Land of Danger

While there will be no order to things here, the idea of writing about every Guided by Voices song did send me back to the very beginning. I toyed with many ideas, wanting to start with "Land of Danger" and end with "Huffman Prairie Flying Field" to perfectly bookend the band's career. There is nothing tidy about GBV, however, so any such plans seemed tin-eared at best.

But when I did go back to the beginning, pulling the band's debut EP, Forever Since Breakfast, out of the Hardcore UFOs box set for a spin, I couldn't stop listening to "Land of Danger." It's an imperfect song that in no way foreshadows the brilliance and longevity that was to come, but it is quite good for what it was. Back in 1986, Guided by Voices was one of hundreds of bands that sprung up around the country composed of musicians who grew to realize that they were just as able as their heroes to make and release music. It was a continuation of the ripple effect of punk, as bands begat bands begat bands.

There is a clear debt to Chronic Town-era R.E.M. here, much as there is in similar EPs and LPs from dozens of other contemporaneous bands. Here in the Midwest, bands like Turning Curious and the Primitons trod similar ground. What I hear most in "Land of Danger," however, is the Hollowmen, a band from my native Des Moines that put out two great LPs in the mid- to late-1980s. The first, Sinister Flower Gift, could have easily included "Land of Danger," its mix of jangling guitar, hard-driving drums and quirky, ominous lyrics -- "Oh, baby, this is the land of danger (each and every home a battlefield)/ Oh, baby, this is the throat of a stranger (searching for the blood that's now congealed)" -- a perfect fit. The Hollowmen discovered Sonic Youth at the same time Pollard more fully alchemized his love of 1960s British rock, and the two band's paths diverged. Pollard's was the more bankable direction.

In an interview I did with Pollard last year, we talked about that first EP and those from bands that were his peers at the time: "You know, I hope those records, and they were, were better than Forever Since Breakfast... I didn’t want to do anything with it, because I knew people would think, 'This sucks,' and I knew we couldn’t play very well. We just did it for our own amusement. It’s just strange. I think I was just rewarded for my perseverance, my sheer love of doing it, and not going for it. We didn’t promote ourselves at all."

Despite the promise one can see in hindsight, its disingenuous to say it was clear Guided by Voices would succeed where others would not. "Land of Danger" is a solid beginning for the band, but without that perseverance from Pollard, it would have been just another footnote in the history of 1980s college rock.