The Releases: Static Airplane Jive (EP—City Slang, 1993) / Fast Japanese Spin Cycle (EP—Engine, 1994) / Get Out of My Stations (EP—Siltbreeze, 1994) / Clown Prince of the Menthol Trailer (EP—Domino, 1994) / Scalping the Guru (Compilation—Rockathon, 2022)
Earlier this week my band finally committed to the track listing for our first release: a five-song EP. We still have some recording to do—and then mixing and mastering—but I’m hopeful that we can have it out some time before this summer. While it will only be available for download/streaming—at least for the time being—I’ve made a point of having it conform to acceptable side-length parameters for a 7″ record playing at 33 RPM. For this to work, chances are that at least one of the three songs on the A-side will have to fade out early, but it’ll be a close call.
While I’m no Robert Pollard, I’ve released plenty of music before: the bulk of which are five albums that I’ve been a primary contributor to (including one that I made entirely on my own, save for mastering); additionally, I’ve been involved in several other albums, EPs, and singles as a musician, writer, producer, engineer, and/or mixer. I’m lucky enough to have a talented and creative group of friends that have continued to prioritize making music well into adulthood. For all of us, music is merely a hobby, but one that scratches a creative itch, while deepening a sense of community.
And yet, even with a back catalog that I’m mostly quite proud of, I’m particularly excited about this current project. Though I’ve been working with my two primary collaborators—both Strange Currencies contributors—for several years now, there is a definitive newness about the music that we’ve been making for the past two or so years. It’s not ‘newness’ in the sense that we’re making music without precedent—in fact, our influences are worn pretty clearly on our sleeves—but there’s a reinvigoration for the process of music making that I haven’t felt in many years.
For starters, I’m enjoying the act of playing the guitar more than I have at any point since I was in high school. I’ve also sold off several old instruments that hadn’t received much attention in recent years, and used the money to buy new ones that I’ve long been intrigued by—most recently, a small Moog synth. I’ve put in some time and effort toward becoming a better drummer. And—partially inspired by this first leg of “The GBV Project”—I’ve gone back to my roots of analog recording. The Tascam 424 four-track that I bought twenty-two years ago—just as seemingly every home-based recorder was converting to a digital workstation—has been recommissioned, and last weekend, my bandmates and I even recorded a song straight into a portable “shoebox” cassette recorder. It sounded terrible, but was exactly what we were going for.
More than anything though, I’ve really been reenergized by changing my approach to writing songs: the primary difference being that I’m finally writing songs. Now, a literal reading of that would suggest that I’ve never been a songwriter, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve been composing songs for as long as I have conscious memory. I’ve been recording them since I was about five or six years old. I still possess every recording that I’ve made since the age of fourteen. I’m prolific. Again, not Bob Pollard prolific, but prolific. I’ve completed several hundred songs, and have sketched out thousands. Trust me when I say that my reasons for seeing a kindred spirit in Pollard go far beyond being a music-loving middle-aged teacher/father of two.
What I mean by “finally writing songs” is that for as long as I’ve been making music with any kind of knowledge about how to do so—I place this at the age of fourteen, when I started making layered “multi-track” recordings with ‘real’ instruments—I’ve always focused on crafting songs to serve a purpose toward something bigger: i.e. an album. Sure, I love songs, but I’ve always been an album guy. Even back in high school, even with the flakiest of bandmates, when I was writing a song it was almost always with an eye toward where it would fit as part of a sequence of songs. This might sound absurd, but yes, there have been plenty of times where—in the early stages of a new song—I’ve thought to myself, “okay, this sounds like a ‘Track #7.'” And, looking back on the aforementioned five albums that I was a primary contributor to, all of them were very deliberately crafted as specific sequences of songs.
But over the past two years I’ve fought against that instinct, and pushed myself to write songs as their own things. And it’s been pretty damned fruitful. So far I’ve written somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five complete (music and lyrics) songs; roughly as many ‘in progress’ (music done, lyrics not) ones; and another several-dozen that exist as quick-sketch demos, captured as voice memos on my phone. In addition, one bandmate has chipped in several songs of his own, and the other has helped contribute some lyrical ideas to bring a few of mine to completion. Most of these have been demoed in some form, and several are at some level of completion for their ‘actual’ recordings. Other than the five that we have committed to the aforementioned EP, I have no idea where they will end up, as per an eventual release.
