MAGNET
By Jim Greer

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

JIM GREER UNPACKS GUIDED BY VOICES SUITCASE

Note: There may be a few readers of this magazine who didn’t play in Guided 
By Voices, but I know most of you did—at some point—so I apologize if any of 
this stuff covers ground with which you’re overly familiar.

So, Suitcase: Failed Experiments And Trashed Aircraft. The 100 songs (on four 
CDs) comprising this release were culled, in theory, from the suitcase Bob 
Pollard used to keep his old tapes in. We talked about the suitcase all the 
time, but I only saw it once. It was an old, gray Samsonite, and the left 
lock was broken, so he had to keep it shut with duct tape. There were at 
least a couple hundred tapes in that thing, each one filled with Bob’s songs, 
from toddler age onward. There was stuff like the original a cappella version 
of “Drag Days,” called “Germantown” (instead of “We have come to drag days,” 
Bob sang, “In a Germantown”; Germantown is a Dayton suburb), which he penned 
at age nine, and a version of the first song he ever wrote on guitar, 
“Quality Of Armor” (which eventually ended up on 1992’s Propeller). But one 
night in the mid-‘90s, Bob ritually burned the suitcase in a Bud Light-fueled 
spiritual frenzy, convinced that rock music was the tool of the devil. (He 
was right, too.) So I have no idea where these 100 songs came from.

That’s not true, of course. But the fact remains that if you’re expecting 
gobs of juvenilia, look elsewhere. (I don’t know where, exactly; it’s a 
figure of speech.) The songs on Suitcase are mostly of more recent vintage, 
coming from three main sources: two junked albums, 1989’s Learning To Hunt 
and 1992’s Back To Saturn X; demos for our aborted 1995 concept album The 
Power Of Suck; and outtakes/demos from 1994’s Bee Thousand through last 
year’s Do The Collapse. There are earlier scraps, sure, plus some funny 
semi-live stuff, but what’s weird is that despite the disparate source 
material, each Suitcase disc feels organic, like a “real” Guided By Voices 
album. Bob probably spent more time sequencing and assigning band names (each 
Suitcase track is credited to a different group) and song titles than he did 
choosing the songs themselves, anyway. He’s always believed that sequencing 
is half the work of making a record and doing the artwork is the other half. 
The rest is just hanging out and drinking and pulling brilliant melodies at 
will from the vast store in his unhinged cranium.

Most interesting to me, personally, are the fragments from The Power Of Suck. 
Enough outtakes, demos and live versions of the songs meant for this double 
album (the story of which concerned the rise and fall of a fictitious band 
from Bob’s hometown of Northridge, Ohio) are still extant to recreate the 
originally intended sequence, and maybe someday somebody will. A bunch of the 
songs eventually made it on record, mostly on 1996’s Under The Bushes Under 
The Stars: “The Official Ironmen Rally Song,” “Big Boring Wedding,” “Drag 
Days,” “Redmen And Their Wives” and a few others. But we never recorded the 
best songs, and they exist only on ultra-rare rehearsal tapes (I accidentally 
threw mine out a few years back, and I don’t know if even Bob has copies) and 
on the demos presented here: “Pink Drink” (CD one, credited to Tax Revlon) 
was one, “Why Did You Land?” (CD four, credited to Matted Pelt, although the 
version here isn’t the one we used for The Power Of Suck demo) another. 
“Bughouse” (CD two, credited to Arthur Psycho And The Trippy Warts) is 
presented in two versions, both the original demo and the version we recorded 
in Chicago with Steve Albini. The version of “Pantherz” on Suitcase (CD 
three, credited to Indian Alarm Clock) is the one from Bob’s original 
voice-and-guitar demo tape (“engineered” by Pete Jamison), which, when I 
first heard it, made me cry. I’ve carried that tape around in my car for five 
years, and I’m glad some of this stuff will have a wider audience now. (Plus, 
my tape has gotten kind of dingy sounding.)

Whether this means anything to you or not, even a casual fan will find enough 
gems spread among the hundred songs here to justify spending the $50 to 
purchase Suitcase. What astounds—what continues to astound—me about Bob is 
not that he writes so many songs, but that so many of them are worth hearing. 
Suitcase is maybe over-ample proof of his rare and captivating talent, but 
it’s honestly hard for me to get enough. One of the questions people are 
always asking band members, former and present, is, “How do you learn so many 
songs?” The answer has always been the same: You don’t learn Guided By Voices 
songs. They learn you. [Fading Captain Series, 1521 W 86th St, Indianapolis 
IN 46260]

Jim Greer is a former member of Guided By Voices, having served as bassist 
from 1994 to 1996.