Another wicked GBV story from Jim Greer...

GBV playing a party for REM, talking about their fights with Sebadoh, and how Eddie Vedder became a fan....good read.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Hunting Accidents: Being The Further Adventures of Guided By Voices

Chapter XIV: The Time We Played A Private Party for R.E.M.

I don’t think this is a widely known story. Possibly it’s a not entirely interesting story, which may account for its lack of currency in GbV folklore, but I always thought it was kind of cool, conceptually at least. That’s maybe the problem: the concept of this story, of what happened, is more interesting than what actually did happen. But outside of fiction, that is almost always true, and even inside of fiction, where the writer really should know better (sorry!), it's too often true as well. I don’t mean to say there aren’t incredible, fascinating, enthralling true stories. I mean instead that telling the story is usually better than experiencing the story.

Glad we got that out of the way. Sometime in I believe spring of 1995, Guided By Voices were asked to play a private party at the Crocodile Club in Seattle, for the occasion of Peter Buck’s birthday. Peter Buck is the guitarist for R.E.M., and R.E.M. was one of Bob’s formative musical influences. He will tell you to this day that the reason he started singing in a fake British accent was because if he didn’t, he thought he sounded exactly like Michael Stipe used to sound on early R.E.M. records. (Which incidentally was the whole reason we got in a fake fight with Sebadoh for a while, because one of the guys from that band said something dismissive in an interview about Bob’s fake British accent, and we wrote an unreleased song — to this day, but I played it for Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon and Steve Malkmus when they stopped by Kim Deal’s house in Dayton during the 1995 Lollapallooza tour — called “Jason Lowenstein’s a Wanker,” at the end of which Thurston asked, quite reasonably, “Why do you guys hate Sebadoh?”)
To which I had no good reply, but the song was pretty funny just because those were the only lyrics, I think, and Bob sang them in an even more exaggerated British accent. He was self-conscious about his unaffected twang, in other words, so he adopted a self-conscious British inflection to compensate. Bob will also tell you to this day that most of the music he listened to growing up, and still his favorite music on into the post-punk years, ending in about 1982 or 1983, which is also when all good music stopped being made, with the exception of Guided By Voices, again according to Bob, was British, so it was only natural that when he opened his mouth to sing, it came out Limey. And then a lot of times he doesn’t sing in a British accent at all, so you figure it out. He’s a complicated guy.
Peter flew us to Seattle and put us up in a motel about ten or so miles out of town, which did not make Bob happy. We were all invited to R.E.M.’s show at a place called (I think) The Gorge, which is short for Gorgeous, but only Pete Jamison, Kevin Fennell, and myself went, which also did not make Bob happy (he values solidarity and loyalty highly in his band members), but I had my own prior relationship to the band, and thought it bad manners to refuse the invitation. The next night was our show. Peter’s wife ran or owned the Crocodile at that time, I’m not sure which, and we were headlining an ad hoc bill that included Thurston Moore playing with some of his pals, about which I remember very little, except Thurston sitting with Bob and asking about the lyrics to our song “Stabbing A Star,” which he had slightly wrong, but whose alternative lyrics Bob liked. I think Sonic Youth were on tour with R.E.M. at the time, but I could be wrong.
Though Bob was not anymore an avid R.E.M. fan, he still idolized the band, and when I offered to introduce him to Michael Stipe, he demurred for several minutes before finally giving in. He asked Michael to clarify some of the lyrics to the R.E.M. song from Murmur we had learned for the occasion, but Michael refused, using much the same rationale Bob had used when he heard Thurston’s lyrics: that he preferred to hear our own interpretation. The song we had learned was “Sitting Still,” and we learned it at Mitch Mitchell’s house, where we rehearsed at the time, listening to Mitch’s vinyl copy of Murmur, which Bob was not convinced wasn’t his own copy, as Mitch apparently had a habit of “borrowing” other people’s records. It took us five minutes to learn. The hardest part was the lyrics, which Bob slurred through as best he could. By the time we got up to play, we were (as usual) sufficiently drunk that he slurred through most of the songs anyway, but I do remember being sufficiently nervous or at least self-conscious enough to look up and see who among R.E.M. were in the room. The Crocodile was not a large club – capacity maybe a couple of hundred, and it was filled to capacity that night. I couldn’t pick out anyone in the sea of faces, and I’m pretty sure I fucked up the bassline.
Afterwards, being drunk, I went up to Michael and poked him in the chest several times, saying, “Did you hear us play your song? What’d you think? What’d you think? What’d you think?” punctuating each question with a chest-poke. He poked me back in the same manner, saying “It was good. It was good. It was good,” which led me to believe either a) it was not good, or b) he hadn’t listened.
The last thing I remember about that night was Eddie Vedder coming in right before we went on. I wasn’t sure he remembered me from the story I had written about Pearl Jam for Spin a couple of years before. I said “Hi, Eddie, it’s Jim Greer,” and he gave me a cold-eyed stare and said “I know who you are,” then proceeded to ask if he’d missed Thurston’s set. I told him they had just finished and he expressed disappointment. I told him I was playing in the next band, to which he expressed indifference. Years later, for whatever reason, he decided to become a big GbV fan, and even took Bob out on tour for a couple of arena shows in the Ohio area, on which they dueted "Baba O’Riley" at the end of Bob’s set. I’d like to think that his appreciation of the band started that night at Peter Buck’s birthday party, but I don’t think that’s true.
We played “Sitting Still” a few more times in our set in non-R.E.M.-related situations, because it seemed like a waste to learn a song and then never play it again, but then it sort of dropped off the setlist, more because Bob was always adding new songs than any other reasons. Songs dropped off our setlist all the time. I still like “Sitting Still,” and I still think Eddie Vedder’s a pretty nice guy.