Pounding (the) Pavement

Friday is fun because it's MUSIC! With Playlists. Happy Friday Everyone. Happy news this week for sure.

It’s been a pretty good week really, as we hurtle full steam now towards Christmas and the end of the year. Madness! It’s mid-November. And my brain is somewhere lost deep in July still.

My band, Dirty Spoons, returned to the stage after a well-earned month off following our three big gigs in a row across September/October.

The weather was sublime. For the most part. So much so that I got out and about with my brand new AirPods and did a lot of walking.

I finished watching Dahmer (which is a relief, good as it was; though ‘good’ still doesn’t feel like the right word really…)

I caught up with friends, spent time with family, got some decent runs on the board at work…all good things of course.

But the highlight, was finding out that Pavement is coming to New Zealand. (Actually, the highlight was having my Dirty Spoons bandmate, Sam, buy me a ticket. Band Field Trip!)

I have never seen Pavement.

And I didn’t think I ever would, I missed two fairly obvious chances. We all have gigs we regret missing; ones that we remember missing. In 1997, many of my friends went and saw a Pavement gig they would refer to the next day as a blinder. But I had just got my first record-store job and it included late nights. So that was me out of action.

And then when the band reformed in 2010, I chose to go see Pixies, instead of Pavement. (Couldn’t justify the travel and tickets for both). And I regret seeing the Pixies. They simply weren’t that good. The smarter option would have been Pavement. And so that was that. I thought.

Until this week, when tickets went on sale for a Pavement show in Wellington. (There’s one in Auckland too).

If I have to name just one favourite band from and for the 1990s, it might just be Pavement.

Here’s a band that formed in 1989 and broke up in 1999 – they existed, perfectly, for the 90s and came to exemplify the “alternative” if you like, all the while the music was completely accessible, tuneful – often it seemed a crime that it couldn’t be blasting out like a pop hit from a (non-college) radio station. But it was all the better for the fact that it wasn’t. It was music you had to go to – not music that came to you.

I enjoyed Wowee Zowee – it was my introduction to the band, but it was 1997’s Brighten The Corners that I really took on board, that’s why I was so gutted to miss them on that tour. That confirmed Pavement as a band worth listening to. So many people had raved about Slanted And Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain  and so then it became time to check them out as well; perfectly angled/angular guitar hooks – quirky without ever losing steam and meandering too far from the goal of remaining a tight pop song.

And when Terror Twilight was released – as a swansong – it felt like that, a swansong. But in the right way, in the best possible way.

Slanted And Enchanted (1992) had roots in many things but it didn’t really sound like any one obvious antecedent was driving it. In a way it updates Brian Eno’s famous quote that “the first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band”. As Slanted And Enchanted would go on to become one of the defining, pioneering and most influential albums of the 1990s it’s fair to say that (almost) everyone who bought it or heard it formed a band (or was already in one).

Stephen Malkmus was often imitated but never bettered as writer, player, and singer; self-aware and never falling into the traps when one is being overly self-conscious, Malkmus stayed true – and the band stayed true – to the vision, to the blueprint. They did not change with the whiff of mainstream success, with the slight pick-up in sales or with the bands that started to sound like them.

Pavement was also a band that exemplifies the – shall we say – Other Nineties; never a big name, the group stayed true to the indie ethos and to the indie label. Sure, they had distribution, they had recording budgets, they had package tours, but there was never a giant – seemingly overnight – compromise of standards, songs, integrity.

That’s what I like about Pavement’s music. Listening to it now, it feels so correctly linked – still –  to the 1990s, a band that was in and of its time. But it’s still there to be discovered now.

Pavement’s art was in giving a voice to the “slacker” subculture before it was even labelled as such; making music for music’s sake. The band captured the spirit of its time without baiting the traps.

I also consider them the great band of the 1990s because of the consistency across a handful of records, they just seemed to exist in a perfect space within that decade.

The Quarantine The Past compilation cherry-picks pretty well for anyone looking for a starting point. But buy the lovely, expanded editions of the albums. Or save them to your queue. They’re worth it. They tell you more and put you closer to the ‘place’ than any one compilation ever could.

Roll on March 2023. I am excited to finally be getting around to seeing Pavement.

Were you a fan? Are you a fan? Will you go and see them? And what’s your favourite Pavement song or album?

Not a Pavement fan at all you say. No worries. I’ve got your back. The 91st edition of A Little Something For The Weekend…Sounds Good! features exactly no songs by Pavement. But it is a rocking good time. Promise.

Happy weekend all!