But despite the fact that I’m genuinely excited about readying one, truth be told, I’ve never been the biggest fan of the EP format. In fact, my stance on EPs has been a source of controversy amongst friends of both the long-time and somewhat-recent variety. And—if I’m being really honest—it’s becoming a source of controversy within myself. I’ll try to explain why, without getting too bogged down, and with respect to those who are already wondering when the hell I’m going to finally start talking about the very good music that this project is covering this week.
Coming of age as a music fan in the nineties meant coming of age as a music fan in the era of the CD—which was, as formats go, an era of excess. Album lengths tended to balloon to upwards of an hour (and often beyond), and as such, quality B-sides were less common than they tended to be a generation earlier. Obviously, there were plenty of exceptions to this, but as a new music collector of limited funds, it made sense to spend those scarce resources in the most efficient way possible. I can remember more than a few instances of spending money on singles or EPs by bands that I loved, but ultimately regretting it, as these (often import) discs were typically not that much cheaper than their full-length counterparts. And for every great one that I laid my money down for (Frank Black and The Catholics’ “All My Ghosts”), I can name at least three ‘meh’ ones (Frank Black and The Catholics’ “Dog Gone,” Ben Folds Five’s “Battle of Who Could Care Less,” Pavement’s Shady Lane—by the way, ‘meh’ suggests nothing about the quality of the title tracks here, particularly the last one). Really, it often just seemed like—at least in the nineties—B-sides and EPs were a dumping ground for subpar material.
It didn’t have to be that way though. I mean, my two favorite bands of all-time are R.E.M. and Pavement, whose Chronic Town and Watery, Domestic EPs mop the floor with virtually any full-length album ever released. The problem is, the CD era meant that (at least for me) Chronic Town was only familiar as the last five songs where the otherwise (mostly) ‘meh’ Dead Letter Office all-of-a-sudden gets inexplicably good; and Watery, Domestic was a four-song CD that cost nearly as much as the seventeen-song one (Wowee Zowee) when I held both in my hands, weighing which to buy at Flagstaff’s lone independent record store, Gopher Sounds. Like everything else, music fandom is a problem of scarcity; and in my formative years, EPs usually lost out in that battle.
But I’m no longer in my formative years. Now I can afford to go onto Discogs and buy four thirty-year-old EPs by a band that I love: EPs that were released on four small record labels in the wake of said band’s first brush with success. Those four EPs were comprised of a mix of new and old recordings, including several that were from early versions of the album that eventually became Propeller. In 1993, Bob Pollard was concerned that Guided by Voices might only have a limited window of time in which the outside world was interested in what they were doing, so when any record label expressed interest in putting out a GBV release, the answer was ‘yes.’ Thus, from December 1993 to March 1994, the band issued Static Airplane Jive (City Slang), Fast Japanese Spin Cycle (Engine), Get Out of My Stations (Siltbreeze), and Clown Prince of the Menthol Trailer (Domino) on four separate imprints.
In his own words, Pollard’s intention was to give each of these labels “five throwaways and one hit.” In this regard, it seems clear that City Slang got the best end of the deal, as Static Airplane Jive begins with “Big School”: arguably the finest track from the four EPs, and a certified GBV classic. Its opening (“one-two-BIG-SCHOOL”) seems to do nothing less than recast Dayton’s finest as the rightful heirs to the power pop throne once occupied by the Ramones. Elsewhere, Static shines with the Velvet Underground-inspired “Damn Good Mr. Jam”—which had been previewed on Propeller‘s “Back to Saturn X Report”—and the inexplicably charming forty-eight seconds of “Hey Aardvark.” According to Matthew Cutter’s 2018 Pollard/GBV biography, Closer You Are, City Slang label head Christof Ellinghaus claimed that Pollard “gave me three hits.” He could have been referencing any of the aforementioned three, or the also-excellent “Rubber Man,” “Glow Boy Butlers” or “Gelatin, Ice Cream, Plum.”
The New York-based Engine Records also made out quite well with Fast Japanese Spin Cycle, which includes two more top-tier tracks in “My Impression Now,” and a re-recording of the Vampire on Titus fan-favorite “Dusted.” While the ‘throwaways’ are a bit more apparent here, Spin Cycle still charms throughout: especially with the revisitation of another Titus track, “Marchers in Orange,” and “Kisses to the Crying Cooks”—which is an embryonic version of Propeller‘s epic opener, “Over the Neptune.”
