Back to Saturn X Radio Report

In a catalog already bursting with stray snippets, bits that resurface and mutate years later and dozens upon dozens of very short songs, the most interesting Guided by Voices song may be "Back to Saturn X Radio Report." Why? Mainly for the fact that the entire song is a collage of snippets. Not only that, but the snippets come from songs that were originally slated for the aborted album Back to Saturn X. So, the "radio report" part of the equation makes sense: This plays like a radio dial being spun through the airwaves on Saturn X, each static-filled song perhaps representing a different station.

At the time of its release on Propeller, the song was a tease of sorts. None of the songs being sampled had yet been released. By now, of course, as Robert Pollard has effectively mined the vaults for any and all releasable tunes, all eight of these tracks has seen the light of day. Even casual fans will recognize things like "Buzzards and Dreadful Crows," the first snippet and one of the standout tracks on the later album Bee Thousand, as well as "Chicken Blows" from Alien Lanes. A few others are more obscure, popping up on collections like King Shit and the Golden Boys or the Hardcore UFOs and Suitcase boxed sets.

It's a curious and enlightening artifact, and yet another example of the creative fire burning in Pollard. That he could toss aside an album full of songs of this quality, content to mash them into a minute-and-a-half and bury it in the middle of the second side of the album that replaced it is fairly amazing.

With much respect to those who diligently documented all of the songs that appear here and then posted that information to Wikipedia for me to steal, here are the eight songs and their eventual homes:

--"Buzzards and Dreadful Crows," Bee Thousand
--"Sopor Joe," King Shit And The Golden Boys
--"Fantasy Creeps," King Shit And the Golden Boys
--"Back to Saturn X," Hardcore UFOS
--"Mr. Japan," Suitcase: Failed Experiments and Trashed Aircraft
--"Chicken Blows," Alien Lanes
--"Damn Good, Mr. Jam," Suitcase: Failed Experiments and Trashed Aircraft
--"Tractor Rape Chain (Clean it Up),"Darla 100 - Sixth Year Anniversary Compilation
--"Damn Good, Mr. Jam" reprise

On the Tundra

Anytime someone mentions the charm of Guided by Voices' early four-track days, songs like "On the Tundra" are what come to mind. The song closes Propeller, one of the band's more hi-fi early mid-period albums, on a mid-fi note. The drums are tinny, the guitars a bit compressed and Robert Pollard's vocals are even more prominent than usual in part, it seems, because he was closest to the microphone.

The song is indecipherable, and at times unintelligible, but it has a great big hook on the chorus that redeems it. And then... the song fades to nothing before picking back up again. It's as if they didn't work out how to get from the chorus and back into the verse, or perhaps they stopped the tape, reset and started again. Whatever, it's the kind of move that draws attention to the band's methods. This is as far from slick as one can get. And that is exactly what made so many people love them.

Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox

This epic two-song juggernaut may well be the first truly transcendent Robert Pollard composition. It's certainly the first time the full potential and power of Guided by Voices was put on full display. It starts with one of the great openings in rock. In a collage of sound meant to simulate a live show, Pollard yells "All right, rock 'n' roll!" then a crowd starts chanting "G-B-V!" Someone intones, "Is anybody ready to rock?" After a few moments, Pollard replies, "This song does not rock." Then the song begins, and it does, in fact, rock. Not only that, but it's about rock, at least in part:

And hey, let's throw the great party
today for the rest of our lives.
The band is just about to get started
so throw the switch,
it's rock-n-roll time

It's a great, driving rocker with an insistent beat and one of Pollard's better melodies. So good, in fact, that an acoustic version dubbed "Kisses to the Crying Cooks" is a standout on the Fast Japanese Spin Cycle EP.

From there things slide into a bit of slowed-down prog rock. The beat drops, the driving guitars are replaced by spacey sounds and Pollard begins his best The Wall-esque intonation:

Spit me out from your cosmos
Draft me into your troops
Set me up for the knockdown
You can watch
And I'll be back when it's over

Then the drums return for an insistent moment as Pollard's vocal turns boastful:

I'm much greater than you think
I'm swimmer in the drink
I'm much greedier than you think
I'm slammer in the drink

Then the song shifts again, taking on an anthemic tone as Pollard seems to shift his focus toward a love object, the Mesh Gear Fox. "Time's wasting and you're not gonna live forever. And if you do, I'll come back and marry you." From there he pins his heart firmly on his sleeve:

It's not the way that I fear that I feel
It's the way you act
It's the way you look when you're near me
It's not so hard to conceal to concede?
It's the things you say
It's the things you do, go right through me

The song closes with about a minute of full-on guitar wankery that would make the most indulgent seventies dinosaur rocker proud.

GBV may have been a band only in the sense of a handful of guys playing in the basement at this point, but this song betrays long nights practicing and listening to some of the great music of the 60s and 70s. They hadn't really played on stage up to now, but they ably recreated a great live show as if they were old pros. It's fitting that the song opened the band's final show at the Metro in Chicago on New Year's Eve 2004. By that time it was no posture, but rather the real deal. Despite that, the band never topped this first performance.

Quality of Armor

"Oh yeah, I'm going to drive my car. Oh yeah, I'm going to go real far." Thus kicks off the first Guided by Voices song with which I was smitten. It was 1993 and I had just bought the Vampire on Titus CD from my local record shop. Those were the days when the recommendation of a clerk actually meant something. Vampire on Titus itself wasn't doing much for me, so I skipped forward to the tracks that, according to the liner notes were "originally released as "Propeller" LP, 1992, by Rockathon Records."

Now this I liked. I eventually fell in love with much of that album, even as the Vampire on Titus material continued to fail to click (something that, for the most part, holds today). "Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox" and "Weed King" were fitting lead-ins, priming me for what I didn't know. When it kicked in in the form of "Quality of Armor," I was hooked. Over the course of two-and-a-half minutes of frantic power chords from Mitch Mitchell, Robert Pollard sings about finding God in the dictionary, taking photos in the cemetery and moving beyond the secrets of this world and the Montezuma Halls. Along the way he comes up with a mission statement of sorts, one that seems borne of his twin pursuits at the time as both teacher and rocker: "The worst offense is intelligence, the best defense is belligerence."

At the time it seemed odd that the lyrics had nothing to do with armor or any qualities it might possess. Soon I figured out that Pollard had great song titles and great lyrics, only occasionally do the twain meet. All of the disparate elements here came together to create what could be seen as the prototypical GBV song: short, perplexing, lo-fi and undeniably catchy.