GBV @ Oyafestivalen, Oslo, 2011

I've linked to a couple of segments from this in a previous post, as it features my ex-patriate Memphibian friend Vanessa, and her husband Gavin, if only briefly. A few days ago, the whole show suddenly appeared online. This is a genuinely good set, and an interesting document. The sound is better than usual in the numerous audience videos, being a TV broadcast, and it's interesting to see a band accustomed to playing two or three hour shows having to adjust to a tightly-managed 60-minute slot, paring the set list down to (apparently) the material they feel most strongly about. The playing is also very solid and together all around (though Kevin Fennell's face suggests he is fighting for his life), as is Bob Pollard's performance. It occurs to me that 60 minutes isn't quite long enough for anyone to get drunk enough for things to really deteriorate as they might in longer shows.

Universal Truths and Cycles

The world is full of universal truths. One such universal truth is that everyone will be made (or be found to be) redundant (in some sense of the word) at some point in their lives. And everyone knows that things come in cycles, including redundancy. As of yesterday, I am in the third wave of my redundancy super-cycle. Time to catch up on my YouTube viewing. Here's one I stumbled on by chance - a tour de force live performance of the entire album (possibly for the first time), with spectacular banter from Bob Pollard, and even better, fellow Memphibian Dave Shouse (of The Grifters, et al, whom I first met in 1981) gets name checked at the get-go for opening the show.

Love is a Stranger

Only Guided by Voices fans (and my long-suffering children, who are inadvertently developing an encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject) will get the joke here, but I think this (from my summer labor of love) works pretty well in its own right, and it makes me laugh every time. For the uninitiated, the answer lies here.

Everywhere With Helicopter

The greatest amusement park-themed music video ever made.

Queen of Cans and Jars

Another instalment in what is gradually turning into a saga - a stubbornly recurring effort to cross-pollinate Guided by Voices and Kraftwerk. Is synth-pop a sign of mid-life crisis?

Inspiring Doug Shell

Probably as a function of the age I'm at, I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about how I got here. It's a fascinating gift we enjoy as human beings to have memory and analytical capacity, which allow us to examine every choice, relationship, and experience we've ever had and find points of connection between them, to draw maps and timelines of what we have done or experienced, and how it led to somewhere else, and ultimately to the here and now. Often there is a key person, a source of impetus or inspiration, at each of the main inflection points, and I have been thinking about some of those people of late.

The other day I stumbled across this clip from 1994, which is an entertaining little tidbit from the halcyon days of the "Classic Lineup" of Guided by Voices. At 2:11, a young man from the audience at the Threadwaxing show in New York says, "It was awesome. It was incredible. I feel myself becoming a groupie." I had to watch this a few times just to convince myself that I was not hallucinating, and I now have confirmation from a mutual friend that I was not, which I pretty much knew anyway. This exuberant young fan is named Doug Shell, and I met him in London nearly 10 years after this was filmed.

Back when I was doing the telecom financial analyst thing (which seems like two lifetimes ago), I determined that the only way to achieve some real job satisfaction, retain my sanity, and possibly open up some new doors, was to write in a different style, to produce more thematic and unconventional research. On my maiden voyage in this vein in 2003 (I think it was, possibly 2002), about an hour after I'd pressed the send button, I got an email from a sector specialist analyst at one of our fund management clients. His name was Doug Shell, and I hadn't previously had any contact with him, that I can recall. I think he was relatively new in that role. His email said something along the lines of, "This is an excellent piece of work, very different and thought-provoking. This is the sort of thing that investors can really benefit from. You should be really pleased with it. Keep going." Or something like that.

He subsequently became my most ardent supporter, though he was never quite so fulsome as in this video. But it mattered to my employers at the time that a client had been so impressed with something that our humble little research team had produced, and it gained me a lot of credibility with them, and gave me a huge degree of confidence that I was on to something, rather than just bored and crazy. We developed a friendly dialogue and spoke at regular intervals. He was always keen to hear my opinions and to debate industry issues, not so much specific stocks, and I think we learned a lot from each other.

Based on this critical early support, I did indeed keep going in the same vein, and many interesting and amazing experiences flowed from this decision. I've lost track of Doug, but man, wherever you are, thanks.

"And we're finally here,
And shit yeah, it's cool,
Shouldn't it be?
Or something like that."

Neon Lights

I don't know why, but sometimes I get musical ideas in my head which just won't go away, and this is one. I am a huge fan of both Kraftwerk and Guided By Voices, and sometime back I had the crazy idea to put together "A Salty Salute" and "Neon Lights," and so here it is. I really like it.

Shocker in Gloomtown

Even if you're not a fan, this early edit of what later became "Watch Me Jumpstart" will still be interesting and entertaining, due to the personalities and wit of the band, and the highly unusual story of how it came to be known outside of its small circle, or how it almost didn't. Mitch Mitchell's grandmother anecdote at 7:30 alone is worth the price of admission. As an added bonus to Memphibians everywhere, I'm 99.999% sure that in the opening seconds of the film, Bob Pollard is wearing an Easley-McCain Recording t-shirt. I used to have one too - now added to the list of Things I Won't Keep/Sad if I Lost It.

The Devil Went Home and Puked

No doubt there are some raging hangovers today in the wake of the second annual EuroHEEDFEST, which I unfortunately missed.

Wished I Was a Giant

Huge amps in a small room, turned way up, the way it should be.

"Is there any way the vocal can be a bit louder, or is that about it?"

"Uh, no."

"It's maxed?"

"Completely."

Guided to Love

When I wrote a post two years ago (!) on the amazing night in 2005 which I spent in the company of some Stax legends at the Barbican in London, I neglected one part of the story, because I couldn't work out how to make it relevant. But thanks to the power of YouTube, I now can. Between sets that night, Jim Spake and I ventured out the side doors from the dressing room, just to look at the room and the crowd, because backstage at the Barbican is basically hermetically sealed off from the stage, apart from a pair of doors at the back of the stage which, that night, were only for artists or technicians entering or leaving the stage. So, we'd been standing there at the right of the stage for a couple of minutes, when I noticed charging toward me, at great speed, a shock of red hair in a tie-dye t-shirt which I immediately recognised as one Vanessa Robertson from Memphis - someone I hadn't seen in at least 10 years. She embraced me and gave me a big kiss on the cheek. I was almost speechless - keep in mind that this was before Facebook, back in the days when people just lost track of one another. I asked the obvious question, and she explained that she now lived in London, having met her husband (the lovely Gavin) on a Guided by Voices web community. I had dinner with them a few weeks back, and they are lovely people, and a lovely couple. See for yourself here, at around 7:09 to 7:13 where you can see them smiling and bouncing around in the background. And in "Smothered in Hugs" in the clip which follows, Bob Pollard can be heard shouting out "V" to Vanessa. 1,400 songs and at least one happy marriage - that's a great legacy, Bob! (FYI/FWIW, this very amusing and insightful interview was done only a week after the band played Memphis with The Grifters in 1994, a gig I remember seeing advertised at the time, but was unable to attend for some long-forgotten reason. Vanessa made it to that gig, and the rest is history, I guess.)