Guided by Voices: Suitcase: Failed Experiments and Trashed Aircraft
2000
Fading Captain Series
Format I Own it on: Compact Disc
Track Listing: Are you kidding?!?! This thing has 100 songs on it! I'm not typing all that shit out! Here...Look at this instead:
Fading Captain Series #6. Number Five was the "Dayton Ohio- Nineteen Something and Five (Live) 7-inch, which we'll get to later when it was rereleased as part of the "Selective Service" CD (FCS #16). "Suitcase" is an unprecedented look into Robert Pollard's famous suitcase of demo cassettes. 100 songs stretched across 4 CD's, each song attributed to a different fictional band (examples: Bozo's Octopuss, Ceramic Cock Einstein, Urinary Track Stars, Too Proud to Practice, Homosexual Flypaper, etc), some of which eventually became real bands (Ricked Wicky, Hazzard Hotrods, Go Back Snowball).
I bought this at Zia Records right after I had moved to Tucson, AZ in 2001. I had heard there was a boxset of GBV outtakes and the thought of a hundred new GBV songs drove me fucking crazy. I had no choice but to track down suitcase. I can remember bringing it home and settling down in front of my crappy boombox (maybe the best way to listen to Guided by Voices) and cracking open the big fat booklet. The glossy booklet is pretty neat. Lots of photos, lots of ruffly shirts, lots of back-patting review snippets, a cool GBV Family Tree diagram, a pretty extensive breakdown on who played what on each song and the year it was recorded. Well done.
Now for the music. There's a lot of it. Spanning an unexpectedly vast period of time (there's even a kiddie bubblegum song on here called "Little Jimmy the Giant" that dates back to the freakin' 1970's). A handful of knockout greats. A large amount of very good material. A modest amount of junk. Pretty much a standard GBV album writ large.
Knockout Greats: A lot of my favorite stuff on here is the Box-era material. Apparently Pollard did a large amount of recording in the late 80's that turned out to be a wonderful wellspring of unreleased treasures. "I'm Cold" is maybe my favorite thing on here. Very evocative of the lonesome, snow-swept, one-man-and-a-guitar isolation anthems from "Box." Listening to it, I can tell the bar he's going to is very dimly lit and has only one or two cars in the parking lot. He summons something very vivid here. "Where I Come From" is another favorite of mine. One of those "Forever Since Breakfast"-type REM knockoffs that Pollard used to excel at.
"Try to Find You" is a must-listen. Probably one of the funniest things Pollard ever released. It's a live recording of a poppy little song (the chorus of which would later pop up in "Storm Vibrations," in a moment that made my head spin when I first heard it) that's cool and all but is utterly upstaged by two women standing too close to the mic, their chatter growing and growing in volume until they eventually swallow the song completely. Prattling smalltalk forever immortalized on tape. If nothing else, buy the box set for this. Totally worth it.
The other tracks I effing love are "Pantherz" and "Pink Drink" which are just electric guitar and fantastic vocals. That vocal melody for "Panterz" hits me so right. Arm-hair raisingly good. There are a couple really cool, luminous piano songs, "Supermarket the Moon" and a version of "Wondering Boy Poet" that will drive you insane that it wasn't on "Vampire on Titus." Speaking of re-recordings, there's a version of "Spring Tigers" on here in a rock arrangement as opposed to the quiet version from the "Get Out of My Stations" ep. I can't tell if it's superior or not. Kind of a lateral move. Works both ways. I feel the same way about "Rocking Now" which is a crunchy alternate take on "Wrecking Now."
Very Good Material: Most of the set falls in this category. Solid rockers like "James Riot," "Shrine To The Dynamic Years," "Taco, Buffalo, Birddog And Jesus"...Stuff I don't necessarily worship but like to jam out to now and then. Although, the wobbly, new-wave "Perch Warble" is this close to godhood...I'm also sort of obsessed by the doomy sadness of "In Walked the Moon." What an odd song. You can't shake the feeling that something unspeakably awful has happened to the girl in the song but the lyrics don't reveal anything too terrible. A break-up maybe? I don't know...
Oh yea, it's worth mentioning that a ton of the middling stuff later gets reinvented on the Boston Spaceship albums. That might be Suitcase's greatest legacy, actually. I must have listened to "Dorothy's a Planet" or "On Short Wave" at least 50 times in my life and never realized how good the songs were until I heard them on a Boston Spaceship album...It's because as presented here, they're not that impressive. Just acoustic sketches with (apparently) infinite potential...
Junk: There's a number of songs on here that aren't good by any objective measure, but at least most of it has something interesting going for it (which differentiates it from something like the Nightwalker album). In this category we get stuff like "Hold On To Yesterday" or "Gayle" which are both pretty terrible songs but you get to hear what a Mitch Mitchell-led GBV would sound like..."Little Jimmy the Giant" isn't great but it's the earliest glimpse into Pollard's songwriting available, so again, some historical merit. Really, the only songs I flat out skip are the boring, overlong Hazzard Hotrods live jams which were recorded live in a video store and find the band engaging in dull, cliche, jammy, bar-rock. They do the genre just fine, it just so happens it's a genre I couldn't be less interested in. There's a CD of the show available elsewhere (as one of the entries in the Fading Captain Series) but I'm questioning whether I have the patience to sit thru that one...
Newcomers might be overwhelmed and wonder what all the hubbub is about but for a die-hard GBV fan, this is a super-fun, immersive experience. Fair Weather fans will bust out the wheat-and-chaff bit but to me, this finally feels like enough GBV. Bring on the Suitcases! I want a whole 9-piece luggage set!
Let's listen to some GBV. Here's "I'm Cold." Enjoy enjoy enjoy...
Oh yea. The rankings...I'm gonna start a whole new category for this one. Here's the ranking so far for my favorite GBV box sets...
1. Box
2. Suitcase 1: Failed Experiments and Trashed Aircraft
"Box" has the advantage of having four albums and only one disc of rarities (which ended up being the possible highpoint of the set). So the box of outtakes and leftovers can't quite compare (despite a lot of it originating from a period that is more highly regarded by most respectable folks (I'm not respectable, remember))...I will concede that "Suitcase" is more representative of GBV as a whole though...
