Confession upfront: The “friend” discussed here is me. I have album issues and am reluctant to chase down and/or listen to singles. Using iTune’s Genius Playlist thingy is about as close as I get. I’m working on getting over my condition and I have found a most unexpected path.
Years ago when Guided By Voices was being hailed as the-next-great-thing I read about the bands they were compared to and influenced by and blah blah blah. This led me to suspect that I would dig them. According to said experts, I should run-out-and-get a CD of theirs called Bee Thousand. So I did. I listened to it. I listened to it again. I even tried listening to it by skipping from song-to-song, which is unlike me. To no avail. I can’t say I think “they suck” as it seemed good enough I suppose. I could listen to it again and probably rip holes in it but I don’t see the point in that. Let’s just say that I haven’t listened to it since.
In mod-like fashion Mr. Moderator recently gave me a flash drive with a bunch of singles-like stuff on it. Loads of it I dug. None of it I disliked. I was playing it in my car via the USB Aux thingy and it didn’t always reveal the artist/song/album on the radio display. I actually liked that I was frequently unaware of who was playing the song. I had no prejudgement on any of these particular tracks. Of all the tracks, I kept coming back to one over and over again. It quickly became my favorite among so many that I liked. I even misunderstood a word that I assumed was in the title. I thought the guy was singing “Hey, black girls, only wanna get you high.” I thought that was funny, gutsy, and cool and so I Googled that phrase. Other than a number of links quoting the fairly obvious Rolling Stones reference, I kept seeing that Guided By Voices did a song that went “Hey glad girls, only wanna get you high.” At first I thought that there was no way it could be GBV as I didn’t really like GBV. I was wrong. Here’s the tune:
