Hit by Pavement

Three Artists On one Band that Changed Their
art, loves and lives, forever

Illustration by Nat Damm for City Arts.

This month, seminal ’90s indie rock band Pavement will play its first show in the Pacific Northwest in ten years, capping the second day of the Sasquatch! Music Festival at the Gorge Amphitheatre before heading off on a much-heralded reunion tour. For months to come, fans and critics alike will wax nostalgic about their first run-in with the sloppy pop anthems of a band from Stockton, California. Even though the band doesn’t hail from Seattle, its impact can be felt in the art and attitudes of many of the city’s creatives. City Arts invited three of those folks – an artist, a curator and a screenwriter – to share their memories and impressions of the band that left them slanted and enchanted.

I spent the summer of 1994 living in Stanwood, Washington, an hour’s drive north of Seattle. I often drove from the art supply store in Pilchuck down to Pioneer Square, where I still had an apartment, driving first along fir-lined gravel roads, then on the highway, past tree snags, casinos, a Walmart and sound walls. The then-brand-new alt rock radio station 107.7 The End accompanied me on these journeys.

The first time I heard Stephen Malk-mus sing, “Have you seen the drummer’s hair?” I recognized and ingested it. It was conversational, as if pulled from an ordinary day, or the air.

I found myself living inside elliptical lyrics for extended moments as the songs coming from that station became the soundtrack for my round trips from the woods to Seattle and back again. The green whizzing by would be doubly colored by Pavement talking about a new band starting up or Weezer lamenting a frayed sweater. And in the lineup were always Dinosaur Jr., Beastie boys, Gin Blossoms, Nirvana and Sleater Kinney. I drove and listened.

Pavement’s offhand delivery of this-is-what-I’m-doing-now lyrics was my introduction to the concept of making authentic and banal moments into art. It’s what Arthur Danto has in mind in speaking of “the world of dailiness, the world of common experience, the dear predictable world anyone ... longs for,” when describing Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s work.

With these phrases, I began to construct a kit for art, a collection of raw materials. “Have you seen the drummer’s hair?” together with the Replacements’ “going to the talent show” contributed to my approach to making art, building as I go from what I encounter each day on the ground, on the air and on the radio. The words meant even more to me than the melody. My goal has always been to build a visual vocabulary as distinctive as my ear for language. During my summer highway commute, “Why’d you have to go and cut your hair?” mixed well with the woods and Seattle, the road and my black Sirocco.

Pavement came on like a normal day or an expected moment, startlingly rephrased. And now it’s back, Narcissus to my Goldmund, circling back around, like verse. And in some ways I am still moving through the same space, my own forward motion orbiting the same idea set, not one song at a time, but one phrase at a time.

Gretchen Bennett is a visual artist working in Seattle. Her work can be seen in many of the city’s finest galleries, including Seattle Art Museum, where she is currently showing as a part of the Kurt exhibition.

One day early last year, I happened to find myself on a date with a young lady. In fact – and here’s where the trouble lay – she was an awful lot younger than me. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the date was not destined for the greatest hits collection. Still, it was pleasant enough just to spend an evening in the company of an attractive woman. As the night wore on and we exhausted all the basic talking points, she asked me, “What kind of music do you like?”

Now, I am of the opinion that this is a query to exhume only within the most painfully desperate of conversational vacuums. Nothing good can come of it. How do you answer a question that is so damnably vague and yet requires such a specific response? If you’re me, you mumble something about “feeling” and “sincerity” and hope a wild animal enters the bar and devours you whole. No such luck. I rambled on embarrassingly, eventually staggering my way into saying something along the lines of, “I can completely appreciate carefully arranged and produced music full of precision, but I also like music that is just kind of sloppy.”

“What do you mean, sloppy?” she countered.
“Oh, you know, like Pavement.”
“Who’s Pavement?”
I inhaled sharply.

