Chapter 6
Tobin and the Vampire
(1986)
Here’s the thing about Devil Between My Toes. I had no notion of any “genre” type of thing—lo-fi, punk rock, whatever. I was just out of a heavy metal band, Anacrusis. I’m making records now, but no one gives a fuck so it might as well be exactly what I want to be on there. I want to put Jimmy saying, “Hey, Dad owes me some fucking money,” on there. I want to include everything that entertains me. Devil Between My Toes is strictly for me and me only. Because no one’s going to buy it, no one gives a fuck, but I’m still gonna do it. So I might as well put only what I want on it, for me. An album for me.
—Robert Pollard
On Friday, June 13, 1986, the weather was mild, but the barometer was rising. A first-quarter moon hung in the afternoon sky. As evening came on, Fig. 4 took the stage at Gilly’s as the opening act for the Pleasures Pale.
Nick Weiser lamented that morning in his music column, “Local bands are making up and breaking up all over the place this week.”1 Fig. 4 was supposed to open for Guided By Voices, but Forever Since Breakfast’s uneventful release and Pollard’s thinning patience with live gigs had done them in. Weiser reported: “Rumor has it that the four members of GBV have parted company.”
Fig. 4 was fairly well received around town. Although any indie-leaning outfit was bound to be heckled here and there, Sprout’s Byrds and Beatles proclivities served the band well as they developed their own sound. They had a soft-spoken appeal, Sprout and Peterson ruggedly handsome, Toohey exuding affable, Ringo-esque charm.
That said, Sprout recalls, “There weren’t a whole lot of people.” In the sparse crowd, he noticed a familiar trio standing at the lip of the stage, silhouetted by gel-colored stage lights. They all had long overcoats on and were drinking beers, orange embers of cigarettes in their opposite hands, heads bouncing in time to Peterson’s beat.
After the set, the Pleasures Pale took the stage. Pete Jamison appeared wearing a duster. “Hey, I’ve got a guy over here who wants to meet you.”
It was Bob, drinking a Colt .45 malt liquor, Jimmy sitting next to him smoking a Viceroy. “I thought that was pretty cool,” Sprout recalls with a smile. “Bobby’s already got people working for him.”
Sprout hung out with them and talked for a while. Bob said the live outfit might have dissolved, but recording was going strong. They planned to make another Guided By Voices record at a place called Steve Wilbur’s 8-Track Garage.
One of Pete’s buddies had told him about the studio, right around the corner from his house in Dixie Estates. Wilbur’s garage was in an unassuming ranch-style suburban home with yellow siding and white trim. In fact, it was called Nemesis Records, but Bob changed the name—for his records, anyway—because he refused to put Nemesis on one of his covers. Wilbur, who played in local heavy metal band Onyx, actually ran the place out of his garage. It was cheap and available.
Sprout and Pollard quickly found that their goals were the same: to put out a record. In many ways they were polar opposites. Sprout was as soft-spoken as Pollard was confrontational; Bob hailed from blue-collar Northridge and Tobin from well-to-do Oakwood. “North Dayton despises south Dayton,” according to Jim Greer.2 But all that was left by the wayside. Shared musical tastes made Sprout the moon to Pollard’s sun.
By the end of the night they agreed to record at Wilbur’s, which would give each of them a chance to help out on the other’s projects. For Sprout, Bob was willing to relax the “one-band” rule. He was on his way back into GBV. Says Sprout, “It wasn’t easy. Once you’re on the shit list you stay there for a while.”
FOR THE ALBUM THAT BECAME Devil Between My Toes, Pollard originally conceived a cover based on a painting of a colonial-era cockfight. He planned to have Paul Preston, an acquaintance from art class at Northridge High, repaint the image and populate the crowd with “bikers and businessmen and shit.”3 He would call it The Future Is In Eggs.
When Preston could not be found, Bob concocted an alternate plan. He told Mitch they needed to get a picture of Big Daddy.
