The Releases: The Grand Hour (EP—Scat, 1993) / If We Wait b/w Red Chair (Split Single—Anyway, 1993)
Attention is weird. The idea that people are watching you—and making any kind of note as to what you’re doing—is bizarre. At least it is to me.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my childhood love of baseball, and how I wanted to be a left-handed second baseman. In reality, most of my time as a baseball player was spent in the outfield. As a very young player, this was all pretty low stakes stuff. By the time a ball made it out to you, it was typically traveling so slowly that you were basically picking up a nearly-stationary object off of the ground, and tossing it back into the infield. But once I hit the age of twelve or so, playing the outfield was a much more nerve-wracking experience. All of a sudden, the pubescent pre-teens that I was playing against could hit the ball a couple-hundred feet in the air. My job on the field was now relevant, and it couldn’t just be done by any kid whose parent decided to sign them up for Little League. I mean, it would be done by those kids, but not without some genuine element of risk involved.
In actuality, I was pretty decent at shagging fly balls. I could read the ball off of the bat reasonably well, and while I wasn’t fast by any stretch of the imagination, my routes were generally efficient. Both being tall and having an ability to snare most anything that hit my glove added several feet to my range. So too did the fact that I was always willing to dive for any ball—and rather enjoyed doing so. Really, my one true weak spot as an outfielder was my arm. Of course, as a lefty, if I had any kind of arm strength, I might’ve made for a halfway useful pitcher; but alas, playing corner outfield was my lot in life, and I accepted it.
The thing is, as decent as my fundamentals were in a practice situation, by game time all bets were off. I can only remember a small number of fly balls—probably less than twenty—that actually made it in my direction during the last couple of years of my time as a baseball player, and all of them followed a similar pattern. In a game setting, my otherwise-solid knack for reading the trajectory of the ball, taking a non-circuitous route to its landing spot, and—if necessary—timing my dive, all but abandoned me. From the moment that the ball hit the bat, to the moment that the play was over—or at least my part of it had concluded—I was an absolute wreck of a person.
Granted, these plays were successfully completed at what I would estimate was somewhere in the vicinity of 75% of the time: certainly a poor enough number to be the worst outfielder in the history of professional or semi-pro ball, but probably acceptable for a U-14 league. However, as these plays were unfolding, it was if I could feel my body contorting into twisted shapes—sometimes parallel to the ground, upside-down, or curled into a 110-pound ball of human flesh and polyester uniform. Again, 75% of the time, the ball landed safely in my glove, and probably in a fashion that was unremarkable to any observer; but in my mind, it must have looked terrible, and only appeared successful as a result of luck. And—while in sum total—these moments probably made up less than three full minutes of my adolescence, they feel foundational, even thirty years later.
As best as I can understand it, my issue stemmed from the fact that from the point in which the ball came into contact with the opposing player’s bat, to the moment in which it either: a) came to rest in my black Rawlings glove, or; b) hit the grass and rolled toward the warning track, all eyes were on me. This felt paralyzingly unnatural to me; even though at that moment in my life, the thing that I hoped for most in the world was to someday be able to do this very activity in front of an audience of millions. It’s just that those millions in my dreams only existed in the abstract; whereas the dozens in front of me at that exact moment were all too real.
Now, I recognize that a lot of this isn’t wholly unique to me. Those ages between 11-14 are a smoldering cauldron of insecurity: a time in which the dreams of childhood are typically crushed by the realities of adulthood. It’s an unavoidable collision course, wherein you likely learn that you’re not always good at the things that you love the most—but also discover that you might in fact be great at things that you had never even considered doing before. I’ve (mostly) gotten over the “paralyzing imaginary contortions” thing, but the fact of the matter remains: attention is weird.
Today, my (paid) job requires me to spend most of my working day at the center of attention for a group of anywhere from twenty to forty people at any given moment of time. The first that time I did it—nearly twenty-three years ago—I had a similarly disconcerting experience; to the point of where I froze, and genuinely worried that I had completely wasted four years of my life—and tens of thousands of dollars—pursuing a degree for a very specific career. It got better though. However, every once in a while—in the middle of a lecture on something like say, the politics of the Jacksonian Era—I’ll find myself momentarily thinking about the profoundly weird fact that thirty-some sets of eyes are on me. It’s generally a fleeting feeling, but it’s still there.
Along a similar line—after the undistinguished conclusion of my baseball career—one of the things that I discovered I was pretty decent at was making music. I’ve written and recorded some duds here and there—most of which were confined to my teens and early-twenties—but when I actually put something out into the world for public consumption, I’m usually damned confident in it. Still, every time I listen to these recordings with people who weren’t also involved in their creation, or when performing those songs in front of an audience, something inevitably feels off. As a consequence, I rarely genuinely enjoy playing live.
Likewise, Strange Currencies draws a few thousand readers each month. I enjoy writing these pieces, and as good as I am at my ‘real’ job, I’d love to be able to do this one for a living. But the fact that you—a person who I’ve (probably) never met, and (probably) never will meet—are reading this right now is a bit off-putting. Keep reading—and please, pass this site on to your music-loving friends—but do so with the knowledge that it kinda weirds me out.
