Tractor Rape Chain

The third and longest track on Bee Thousand is a Robert Pollard song. Pollard said in 2024 that it reworked a much older song, Tell Me, which the band played live in the early 1980s. A sibling song, Tractor Rape Chain (Clean It Up), shares its refrain about parallel lines on a slow decline but has entirely different verses. It was slated for two abandoned 1992 albums and finally appeared on a 1996 seven-inch. The album take has Pollard on vocals and guitar, Kevin Fennell on drums and Greg Demos on bass.

Stereogum's Chris DeVille held up the title as an example of Pollard's puzzling names and admitted he still did not know what it meant. Diffuser ranked it seventh among the band's best songs. Crooked Fingers covered it on the 2011 tribute Sing for Your Meat, and Ben Gibbard recorded a solo acoustic version for SiriusXM in 2015.

Live

First played at CBGB in July 1993, it has been performed more than 550 times, through to Dallas in October 2024, and sits beside Game of Pricks and I Am a Scientist among the band's most played songs. It was in the encore of the Austin City Limits taping in November 2004, released on Live From Austin TX, and it turns up on many live albums from the 1994 Crying Your Knife Away onward.

The 2024 version

For Bee Thousand's 30th anniversary the band recorded it again in hi-fi, released on 28 August 2024 as a double A-side with a new I Am a Scientist. Pollard said the new versions are pretty true to the way the band plays them live. One upload in the hypersongs web is the 1994 album version and the other is this 2024 30th Anniversary Version.