Guided By Voices
Terminal 5, NYC
NOvember 7, 2010

01-Guided By Voices
02-Tractor Rape Chain
03-Game of Pricks
04-I Am a Scientist
05-Shocker in Gloomtown
06-Gold Heart Mountaintop Queen Directory
07-Gold Star for Robotboy
08-My Valuable Hunting Knife
09-Motor Away
10-A Good Flying Bird
11-Cut-Out Witch
12-Matter Eater Lad
13-Watch Me Jumpstart
14-Striped White Jets
15-Terminal 5, Drinking and Such
16-My Impression Now
17-Awful Bliss
18-14 Cheerleader Coldfront
19-Lethargy
20-Break Even
21-Buzzards and Dreadful Crows
22-Exit Flagger
23-Hot Freaks
24-Closer You Are
25-Gleemer (The Ballad of Fertile Jim)
26-Quality of Armor
27-Queen of Cans and Jars
28-Echoes Myron
29-Unleashed! The Large Hearted Boy
30-A Salty Salute
31-Smothered in Hugs
32-Postal Blowfish
33-Hey Aardvark
34-Pimple Zoo
35-Bright Paper Werewolves
36-Some Drilling Implied
37-Dodging Invisible Rays
38-My Son Cool
39-Don't Stop Now
40-Johnny Appleseed
41-Weed King


Lineage: Standing center floor, among a rowdy, shoving, bobbing, joyous, beer flinging crowd, 30 feet back from the stage, Core-Sound High End Binaurals to Sony PCM-M10 (48 kHZ, 24 bit), WavePad Sound Editor to chop and FLAC only. Lots of crowd noise, sounds nice.

Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes are two of my favorite albums. Densely evocative cryptomondo lyrics draped over some of the sweetest melodies in pop music and squeezed out slightly scuffed and low-fi. Listening to GBV songs reminds me of that phase of childhood when you're just starting to learn things about the world and everything is a revelation. Taken together, GBV songs are like a scrapbook from a world . . . well, a world guided by something. Not sure what.

I didn't really know much about the band besides that Robert Pollard seemed to be the one mainly guided by the voices and that they were from Dayton, OH. I was kind of expecting Pollard to be a detached, zenned out guru type who stood back and presided over things with an ethereal cool. Well, was I ever wrong. Pollard is a glib, profane comic with a cloud of white wavy hair and a plastic expressive face. He's like Soupy Sales' younger, smarter, ADHD brother who's been to a series of special schools. Pollard is also a rock star. He's only got a few moves: the high kick (very impressive for a man in his 50s), the microphone twirl, the cigarette and the tequila bottle. But he has rock star charisma, and at Terminal 5 on Sunday night he had upwards of 3000 slavering, adoring fans. Pollard smoked frequently, and Mitch Mitchell had a cigarette dangling from this mouth constantly for the entire show. It was striking how transgressive that seemed, how the norms of our culture have been almost made over. When I was younger smoking was nothing. Everybody smoked. All houses had ashtrays and cigarette butts littered the ground absolutely everywhere. You'd have found cigarette butts on the top of Everest and at the bottom of the Marianas trench. Now smoking has become one on a very concise list of taboos, along with admitting that you don't adore children, or for that matter, that you do.

Pollard sure seems to like NYC, and that's cool, but . . . he variously told us that NYC was the first place to embrace GBV, that he'd decided he was actually from NYC and had gone to high school here, and most fatuously, that Terminal 5 was now his favorite rock and roll club, beating out 9:30 Club in DC and Irving Plaza. Well, that's ridiculous. For you non-NYCers, Terminal 5 is nobody's favorite anything. It's like the fruit of some Soviet communist 5 year rock and roll plan: big and featureless, with poor sight lines and acoustics, and in Hell's Kitchen to boot, which neighborhood is sadly not nearly as colorful as the name suggests. Terminal 5 is amid a wasteland of CBS production buildings shoved up against the river without even a deli within 4 blocks. But people hate Irving Plaza and the Beacon too, so nobody here likes anything, but at least those two got history.

One of the things I like most about NYC is that you can draw a large group of any arbitrary spec, and here we're talking expats from Dayton OH. We were standing next to a clutch of Dayton born Brooklynites in their early 30's who remember sneaking into clubs to see GBV back in the 90's. I really enjoyed listening to them talk. It made me feel connections across time and space that I'm glad are still there. And I'm glad GBV are still there too. They say the New Year's Eve show at Hammersmith Ballroom is it, but who knows? In twenty years maybe some kids at a GBV show at Irving Plaza will be talking about the show they saw at the now defunct Terminal 5 way back in 2010. I hope I'm there too.

Oh yeah, download the opening act, Blitzen Trapper, too. If you're a GBV fan, you'll like it.