Bee Thousand 33 1/3

2008-09-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

Bee Thousand Book Extravaganza at Paradise Lounge in Boston
Before Robert Pollard’s Boston Spaceships / Big Dipper Show
Tuesday, 30 September

To introduce my book on Guided by Voices’ much-loved LP Bee Thousand, part of the world-conquering 33 1/3 series, to the rock cognoscenti of Boston (my home town—well, actually, Concord, but . . .), I'll be presenting a multi-media (or at least bi-media) Bee Thousand "extravaganza" at The Paradise Lounge (967-969 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston/ http://www.thedise.com/) at 6:00 PM on Tuesday, 30 September, in the very same building as, and just before doors open (at 7:00) for the Robert Pollard's Boston Spaceships show at The Paradise.

Come by for pre-show festivities at the Paradise Lounge. There'll be a randomly chosen interview cassette minute (usually at the expense of the author’s dignity), the collective making of a found poem from Bee Thousand lyric fragments using the Tzara Dada method of anti-lyric composition, the playing of a few Bee Thousand-era rarities, and a full-size anagram contest (prix d'honneur for the winner).

Should you require further inducements, the Chicago Tribune had this to say about the tome: “Akin to Guided By Voices themselves, Marc Woodworth's homage to the band's 1994 breakthrough [Bee Thousand] is fun, wordy, spirited and peculiar.” So am I.

Sing alongs? Why not? “Why I love this record in 200 words or less”? Bring your responses and I’ll read a few. I’ll also give away home-made, individually decorated, and very lo-fi indexes to those who buy the book or bring in their tattered, smudged and dog-eared copies.

2008-09-24T08:39:00.000-07:00

Gary Waleik is guitarist/singer/writer for Big Dipper. He wrote this appreciation of the record too late to include in the book, but as the Dipper is playing with Robert Pollard's Boston Spaceships IN Boston on Tuesday, 30 September, I offer it up now:

Why I love Bee Thousand
by Gary Waleik

I hate Bee Thousand. I hardly ever take it off the shelf anymore. It’s a mirror in which I look bad as a musician, a songwriter and a singer. It’s a comprehensive encyclopedia of self awareness and honesty, and I’m afraid that my musical attempts sound very unaware and dishonest in comparison. Even the goddamn cover is brilliant, and it cruelly mocks as it reminds me of the time my band made the mistake of dishing out $10,000 to a New York City graphic design firm in exchange for the worst album cover in the history of rock. We had no idea that you could clip a great album cover out of a magazine.

But I also love Bee Thousand. I could say a lot, as many have, about its illogical and breathtaking synthesis of pop hooks and rock riffs and noise and angst and wholly unsentimental acknowledgement of beauty. But there aren’t enough words in a 200 word essay to do that. So maybe the best way to state my love for Bee Thousand is to say that the last few lines of Echos Myron may have saved my life.

2008-01-17T07:27:00.000-08:00

AUDIO BEE THOUSAND BOOK FEATURE

Eric A. Thomas of the Missouri Review just posted his audio feature about the book on the Review's website. It's so well-done, wit and irreverence desert me:

http://www.missourireview.com/audio/2007-12-18_woodworth.mp3

2007-12-05T09:14:00.001-08:00

2007-11-20T07:50:00.000-08:00

Bee Thousand Book Extravaganza at Smart Bar

To introduce my book on Guided by Voices’ much-loved LP Bee Thousand, part of the world-conquering 33 1/3 series, to the vaunted upper-mid-West rock cognoscenti, I'll be presenting a multi-media (or at least bi-media) Bee Thousand "extravaganza" at Smart Bar in Chicago (www.smartbarchicago.com /3730 N Clark St) at 7:00 PM on Friday, 30 November (doors at 6:00), in the very same building as, and just before doors open for, the Robert Pollard show at Metro.

Come by for pre-show festivities at Smart Bar. A binding majority of Chicago’s own Textbook Committee (GbV ‘tribute’ band extraordinaire) will provide live sonic illustrations, there'll be a randomly chosen interview cassette minute (usually at the expense of the author’s dignity), the collective making of a found poem from Bee Thousand lyric fragments using the Tzara Dada method of anti-lyric composition, the playing of a few Bee Thousand-era rarities, and a full-size anagram contest (prix d'honneur for the winner).

Should you require further inducements, your very own Chicago Tribune had this to say about the tome: “Akin to Guided By Voices themselves, Marc Woodworth's homage to the band's 1994 breakthrough [Bee Thousand] is fun, wordy, spirited and peculiar.”

Sing alongs? Why not? “Why I love this record in 200 words or less”? Bring your responses and I’ll read a few. I’ll also give away home-made, individually decorated, and very lo-fi indexes to those who buy the book or bring in their tattered, smudged and thin-paged copies.

