1. Summer Babe (Winter Version)
2. Trigger Cut/Wounded Kite at :17
3. No Life Singed Her
4. In the Mouth a Desert
5. Conduit for Sale!
6. Zurich Is Stained
7. Chelsey’s Little Wrists
8. Loretta’s Scars
9. Here
10. Two States
11. Perfume-V
12. Fame Throwa
13. Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era
14. Our Singer
Hadley Freeman is a journalist and is mainly to be found in the Guardian. She’s also written a couple of books; the most recent one, Life Moves Pretty Fast, is a slightly obsessive fan letter to eighties movies. She was born in New York and now lives in London with a sportswriter from Somerset, their seven-month-old twins and a five-year-old Norfolk terrier named Arthur.
Like a Prayer – Madonna
Paul’s Boutique – Beastie Boys
Disintegration – The Cure
I’ve got so much to say here that we’re launching right into it – I don’t even have enough time for one of those imaginary conversations that I like to do.
‘Oh go on.’
‘No.’
Here’s my story of Pavement in ten parts.
A fella called Joseph Campbell once wrote a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In it, he argues that all heroes follow the same journey, which is essentially this: an innocent youth meets an older ‘guide’ and they embark on an arduous quest before a decisive victory is won.
He uses various ancient myths and legends to support his case – from Jesus to that Athenian bloke who killed a Minotaur in a maze – and it’s been argued that his work has inspired contemporary stories such as Star Wars, Harry Potter and The Lion King.
Anyway, here’s Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus talking about his childhood:
‘I was a playful kid, you know, like good champagne. I wore little Lacoste jumpsuits and went to the beach with my grandma, who loved me. I had a good tan.’
So there you have it, the repetition of a theme – a child being mentored by an elder.
But unlike Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter or Simba, Stephen Malkmus was dressed in Lacoste and had a great tan.
What a great start.
While Malkmus was at school in Stockton, California, he thought American sports were a complete waste of time and decided to play soccer instead.
This fact alone automatically makes him cooler than virtually all other Americans.
It’s also led to me having a series of incredibly pleasant daydreams about Stephen Malkmus playing football. I’d imagine him as an American version of Alan Hansen – elegant and graceful, a last line of defence wearing a plaid shirt.
To satisfy my curiosity, I asked him on Twitter what position he played.
Unbelievably, he replied:
‘The guy at the edge of the wall who ducks when the free kick comes.’
I should have known.
It was on the football pitch, though, that Malkmus would meet another cool kid – Scott Kannberg.
In 1989, fourteen years after they first met on a football pitch, Malkmus and Kannberg form a band and borrow enough money to record a single. Naturally, they decide the best place to do this is at a local studio run by an alcoholic hippy called Gary Young.
Young describes their music as ‘weird guitar noise’ and asks if he can join in on drums. Malkmus and Kannberg agree, the three of them making the whole thing up as they go along, and four hours later they’ve recorded their first EP – Slay Tracks.
Upon hearing the finished product Young said of our hero, ‘this Malkmus idiot is a complete songwriting genius.’
A thousand copies of the EP are produced and, before the inevitable happens, I want you to consider one thing – imagine if Gary Young couldn’t play drums.
As Slay Tracks is due to be released, Malkmus decides it might be a good idea to go travelling around the world.
In a record shop in Austria, he hears the EP playing on the stereo and is so shocked that he asks whether he can see it. After confirming that it is indeed the single he recorded with his mate and some weird hippy fella, he tells the shop assistant that Pavement are his band.
The shop assistant replies:
‘That’s a good name, somebody had to use it.’
Malkmus phones Kannberg back in the States and tells him that he’s just heard the single being played in Austria. Kannberg, who doesn’t remember sending any copies to Austria, wonders what on earth is going on.
The Austrian shop assistant was correct in his assessment by the way – Pavement is a brilliant name and, according to the National Word Association of America, it’s one of the twenty most pleasant-sounding words in the English language.
‘Serendipity’ is also on that list though, and I just want to make it clear that I would set fire to any band that had the nerve to call themselves that.