Honestly, I wasn’t expecting anything beyond the most remote awareness. “Oh, I’ve heard of them. I like that song about the haircut.” This would have been fine. Really! But to have no knowledge of Pavement at all? That, to me, is to suggest that finding the “Demolition Plot J-7” seven-inch for five dollars at a record fair in 1997 was meaningless. That the poorly printed, original issue Slanted and Enchanted promotional sticker I own is entirely without value. That every late-night discussion dissecting the strange and twisted corpus of Wowee Zowee can be forgotten to no ill effect. That even the disappointment I felt upon first hearing Terror Twilight never happened. And what of their masterpiece, the Watery, Domestic EP? Am I seriously supposed to accept that it has all the lasting cultural merit of a dry sneeze? It cannot hold.

Yes, on the surface, coming to the conclusion that you don’t want to date someone based (largely) on the fact that they haven’t heard of a band is ridiculous, reductive and, undeniably, insulting. Maybe, as a result, I am a terrible and lonely person. Half of that is definitely true. Possibly, I should have offered to introduce her to their music, creating both a new fan and a shared experience. But, come on! I came of age in the ’90s! My decade’s defining ethos was “trying is, like, totally uncool, man.”

The members who made up Pavement, at their best, were – or at least wore the facade of – accidental heroes. The songs seemed effortless, tossed off in one dusky afternoon to whoever wanted to hear them. Well, I did, and although I don’t have a girlfriend, I can always listen to “Silence Kid” and, eventually, fall asleep.

Matt Olsen is a former employee of both Sub Pop and Sonic Boom Records and currently lives in Los Angeles, where he is a show business unemployee.

 

I’m a late bloomer. I didn’t kiss a girl till I was nineteen. Okay, twenty. I didn’t learn to drive a manual till twenty-three. Let’s not talk about how old I was when I first had sex (it wasn’t right after that first kiss). And I didn’t start listening to Pavement until after I graduated from college.

Now, this was a mere eight years ago. Don’t get me wrong, I knew who Pavement was – I had heard the haircut song. Pavement was legend. They were regularly featured in conversations about the most important, influential bands of the ’90s. Fans of Pavement were serious. The band even got big enough for hipsters to start hating on them.

Needless to say, when I picked up a used copy of Terror Twilight, their last record and probably the least Pavement-like, I had some preconceived notions of what I might be getting into. Expectations were high, especially coming from a guy like me, fresh out of art school, slaving away by day in art museum guard drudgery while painting in my basement apartment storage room at night. Music was vital to my artistic process. I needed great records to play, to push me while I worked. Could Pavement be such a band? 

I was on the fence for the first eight songs of the album. There were fun, interesting, sharply written rock songs that moved around and took surprising turns, but was this really the stuff of legends? I wondered. Then came “Speak, See, Remember,” and I was sold. The song started off unassumingly enough. There were vague metaphors, generally setting up a mood, possibly telling a story, and a nice little melody ... but then, towards the end, the song just picked up and built into this dramatic thing that just simply got me. I can’t explain it, but I hadn’t heard rock songs do that before, to possess that quirkiness and that ability to be both silly and serious at the same time, to have an energy both raw and polished. Nothing was ever clear in Pavement’s music, and I think they liked it that way.

I quickly picked up most of the back catalog. Fortunately, Matador Records had released that excellent double album compiling Slanted and Enchanted and the Watery, Domestic EP with some other stuff, so I didn’t have to go out and find a bunch of out-of-print 45s and really nerd out. Yeah, I lost some indie cred there, but it was never all that high. Which was made crystal clear when I heard that line in “Range Life” that goes, “Out on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins ... they don’t have no function ... I don’t understand what they mean and I could really give a fuck.” 

It hurt a bit, that line. I used to love the Pumpkins! I still have a soft spot for them. How could this new band I loved insult that old band I loved? It was like a new girlfriend insulting your old girlfriend. Yeah, you love the new girlfriend more, she’s more mature, smarter, maybe prettier and all, but you still kind of feel you should defend the past girlfriend, right? But you realize it’s all about where you are in your life. The Pumpkins were right for me at a certain time, and I’ll always hold them dear. And Pavement is right for me now. I’ve painted a lot of canvas listening to that band and I will paint a lot more. Better late than never.

Ryan Molenkamp is an artist, occasional curator, manager of security at the Frye Art Museum and two-time Golden Ladle chili cook-off winner.