"I suppose you don't like sports, do you?" This is what Stephen Malkmus—the enigmatic architect of Pavement—asks me as he sits in a Thai-sandwich restaurant, waiting for his bacon. He is casually pawing at a local Portland alternative newspaper that features Trail Blazer Greg Oden on the cover; it's the day before Thanksgiving, so Oden's patella is still unexploded. Malkmus seems slightly (but unspecifically) annoyed—his wife's parents are in town for the holidays, he's just spent the last ninety minutes at a school party for his 6-year-old daughter, and now he has to waste two hours with some bozo who probably doesn't know why Greg Oden is interesting. He keeps his head down as he speaks. At this moment, Stephen Malkmus looks so much like Stephen Malkmus that it seems like sarcasm. In fact, he looks like someone playing Stephen Malkmus in an ill-conceived Cameron Crowe movie: He's unshaven, he's wearing Pony high-tops that no longer exist on the open market, and his baseball cap promotes the Silver Jews. His T-shirt features the logo of the Joggers, a Portland band whose greatest claim to fame is being mentioned in a GQ story about Stephen Malkmus eating at a Thai-sandwich shop. The restaurant is loud, so I initially mishear his question. He asks it again.
"I said, I suppose you don't like sports." I tell him that I do like sports. I tell him that—honestly—I'm probably more qualified to talk with him about sports than I am to talk with him about Pavement. Immediately, everything changes. He's no longer irritated, except when I suggest that Greg Olden might be no better than Erick Dampier. For the next forty-five minutes, we discuss our respective fantasy teams, pretty much nonstop. I cannot exaggerate the degree to which Malkmus enjoys fantasy sports; he almost seems to like them more than music. His fantasy football team was devastated by the loss of Ronnie Brown to injury, but he's stayed in the playoff hunt by picking up Vikings wide receiver Sidney Rice. ("You could just immediately tell he was going to be Favre's guy.") The most productive player on his NBA team is under-publicized Pacers forward Danny Granger, but he's more satisfied about stealing the Nets' Chris Douglas-Roberts off the waiver wire. Malkmus does not watch the NHL, yet he still participates in a fantasy hockey league. He's that kind of guy. I don't even try to talk with him about rotisserie baseball.
After almost an hour has passed, I realize we need to start talking about music, partially because that's the motive for this story but mostly because Pavement is a band worth talking about. We leave the restaurant and jump in his Audi; he rolls a cigarette with a Dutch brand of tobacco called Samson. I notice that Malkmus does not wear a seat belt, nor does he tell me to wear mine. I am immediately more comfortable.
The original plan was to meet at Malkmus's home and talk about the upcoming Pavement reunion shows, four of which sold out in New York a full twelve months in advance. (The worldwide tour begins this month in New Zealand.) Malkmus meets me at the front door and says, "Okay, here's the new plan. I'm sure you can roll with the new plan. My daughter has this Thanksgiving feast at her school, right? And I'm going to go there for an hour. Do you like coffee? Actually, that doesn't matter. I will meet you at a coffeehouse in an hour." He gives me directions to the coffeehouse, and that is where I go. I get the sense that Malkmus is very accustomed to telling people what to do; he's polite, but he speaks in clear, direct sentences. When he shows up at the coffeehouse a hundred minutes later, the first thing he tells me is that—despite the aforementioned school feast—he's still hungry. "It was potluck," he says. "I don't eat potluck." We drive to the Thai place; he buys a $9 bacon-oriented sandwich.
After we talk about sports, I try to persuade him to take me back to his house. "It's kind of crazy over there right now," he says. "Maybe not today." We decide to go to a park instead. I try to talk about music on the drive over, but Malkmus wants to talk about books. He just returned from a festival in Holland and Belgium that featured both musicians and authors, and he talks about whom he saw—Nick Kent ("My wife really loved his Stones books when she was in college"), Denis Johnson ("He's got a lot to be proud of"), a slightly drunk Jay McInerney ("He looks exactly like his author photo"). Malkmus is more gossipy than one might expect—he's never cruel, but he likes to talk about how an artist's persona is both detached and irrevocably tied to how his art is consumed. He likes to talk about authors the way Pavement fans like to talk about Pavement.
