirty-five (at the time) Guided by Voices LPs. I gave it a score of 6.5, mentioned its post-punk leanings, name-dropped R.E.M. and Wire, called the album “scattered,” and moved on to #30: a 2013 reunion-era record that I ultimately called “the least-inspired set from Guided by Voices in some time.” And, at least in regard to Devil Between My Toes, I was dead fucking wrong.
See, here’s one of the key things about Guided by Voices: no matter when or how you came to the band—even if you were one of Bob Pollard’s closest friends, listening to homemade tapes from Day 1 in the Snakepit—you were bombarded with a deluge of material. Sure, you’d latch on to immediate favorites—probably a lot of them—but inevitably some songs and even entire albums were going to fall through the cracks. And yes, those who ultimately chose to take the plunge would eventually go back to revisit the rest, but it would be hard to do so without letting the wider GBV “narrative” take hold, which meant that—for most of us, at least—those not-as-immediate songs and albums were likely to be heard through the filter of this already-existing narrative.
And that already-existing narrative suggests that Devil Between My Toes is a noble, but ultimately tentative, first step for a band that wouldn’t reach “greatness” on an album scale until 1992’s Propeller. It’s a narrative which argues that Pollard was leaning too heavily on influences that he’d eventually downplay on his best work. It’s a narrative that views the presence of five instrumental tracks as proof of a lack of inspiration. It’s a narrative told from a perspective that misses the cohesion that GBV’s most celebrated albums possess in spades, and thus dismisses Devil Between My Toes as “scattered.” It’s a narrative that my own Catalog Crawl contributed to, at least on a small scale.
But for a moment, let’s forget about those brief instrumentals that tend to be the most divisive element of Devil Between My Toes. Without them, there are still nine songs here. Of those, the most familiar is likely the closing “Captain’s Dead,” which later appeared on the 2003 ‘best of’ compilation, Human Amusements at Hourly Rates. It’s a certified GBV classic: one that finds the band hitting a sweet spot on the spectrum between their aforementioned post-punk influences and Pollard’s biggest heroes, The Who. It rips, roars, and clatters in the same way that future favorites like “Shocker in Gloomtown” and “Motor Away” eventually would.
Those oft-cited R.E.M. and Wire influences arguably best show themselves on “Old Battery” and “A Portrait Destroyed by Fire” respectively. The former kicks Devil off with a nervy tension rarely heard in GBV’s best-known work, but it plays to the strengths of both the band and their emergent lo-fi aesthetic. That tension boils over on “Portrait,” which sure, once it gets going, sounds like it probably could’ve found a home on Pink Flag, but more as a complement than a knock-off. Between those two tracks, the buoyant “Discussing Wallace Chambers” (okay, still pretty R.E.M.-esque) and pensively atmospheric “Cyclops” similarly display the band’s range.
Aside from “Captain’s Dead,” the highest praise for Devil Between My Toes tends to be directed toward a pair of poppier numbers on the album’s second side. “Hey Hey, Spaceman” matches a catchy, wordless hook with lyrics that evoke childhood nostalgia—à la Syd Barrett, but with a decidedly midwestern spin. Similarly appealing is “Hank’s Little Fingers,” which somewhat-obliquely tells the story of a Pollard acquaintance who suffered from brachydactyly—a condition that causes small fingers—but who cleverly devised a way to play guitar by affixing a pick to his affected strumming hand with rubber bands.
These seven tracks would be enough to vault Devil Between My Toes over the seven-song Forever Since Breakfast on their own. Add in the darkly melodic garage-era throwback “Dog’s Out,” and whatever value you get from the transitional instrumental pieces—I happen to like them—and you have a release that easily clears the bar set by the band’s debut. But that still leaves one more track:
Nestled toward the end of the album is “The Tumblers”: an almost entirely unique entity in the Guided by Voices catalog—I say almost, only because 2012’s “White Flag” could be similarly described as vibe-y. Here, Kevin Fennell’s galloping toms openly defy Pollard’s alleged snare-only rule; Mitch Mitchell’s bass line channels Mike Mills, sure, but with a rough-hewn charm that is all his own, and all Dayton; Steve Wilbur is granted the latitude to lend the track some gentle atmosphere, adding in a tasteful delay, budget be damned; the keeper of said budget voraciously strums open chords on one, two, three (?) guitars. They ring together, brightly enough to cut through the haze of cheap eight-track tape, captured for posterity in the dim of a midwestern garage, thick with the air of cigarettes and Natural Light. Bob Pollard’s voice coos a cryptic missive, softly, over the most overtly rhythmic thing that this group of drinking buddies would ever record on a Sunday afternoon. It’s practically transcendent. So much in fact that you swear you can hear a cello—and perhaps even a flute—in the mix. The sun’s going down over Northridge. It’s autumn, and there’s a crispness to the air that only hits in this way for a few days in late October. It’s absolutely perfect.
Three hundred copies of this record will be pressed; two hundred less than the last one. It will get a few brief mentions in local papers, but will otherwise be ignored all the same. No big deal, Bob. You made it for yourself. It’s not your fault they missed it. But I can’t give them too hard of a time about it. I missed it too.
Rating: 8.4
Bob-ism of the Week: The midwesterner peeks out again on “Hank’s Little Fingers,” as Pollard commands his listener, “Unless you’ve got the answers / don’t patronize the mountain men.” It’s an early reveal of the defensiveness that Pollard would employ once tasked with presenting his art to the “New York types” who he figured would look down on a self-described “hick” from Dayton.
Next Week: The momentarily-stable lineup wastes no time getting to LP #2, treating Steve Wilbur’s garage studio like their own private Sandbox.