Mitch laughed; he knew who Big Daddy was. As Pollard tells the story, “I bought a chick, for my little boy […] on Easter. And it grew up into this real scary, nasty looking rooster. So we gave it next door to these crazy people. And then it came back and it was always chasing me. It was a mean son of a bitch. We called it ‘Big Daddy,’ and they had to confine it, you know?”4
The resulting black-and-white cover was a blurry, overexposed photo—secured by Mitch at great risk—of the rooster with comb erect, a cryptic question superimposed: “2/15/87 WHAT MAKES BIG DADDY HAPPY?” The new title came from a 1946 movie called An Angel on My Shoulder. Thinking of Big Daddy, Pollard asked himself, “What’s the opposite of an angel on my shoulder? A devil between my toes.”
The cassette tape of song fragments Bob acquired from Weiser and Dodson during the 86 days was to be the inspiration for the record’s sound. Sound collage—or montage—would be the guiding philosophy. He took ideas from his musical inspirations, things he saw around Dayton, offhand Monument Club utterances, past ideas recorded on cassettes, songs the Crowd used to play. By recombining them, he created something that was—he hoped—new.
Pollard says, “The way I write songs and I put records together, it’s collage.” This time he selected his favorites, whether they’d been recorded in a studio, into a boombox, on a 4-track in the basement—it didn’t matter. Fitting the sequence was his only criterion.
Recording at Wilbur’s studio presented challenges unrelated to slick setups or sterile sound. First, on a weekend they had to wake up Steve somehow, usually by calling him incessantly. They were all excited, been up all morning, practicing and then drinking. Sometimes Wilbur told them to come over at two p.m., and they had to knock until he got out of bed. Even then he might beg off, mumbling he didn’t feel like it and try him next weekend or something.
Or Wilbur might rub the back of his neck and hiss, “Man… I don’t think so. Try me at four.”
By that point the band was starting to get loaded. It was six or seven p.m. before Wilbur relented. “All right, get over here. But,” he stipulated, “bring me a six-pack of Charmin toilet paper and a two-liter bottle of Cherry 7 Up.” Sometimes he also wanted cigarettes.
Pollard alternately describes Wilbur as looking like “a very out-of-shape Clay Matthews, from the Packers” or “Nick Nolte with long hair.” He smoked constantly during recording sessions, so much that the smoke left residue on the reel-to-reel tapes and caused, Pollard jokes, “More dropouts than the Dayton public school system.”
“It was like being in a submarine,” Tobin says of recording there. “Just the sharing of air, and the stuff you have to deal with. This garage… I don’t even think it was two-car. Maybe a car and a half. It had a room with the recording equipment and the board, with just enough room to stand behind it.” They’d all crowd in behind Steve to listen to playback, trying not to stumble over old mattresses leaned against the wall, the air thick with smoke.
“You’d open the door and say, ‘Oh my God. There’s air.’ But you had to keep the door closed because his wife didn’t like the noise. I think Wilbur had a wife,” Tobin adds. “You always heard about her, but you never saw her.”
Before the recording sessions, Fennell was still salty about Forever Since Breakfast. “I really was pretty pissed off and hurt,” he says. “I just told him, ‘Look, y’know, it’s wrong what you did. I don’t appreciate it, I’m family now, you have to show me a little more respect than that.’ I demanded that he get rid of Peyton Eric.” Fennell thought he’d been with Bob long enough to have earned his place. “I was livid. I felt like I should have been on that record.”
Peyton Eric, meanwhile, stuck around long enough to play the kit on the songs “Captain’s Dead” and “A Portrait Destroyed By Fire.” Then he had his own falling-out with Bob over money owed for the Forever Since Breakfast pressing. “What I remember,” he says, “is being short.” Bob fired him, and although Earick wasn’t happy about it then, he allows, “It’s understandable. He had kids and a lot on the line. It was more important to him than it was to me, in that respect.”
Bob took his role as producer seriously. When he brought Kevin back to play on several songs at Wilbur’s garage, he limited him to hi-hat, snare, and bass kick. “That’s all you can have.” He didn’t want Fennell vaulting off into polyrhythms; he wanted the drums simple and straight-ahead. Fennell didn’t agree and made sure everyone knew it, but later had to admit he quite liked the results.
“I’d never been in a recording studio,” Fennell says. “There was nothing to compare it to. All I know is [Wilbur] had a lot of really impressive-looking equipment. He knew enough of what he was doing that he could help us put a record out. He was quirky, and he was weird, but hell—so were we in a lot of ways. I think for a while it was a pretty good marriage.”
