Pavement

As much as they belong to the world of indie rock, what I love about Pavement is what I love about the music of a composer like Thelonious Monk, who once famously (or at least apocryphally) called into a Columbia University radio station to complain to a presenter talking about the importance of the “wrong notes” in his music that, in fact, the piano didn’t have wrong notes—that you could play a song as quaint and domestic as “Tea For Two” with just enough dissonance to stretch a listener’s sense of beauty while also conveying a sense of human fallibility that a more polished performance can’t. (The spiky, sour opening of Pavement’s “In the Mouth a Desert” could almost be a Monk line, the way all its ugly little turns resolve so rightly.)

Slanted and Enchanted is music of cowlicks, of family photographs at crooked angles, of accident as essence, the imperfect as perfect just as it is. Pavement happened to arrive in my life just weeks after the suicide of Kurt Cobain, an event that in certain ways deepened the band’s myth but in others made it almost impossible for me to connect with them the way I had before. Was this where that line of creative expression led? Was this, in some ways, what the music was about? Even at 12, I found my own angst both unavoidable and totally boring, the kind of thing you slough off on the way to a deeper and more interesting time. (I’d rather listen to your dreams than your pain, all day, every day.) The laxness and play in Pavement reminded me (and still reminds me) that accidents are natural and big feelings are often as transient as small ones and the margins are usually as lively and exciting as what some people call “the point”—difficult lessons for a natural cueball-squeezer like me, but ones that over time have kept me saner and seem to contain more practical magic than most others.

Pavement’s third member at the time of Slanted was Gary Young, a drummer who operated a small studio in the band’s hometown of Stockton, California, where the album was recorded. Young was more than 10 years older than Malkmus and Kannberg, the weed-dealing punk-hippie (this was when “dealing weed” was still a notable qualifier), passing time with whoever in town still seemed interesting. (“This Malkmus idiot is a complete songwriting genius,” Young reportedly told Kannberg.)

Young was both a gymnast and an alcoholic, qualities you can hear in how his playing fumbles and stumbles and still lands on its feet with a breathless ta-da. (The fills on “Lions (Linden)” on the Watery, Domestic EP, lately packaged with Slanted and Enchanted, are a great illustration of this; Watery, Domestic is, in general, perfect.) As much as Slanted is defined by Malkmus’s sloppy charm (the way he sings “eeeeeeelectricity and lust” on “Trigger Cut”—who else would do that?), it’s driven by Young. He didn’t last, partially because of his drinking, partially, it seems, because he was at the point in life where he felt too old to tour for dirt and sleep on floors. “Any concept of punky went out of the band with Steve,” Malkmus said later, referring to Young’s eventual replacement, Steve West. “He never experienced punk and wasn’t that way. I wouldn’t blame the whole demarcation on him, but that’s one thing that changed.”