There's an inherent problem with writing about Pavement: People tend to know nothing or everything about them. To most of the populace, they were a band with a funny name, one minor MTV hit (1994's "Cut Your Hair"), and a lot of abstract credibility among people who get mad at the radio. But to the kind of hyperintellectual, underemployed people who did not find it strange to buy concert tickets a year in advance—and who will buy the band's upcoming greatest-hits release even if they already have all the tracks—Pavement are the apotheosis of indie aesthetics, the "finest rockband of the '90s," according to former Village Voice critic Robert Christgau. They are remembered as the musical center of the lo-fi era, a designation that's spiritually true but technically wrong.¹ Over the span of five albums and nine EPs, Pavement became a decade-defining band, widely regarded as essential and game changing (at least among those who cared). Malkmus is completely aware of this. This being the case, I return to our discussion about Jay McInerney: Since just about everyone now concedes that McInerney's self-perception as a writer was adversely impacted by the avalanche of criticism he received in the years following Bright Lights, Big City, I ask Malkmus if he's had the opposite experience: Does being endlessly told you're a genius make you feel like one? Did having so many people insist that Slanted and Enchanted was brilliant change the way he now thinks about those songs?
"Of course it does, in a way. But no matter how much positive feedback you get, it's never enough," Malkmus says. "I'm not a particularly needy person, but it always seems like every review could be better. With a record like Slanted and Enchanted, that was so much a timing thing, along with the fact that its flaws are a big part of what makes it good. It's not like some Radiohead record, where the whole thing is good. Our records aren't good in that way. Our records are more attitude and style, sort of in a punk way. We're good in the same way the Strokes are good. I think Slanted and Enchanted probably is the best record we made, only because it's less self-conscious and has an unrepeatable energy about it."
- Lo-fi is an abbreviation of the term low fidelity, and fidelity means how faithful something sounds when compared with its original source. In truth, albums from bands like the Electric Light Orchestra and Def Leppard have a much lower fidelity than anything Pavement produced, as those recordings have no relationship to what a living, breathing band could sound like live. A better term for Pavement would actually be mid-fi, because their material falls somewhere between amateur authenticity and imaginative construction. But—as always—technical reality rarely matters when discussing pop music. Whenever a normal person says he prefers lo-fi music, it means he prefers bands like Pavement: imperfect sound forevermore.
Two years later, Pavement teetered on the edge of mainstream success with 1994's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, but that didn't last—their following project (Wowee Zowee) drove them back into experimental semi-obscurity. Since the band's dissolution in 1999, Malkmus has recorded four solo albums with a backing band called the Jicks. He plans to record a fifth Jicks album in 2010. Much of this solo material is competitive with anything he made with Pavement. However, it's pretty clear Malkmus does not believe that. Not completely.
"I barely think about music anymore," he says, although somebody must have come up with the songs on those Jicks albums. "I have other interests now. ADD things, like fantasy sports. Things I can think about while thinking about something else, as opposed to songwriting, where you have to focus really hard on what you're doing. That's not the only reason people make inferior music when they're older, but it's probably a factor. Your ambition and confidence change. It's not right to say any music I make now is not going to be as good as music I made when I was younger, but it's probably not going to be as intense. I'm not going to yell as loud—figuratively or literally. I used to drunkenly yell on a record. I wouldn't do that again. I played some Pavement songs when I was in Holland, and when I got to the part at the end of 'Range Life' [which mocks the Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots], I just didn't feel like singing those words. It seems so dated now. At the time, it was an attempt to be topical, kind of like an ironic rap song and a way to make fun of the whole indie 'We're cool, you're not cool' thing. But I probably wouldn't do that now."
