SPIDERLAND

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[A] consistently excellent seriesUncut (UK)
We . . . arent naive enough to think that were your only
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For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this
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3
4
Spiderland
Scott Tennent
5
2011
The Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright 2011 by Scott Tennent
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tennent, Scott.
Spiderland / Scott Tennent.
p. cm. (33 1/3)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Slint (Musical group)
2. Slint (Musical group). Spiderland. 3. Rock
musiciansBiography. I. Title. II. Series.
ML421.S6132T46 2010
782.421660922dc22
2010024900
eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-8941-7
6
Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand
Printed in the United States of America by Thomson-Shore,
Inc.
7
8
9
Contents
Acknowledgments
Let Me In
The Early Years
Please Give Me Some New Headphones
A New Sound
River North
Spiderland
Brian Stepped Outside
Sources
10
11
Acknowledgments
I feel compelled to thank my hometown record store, circa
1994. It was a chain, a Tower, and countless hours of my
youth were spent there. In my smallish town there was little
else to do but while away the hours in its aisles. There I
found, by a chain of events too mundane to detail here, a
strange record filed in Miscellaneous S. I was a high school
metalhead at the time an era I like to call BS, Before
Spiderland. Ive been listening to the album regularly ever
since. It changed the way I listened to music and set me on a
path that Im still traveling today.
Which of course means I must thank Slint, both for making
this record and for their help in my research for this book. In
particular I am grateful to David Pajo and Todd Brashear for
agreeing to be interviewed and for taking the time to check
my facts. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Sean
Garrison for inviting me
to his home and filling me in on the details of Maurice and
the early Louisville punk scene a significant and
underreported period in Slints history.
Thanks are also due to my editor, David Barker, for reeling
me in before I went too far off the deep end; to graphic
designer Justin Goetz for making sense of my elaborately
kooky Slint family tree; and to Sara-May Mallett for seeing
this project through the design and production phase. I also
appreciate the help of Richard Crary, Dan Sylvester, and Sam
Yurick, each of whom gave me valuable advice at various
stages of this project.
12
There is a complete list of references at the back of this book,
but I would be remiss not to acknowledge a few indispensable
sources which I returned to over and over again in researching
this book: the website louisvillehardcore.com has an
encyclopedic archive of the local scenes history; Rob
Ortenzis and Jeff Guntzels 2005 articles on Slint in
Alternative Press and Punk Planet, respectively, provided the
springboard for some of my research; and the unknown writer
behind the 1986 photocopied zine the Pope (which I
discovered via the blog swanfungus.com) gave me a more
detailed account of the history of Squirrel Bait than I could
ever have hoped for.
Finally, and foremost, I thank my wife Jill for ten years (and
counting) of encouragement and love. I would not be the
person I am today were it not for the support and courage she
gives me every single day. Im filled with joy to know that
our new son Cooper will get the same.
13
14
15
Let Me In
To get to Utica Quarry you take Interstate 65 north out of
Louisville, over the Ohio River and into Indiana. Not long
after crossing the border you follow I-265 east until the
freeway dwindles into a one-lane road that dead-ends at Utica
Pike. The area is a surreal collection of steelworks set amidst
cornfields.
As you follow the pike east, you enter the small town of
Utica, Indiana, founded 1794, population 591. You pass a
small marina on the edge of the river, heading down a
tree-lined two-lane road. In the fall the trees are rich reds,
golds, browns. Rickety wooden posts punctuate both sides of
the road, stringing sagging power lines overhead. The houses
along Utica Pike are modest, most built in the last fifty years,
though a small town hall from the nineteenth century is still in
use.
Make a right at Hillcrest Cemetery, founded 1817 notably
established a couple of decades after the town founders
arrived. From here you can
see the Ohio, a vast bloom of golden trees gathered on the
Kentucky side obscuring the activity of the Louisvillians
underneath the canopy.