LINKS

Bee Thousand book blog: http://b1000.blogspot.com/

The book: http://www.amazon.com/Guided-Voices-Bee-Thousand-33/dp/0826417485

33 1/3 Series Blog: http://www.33third.blogspot.com/

Robert Pollard homepage: robertpollard.net

2007-11-05T08:12:00.001-08:00

Uncle Bob turns 50 and Bee Thousand is better than ever

2007-06-13T07:06:00.001-07:00

I had a lovely time at the Bee Thousand party in Brooklyn last Saturday night. Here's one of Nina Minichetti's photographs of Nina Katchadourian and Rick Moody playing a fine, sweet version of "Awful Bliss."

2007-05-16T14:51:00.000-07:00

2007-04-11T13:39:00.000-07:00

2007-03-26T10:32:00.000-07:00

Here's a happy-making POPMATTERS Review of the Bee Thousand book

Amplified to Rock

by Jason B. Jones

PopShop

Amazon

Amazon UK

Bee Thousand makes perfect sense for Continuum’s famous 33 1/3 series. The breakthrough album for Guided by Voices undoubtedly has an appropriate stature, as it exemplified a certain style of lo-fi, DIY aesthetic that’s still influential. Moreover, Robert Pollard’s elliptical lyrics and layered, yet quasi-improvisational melodies would seem to profit from a handy introduction. Everyone I know who listens to Guided by Voices was introduced to their music by some knowledgeable friend, a role which Marc Woodworth ably takes up in his short book. What’s more interesting about Bee Thousand, though, is the way it both embraces and complicates the nostalgia permeating the entire 33 1/3 series. Simultaneously a mythologizing and de-mythologizing book, Bee Thousand demonstrates yet again the power of Faulkner’s claim that “the past isn’t even past.”

The circumstances around the Bee Thousand album are familiar. Recorded after the Dayton, Ohio band had decided to break up, on a four-track in Tobin Sprout’s garage, it led to critical acclaim—with Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, a defining lo-fi record—and the band’s continuation (indeed, now Pollard was able to quit teaching). Guided by Voices albums feature lots of short, imperfectly recorded songs, and Bee Thousand is no exception. Its 20 tracks take less than 37 minutes to play—the longest, “Tractor Rape Chain,” clocks in at an epic 3.04mins—and there are notorious recording glitches and accidental effects. All of the songs were recorded in a hurry.

The book Bee Thousand takes a kaleidoscopic approach to its topic. It features narratives by Robert Pollard, Don Thrasher, Kevin Fennell, Robert Griffin, Dan Toohey, Greg Demos, and Tobin Sprout, an interview with collagist filmmaker Lewis Klahr, and a series of “Listener Responses.” It also features a series of “word clusters,” associations found in the album, a sonnet composed of phrases from Bee Thousand, and excerpts that purport to be from a dissertation on Pollard’s lyrics. (The foreword by “Bart O. Roper, LLD” gives the game away.) Woodworth’s own contributions come as both short overtures on key topics—“Love & Purity,” “Desire & Its Limits”—and a five-part main thread, “Fiction, Man & Hardcore Facts.”

As Woodworth points out, the immediacy of the album’s sound is misleading. The fuzzy, dirty recordings sound urgent and fresh, as if they are bursting out onto the four-track, without much attention to craft. However, this isn’t quite right. Many songs are versions of earlier GBV songs, or are made out of snippets of such songs, and some even reprise melodies Pollard apparently wrote as a boy. The band’s narratives are especially interesting on this score, as they reconstruct the diverse origins of the songs. More generally, in Woodworth’s hands the band’s songs turn out to be palimpsests, in which British Invasion songs are overwritten by “Pollard’s past as a nearly life-long maker of songs, his immersion in the music of others, and a memory of childhood pleasure and creativity made melancholy because it is no longer present with the same force it once had”.

This emphasis on the past has interesting effects. One of the charming conceits of the 33 1/3 series is that the books are frequently intensely personal responses to an album, and so they are nostalgic, not just for an album but also for the critic’s own youth. Bee Thousand opens with a poetic excursus that seems to evoke all of these feelings: you’re left “with a pang of longing but also oddly pleased,” “you’ve got to build the playground in your head because you’ve got to build the playground in your head because you can’t play on the real playground anymore—rust has eaten through the elephant slide and the monkey bars’ thinning aluminum is too cold to grip, not to mention that you’re not allowed to go in there anymore, old man”.