Siltbreeze may not have gotten any true Guided by Voices masterpieces for Get Out of My Stations, but they easily received the best cover image of the four EPs: a Tobin Sprout shot of Jim and Bob Pollard—captured in their basement hideaway/studio, The Snakepit—with a bright beam of light, seemingly reaching out to the younger Pollard brother in a gesture of extraterrestrial warmth. The best of the EPs songs—namely “Scalding Creek,” “Dusty Bushworms,” and the ultra-endearing “Melted Pat”—are, at absolute minimum, second-tier GBV classics.
London’s Domino got the last, and least, of the four EPs—though they’d ultimately go on to become the most prominent of the four labels—with Clown Prince of the Menthol Trailer. Not to say that there isn’t anything worthwhile here—after all, this is a Pollard/GBV release from the years 1992-1996—but when the apparent ‘hit’ is the seventy-three second “Matter Eater Lad,” it would seem that Pollard had already sent most of his A-material out to the first callers. Still, “Lad” is a gem, and so too is the downcast closer, “Johnny Appleseed,” which ends the loosely-connected four-EP project on a rewarding note.
For many years, the twenty-eight songs of the four EPs—Pollard never quite stuck to the “five throwaways and one hit” formula—were mostly relegated to the status of ‘deep cuts.’ While some of the tracks remained in live set lists for years, they tended to go largely unknown to all but the most-devoted of fans. For instance, none of these songs appeared on the 2003 ‘best-of’ compilation, Human Amusements at Hourly Rates. However, as Robert Pollard is often wont to do, he returned to these songs for a 2022 archival project titled Scalping the Guru—named after a track from Clown Prince of the Menthol Trailer.
Scalping the Guru collected twenty of the 1993-1994 EP tracks, and resequenced them to function as a cohesive full-length LP. Not all releases were treated equally: all six songs from Static Airplane Jive were included in this new sequence, while several from Fast Japanese Spin Cycle were left off. Perhaps in deference to Vampire in Titus, Guru omitted the reworked versions of “Marchers in Orange” and “Dusted”—despite the fact that many fans, myself included, consider the re-recording of the latter to be far superior to the original. Also missing from Spin Cycle were “3rd World Birdwatching,” “Snowman,” and “Kisses to the Crying Cooks.” Two tracks from Get Out of My Stations (“Queen of Second Guessing” and “Blue Moon Fruit”), and one from Clown Prince of the Menthol Trailer (“Broadcastor House”) were also omitted.
While one could quibble with the choices of which tracks were left off, Scalping the Guru effectively crafted another LP-worth of fantastic—and largely-unknown to non-devotees—material from GBV’s most fruitful era. Even for someone well-versed in mid-nineties Guided by Voices, revisiting these EP tracks over the course of this past week—both in their original form and in the Scalping the Guru reconfiguration—has been little short of a revelation. This stuff is genuinely fantastic, and even though Pollard gave me every opportunity to revisit it in 2022, it still arrived as part of a deluge of ‘new’ material from that year. It took me devoting the majority of my free listening for the better part of a week to really absorb it; and, it only reminded me of how little time we often make for such things. And even if we did set aside the time, the fact remains: There. Is. So. Much. Content. And even though they contribute more than their share to the content pile, I don’t just mean GBV.
So, how can we possibly allocate adequate time for all of this stuff? Especially when we still feel compelled to spend time with the things that we already love? Readers of Strange Currencies, in all honesty, I kinda wish that I could spend a little more time with these four EPs before moving on to the next installment. But then, I see what’s up next…
Ratings: Static Airplane Jive (8.4) / Fast Japanese Spin Cycle (7.8) / Get Out of My Stations (7.2) / Clown Prince of the Menthol Trailer (7.0) / Scalping the Guru (8.5)
Bob-ism of the Week: “I’m travelin’, and the last I heard / Twelve sad stories from disciples of the sun / And we rang the bell, and fired the gun / To worship the perfect and sometimes cruel impartiality of the sun” (“Indian Fables”)
Next Week: Robert Pollard makes his masterpiece. His absolute fucking masterpiece.
