Thursday, February 10, 2011

1999: Pondering Pavement

Pavement were, hands down, one of my favorite bands ever. They broke up shortly after this review was written. However, they reunited last year and toured the world, selling out venues wherever they landed. As I understand it, though, they have no current plans to record together, or to stay reunited. But you never know...


In a recent interview with the boys from Pavement, none other than Moon Unit Zappa exulted at the lack of commercial potential exhibited on their extraordinary fifth album, Terror Twilight. And she’s right: you won’t have to go to a baseball stadium to hear them play anytime soon. In fact, you can catch one of the finest rock bands of the 90s right here in Tucson on October 5th at our little old Rialto Theatre downtown.

Actually, given the mediocre sameness of most of what gets played on commercial radio these days, it’s a great compliment that radio seems to have given up on Pavement, and vice versa. While too many of their contemporaries sing of strangled masculine angst, Pavement makes idiosyncratic grooves on subjects like water politics, trench warfare, architecture and, yes, the mediocre sameness of contemporary rockers. They blend Stephen Malkmus’ oblique lyrics and improbable rhymes (my favorite: “men in dashikis/and their leftist weeklies”) with a cheerful eclecticism that embraces free jazz and bluegrass as well as the whole of rock history.



Pavement started in Stockton, California in 1989 when Malkmus began making homemade tapes with his hometown pal Scott Kannberg. The low-tech recordings generated some major critical buzz and spawned scores of imitators. By the time they released their first album on Matador Records, 1991’s Slanted and Enchanted, Pavement was the object of serious courtship from major labels.

At this juncture, the Pavement lads faced two viable career options: jump ship like REM did, sharpen their style for a mass audience and, well, tour the world playing in baseball stadiums. Or they could follow the example set by indie elders Sonic Youth, who had flirted with mainstream accessibility but found it a poor fit (or as Jerry Garcia once put it, “We tried to sell out but nobody was buying!”). Sonic Youth continues to make music that pleases them and their audience, but the majors have long since stopped calling.

Much to the consternation of drummer Gary Young, Pavement decided to stay with Matador and keep playing in the minor leagues. Young was replaced with Steve West, and Pavement went on to make a series of strange and wonderful albums, none of which have sold more than 200,000 copies. Matador signed a distribution deal with Capitol Records, but recently bought back that chunk of themselves and are once again truly independent.

And Pavement are as independent as ever, but seem to have decided to stick with it for the long haul. Early Pavement songs were like onions: they peeled apart after repeated listening to reveal indelible melodies buried under layers of fuzz and tape hiss. They claimed that they weren’t trying to sound low-fidelity on purpose, but I think they’re lying.

Likewise, Malkmus claims to dash off his lyrics at the last possible minute like a college term paper. I think he’s lying about that, too – he has a habit of lying to journalists. But if you take him at his word, the random surreality and studied lack of narrative serve the music quite nicely, allowing both the singer and the singee (that’s you) to make connections they might otherwise not have.

When I saw Pavement in Austin during my honeymoon in 1997, I found they had honed their instrumental attack considerably over previous tours. Like good indie rockers, they never emphasized virtuosity, but over the years it’s become harder to conceal. Somehow the band had acquired a group mind, that rare, almost telepathic quality that I’ve seen only in bands like NRBQ, Oregon, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sonic Youth and the Dead.

In the meantime, the young pranksters had acquired wives and families as well as a devoted audience that had found them one way or another despite the zero airplay. So when asked what the new album would sound like, Kannberg replied only that it would be pleasing to Pavement fans. And that it is, though by now the onion has been cooked quite nicely in a 24-track recording studio with the help of Nigel Godrich, who has previously twisted the knobs for Beck and Radiohead.

Back in the day, Andre Breton, the father of surrealism, once remarked that the most surrealist thing you could do was go for a walk, because by doing so you unite all sorts of unrelated elements by the mere fact of your presence. That may still be so, (though you have to wonder what Breton could do with a sofa and a remote), but I’m guessing a close second would be to take a walk downtown and watch these old boys put their jigsaw puzzle of a music together onstage. And who knows, you might not be able to see them on a small stage forever. Or did they have something else in mind when they sang “Bring on the Major Leagues?”

6 comments:

  1. POUNDING PAVEMENT
    Most people would have to be pretty desperate before they would even think about standing alone, on the side of an interstate highway, with their thumb out. Even scarier, than soliciting a ride from a stranger, is having one stop after you did!

    The road is a "black river of asphalt" upon which every imaginable form of humanity flows. But there is little that you can do to protect yourself against the unknown so no matter how you do it, "hitch-hiking is very dangerous."

    More than one hitch-hiker has died from "over-exposure," but what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger -- and so it was in my case. You enter another world every time you climb into a car when you are hitch-hiking. The first thing that hits you is the smell. This sets the pace as you examine the face of your new captor. Will they be kind? Are they cool? Why did they really stop, and what do they want from you?

    "Cash, grass, or ass... nobody rides for free." That's what the truckers used to say, but that's not entirely true. Catching rides on "Big-Rigs," that are running fast, without giving up your stash (cash, grass, ass)... now that's a hitch-hiker with a lot of class! Eventually, I graduated to this exclusive group of "free-loaders." Ah, but there I've gone and let the cat out of the bag by just telling you the secret to my success.

    "A Lumper" is a person that unloads tractor trailers. I used to solicit rides out of truck stops by offering "to lump your load for free if you happened to be going my way," so in a sense that made me a "Free Loader." I imagine that some "hitch-hiking girls" have used this same line, but please understand that I never meant it the way that they probably did.

    Be that as it may, I sought to satisfy my wanderlust, panning for rides from the highway. Out there, Big Rigs will seldom/almost never stop for some dude with his thumb in the air, but they will if a good-looking girl is stuck on the side of the road with her skirt jacked-up.

    If you and I were hitch-hiking together, I would instruct you on precisely where to set down your "pack" and where to stand. I would be critical of the impression that our presence, on the highway, was making to the passersby. Beggars can't be choosers, but Pickers can, so it obviously pays to look sprite whenever you are hitch-hiking.

    Location is everything to a talented hitch-hiker. First-off, there has to be enough space for a person that is willing to stop for you to safely pull over. Secondly, the hitch-hiker and all of their belongings must be fully visible to the on-coming traffic. It's a buyer's market out there, so as a hitch-hiker you must package your self properly. Sometimes, nothing that you do works, but a friend of mine named Charlie told me a hitch-hiking story that really does prove otherwise.

    He was hitch-hiking in the dark one night and, needless to say, was getting nowhere... and it was raining to boot! You would be surprised at the number of good Samaritans that will hesitate or not even stop to pick up someone who is all wet. Charlie told me that, "a tree talked to him and told him to come and stand next to it." The tree promised Charlie that if he did, he would get a ride, so Charlie obliged. Almost immediately a car's brakes were slammed on and after skidding to a halt, the car backed up to where Charlie and the tree were standing. "I almost didn't see you", the driver said to Charlie, after he got in. "I thought that you were a tree", the driver explained!

    It's no wonder that trees talked to Charlie because he had long red hair that looked just like a bush.

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