10.09.2005
Picture me big time
I'm always excited to pop open the mailbox and find a CD; Saturday that excitement was fourfold thanks to the arrival of a box from Luna Records holding the new four-CD Guided by Voices box set, Suitcase 2: American Superdream Wow. The box, as the title suggests, is the second of Robert Pollard's closet-clearing collections that gather unreleased songs, demos, outtakes, etc. The first, per the usual ratio of great-to-good-to-decent in his catalog, included a solid disc's worth of good stuff among its 100 tracks, and I assume the same from this. That's a lot of editing that Pollard requires his fans to do on his behalf, but at least this way we know we have access to it all; surely there's no hidden gem avoiding release at this point.
Not quite ready to dive in, but wanting to hear some GBV, I dug up a couple of older discs to put on -- Mag Earwig and Do the Collapse. Diehards who hate the thought of produced music from these lo-fi pioneers would debate this, but these discs represent what to me is the apex of Pollard's work. Do the Collapse, in particular, is a disc full of should-be hits. I hate when critics fall back on the "in a parallel universe" sort of thing, so I'll refrain here. There was little chance that GBV would have a hit, but if it was to happen, "Surgical Focus" or "Teenage FBI" (or even the treacly "Hold on Hope") were the band's best bets. But that's not what the masses want to hear, for whatever reason. At the last GBV show I saw, on the cusp of the band's "Electrifying Conclusion" tour (coming soon to a DVD player near you), Pollard ended one of these latter-day wonders and said, "That should have been a hit. That's why we're breaking up. If that isn't a hit, we should just quit doing this."
I was reminded of that further when watching the Ramones documentary End of the Century this weekend. At one point, Johnny Ramone said he finally realized after the Phil Spector-produced End of the Century disc failed to sell any more than its under-performing predecessors that this was the best the band was going to do. Regardless of the fact that its music was catchy as all get out, the public just wasn't embracing the band. Retrenchment was the solution, he said, the goal from there on out being to continue to please the fans the band had and make a good living on the road.
Why do some things hit and others don't? Well, no matter how good the Ramones were, four surly New Yorkers in leather jackets were a harder sell than say, three cute punks from Orange County 15 years later (that'd be Green Day). By the same token, a 40something former elementary school teacher with a serious Who fetish just isn't going to break through to the mainstream, no matter how good those GBV discs are.
Not quite ready to dive in, but wanting to hear some GBV, I dug up a couple of older discs to put on -- Mag Earwig and Do the Collapse. Diehards who hate the thought of produced music from these lo-fi pioneers would debate this, but these discs represent what to me is the apex of Pollard's work. Do the Collapse, in particular, is a disc full of should-be hits. I hate when critics fall back on the "in a parallel universe" sort of thing, so I'll refrain here. There was little chance that GBV would have a hit, but if it was to happen, "Surgical Focus" or "Teenage FBI" (or even the treacly "Hold on Hope") were the band's best bets. But that's not what the masses want to hear, for whatever reason. At the last GBV show I saw, on the cusp of the band's "Electrifying Conclusion" tour (coming soon to a DVD player near you), Pollard ended one of these latter-day wonders and said, "That should have been a hit. That's why we're breaking up. If that isn't a hit, we should just quit doing this."
I was reminded of that further when watching the Ramones documentary End of the Century this weekend. At one point, Johnny Ramone said he finally realized after the Phil Spector-produced End of the Century disc failed to sell any more than its under-performing predecessors that this was the best the band was going to do. Regardless of the fact that its music was catchy as all get out, the public just wasn't embracing the band. Retrenchment was the solution, he said, the goal from there on out being to continue to please the fans the band had and make a good living on the road.
Why do some things hit and others don't? Well, no matter how good the Ramones were, four surly New Yorkers in leather jackets were a harder sell than say, three cute punks from Orange County 15 years later (that'd be Green Day). By the same token, a 40something former elementary school teacher with a serious Who fetish just isn't going to break through to the mainstream, no matter how good those GBV discs are.