After Austria, the Slay Tracks EP then fell into the hands of The Wedding Present – a sort of indie-pop prequel to Last of the Summer Wine.
They liked the EP so much that they covered one of the songs, ‘Box Elder’, and this led to generous airplay on John Peel’s radio show. Before long, people wanted to know more about Pavement.
Who were they? Why have they got such a brilliant name?
The Wedding Present didn’t even know, they’d never met them or even asked their permission to cover the song. It was a mystery. The only information available was on the liner notes to the Wedding Present EP:
‘Box Elder, written by Pavement from Stockton, California.’
Again, word reaches Kannberg of the news – this time that indie legends in the UK have covered one of their songs. He goes mad.
‘Who do they think they are? How dare they cover our songs without asking us?’
He then realises that the exposure might be good for the band and calms down.
And how does Malkmus react?
No one knows because he’s still on his holidays.
Malkmus finally decides to return home.
Pavement release another couple of EPs, again with Gary Young on drums, and then Malkmus decides on another brilliant career move – he goes to New York to become a security guard.
While in New York he moves into an apartment with Bob Nastanovich and David Berman where they form a side project called Silver Jews. Then this, the best story ever, actually happens:
Somehow they manage to get the home phone number for Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth. Once or twice a week, they get drunk, phone the number and record a jam on their answering machine!
Imagine that. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon come home from a gruelling tour, listen to their messages only to find that some experimental art band have been playing songs down their phone for a laugh.
Again, I reached out to Twitter to satisfy my curiosity.
This time I asked Bob Nastanovich whether Sonic Youth ever discovered the identity of the band who left all those songs on their answering machine.
Unbelievably, he replied:
‘I honestly don’t know. Seems like Malkmus would have told Kim. They’re good friends.’
Bob Nastanovich would later go on to join Pavement and become a massive fan of horse racing.
Wanna hear a great fact about him?
He’s the only known American to have visited all sixty racecourses in the UK. Weird that, isn’t it? If someone had told you that only one American had achieved such a feat, I’m guessing the last person you’d think of was a fella who used to be in Pavement.
I have two more things to say in this section.
Firstly, the former members of Pavement give great customer service on Twitter. I’ve asked two of them questions now and they’ve both got back to me within an hour. East Midlands Trains could really learn a lot from this.
Secondly, I’ve already written a letter to the BBC to try and get funding for my new sitcom – Stephen Malkmus, Security Guard.
During the Christmas of 1990, Malkmus stops bothering Sonic Youth via their answering machine and returns home to Stockton, California.
It’s here that Pavement record their first album – Slanted and Enchanted.
The process, if you can call it that, was just as shambolic as the process of recording their first EP. Malkmus and Kannberg would turn up at Gary Young’s home studio at around noon and eat chicken and vegetables that had been cooked in the fireplace. They would then work on barely rehearsed songs, often making lyrics up on the spot, and jam until about 10 p.m.
When they felt they had something they could commit to tape, Young would go into the laundry room, start the tape, and then run barefoot back into the studio to play drums. After the song was finished, he then ran back into the laundry room to stop the tape. As you can imagine, this became exhausting after a while so they eventually decided to settle on the earlier takes of each song.
Ten days later Pavement have finished their first album. Two kids who met playing football, messing about with an alcoholic who just happened to be a brilliant drummer.
It’s one of the best albums of the nineties.
Pavement now recruit two new members – the aforementioned Bob Nastanovich and Mark Ibold.
Mark Ibold played bass and smiled a lot, and Bob Nastanovich was brought in as ‘Assistant Time Keeper’ – essentially to keep the brilliant, but erratic, Young in check.
In fact, they’re the only band I know of where one of the members is an assistant to another one.
Yet, off they go.
The initial live shows are reminiscent of a debauched frat party and Young, in particular, is quite the character. He couldn’t understand why bands would hang out backstage before the gigs so, instead, he would greet the fans at the door as if they were coming round his house.
Often he would say things to them like ‘May I ask you what brings you here this evening?’
