The 500 - #327 - Exile To Guyville - Liz Phair

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

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Album: # 327

Album Title: Exile To Guyville

Artist: Liz Phair

Genre: Indie Rock, Lo-Fi

Recorded: Idful Music Corporation, Chicago, USA

Released: June, 1993

My age at release: 28

How familiar was I with it before this week: Not at all

Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, to #56 -- moving up 271 places

Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Never Said

In the fall of 1996, shortly after I had graduated from Teachers' College, I was in a funk. School boards in Ontario were not hiring. However, I was fortunate to get on the Occasional Teachers' list with the London School Board (now Thames Valley) but supply work was tough to secure and provided a limited revenue stream. I knew that I would need to return to full-time bartending to make ends meet. My $10,000 investment into a teaching degree had, seemingly, led me nowhere.

Thames Valley District School Board Logo

One of my college roommates, Brendan, was renting two floors of a large home in downtown London with members of his band, The Pedros. He let me know there was a basement room available and I jumped at the inexpensive opportunity.

One of the few pictures I have of my roommate Brendan, 
taken at his birthday party, January, 1996

One of Brendan's bandmates, and now my new roommate, was Lisa, a talented singer and guitarist. We took turns picking CDs for the communal stereo system and she acquainted us all to many contemporary female singer/songwriters, including Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, Jewel and this week's artist, Liz Phair.

Liz Phair (circa 1996)

The first Phair record I heard blasting through our sprawling, 100-year old, Victorian-era rental was Whip-Smart, the sophomore release by the Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist. It contained the song Supernova, which received significant radio play and was nominated at the 37th Grammy Awards for the Best Female Rock Vocalist Award...losing to Come To My Window by Melissa Etheridge.

Phair's second release Whip-Smart (1994)

The record that appears at position #327 on The 500 list is Phair's debut release on Matador records, Exile To Guyville. Technically, it is her fourth release. Between 1990 and 1992, Phair had self-released three cassettes under the pseudonym, Girly Sound.

Girly Sound Cassette Releases (1990-1992)

Phair acknowledges that the term Guyville was coined by Nash Kato of the band Urge Overkill on their 1992 song Goodbye to Guyville. It refers to the testosterone-fueled Chicago music scene of the early 90s -- of which both Phair and Kato belonged. 

As Kato put it:

"These were guys with an unnecessary swagger, wearing huge, gold chains...wielding Rock and Roll like some kind of power tool to get your manly feelings out. The scene was a total sausage-fest (almost exclusively male). It always seemed like a bad frat-party."

Nash Kato, left, onstage with Urge Overkill (1994)

Urge Overkill was not the only group from which Phair drew inspiration for Exile To Guyville. The album is a song-by-song reply to Exile On Main St., arguably the best record by The Rolling Stones. In fact, Main St. appears at position #7 on The 500.

Exile On Main Street

Phair has made it clear in interviews that her tracks are not a clear or obvious response to the Stones' album. Instead, she sequenced the songs on Exile in Guyville to match the song list and pacing of the Exile on Main St. On Spotify, a contributor known as STVX, has created a playlist which pairs the songs from both albums together, one after the other. It is well worth a listen. You can find it here.

As you might imagine, there is a lot to dig into with Phair's lyrically powerful record -- certainly too much for me to cover here. The production is "lo-fi" (low-fidelity), a sonic aesthetic that retains the raw, simplicity of a studio recording (warts and all). It is, as one might expect, the opposite of a "hi-fi" (high fidelity recording) -- where studio tools are used to hide imperfections and enhance sound quality. 

Phair in the studio (1998)

Phair's lyrics are also raw and forthright, bringing the role of women in music and society into sharp focus. However, to be clear, these are human stories, and many are universally relatable. This is not man-bashing from an angry, female songwriter (which, by the way, is a hack, lazy, criticism I hear far too often from some circles). 

In a 1994 interview, Phair said:

"That stuff didn't happen to me, and that's what made writing it interesting. I wasn't connecting with my friends. I wasn't connecting with relationships. I was in love with people who couldn't care less about me. I was yearning to be part of a scene. I was in a posing kind of mode, yearning to have things happen for me that weren't happening. So I wanted to make it seem real and convincing. I wrote the whole album for a couple people to see and know me."

This is a record that I will cue-up again -- probably the aforementioned Spotify version that matches it with the Stones' classic. 

It has been a long time since I saw my former roommate Lisa, and I owe her a belated thanks for being the first to put Phair on my radar.  I also still owe her about $25 for our last hydro bill. Unfortunately, she, Brendan and I lost touch with each other after moving out of the old apartment building in the spring of 1997. So, if she happens to read this, I'm still good for it, Lisa.