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From Alternative Press - October 2000
By Marc Hawthorne

Guided By Voices
Suitcase: Failed Experiments and Trashed Aircraft
#6 in the Fading Captain Series

Suitcase Abridged: Briefcase Drinks and Deliveries
#7 in the Fading Captain Series

Suitcase 3 out of 5 stars (Good)
Suitcase Abridged 4 out of 5 stars (Outstanding)

Robert Pollard unearths 101 more of his lo-fi experiments.

It's no secret that in addition to being indie-rock's most prolific songwriter, Robert Pollard has an editing problem that prompts him to release an obscene amount of material. But the fact remains that he has many devoted followers who literally want to hear everything the lo-fi pioneer has committed to tape. When word got out that there was a suitcase packed with cassettes that contained hundreds of abandoned Guided By Voices and pre-GBV songs, Pollard's die hard fans naturally began to beg their hero to make the music available to the public.

Though a flood in the basement of his Dayton, Ohio home drowned out the possibility of being able to hear all the songs he had hidden away, Pollard has gathered 100 of them - a handful of them which have appeared elsewhere in different forms - onto four CDs collectively titled Suitcase: Failed Experiments and Trashed Aircraft.

Pollard is the first to admit that these songs (shortest: 33 seconds; longest: seven minutes, 53 seconds) had been tucked away for a reason: They were deemed unfit for release. But the demand of the suitcase songs, all of which are attributed to pseudonyms (Hazzard Hotrods, Ghost Fart, Urinary Track Stars, Royal Japanese Daycare, etc.) was great enough to make him overturn his initial verdict. Go ahead and call him an opportunist if you want, though it seems highly unlikely that Pollard will strike it rich by releasing these CDs. Suitcase - which includes songs recorded as far back as 1974 and as recently as this year, and features basically every Guided By Voices line-up save the one that made Mag Earwhig! - was compiled for the GBV obsessed only. Half-hearted fans need not apply. Only the blindly in love will fully appreciate Suitcase, which is chock full of bruised and blemished tracks, though its not all throwaways. Some of Pollard's best pop and rock work is offered on Suitcase, such as "Bunco Men", "I Can See It In Your Eyes", "Where I Come From" and "Shrine To The Dynamic Years (Athens Time Change Riots)". He's also exposed his oft-overlooked tender side by including such beauties as "Little Jimmy the Giant" (the oldest song here, recorded by Pollard when he was a junior in high school) and the piano ballad "Wondering Boy Poet".

For completists, as well as those interested in Suitcase's more accessible numbers, Pollard has also put together a limited-edition vinyl "best of" version called Suitcase Abridged: Briefcase Drinks and Deliveries (the LP's bonus track, "Sensational Gravity Boy", originally recorded with the Deal Sisters under the Freedom Cruise moniker, is one of Pollard's finest moments). Those seeking the long-lost relative of Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes should look no further than Suitcase Abridged.

SELF ANALYSIS with the astoundingly productive Robert Pollard

AP: How many of the suitcase tapes were destroyed by the flood?

Bob Pollard: I would say 150-200 tapes got lost in the flood probably. I'd actually taken the suitcase - stuff that I had extracted for Suitcase - and elevated it. But all the rest of the tapes were sitting in boxes and things, and they were sitting on the floor, and I guess the water hit the bottom box and caused it to fall over. Which I thought was some kind of a premonition from God, as to say like, "okay we'll let you put out Suitcase, but no more of this crap."

AP: Are there any songs on Suitcase that you play live?

BP: We never did play any of them live. Actually, I take that back. There are some songs that we recorded as a full band as demos for Do The Collapse - "James Riot", "Shrine To The Dynamic Years" and "The Kissing Life" - and I think we did those live. Come to think of it, there are quite a few things that I'm sure we played live back in the '80s, back before anyone knew about us, when I used to play guitar. The thing about a lot of the songs on it is like, some of them are good songs, some of them are down right ridiculous. But I wanted to get a whole spectrum of - especially back before people were listening to is - what we did. We did things a lot of different ways - we'd gone into the studio sometimes, sometimes we did 4-track stuff, sometimes we would just jam in the basement. One of the bands that's on Suitcase, Hazzard Hotrods - there's like 3 songs by Hazzard Hotrods. There's a live jam that Toby Sprout, Mitch (Mitchell), myself and this guy named Larry Keller did in like 1990. It's just real rootsy sounding. Kind of sounds like a Stones practice or something. That was recorded live - we just made it all up. We recorded it in a video store after it was closed down with no audience. I was standing next to a rack of the classic videos, like A Star is Born and all that kind of stuff. I just used those titles. We just made them up on the spot.

AP: How difficult was it finding all the songs and putting together such an immense collection of music?

BP: Initially it was kind of exciting to dig up these old songs. We {Matt Davis, who helps run The Fading Captain Series, band friend Kevin Poindexter and I would) meet two or three times a week, and I was pretty busy anyways, so I thought, "Man, it's getting tough for me to do this". So, we just kind of abandoned it. Also, it could be kind of embarrassing at times to dig some of these things up. I thought, "Well, I don't know about this shit." Then after we got back off the road, I thought, "Well, I'm going to go through the rest of these tapes and see what else is there." I just thought the timing was right. It's going to be a while before the {next} Guided By Voices record comes out - it's probably a good time to put out the Suitcase now, something to let our fans kind of chew on for a while. And this is a big thing for them, too, because it's a lot of songs, and you've got all the pseudonyms on there and everything. On the Internet, they analyze and discuss everything. They actually know more about what the fuck's going on with Guided By Voices than I do. It sometimes seems to me like it's more important to them than it is to me.