A Sunny Day in Glasgow "Game of Pricks"

More than a few years ago, I turned one of my (at the time) good friends onto Guided by Voices, via the song “My Valuable Hunting Knife” from Alien Lanes. She had remarkably good taste in music (ahem) and immediately latched onto the band. After about a month, Alien Lanes was once again playing in my car, when she took control and advanced the disc to “Game of Pricks,” which was by then established as her favorite. She was enamored particularly with the mini-chorus/refrain of the song (the entire song, more or less, was a minute and a half chorus): “It’s just the sweetest sentiment, really,” she told me as we were driving. “I mean, just think about it. ‘I never asked for the truth, but you won’t lie to me.’ What a sweet little line.” I wasn’t quite sure what to say at that point. The Guided by Voices aficionado within me wanted to correct her, to set her on the straight and narrow, to let her know that, actually, the song’s sentiment is quite the opposite. It’s not “but you won’t lie to me,” but actually “but you owe that to me,” and was written by Pollard regarding a quite nasty marital breakup. But, on the other hand, I thought, why not let her believe what she wanted to believe about the song, regardless of the meaning its author intended? It obviously made her happy and she took meaning from it, and, in a general sense, art is always imbued with the personality, worldview, hopes, fears, etc. of its viewer, so why not let this one go, and let her regard the song as she had been. Well, yeah, whatever. “Um, it’s actually a song about a pretty awful divorce and Pollard, while crafting one of the better melodies of the decade around it, meant it pretty much as it’s written in the liner notes, which is…(you get the point),” I didactially countered. I saw a moment of recognition, then a slightly longer one of embarassment, during which I felt like I had just set fire to her grandmother’s diary or something. “Well. Now that I look like the idiot who can’t read the liner notes, where are we going for lunch?”

I’ve never forgotten that moment. The weather, the smell in the car, the time of day, it’s all still fresh. It was when I shared my first mutual Guided by Voices moment with one of my best friends, and we listened to the whole record (not a Herculean task, mind you) and parsed the lyrics and their worlds of possible meanings. It was the afternoon when Robert Pollard revealed himself to us as the poet laureate of the middle-class Midwest. As the folk singer who employed esoteric turns of phrase cobbled together from Dayton street signs and bowling alleys (Allen Lanes) to create a disparate community (some would wrongly say “cult”) of disaffected collegiate punk kids and middle-aged dudes with dusty Epiphones in their basements.

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The moment, a week or so ago, that another friend of mine turned me on to A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s version of “Game of Pricks” (mp3), caused the time recalled above to come rushing back to me, after what had seemed like years. The current group, like my friend a decade or something ago, chooses to concentrate only on the song’s refrain. I don’t know what meaning it holds to the angelic, innocent voices singing it, but they present it only as a hazy memory, through what seems like acres of recollection. And its brief repetition approaches me like a specter, reminding me with spooky precision of the exact moment I translated it for a friend—a friend who never asked for the truth, but to whom, for some reason, I felt it was owed.

Visit A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s website, and buy their magnificent EP here.
Buy Guided by Voices’ Alien Lanes here.