But the nostalgia Woodworth evokes is not his own, but rather an imaginative response to GBV lyrics—that is, it’s presented as the songwriter’s nostalgia. Robert Pollard describes his method as “deconstructionist”, by which he means that he works from snippets of old songs, putting them together in new ways, and then breaking them apart or disrupting them in some way. A recurring distinction in the book is that between a “creamy” song, which is unappealingly smooth and polished, and ones that are adequately “fucked up,” where imperfection points up the humanity behind the art. Fucking up, for the band, is both accidental and deliberate, a chance occurrence and methodological imperative: One way to write a song is to take a “creamy” melody and interpolate it with new sounds, free-associative lyrics, and other artifacts of recording. The result, for GBV, is new music born from the shards of the past—or, as Woodworth puts it, it shows that “life can rise from art”.

What’s remarkable about Bee Thousand is Woodworth’s ability to reconstruct the ”event“ of the album despite only discovering it later. In fact, by the time he started listening to GBV the musicians had almost entirely changed, and he had to work backward to Bee Thousand. This means that his experience of the album—the way that it bits of it stuck with him until he began to connect more passionately to it—is uncannily like the experience of making the album: “I felt more akin to the band as a 30-something myself, a partially lapsed rocker, who like Pollard and Company, grew up listening to big rock in big arenas during the ‘70s”. While that might be the generation that finds GBV most naturally, Woodworth’s book should help listeners of any age find joy in such oddities as “Hardcore UFOs,” a “dairy creamer explicitly laid out as a fruitcake,” and the “kicker of elves.” More generally, anyone interested in DIY-type bands should find the band’s narratives relevant.

2007-03-19T11:09:00.000-07:00

Chicago Tribune Mention

I'm tempted to be a team player and share all ten mentions of 33 1/3 books that appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday, but for reasons of brevity and temperament (lazy; only child), I'll simply offer an excerpt about Bee Thousand by Bob Gendron who's not only "Special to the Tribune," but, now, special to me, as well.

March 18, 2007:

"Bee Thousand," by Marc Woodworth (2006)

Akin to Guided By Voices themselves, Marc Woodworth's homage to the band's 1994 breakthrough is fun, wordy, spirited and peculiar. Lengthy discussions with group leader Bob Pollard unscramble the patchwork songwriting and recording processes, and multifaceted interpretations of lyrics make for convincing notions about meanings. While Woodworth might not change detractors' minds regarding the band's value, his abstract thinking and quirky organization justify the lo-fi rockers' enduring appeal and polarizing aesthetic.

Here's the link to the whole piece:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/arts/chi-0703170072mar18,1,4167703.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

2007-02-26T06:37:00.000-08:00

Book Party at Valentine's in Albany, NY

To celebrate the publication of my book on Guided by Voices' Bee Thousand in the 33 1/3 series, I'll be presenting a multi-media (or at least bi-media) Bee Thousand "extravaganza" at Valentine's (http://www.valentinesalbany.com) 17 New Scotland Ave, Albany, NY at 6:oo PM on Friday, 2 March. There'll be a randomly chosen interview cassette half-minute, the collective making of a found poem from Bee Thousand lyric fragments using the Tzara Dada method of anti-lyric composition, a full-size anagram contest (prix d'honneur for the winner), and the playing of some Bee Thousand-related rarities. On hand will be some home-made and hand-decorated Lo-Fi indexes that are in keeping with the GbV DIY spirit (the initial batch of these instant collector's items were snapped up by the NYC cognoscenti when we last read there and sold for at least several cents more than the paper costs on a money-leeching internet commerce site which must, our lawyers tell us, remain nameless) which will be happily given to those who buy the book at Valentine's. Fans are encouraged to come with a paragraph about their experience of the album which I'll read to the masses assembled on Friday night.

2007-02-14T11:32:00.000-08:00

There's a pleasing (to me) review of the book at Popmatters.com:

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/books/reviews/11168/bee-thousand-by-marc-woodworth/

2006-12-20T12:49:00.000-08:00

We've made a number of indexes in the DIY spirit to accompany the book. Meant for gifts at readings, only one of which took place before the Normal Happiness tour was cancelled, they took off like, proverbially, helicopters. We offer an example of one of these rarities above so you know what you're missing until the big promo rotors that we command start spinning again:

2006-12-06T19:01:00.000-08:00

An Excerpt from The Author's Cut: Bee Thousand Word Frequency Report

I am not a scientist, but if I were, I might have compiled this clever and objective analysis of how many times certain words recur in the lyrics of Bee Thousand and how these words compare to related words. Due to commercial concerns beyond our admittedly limited comprehension, this revealing page was excized from the ms. for Bee Thousand (The Book)

Click to enlarge and scrutinize.