Most people just thought he was mad and ignored him, and virtually no one believed he was in the band until they saw him on stage.
On another occasion, he made toast for the entire audience.
‘I could sit there and play drums,’ he said, ‘but where’s the fun in that? Don’t you think it’s more fun to give out cinnamon toast? I sat there for forty-five minutes at London University with a toaster and four loaves of bread and a tub of butter and some cinnamon and I made cinnamon toast for the audience.’
At a gig in Berlin, he greeted fans at the door and gave them a cabbage.
Like me, you’re probably reading these snippets of Young’s behaviour and thinking he sounds brilliant. Pavement, on the other hand, had to live with it on a daily basis and the antics, and his alcoholism, soon wore thin.
As a result, Young and Pavement parted company.
The new drummer was a fella called Steve West. He probably wasn’t as good a musician as Young but, on the plus side, he didn’t greet you at the door with a vegetable.
They release five more albums and become one of the best bands of the nineties – providing much-needed relief from Britpop and that drummer from M People who was absolutely everywhere.
In ‘Range Life’, Malkmus improvised some lyrics that took the piss out of The Smashing Pumpkins and The Stone Temple Pilots.
In ‘Unseen Power of the Picket Fence’, he wrote an entire song dedicated to how brilliant early R.E.M. were.
There’s this lyric by The Hold Steady:
‘It’s a funny bit of chemistry, how a cool car makes a guy seem that much cooler.’
I can’t drive and I hate cars so, to me, that lyric is about Pavement.
Let me explain.
Take the most uncool person you can think of – for example the Conversative MP Chris Grayling. Now imagine that you’ve just read an interview with him where he says his favourite band are Pavement.
See, suddenly Chris Grayling is much cooler.
That’s Pavement in a nutshell – they were brilliant and, whether by accident or design, they were the coolest band around.
But even more importantly, they weren’t Weezer.
Stephen Malkmus once said Pavement didn’t have any real plans because they weren’t a real band.
Yet, that’s exactly what they became. And in 1999, he decided he didn’t want that anymore.
Their final show was at Brixton Academy and Malkmus played the whole gig with a pair of handcuffs attached to his microphone. During the gig, he told the audience that the handcuffs symbolised what it was like being in a band for all these years.
They ended the show, beautifully, with ‘Here’ from Slanted and Enchanted, and then their record label put out the following statement:
Pavement are retiring for the foreseeable future in order to:
1) Start Families!
2) Sail around the world!
3) Get into the computer industry!
4) Dance!
5) Get some attention!
The bit they left out, and it’s crucial, is that a decisive victory had been won.
There is a two-word answer to why I have never listened to this album by Pavement or, indeed, any album by Pavement: Jamie Macintosh.
Jamie Macintosh was the cool boy at my school, or, at least, he seemed like the cool boy to me: he was a bit of a skater and he smoked weed. To a sheltered teenager from Manhattan’s Upper East Side that is pretty much the bleeding cutting edge. In fact, he was a lot like Travis in Clueless, who I still maintain is the real heartthrob in that film (sorry Paul Rudd). He was also – and this is possibly not entirely relevant to today’s discussion, but what the hell – cute as a button, with sad eyes and curly hair and a long lanky body. Obviously, I knew he had no idea who I was, but I knew everything about him, such as that he was a big Pavement fan, and I didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work that out because he wore a Pavement T-shirt to school pretty much every other day.
Now, some girls might spot a boy they fancy, figure out what band that boy likes and then obsessively listen to that band so as to have something to discuss with him. I, however, am a girl who didn’t even kiss a boy until she was almost twenty, so obviously my flirting technique as a teenager was somewhat lacking. No, my conclusion upon learning Jamie’s musical taste was that I should never listen to Pavement because it was obviously cool music and therefore I’d hate it.
I was not a cool teenager.
When people say that now they mean they were a cool geek, in a sort of Michael Cera or Jesse Eisenberg way. Let me reiterate this point: I was not a cool teenager. I was not a cool geek teenager. I was just a big dork. Or at least, that’s how I saw myself, so I had this idea that anything cool people liked would be utterly alien to me, whether that was smoking, music festivals or Pavement.
