When it comes to Guided by Voices, John Peel and I both have something in common. Namely, we discovered them a long time after everybody else. In my case, this ignorance was far longer than Peel’s had been. In the summer of 2001, during a spree of record buying, I bought a compilation CD called The Sound City Sessions, which had originally been given away in an October 1999 edition of Melody Maker. It showcased bands who had, at various times over the course of the 90s, played as part of Radio 1’s Sound City event, which was a precursor to their Big Weekend event.
Some of the performances on the CD were taken from the artists’ sets at Sound City gigs, including Oasis at Glasgow in 1994 and a performance of Supersonic, where the engineers put Noel Gallagher’s lead guitar so low in the mix that the whole performance is carried by Paul Arthurs’s rhythm guitar. We also got Garbage performing Dumb at Leeds in 1996, Reef performing End at Bristol in 1995, Travis performing Hazy Shades of Gold at Oxford in 1997 and future Peel favourites Ash performing Jack Names the Planets at Leeds in ‘96. As far as I’m concerned, the CD justifies its existence because its tracklisting includes Gangsters by Longpigs, but it also introduced me to Guided by Voices who were due to perform at the Sound City event being held in October ‘99 at Liverpool. The track they had on there was Teenage FBI, which I thought was OK, but didn’t really inspire me to go much further given that it appeared to be modelling itself on the work of The Supernaturals. In my ignorance, I assumed that Guided by Voices were a “new” late-90s band who hadn’t got further than the stereo in the Melody Maker office. It was only in subsequent years that I discovered just how far back they went - formed in 1983, first records released in the mid-80s - and, indeed, they had been so busy and productive that by the time Peel discovered them around February 1993, they had retired from live performances and were onto their fifth album, Propeller, from which Weedking was taken.
I was also to discover that the sound on Teenage FBI and its accompanying album, Do the Collapse, were considered to be unrepresentative of what a Guided by Voices record “should” sound like. If someone had played Weedking and Teenage FBI to me in 2001 and asked me to guess who they were by, I would have probably answered with two different bands. Teenage FBI sounds glossy, shiny and hopeful of getting the listener’s attention, but Weedking sounds monolithic, slightly prog and mythical. It’s quite the trick to go from sounding like grizzled rockers to preppy pop stars in 7 years, but having listened to both the Propeller and Do the Collapse LPs over the last two days, they both share what I consider to be core elements of Guided By Voices music:
1) Psychedelic poetry which tells the listener nothing specific, but somehow transports them to the place, time and emotion that their tracks are set in.
2) A sense that everything they put out is considered, solid and complete. Propeller features maybe half a dozen tracks that could have fit in next to the smoothly produced tracks on Do the Collapse. The rest of its content is lo-fi, sketchy and immediate. As if the band set their 4-track to record wherever they were, grabbed the instrument closet to them, and recorded the song. But although the recordings may feel haphazard, the songs themselves never seem unfinished or ill-fitting. It’s as if they instinctively know which tracks need extensive colouring/layering and which can be presented in a basic form. Regardless, the songs are ready for you to hear.*
As far as 1) goes, for me Weedking sounds as though it is a song about the thrill of discovering rock music and the even greater thrill of being able to play it. Robert Pollard spent part of his mid-1970s teens playing in a heavy metal covers band and going to concerts. The titans of heavy metal guitar playing, as referenced in the opening verse, appear to inspire Pollard - We conjure ghosts and then we feed them - and the remainder of the song sounds like a procession through the joy of making music, improving your ability, hanging out with friends and like-minded people, going to shows until the musicians reach their logical endpoint: lighting up a joint and using it to set a state of mind from which to create music and sing your songs.
For the dreams of the weedking, we all sing.
It’s also possible that the song was meant as a farewell to rock music. Over the course of a decade, Guided by Voices had struggled to attract much interest, and by the time they came to record the Propeller LP, they had quit live performance and were putting out Propeller as a farewell record. Just in time, the record picked up some attention and Guided by Voices carried on into the present day.
Video courtesy of stonedcomedianringo.
Lyrics are copyright of Robert Pollard.
*I appreciate that I’ve only heard 2 out of 40 studio albums that the band have put out, so if you do know of examples in their discography where they’ve succumbed to a “that’ll do” sensibility, please leave a comment.
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