A passage appears in the massive hill rising on the other side
of the road, and through it you can see water in the distance.
In fact its no mere hill. Its the quarry a giant bowl of
limestone holding a small lake, water from the river flowing
in from an underground passage.
16
Inside the quarry the rest of the world seems shut out. You are
surrounded on all sides by towering limestone cliffs, the river
out of view and the trees out of reach. The signs say swim at
your own risk, though the water is still.
* * *
Of all the seminal albums to come out in 1991 the year of
Nevermind, Loveless, Ten, and Out of Time, among others
none were quieter, both in volume and influence, than
Spiderland, and no band more mysterious than Slint. And
while there are few single albums that can lay claim to
sparking an entire genre, Spiderland all six songs of it
arguably did just that. Within a few years of its release, a
cornucopia of new bands arrived on the scene, playing a cold
brand of calculated rock. The sound was so much the
antithesis of the Rolling Stones, or T. Rex or the E Street
Band or Black Flag or Dinosaur Jr. or the Jesus Lizard, that
critics grouped it under a newish umbrella called
post-rock. The term didnt originate with Slint, but it
nonetheless became synonymous with the sound of
Spiderland. Bands everywhere, starting in the Midwest and
percolating out to the rest of the country and eventually to
other parts of the world, embraced the sound of spindly
guitars, stark drumming, slow tempos, complicated rhythms,
and carefully orchestrated rises and falls. The underground
had taken a turn from a sloppy, anyone-can-do-it ethos toward
something more grandiose, technical, and epic. Other
subgenres developed during the decade emo,
post-hardcore, math rock, slowcore, space rock and
Spiderland was a touchstone for all of them.
17
And yet, as if to lay the foundation for their own
mythmaking, Slint evaporated before anyone even realized
who they were. Those six songs, it turns out, were enough.
* * *
Spiderland sold only a few thousand copies in its first year of
release, due to the fact that the largely unknown quartet from
Louisville, Kentucky Britt Walford, Brian McMahan,
David Pajo, and Todd Brashear had already called it quits.
No ones ears perked up until Steve Albini, a longtime
booster for the band and the engineer who recorded Slints
little-heard debut, Tweez, wrote a prophetic rave for Britains
Melody Maker, rating it ten fucking stars.
In the ensuing decade, Spiderland gained a mythic
significance. As was famously said about the Velvet
Underground, it seemed that whoever heard Spiderland
started a band. Yet for so much influence, both the band and
the album remain something of a puzzle that no one has truly
attempted to solve. Since the band never did press at the time
of Spiderlands release, there is little record of their personal
or aesthetic perspective at the time; most interviews and
articles since have used Slint as a contextual preamble for the
members current projects (such as McMahans run as the For
Carnation, and Pajos many associations, including Papa M,
Tortoise, and Zwan). Even when the group briefly reformed
in 2005 to curate All Tomorrows Parties and do a short tour
of the US and England (and another reunion tour in 2007),
only a small handful of publications attempted to shine a light
on the murky history of Slint. Spiderland is usually a gimme
on any best-albums-of-the-90s (or all time) list its one of
the 1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, and
18
appears on best-of lists by the likes of Spin, Rolling Stone,
Pitchfork, and others but it typically only garners a
shallow, misinformed, single-paragraph nod, usually not
getting beyond the fact that Slint get quiet, then loud; that
they had ties to another Louisville band, Squirrel Bait; that
Will Oldham, aka Bonnie Prince Billy, took the photograph
on Spiderlands cover; and that Good Morning, Captain is
their most famous song thanks to its inclusion on the Kids
soundtrack in 1995. Thats not much.
Maybe the band was too mysterious for its own good. The
packaging for Tweez and Spiderland revealed almost nothing:
the covers were free of copy, the song titles were cryptic, and
no lyric sheet, thank-you list, or substantive liner note was to
be found. Spiderland included an appeal to interested female
singers, indicating that the band didnt even consider
themselves fully formed by the time of their demise. The
songs on either album featured vocals (often spoken) buried
in the mix and contained few hummable riffs fifteen songs
largely free of hooks. There was little to hang your hat on,
other than songs that might better be described as
instrumentals paired with half-intelligible short stories.
