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Pavement: Return of the Heavily-Favored Underdogs

Down but not quite out: New York City, circa 1997 Photo James Smolka

Pavement albums almost never include lyric sheets, allowing room in the listener for slippage and creative mis-hearings. And these seem crucial to the process of Stephen Malkmus who wrote most of the songs. Much hay has been made with respect to the simultaneous delicacy and load-bearing quality of the lyrics. They are powerful and memorable. Though Malkmus says, “Even at the time, it was kind of, ‘I don’t really know where it’s coming from and don’t want to ask.’ It just comes, usually. The early stuff, I wouldn’t even know how it got written or why it did.”

Two writers in the vicinity of Malkmus are Dr. Seuss and A.A. Milne. A Pavement song about “James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George DuPree” would not seem out of place. Nor would a line telling us to never make “thneeds out of truffula trees.” There is a real freedom and aggressively unattended-to quality in a lot of the lyrics. There are incredibly precise lyrics as well that hit you where you live and don’t leave.

For instance, “You’ve been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel of your life.” The horror of belatedness, anyone? “Silence Kit” continues, with a couple of beautiful lines that chase their own tails, such as, “Silent kid, don’t lose your graceful tongue.” Then the song kind of rumbles to a stop, kind of like a streetcar, and starts up again, in something of a tantrum. “Hand me the drumstick, snare kick,” and then some more words, and then the last line, “Till five hours later, I’m chewin’, screwin’, myself with my hand.” And we’re done. This is to say nothing of the emotional content of the song, which is high and real.

There’s a filthy limerick that begins, “I once knew a man from Nantucket.” I have a friend who always finished this off with the family-friendly rhyme, “galvanized aluminum clam bucket.” There was something in the absolute wrongness and clumsiness of the meter that made the dirty little limerick suddenly sound like a true story.

“I can see that,” says Malkmus. “It’ll just be going along and then there’ll be a kind of abrupt something there. Kind of breaking the spell for a second, or not breaking it, or making the spell. Not just having everything go along all sweet until the end, just realizing you have a real person there singing this.”

In the song “Folk Jam,” from Pavement’s final album Terror Twilight, released in 1999, one stanza ends with the simple line, “The feeling is mutual,” but the singing of the word “feeling” is elongated so beyond a reasonable measure that the line’s postponement of meaning becomes one of its meanings, adding, at the same time, a stranger and possibly crueler edge to the phrase’s more normative uses.

IN 2010, PAVEMENT HITS the road again, playing together live for the first time in more than ten years. With five members, the band will bring an extra 50 years of experience to its interpretation and execution of the songs. That’s over 18,250 todays. Time, my God—where did it go, which way did it go?

Says Malkmus, “A reunion is a communal nostalgic thing and its about the past, it’s about now, but it’s about then and what that was like, and what we’re like today—we’re still standing or whatever, we’re still here together.”

Kannberg dedicated his 2008 solo record, The Real Feel, to his grandfather, who died last year, and who taught him how to fish and tell time. “It’s a vivid memory in my life, my grandfather trying to tell me time,” he says. “It’s like tying your shoe, it’s so ingrained in your head. It’s weird to think of having to teach someone that.” The statement shows an honorable sensitivity to average things, an ability to slow things down enough to realize that, while we were getting older and time was exerting itself as perhaps the only real force in the universe, it still took a kindly grandpapa with a pocket watch or maybe a kitchen clock, to teach us time. The big hand, the little hand. The white glove of Mickey Mouse is pointing at the twelve. We learn we’re mortal.

Referring to the late 1990s and the last tour, Kannberg says, “At the end, I kinda felt like, ‘This is the end, but I’m sure we’re going to end up wanting to do something again.’ I don’t think I thought it would take ten years.” Then he spoke of his grandfather again.

“I saw my grandmother the other day at Thanksgiving, and she gave me a book that I’d given to him about four or five years ago, a Thomas McGuane book about fishing stories, and I think it was the last book he read. When she told me that, I just started bawling.”

We talked for a little while about last things, last books, the idea that there’s a last store that you’re ever going to walk into. Then, in a lonely and solemn kind of way, the conversation turned to golf.