Guided By Voices - Crying Your Knife Away (1995)

The live Crying Your Knife Away -- not a bootleg, but a well-distributed, band-winked-at semi-official release -- originally appeared on double LP in 1995 and was released on CD in 1998. It finds these then suddenly fashionable veterans drunk (causing quite a few flat notes from singer Robert Pollard) and raucous at Columbus, OH's Staches on June 18, 1994. In fact, the band was even more inebriated than usual, as the show was a birthday party for their friend Bela Koe-Krompecher, and the celebrations had begun with kegs in the honored guest's back yard seven hours earlier. Like any GBV disc, one must skip a lot -- they have an indulgent tendency to noodle/sketch, but where they're on, they're on, and that's the case through most of this. Best of all, this is the absolute classic lineup: not only the usuals (Pollard, Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell, and Kevin Fennell) but also hot wild-man bassist Greg Demos. Crying oozes and seeps rock & roll: the Grand Hour EP's "Shocker in Gloomtown," Bee Thousand's "Gold Star for Robot Boy" and "Tractor Rape Chain," and the then-unreleased dive-bomb "My Valuable Hunting Knife" -- now the definitive version -- all compete well with hissing cauldron classics such as Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers' Live at Max's and the Replacements' Stink. That is, it's hot. The material and the vocals are inconsistent over 24 cuts, but still, to paraphrase Pollard from an interview in issue 39 of The Big Takeover, "You need this."