When I was in my twenties and mildly less self-loathing than I was in my teens, I tried out two of those things and it turned out that I was right about smoking (disgusting) and wrong about music festivals (fun, sometimes). But I never bothered to investigate Pavement, mainly because it continued to be the band all boys I fancied liked, and, even in my twenties, I found that weirdly off-putting.
Maybe I found these boys so weirdly incomprehensible anyway that I avoided any further evidence of their difference from me. I remember one boy telling me when he was twenty-five that he once house-sat for Stephen Malkmus. I knew enough at this point to pretend to be impressed, but I also suspected that this guy was lying. That tableau – of him lying about Stephen Malkmus to impress me and me pretending to be impressed to impress him – pretty much captures all my memories of dating in my twenties.
There was another issue: I was not really into a lot of nineties music. Nineties music to me seemed to be divided into four categories: R’n’B, dance, grunge and Britpop. Of those four, only R’n’B and some dance music were acceptable – everything else was depressing and pretty much unlistenable, and I strongly suspected Pavement would fall into the ‘tedious miserable grunge’ category.
So there you have it, that’s why I never listened to Pavement: because I was a total dork who was too busy listening to Boyz II Men.
The first time I listened to it I was basically BaaadDad from The Adam and Joe Show in the episode when he reviewed The Prodigy: what is this? It’s just NOISE! I hate this! O cruel world!
The second time I didn’t hate it: I was mainly amused at how it seemed like a sonic encapsulation of the nineties, with Malkmus sounding slightly bored but then also CARING VERY INTENTLY; the guitar feedback; the song titles that make absolutely no sense. All that was lacking was someone encouraging me to wear a Kookai floral dress over a pair of French Connection black trousers (classic look). For a moment I wondered if I’d once made out with a boy to ‘In the Mouth a Desert’, but then I realised it just sounded like the kind of song I thought I’d make out to in the nineties (in fact, the first time I made out with some guy to music it was to The Verve, and I bloody hated The Verve).
The third time I actually listened to it and thought it was… fine. I thought it was fine. I could do without the ones where Malkmus is screaming into the mic (‘No Life Singed Her’, ‘Conduit for Sale!’), and the strummy ones (‘Zurich is Stained’, ‘Trigger Cut/Wounded Kite at :17’) bored me, but others – like ‘Summer Babe’ and ‘In the Mouth a Desert’ – were rather lovely. I also liked how obvious it was that Damon Albarn had been listening to ‘Here’ on loop before he wrote ‘Tender’, and I see why: it’s a good song to listen to if the love of your life has just left you.
So of course I can see the appeal in the album – I’m a dork but I’m not deaf – but it just isn’t for me. If an album isn’t going to make me want to dance (Madonna) or rap in front of my mirror (Beastie Boys), then it has to have moments of transcendent beauty (The Cure), and Slanted and Enchanted just didn’t have that for me. And I guess I knew all along that’s how it would be for me and Pavement.
So here’s a funny story about Jamie Macintosh, because I’m sure you’re all dying to hear how that turned out. So I left the school I went to with Jamie after my GCSEs to go to boarding school for my A-levels, and it was about two weeks after I started my new school that something incredible happened: Jamie called me. Three times! In one month! Can you imagine how shocked I was? Can you fathom what it would take to make a sixteen-year-old boy call up a boarding school just to speak to some random girl he’d hardly ever spoken to before? Can you grasp just how badly I misread the whole situation the year before?
And then something even weirder happened: I did not encourage his phone calls. What I mean is, I never asked him to call again, let alone visit, and I never called him, and eventually he stopped bothering – and who can blame him? At the time, I put my handling of the situation down to me being a giant dork with no social skills. But in retrospect, I think the truth was that I liked to look at him, but I knew we actually had nothing in common, so I left it at that. Just like Pavement, really: I can see the appeal, but not for me. And you know what? I think I’m fine with that.
Probably not deliberately, no. But I wouldn’t leave the room if it came on. How’s that for high praise?
7.