Some songs for the album were recorded at Wilbur’s, others—like instrumental “3-Year-Old Man,” which sounded like an Acid Ranch outtake—were recorded by other lineups in the Snakepit. Bob brought back the Crowd’s song, “Cardio-Combustion,” combined it with memories of watching brachydactylic Hank play guitar, and recorded it as “Hank’s Little Fingers”:
We’re watching Hank’s
(Watching Hank’s)
Watching Hank’s
(Watching Hank’s)
Little fingers
Sprout recalls the lead guitar on “A Portrait Destroyed By Fire” as his earliest contribution to a Guided By Voices song. The track sounded simultaneously new and like a reel uncovered in a British recording company’s vaults.
For Sprout, entering GBV was a process of learning how to write songs in new ways. He says, “I didn’t write that much until I got into Guided By Voices and sort of watched Bob, the way he put things together. I always thought you had to go verse-chorus, verse-chorus, and then you’re out, but no—there’s other things you could do.”
Taking a cue from Tobin, Bob made mistakes a virtue, stumbling blocks into stepping stones. There was no way to punch in and edit tracks, and little money to redo them. Jimmy would always play his part perfectly, only to drop a bad note—a clam, in jazz lingo—on the last beat. So there they stayed, permanent accidents. “The mistakes are the best parts. If you make a mistake, make it the leitmotif of the song,” Bob says. “You do it in the same spot next time.”
Conversely, Wilbur lamented how fast and sloppy they worked. “You guys need to let me make this stuff sound good,” he’d tell them, “then you’re gonna make it!”
Bob’s standard response: “We don’t have enough money, Steve.”
Bob had a never-ending flood of ideas, many of them stymied by lack of liquid assets. He took one of the photos of himself and Mitch and Peyton Eric on the porch at 121 James Street, and drew what he describes as, “Genesis-like flower drawings all around the edge.” It was to be the cover of a 45 rpm single of “Captain’s Dead,” backed by “A Portrait Destroyed By Fire.” But Bob didn’t have the money for that either, and there weren’t any lower-cost options. “We should have done it, let our wives leave us,” Bob says. “But we pussed out.”
BOB HAD DEVIL BETWEEN MY Toes vinyl in hand before 1986 ended; only 300 copies were pressed. They planned for a February 1987 release on Schwa, an invented label. The Offense newsletter didn’t quite get it, referring to the label as “what looks like an upside-down ‘e’.”5 (Well, yeah.) All in all, Bob liked the sound they achieved.
“Old Battery” kicked off the LP with an R.E.M.-infused, folk-rock sound, if a little more lo-fi. Bob praises the song for its almost mechanical sound. “That was one of the first songs I was happy with the recording of; I just thought it was a weird song.”6
With its Wire-like lead guitar and enigmatic edge, “Discussing Wallace Chambers” took a different tack. This album was a different animal from GBV’s previous work. Bob’s lyrics simultaneously mythologized and lowered his subjects absurdly to earth, as in “Cyclops”:
Upon hearing the album opener for the first time on vinyl, Tobin demanded, “Play that one again.” He made Bob play “Hank’s Little Fingers” for him three times. Sprout nods. “That is a great album.” When he listened to it with Bob, Jim Pollard declared it, “The best GBV album.”
The reviews weren’t nearly so effusive, but at least the LP received some press. Reviewer Shane, writing in Flipside, slammed Devil:
Possible [sic] the worst record of the batch. They say produced by “Bob”, I bet they mean he of the Church of the Subgenius Godhead. Totally off the wall stuff in a semi acoustic vein. Worth a listen for sure.7
One gets the sense Shane meant it literally, that the record was worth exactly one listen—for sure. Flipside didn’t quite grok Schwa as a label either, crediting the vinyl to “Backwards E Records.”
But in their newsletter, Sky Church Music in Columbus praised “without doubt THE garage-psych release for the U.S. in ’87.” In Option, Bill Chen gushed, “This is the best low-tech weirdo pop record I’ve heard since the last several releases by New Zealand’s Tall Dwarfs.” Chen compared the band favorably to the Byrds and Peter Gabriel, but saved his highest praise for “The Tumblers,” “which has the kind of ingenious rhythmic progression previously monopolized by the Feelies. Who are these people?”8