And what the fuck does slint mean, anyway?
* * *
Here is a typical way a new fan of Slint experiences the band.
First you buy Spiderland, because thats the album everyone
talks about. And you are blown away by it and vow to
purchase everything anyone associated with this band has
ever done. So you naturally go to Tweez next. And you are
hopelessly disappointed because you can barely find an
19
inkling of Spiderland buried beneath the nine short jazz/
metal/punk flurries. Its not Slint not your Slint.
Stubbornly, you track down the two-song untitled single
Touch and Go released in 1994, three years after Spiderland.
The first,
unnamed track (actually, its called Glenn, though you
wouldnt know it from owning the record), gets you excited
again. Theres that eerie, ominous guitar! The snapping snare
drum! The eventual crushing distortion! But its only one
song. The other track is a Tweez retread. Its not Slint.
You buy the Breeders first album, Pod, because Slints
drummer plays on the record under a pseudonym. Its good,
but its not Slint. Meanwhile youve picked up a For
Carnation album (ex-Slint!), Tortoises Millions Now Living
Will Never Die (ex-Slint!), and maybe one or two Papa M
discs (ex-Slint!) maybe you even tracked down that
Evergreen album (ex-Slint!). On most, the Slint sound
permeates, kind of, and you are pleased enough, though in
truth theyre not Slint. Still hungry, you track down the two
albums by Squirrel Bait, where it all started with McMahan,
Walford, and David Grubbs, who was destined to start his
own influential post-rock act, Gastr del Sol. All of them
together? Its like a primordial supergroup! But actually, it
kinda sucks in a not Slint sort of way. You didnt get into
Slint just to trace it back to some crunchy thrash punk band.
You get frustrated.
Finding the roots of Spiderland can feel like a wild-goose
chase. Part of what makes the album seem so singular is that
so many listeners process all things Slint out of order. Of
course, hearing Squirrel Bait before Slint, or Tweez before
20
Spiderland, doesnt magically transform them into what you
want them to be.
But they do give proper context especially, as Ive
attempted to do in this book, when you start to fill in the gaps
that exist in the Slint timeline.
* * *
Despite the stated purpose of the 33 1/3 series to dedicate
each book to a single album Ive chosen to tell, as best I
can, the entire story of Slints existence, from the four
members pre-Slint affiliations to Tweez to the Glenn/
Rhoda single and, finally, to Spiderland. Ive chosen this
tack for a couple of reasons. First, despite their massive
influence, the full story of Slint has never truly been told, and
I felt it would be misguided to omit that story in the first
large-scale examination of their work and impact. Second,
and more important, I feel that telling that story goes a long
way toward understanding just how brilliant a flash
Spiderland was. At the time of its release, Spiderland was
totally unique, seeming to come out of nowhere. Not only was
it alien to the scene with which Slint was affiliated (i.e.
running in the same circles as Chicago acts like Rapeman and
the Jesus Lizard), but it was alien to Slint.
Theres a disconnect. On the one hand, Spiderland was a
singular achievement almost a fluke that no individual
member truly recaptured on his own or with other groups. On
the other, the mystery and the mythology around the record
and its creators begs for
telling and retelling, investigation and reinvestigation a
search for some explanation for Spiderland in the absence of
more Spiderland. That is my goal with this book: to once and
21
for all tell the story of where these four boys came from
and they were boys when they made this record, barely in
their twenties and in that telling show how the work Slint
is most associated with is an almost ephemeral moment in
their history. Slints legacy is Spiderland, but its history is
Tweez. The Slint most prefer to remember and lionize
happened quickly and lasted barely at all. But thats just it: to
tell the story of Slint is to italicize how much Spiderland was
lightning caught in a bottle. How did they catch it?
