Steve Reynolds Program - Glittering Parliaments
Sego, Utah!
Today, we’re one quarter the way through this top 100 songs series. Thanks to a website I just found, I know if this were a car trip from Los Angeles to New York City we’d be in Sego, Utah now! So let’s get out, stretch our legs and congratulate me for keeping on.
I actually need to write stuff for the shop, the event Saturday and my standup on Monday right now. So this intro is brief. I do have a question for other people using Substack: what’s the deal with the clunky and obstinate resistance to indenting paragraphs? When indented paragraphs are cut-and-pasted from a doc, it both pastes in as several spaces AND just not at all. Come on, service with millions invested in it. Figure this out.
Song #25
Glittering Parliaments
by Guided by Voices
In the story of Guided by Voices, the album Please Be Honest could be called The Great Reset. The So-Called Classic Reunion Lineup era had burned bright and fast, releasing six albums in 29 months. Then, for reasons unstated but intuitedly clear, the group of five ended it (well, drummer Kevin Fennell was out already) after Cool Planet, a fine gracenote to the period, an album with great rockers (“Pan Swimmer” “Males of Wormwood Mars”) and better efforts from Tobin Sprout and the others.
Two years later, the next Guided By Voices album, Please Be Honest, is released. It’s just Bob, mostly, on all instruments, recorded mainly on four-track. This got some fans grumbling. They thought of GBV as the band exactly who it was when they first diiscovered them. Me, I loved the defiant statement of the album: Bob is the constant. Always. It evokes the pre-Bee Thousand oddity Vampire on Titus, another album of the lo-est of the lo-fi recordings with Bob doing most of everything including drums.. And on both VoT and PBH, the songs stand up to anything else in Bob’s discography.
On Please Be Honest, the vocals are what elevates the work. This could be Bob’s best singing over an entire album. Songs like “My Zodiac Companion,” “Hotel X (Big Soap)” and “The Quickers Arrive” have earworm melodies and free-associated lyrics that make no sense on a conscious level, but can hit you emotionally somehow. (Sidenote: I still want to petition the University of Oklahoma to change their team name from the historically problematic Sooners to the innocuous Quickers.)
The epitome of the pairing of great melody and what is he singing? is in “Glittering Parliaments.” The title immediately evokes, at least to me, a flock of birds flying and reflecting the sun with their beating wings, making a twinkling and changing jewel in the sky. The sudden and relentless chug of guitar and bass reinforces that idea of a group in constant flux and action.
Then the lyrics come and that idea dissipates to be replaced with nothing concrete. This is Bob at his most obscure and polysyllabic. It could allude to cocaine (“bar mirror teas/to snort”), but nothing is certain. I mean, you tell me what “Quite broken/A grand array of mustards/Dribbling nectar/Through apple cores galore” means. I have no idea.
In an earlier newsletter, I wrote of Pollard’s love of James Joyce and you can see/hear the influence in the phraseology here. What other rock song by any other songwriter have both phrases “paregoric sop” and “Apollonian bronzefoil?” The words just seem to spill out, jaggedly haphazardly.
What saves it from just confounding the listener is the unique production. The drums surprise as they are punched in POP POP POPPOPPOP. While Bob sings the one phrase chorus, “Sinners and wanderers/Quite chosen,” he plays a melancholy descending bassline as the song quickly fades out.
In the end, it totally makes sense to one person, the one who wrote, played all the instruments and recorded it. He followed his own muse to this end and I admire it. Bob is guided by voices.
The Oh Yeah Part
This week’s Song I’m Mad I Forgot To Put On The List is “Genius of Love” by Tom Tom Club. “What you gonna do when you get out of jail? / I'm gonna have some fun,” one of the best opening lines ever, starts off a song that still sounds fresh decades later.
Depot TV Live! at the historic Santa Fe Depot in Norman is on Saturday. I have free tickets. Just let me know if you want some.
Monday, Feb. 27th, I’ll be the feature on the Fair-Weather Friend mic. I am super jazzed to do 15 minutes because I have a super long bit that I love to do but can’t with shorter sets. Please come!