This three-disc box set collects songs, snippets of recordings, spoken word, answering machine messages, taped interviews and material from a couple of his bands (V-3 and a pre-official version of Ego Summit), as well as a collection of pieces about and inspired by Shepard from sometime collaborators Robert Pollard, Charles Cicirella, Nudge Squidfish, Dennis Callaci and Don Howland.

It is rather a lot of Jim Shephard at 22 tracks and also not nearly enough to make sense of the artist, who comes across as complicated, possibly misogynist (he spits the word “whore” with too much glee for my taste and remembers the girl who coaxed a band member north from Florida only as “a blonde”), enraged and powerfully creative, whether in spare, vulnerable little melodies or in full-on blasts of dissonant noise.

In his poem, “The Death of Jim Shepard,” Charles Cicirella observed, “Jim’s venom-soaked guitar requiems are as charred as his vocals are singed…His live shows were more like indoctrinations into something damp, dark and musty while also electrified throughout from this man’s integrity and sweat. Hell yes, his performances were more like an introduction to an underbelly of light and magic than a music show dealing in the politics of sex.” It is hard to improve upon this as a description of the live cuts.

You also get a sense of Jim Shepard, the artist, who is enough of a hustler to leave a couple of answering machine messages (For a label? A critic? A friend? It’s not clear) when his songs get covered by another band. But he is also enough of an anti-commercial outsider to write songs like “Tabernacle Moneygun,” which starts with the line, “Don’t call me a corporate whore and don’t point that poison pen at me.” You see him in a variety of guises – live and exposed and reading his poetry; accompanying himself with acoustic guitar; covering favorites like Van Morrison, Dylan and Gun Club, and in bands including V-3 and Ego Summit.  

Shephard had two art forms, the spoken word and the music, but they were never mutually exclusive. In cuts like “Fuck the Clock,” he riffs verbally against a Nuggets-esque r’n r backing (Mike Rep and Don Howland in an early version of Ego Summit), narrating a noire-ish drugs and drinking scenario. “He feels the burning in his belly feeds the soul parking meter that marks the passing of the time he spends in any one space, he has a lot of unpaid tickets framed on his wall,” Shepard reads, and it’s a rock song, a short story and a poem all at once. When he tells an interviewer how he got to Ohio in “The Blonde and the Body,” a noise of guitar cuts in and out of the tape recording, as if it was always there, playing in the back of his head, whatever he might be doing.

The set includes “Prom Is Coming” a song Shepard wrote with Bob Pollard, the one out of his band of collaborators who had anything like mainstream success. You hear the Pollard in it at once, the minor-key tunefulness, the absurdist poetry, the gentleness of its offhanded lyricism, but it’s a twist or two darker than most Guided by Voices tunes. Shepard could get close, but he couldn’t cross over into the kind of ingratiating rock pop that gets consumed in bulk; there was an invisible fence between him and commercial viability. You can hear it rattling around in his head in “Star Power,” where he mutters, “Star power, cancels itself out, sanded blank, it exists no more, star power is a battery that drains itself out.”  

The box set comes with in introduction by Ever/Never label head Josh Gordon, a poem by Jason Baldinger and Charles Cicirella and a long rambling essay by Tom Lax; a third disc collects works by friends and collaborators and one more disturbing cut from Shepard himself in “Loaded Gun.” Amid blistering feedback, the artist unspools a violent poetry. “You don’t hold a loaded fucking gun to your mother’s head/take it all back now, take it all back bitch,” he mouths with lacerating disdain and it is strong, bitter stuff that burns all the way down.