Throughout the latter part of 1992, and into the new year, Robert Pollard was similarly “weirded out.” After over a decade of making recordings with a rotating cast of friends, Guided by Voices’ fifth LP, Propeller, had finally caught the attention of some legitimate tastemakers. All of a sudden, people like Matt Sweeney (Chavez), Mark Ibold (Pavement), and Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) were raving about the “Prolific Madman of Dayton,” who holed up in his basement, hunched over a beer-stained four-track, cranking out mini-masterpieces that felt too good to be real. But he was real; and so too was this newfound reverence and attention. And, by all accounts, it freaked Pollard the fuck out.
Now, one might be inclined to say, “Yeah, right. If he didn’t want attention, why did he make all of this music, and release it, in the first place?” A more sympathetic take—depending on the tone taken—might be to view this as a cautionary tale of being careful what one wishes for. The truth—as it almost always is—is complicated. Yes, Pollard wanted people to enjoy his music. But he had also given up on GBV ever ‘making it’ by the time that Propeller was recorded. In fact, he had told his friends and bandmates not to send any of the album’s five-hundred copies out for review. But bassist Greg Demos and “manager for life” Pete Jamison didn’t listen. They knew that Propeller was too good to languish in perpetual obscurity. And now, people—influential people—also knew this.
And it wasn’t only Pollard who was left in a state of disequilibrium by this new reality for GBV. Kevin Fennell—the off-again, and now-on-again drummer of Guided by Voices—recalled in Jim Greer’s A Brief History, “There was something about when people like you—because we weren’t used to that—for me, it was scarier, once I knew that they were embracing us. Because it’s like ‘Okay, now what?'” Of course, it was Robert Pollard’s reaction to this attention that mattered the most. After all, he had been the only constant presence in Guided by Voices since its inception, and it was ultimately up to him to determine just how far this newfound interest would go in providing the band with a legitimate breakthrough. However, the same conflicts—career, marriage, fatherhood, and debt—that had led him to create Propeller as a ‘last word’ on GBV were still ever-present as his labor of love finally reached beyond his inner circle.
Among the many recent Guided by Voices converts was Robert Griffin: guitarist for a Cleveland band called Prisonshake, and the owner of a small independent label, Scat Records. Word-of-mouth enthusiasm had placed Propeller in his hands; and when given the opportunity, he pounced at the chance to have Scat put out the next GBV release. Allegedly, Pollard’s reaction to this development could best be described as one of ‘elation.’ It is said that he ran up and down his street (Titus Avenue) screaming, “We got signed!” Finally, at thirty-six years old, Bob Pollard was a ‘professional’ recording artist.
Reportedly, within a week of agreeing to a deal with Scat, Pollard delivered a nine-minute tape to Griffin, which was to be released as the first GBV seven-inch, The Grand Hour. While clearly the work of a condensed schedule, the EP is a fully-realized sample of peak-era Guided by Voices. Though the majority of its tracks sputter out before the point in which ‘typical’ listeners would suggest that they became actual songs, the spontaneous charms and homespun production of The Grand Hour are hard to deny for all but the most adventure-adverse. Besides, it contains at least one genuine GBV classic in the—technically chorus-less, but still catchy-as-hell—highlight “Shocker in Gloomtown.”
An important component of GBV’s agreement with Scat was that they would also be permitted to issue material on other labels, and—as the summer of 1993 approached—the band readied their own half of a split 7″ single with the Columbus-based imprint, Anyway Records. Released that June, “If We Wait” would—for my money—be the finest Guided by Voices track to date.
There’s an immediate nostalgia present in “If We Wait,” perhaps because—as my wife once inadvertently pointed out during a listen many years ago—Pollard’s vocal melody faintly recalls “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” Perhaps it’s also boosted by the relatively-rare (for GBV) use of a waltz-time rhythm. But there are also the lyrics, which seem to summarize the entire ethos of a project that had begun a decade earlier, and that now, improbably, had reached beyond the largely-disapproving eyes and ears of Pollard’s family—and for that matter, Dayton as a whole:
There’s some food upon the table, boys
And if you have ever seen me flying
Then you’d know that I am weak
And you are free to take me downstairs
Away from cares
As the outside world began to encroach upon Pollard’s invented universe, his basement—ironically, nicknamed “The Snakepit”—remained a safe haven. It was here that he, alongside some of his closest friends, would soon get to work on music that would transcend the descriptor of “pretty damned good.” Yes, people were now paying attention to Guided by Voices; and they liked what they heard. But Robert Pollard knew that he had something greater inside of him. If he was really going to do this—after having already given up on it years ago—he was going to have to make a masterpiece.
The grandest hour was approaching.
Ratings: The Grand Hour (7.1) / If We Wait (★★★★★)
Bob-ism of the Week: “‘Twas a band, they were sickening, arousing everyone / P.S. Dump Your Boyfriend, promotional trash, emotional bash with helium balloons” (“Shocker in Gloomtown”)
Next Week: Recorded in the midst of their dizzying ascension to the top of the American underground, GBV make their harshest and most uncompromisingly “lo-fi” record.