I like Pavement. I suppose I really like Pavement. But I don't love them, or at least not in the way every smart rock critic I've ever met seems to love them. Very often, I don't understand the band's intentions. So I tried an experiment. I asked various Pavement fanatics one question: "What is Pavement's music about?" I then posed these answers to Malkmus and asked if he agreed or disagreed with the analyses.
Theory One: Pavement is the musical equivalent of a boy trapped in a library with all his favorite books and records, and that boy decides to spend the rest of his life writing music about his interior world.
"That's nice. That makes our music seem like a curatorial ercise, and that's kind of true. But we have a relationship to the outside world that had an impact, too. That theory discounts the physicality of the music."
Theory Two: Pavement is a synthesis of everything that was compelling about '80s indie rock, only performed at a higher level. The lyrics are nonessential, and Malkmus is overrated as a lyricist—but he's underrated as a vocalist and a guitar player.
"That could be true. But I would add this: Even though we don't have classic, Bob Dylan lyrics, I think they have a tone that holds up better and is less cringeworthy than most other lyric writing. I don't think any of my lyrics are literal. The way somebody's voice sounds is much more important than how meaningful the words are."
Theory Three: Pavement is about class dynamics. Malkmus was raised in the affluent community of Stockton, California, and he could have pursued any life he wanted—yet he chose to pursue an art form that typically represents the disenfranchised underclass. Pavement's music is about reconciling that class dichotomy.
"That's not true. The fact of the matter is, when we went to New York and the band was getting some attention for the first time, the scene we were in was really—well, at the time, I called it preppy-scum rock. That scene was populated by really rich people—Ivy League millionaire kids who were in punk bands and noise bands. But we always had jobs. When you get down to it, I was middle-class. I was upper-middle-class. My dad's an insurance broker. But there are no airs in central California. I had some relatives who became kind of wealthy through real estate, but they built their house to look like Tara from Gone with the Wind. They had Clydesdales! It wasn't classist. It wasn't classy. It was more like…new. I mean, I like Clydesdales, you can have Clydesdales if you want. But people in Westchester County aren't breeding Clydesdales, you know? The source material for our music had more to do with going to the University of Virginia. That was when I got into Can and the Clean and the Velvet Underground. Before that, I just liked dumb teenage punk. I thought Social Distortion was high art."
After an hour at the park, Malkmus needs to go home. As we walk back to his car, I try to ask the principal questions I need to ask: Why is Pavement reuniting now? Why is the band reuniting at all? I mention that this could actually hurt their legacy, since there's a certain romantic cachet to never coming back. "Oh yeah, I know," he says. I also mention, on the upside, that these massive sold-out concerts will allow Pavement to earn some of the money they never made when they were musically peaking. He says, "That's a consideration." I keep waiting for him to unleash some fake enthusiasm, because that's what musicians do whenever they're promoting something. And he tries. But he just can't make himself do it.
"I think people really want to do it. I… I want to do it. I mean, I don't want to be the person who only kind of wants to do it." Malkmus laughs. He knows he is not being particularly convincing. "Our booking agent had a lot to do with it. He's been pushing for it for a while. If we're going to do it, everyone says this is a good time. I suppose what I like about this whole reunion is the openness. Will it be fun for us? Will people in the audience have fun? Who knows? It's not like I'm gagging to get out there and play those songs, but I am curious to see what it will be like, and I'm curious to see the other guys and watch them play onstage again. I'm assuming it's going to be fun."
I ask if he has much of a relationship with the other members of Pavement; he says he does, but it's tenuous. The only member he consistently communicates with is multiinstrumentalist Bob Nastanovich, but that's mostly because they're in some of the same fantasy leagues. "Stephen is a pretty difficult guy to access," Nastanovich explains via telephone, calling from a racetrack in Illinois where he's working.² "If you're not in the same town with him, you don't really hear from him. I've found that the easiest way to get in touch with him, even if it's about a Pavement-related issue, is to propose a trade in one of our fantasy leagues and attach my question in an e-mail memo." Nastanovich is pretty open about the things he does not know about Pavement. "I have no idea why we're doing this now. I only talked to Stephen for about five or ten minutes about this reunion, and the only things he clarified was that I would need to be comfortable quitting my job, that I'd have to practice, and that I had to promise not to blow the money I made on horses."
