Guided By Voices - Canal Street Tavern, Dayton, Ohio, Sept. 2, 1994

<img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/eb65cc9a34f5e7b5df0fc3da6ab46b02/ba3e3fd1dd77ee1f-5b/s640x960/4494cc25e06836c34d03e45ab71a43cd4b9533db.webp"/>https://archive.org/details/GBV_1994-09-02
, I think. That’s where a 15-year-old had to go for these things back then, kids! Nothing too huge, just a staff mention here, a single review there. Charles Aaron reported: “GBV singer-songwriter Robert Pollard writes jittery, surging, sideways tributes to John/Paul, Syd Barrett, Lou Reed, Ray Davies, et al, like a teenager in full flush.” Sounded enticing! Then there was Jim Greer, in his A Year In The Life of Rock ‘n’ Roll column, closing out a long musing on the recently departed Kurt Cobain with this: “I listen a lot these days to 'Exit Flagger’ by Guided By Voices, an amazing song written by 37-year-old schoolteacher Robert Pollard in the middle of nowhere, where I live too, like most people, without a whole lot to go on. I quoted part of the lyrics at the beginning of this piece because however Pollard intended the song, it’s come to mean a lot more to me since Cobain’s death. The song’s lyrics end on a tag line after the chorus, which I have never been able to decipher properly. Just before the guitars begin their quick, cathartic crescendo to the fadeout, Pollard can be heard singing either 'Promise to lead you,’ or 'Promise to leave you.’ Or maybe both. So far it’s the closest thing I’ve come across to a clue in all this mess.” Oddly, Greer would’ve been able to ask Pollard what those lyrics were very soon; the writer joined GBV as bassist sometime in the summer of '94. He was also engaged to Kim Deal! Jim was leading some kind of indie rock charmed life, it seemed (of course, him and Kim never got married and he didn’t last all that long with Pollard and co., but hey). And what about me?! Well, after reading all of this and more, I finally came across a copy of Bee Thousand that fall at Go-Boy Records in Redondo Beach and took a chance — I don’t think I’d heard a note of Guided By Voices yet. And though I was confused at first when I dropped the needle on that bright-red vinyl, by the end I was more or less head over heels. It’s hard to re-create in my mind the weird, mysterious beauty of hearing that LP for the first few times, trying to figure out what was going on, but I know it unlocked something. Parallel lines on a slow decline, the story of our lives. Anyway, here we are 30 years later, and I’m listening to GBV play a typically rowdy hometown show that’s packed with Bee Thousand tunes, plus plenty of Alien Lanes tunes (then called Scalping The Guru, as Bob notes), alongside a host of classic numbers that still sound like they’ve been beamed in from some other, better universe. “Guided By Voices are fucking pussies!” Pollard exclaims bewilderingly in between songs. Hell yeah they are.  

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