Guided by Voices spent most of the 1980s as a hobby nobody outside Dayton, Ohio was meant to hear. Robert Pollard, a fourth-grade teacher by day, recorded songs at night with a rotating cast of friends onto whatever four-track was around, pressed a few hundred copies at most, and handed them out to people he knew. The results sounded like men trying to make R.E.M. records with whatever money was left over after rent.
By 1995, when Scat Records gathered those early albums into the box set Box, there was enough unreleased material lying around to fill a whole extra disc. That disc, King Shit and the Golden Boys, was built from leftovers recorded between October 1986 and 1993.
It was meant as a bonus.
Instead, King Shit and the Golden Boys turned into one of the more argued-over records in the catalogue of a band whose catalogue is mostly arguments. "Fantasy Creeps" plays like a Who homage recorded through a wall. "At Odds With Dr. Genesis" and "2nd Moves to Twin" are the kind of fragment that would later resurface, half-remembered, as interludes on proper albums. "Postal Blowfish" and "Don't Stop Now" are rough sketches of songs that have since become fixtures of a Guided by Voices setlist, played tighter live but never quite as strange as they sound here.
What the collection captures, better than the tidier albums either side of it, is the exact point where Pollard's songwriting stopped apologising for its limitations. The '80s albums strain towards a polish the band couldn't afford; two years later, on Propeller and then Bee Thousand, Guided by Voices turned that same four-track hiss into an aesthetic rather than a compromise. King Shit sits at the hinge, unfinished on purpose.
Tobin Sprout, who by 1993 had become Pollard's steadiest foil, appears throughout in embryonic form, his gentler melodic instincts audible under the tape hiss well before he earned proper songwriting credits on Propeller and Bee Thousand. Mitch Mitchell, Kevin Fennell and Greg Demos, the rhythm section that would carry the so-called classic mid-'90s lineup, are scattered across these sessions too, years before anyone called them a classic lineup.
Heard now, King Shit and the Golden Boys works less as a curiosity than as a demonstration of how little Guided by Voices needed to change to go from ignored to influential.
The songs are the same size. The hiss is the same hiss. The difference is that by the mid-1990s, everyone else had caught up to what a Dayton schoolteacher had been doing in his basement for a decade.