- Nastanovich has a fascinating job: He does computer charting and analysis for the horse-racing industry, compiling data on both animals and jockeys. He's like the Elias Sports Bureau for Thoroughbreds. "Not everyone in Pavement needs a job," he says. "But I do."
Malkmus likes to say that Pavement is a democracy. But Pavement is a democracy the way the Replacements were a democracy, or the way Creedence Clearwater Revival was a democracy, or the way Zimbabwe is a democracy. The rest of the group have wanted to reunite for years; nobody has ever fully explained why they broke up in the firstplace. I phone guitarist Scott Kannberg and ask him about this. He tells me how much he misses playing their old songs. Kannberg (who performed in Pavement under the moniker Spiral Stairs) cryptically says they broke up because "Malkmus got tired of it" and feared the band would become a cliché. Whenever he talks about Malkmus, it feels like he's describing someone distant—someone he thinks about yet barely knows. He never even refers to him by his first name. "Maybe Pavement is just not as important to him as it is to me," Kannberg says toward the end of our conversation. "That's probably all it is. But I've come to accept that."
As soon as the Pavement reunion concludes, Kannberg says, he's moving to Australia. I ask if he would make another Pavement album if Malkmus decided he wanted to do so. "Absolutely," he said. "But I'd still move to Australia."
Kannberg's detached diffidence is easy to understand: Malkmus is a hard person to read. We talk a little about his wife, sculptor Jessica Jackson Hutchins, whose work will appear in the prestigious Whitney Biennial; he tells me their wedding song was "What Love Can Be," by Kingdom Come. I believe him, but I'm not sure if this indicates weird sincerity or next-level mockery. Sometimes he's amazingly straightforward, like when I ask if he thinks Pavement could have been bigger if that had been what they wanted. This was always the core criticism of the Pavement posture—some may remember an especially insightful episode of Beavis Butt-head wherein Beavis watches the "Cut Your Hair" video and implores the band to "try harder, dammit!" But they never did.
"If we had signed to Gold Mountain management, or if we had signed with Geffen, maybe Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain sells 750,000 copies instead of 250,000 copies. But it was really just the difference between being Pavement or being Weezer," Malkmus says. "I never had a great deal of confidence in my ability to write hits. There's a formula to that, and I'm not a good chorus writer. I'm better at the verses. Sometimes I don't even get to the chorus."
This feels like honesty, but it might just be conversational misdirection. Malkmus sometimes comes across as cagey because he doesn't like constructing fake answers to pointed questions. It's probably impossible to totally understand how he feels about Pavement or about this reunion in general. I think the closest he comes is when he's actually talking about something else: the experience of fatherhood.
"You just do it," he says. "There's not much time for self-absorption. It's great, because it's primal and sort of feels like the reason you're on earth. It's a deep part of life. But on the other hand, it's not that deep. It just happens. It's biology. And I assumed being a parent would be pretty hard, because I'm a pretty selfish person. It's hard for me to sacrifice anything or to take care of other people's needs. Our society is meant to work—or, say, capitalism is supposed to work—when everyone takes a little bit of what they want and gives something else back. But with a kid, it's not like that. There is no give-and-take. In theory, I suppose the idea is that you want to give yourself completely to your child, and then you'll get something back from that experience." He waits a beat and stares at nothing in particular, almost as if he's preparing to say something that will blow me away forever. Instead, I get this: "But that does not seem true when you want to sleep more." Which, I suppose, is about as honest as it gets.
Chuck Klosterman's latest book is Eating the Dinosaur, a collection of essays.