2006-11-17T03:33:00.000-08:00

This bevy of brainy beauties helped out onstage at the Cakeshop reading last Monday with an anagram contest. (Bart O. Roper, LLD, by the way, is the University of Liverpool professor who memorably introduces the dissertation fragments on R. Pollard's lyrics by his late student Nolen Twinn-Johnson in the book). Musician Dan Carlson, paramour and husband of Artist Julia Jacquette—next to me—won the anagram contest and took home a fresh copy of the book, lavishly inscribed to him (well, maybe not . . .), but I SWEAR there was no foul-play, just coincidence and brilliance . . . even though Dan also took this photograph.

2006-11-06T17:42:00.000-08:00

Cover 1

2006-11-06T16:00:00.000-08:00

"I was a teenage rockstar (or tried to act like one on stage at the high school talent show)" (c. 1978)

With Gary Waleik on bass—later to become a 6-string indie hero with Big Dipper—who MUCH later introduced me to the pleasures of Guided by Voices

2006-11-06T12:35:00.000-08:00

I'll be presenting a multi-media (or at least bi-media) Bee Thousand "extravaganza" at the CAKESHOP, 152 Ludlow Street, New York City, at 7:oo PM on Monday, 13 November very close to and just before doors open for the Robert Pollard show at The Bowery Ballroom. Come by for pre-show festivities. There'll be a randomly chosen interview cassette minute, the collective making of a found poem from Bee Thousand lyric fragments using the Tzara Dada method of anti-lyric composition, and a full-size anagram contest (prix d'honneur for the winner). "We" are still working on a 33 1/3 series size supplement to be distributed at the CAKESHOP event. The excellent Ben Sisario will also be reading from his 33 1/3 book on The Pixies' Doolittle should you require further great rock inducements.

My Bee Thousand book blog: http://b1000.blogspot.com/
the book: http://www.amazon.com/Guided-Voices-Bee-Thousand-33/dp/0826417485
33 1/3 Series Blog: http://www.33third.blogspot.com/
Robert Pollard homepage: robertpollard.net
http://www.cake-shop

2006-11-02T23:13:00.000-08:00

My able and wonderful assistant Yolande has just completed an Index for the book (which is not, of course, actually included in the book given who we are and how we operate around here). We are working on a 33 1/3 series size supplement printed in a suitably Bee Thousand-esque way to be distributed at readings and Robert Pollard shows during the upcoming Normal Happiness tour dates (books will be available at the shows) to those of you who get your hands on the books at those events.

I think there's real poetry in Yolande's categories and here are a few excerpts from the index. The 'B's' are especially exciting, as you'll see (but don't discount the allure of the 'R's'):

Bacchanalia: 88.
“Bakesale": 83.
Barrett, Syd: 129.

Big Star: 148.
Black Flag: 81.
Blues and Boogie Shoes: 109.
Brainiac: 31.
Brautigan, Richard: 134.
(The) Breeders: 31, 46.
Bread: 52.

Briars: 104.
British Invasion: 37-38, 41, 74, 82, 104.
Brothers Davies: 129.
Bukowski: 109.
Burroughs: 109.
Bush, George (“the Elder”): 123.

garage: 6, 11, 18, 31, 36, 41, 55-56, 73, 76, 83, 121, 143, 146-147.
Genesis: 4, 83, 129.
Gide, André: 67.

Laundry and Lasers: 21.
Led Zeppelin: 9.
Life Studies: 67.
Lion King: 123.
Lipps, Mike: 20.

REM: 72, 152.
Rickenbacker: 59.
Rimbaud, Arthur: 88.
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner:” 54.
“Rip Van Winkle:” 107.

Twinn-Johnson, Nolen: 85-86.
“(The) Two Thousand Pound Bee (Part I):” 45.
two-track: 148.
Tzara, Tristan: 95.

2006-11-02T20:30:00.000-08:00

Here's news of a couple of Bee Thousand book events.

Monday 13 November, 7.oo PM

I'll be at the very down CAKESHOP (haven't been there--I'm not down--but that's what I hear) at 152 Ludlow Street, New York City, at 7:oo PM on Monday, 13 November reading from and doing various things associated with the Bee Thousand book. The reading is near The Bowery Ballroom where Robert Pollard will be playing just after the event. Ben Sisario will also be reading from his 33 1/3 book on The Pixies' Doolittle.

http://www.cake-shop

Saturday 18 November, 6.oo PM

A similar event though slightly modified to meet the tastes and needs of the denizens of Noho, will take place at Turn It Up (5 Pleasant Street), the storied music store in Northampton, MA, just before the Robert Pollard show that evening at the nearby Pearl Street club.

http://www.turnitup.com

Word soon about a Boston or Cambridge book event on the 17th of November before the RP show at The Paradise . . .

2006-08-29T15:23:00.000-07:00

Sitting out on your house SOON