This is the first of many Guided By Voices records I will rant about. I expect to get carried away with this one. Most albums have stories. GbV albums have history. Mag Earwig! was the first GbV album that my friend Andy and I bought at the same time after High School. We each had just about all the other albums as our love of this band shot to the moon, but this was the first time we were "caught up," ready, and waiting to be the first in line to have the next installment from Robert Pollard and the golden boys in our hands. Mag Earwig! marked a stark shift in GbVs lineup with Bob Pollard stepping away from the tried and true rotation of players, namely the most influential to the established sound - Mitch Mitchell and Tobin Sprout. Although Mitchell and Sprout were still minimally involved on this record, the major driving sound was replaced by members of, fellow Dayton-ers, Cobra Verde and specifically Doug Gillard who liked his guitar hooks loud and large. Apparently this was an attempt at moving from the warm 4-track feel to the well-produced crisp sounding ready-for-radio-rock-record that Pollard always wanted.
Andy and I initially noted the difference as a bad thing, until digging further in and sifting through the obvious changes in sound, as in Bulldog Skin and I am a Tree, finding true-to-form, and actually bigger and better, Pollard gems like Not Behind the Fighter Jet, Portable Men's Society, Jane of the Waking Universe and I am Produced, whose irony wasn't lost on us. As I am listing these, I am finding hints of each track on this record that I love - like the warmth of Sad if I Lost it (linked) and the strummed down version of Now to War (a rock-a-thon of power when played live). It was building into our newest and favorite-est GbV record because it was fresh and, well, it rocked and still does.
The liner notes kept with true GbV tradition leaving little surprises at every corner. Most songs had a parenthetical note after the lyrics like "Re-zoom/Busy signals from the home front," "Scarred but tougher,"The logical nod," "Repeat forever if necessary" as if they were alternate titles or extra instructions to get the full Mag Earwig! experience. Credits included a nod to an apparently fictitious inspiration for one song (Portable Men's Society) named Buffalo Beerwax and thanking The Small Faces (Extras in the Film) which was a 1996 Scottish film about gangs (thanks wikipedia). It's like Pollard was offering us the first step in any band starter kit - the best band name you've ever heard.
Another nugget of uniqueness to Mag Earwig! is that its one of the few short-named GbV releases, up that point, that couldn't be abbreviated with the first letter of each word. ME! didn't make sense to me in the GbV mailing list postings, aka Postal Blowfish, like SIAN (Self Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia), VoT (Vampire-on-Titus), SPTFGS (Same Place the Fly Got Smashed) or B1000 (Bee Thousand)... actually now that I think about it, there were many others that were short in the discography, like Propeller, Sandbox, Alien Lanes and ME! might have been the only with punctuation... proving my theory bunk, but at least interesting to me. It was like a secret society language talking about GbV records like they were MLB future stars.
"But I'll keep a light for 'em/Hold down the fort for 'em/And wear my maroon blazer, all the time" - Sad if I Lost it.
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