Seeing Guided By Voices tomorrow night at VEGA…for their first Nebraska show in two years.
I saw GBV on their “farewell tour” in Orlando, FL about ten years ago. I don’t remember much of the show – I obviously thought I was then the future Bob Pollard I’m not now, like 99.6% of the showgoers in general admission that night.
Yet here I am, quite pleased with the same old song – and feeling like an old fart. Haven’t really listened too closely to the music Pollard and Co. have put out since their first encore began over a presidency ago – and I’m uneasy about how the hell I’m going to make it through myself on a Friday night after putting my 2-year old to bed, with a solo ticket to a gig that starts at 9 at an undergrad bar.
And now it seems I’ve dropped a box of hooks from 1990 through 2005. Must be Christmas, folks. Three/four random GBV songs (with captions!) now hanging on the branches between my ears:
“My Valuable Hunting Knife” (1995): See also Led Zeppelin’s “Boogie With Stu” for off-balance dryer delay on snare.
“Universal Truths and Cycles” (2002): “We know this and that / The romantic soul for us / In the lost hierarchy of land and land owners” Listened to like an autodidact trying to hear oblique references to the social milieu of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in pop lyrics. But if anything, that finishing refrain is a lesson in hewing the ephemeral from the economical.
“A Salty Salute” (1995): I am not the only person who has found the negation of this song in East River Pipe’s “The Club Isn’t Open”.
I’ll be posting a review of the show (hopefully with setlist) for those of you following at home. For those of you following along on Free Public WiFi, uh, y’all are just ghosts of a different dream.