22
23
The Early Years
The accepted story of Slints origin winds back to Squirrel
Bait and usually ends there, as if the notion that Brian
McMahan and Britt Walford shared the stage with fellow
godfather of post-rock David Grubbs was too mythic to
contest. But to trace a straight line from one band to the other
is to overstate the significance of Squirrel Bait at the expense
of the intertwining relationships and lesser-known bands
shared by each of the young men who ultimately created
Spiderland. Squirrel Bait is but one thread among many.
Its certainly not the first thread. To pick that up youd need
to travel back to J. Graham Brown School, Grade 6, 1981.
Founded ten years earlier, the Brown School was (and is)
notable for its open, unstructured learning environment. The
arts were heavily emphasized and each students curriculum
was individually molded based on their unique aptitude,
interests, and self-discipline. I think [Brown] was
pretty significant for all of us, Brian McMahan told
Alternative Press in 2005 all of us being him and his
classmates, Britt Walford and Will Oldham. I dont think I
wouldve been so involved in music or writing if I hadnt
gone there, he said. Just eleven and twelve, respectively,
McMahan and Walford had already picked up instruments;
Oldham was musically inept, but his older brother Ned, an
eighth-grader, played bass. So Brian, Britt, and Ned, along
with friends Stephanie Karta and Paul Catlett, started a band.
They were called the Languid and Flaccid, and were an art/
noise band, according to Clark Johnson, then a high school
freshman who saw some of the bands shows. They were
24
just little kids, Johnson recalled in a 1986 interview in a
small photocopied zine called the Pope. They had songs like
White Castles and Fire Engine, then they also had songs
like K Song, L Song, M Song, N Song, etc. Their best
song was called Big Pussy, and it was so good. Brian sings
on it way before his voice changes . . . Yeah, Languid and
Flaccid were great.
Sean Garrison, a young Louisville punk, was also a fan.
Languid and Flaccid were a very garage-y band, he told me.
Very clever . . . slightly smart-assed. It was just amazing
hearing these guys. Man, they could play.
Most tween bands tend not to justify their place in the annals
of indie rock history, if only because they seldom make it off
of the playground and onto a bona fide stage. But the Languid
and Flaccid played out,
holding their own against the other, older bands in the scene
like Your Food, Malignant Growth, and the Endtables.
All-ages venues at the time were scarce, so the Languid and
Flaccid would get on Sunday matinee bills at a dingy
downtown dive called the Beat Club. Garrison, known around
town as Rat, first caught them at a Beat matinee. He was
fairly new to the scene; hed gotten involved because his
friend, Brett Ralph, had recently become the new singer for
Malignant Growth, arguably the biggest punk band in town.
Just fourteen himself, Garrison became immediately
compelled to check out this band of twelve-year-olds who had
a sets worth of all original music. So he made his way to the
Beat Club to see the Languid and Flaccid open for Your Food
on Halloween 1982.
25
There was this little seedy pocket in Louisville then, he told
me. The Beat Club was next to a really scary strip club
you couldnt get seedier than this called the Penguin. It
was serious. The Languid and Flaccid boys would get
dropped off by their parents, who would help them load their
equipment into the dank and dirty club populated by the
intimidating punks who were part of the Louisville scene.
The guys that were in bands back then, some of them were
really scary. Really scary. And some of them got scarier. But
those kids could hang. It was very, very impressive, at least to
me. It blew my mind.
* * *
It was on the exact same day Halloween 1982 that
Clark Johnson and his childhood friend David Grubbs kicked
around the idea of starting their own band. The two
sophomores were loafing around listening to records when
Grubbs piped up out of nowhere, Why dont you play bass?
So Johnson picked it up. The two didnt actually start
practicing until December; they had to wait for their
drummer, a friend named Rich Schuler, to come home from
his first semester at the University of Cincinnati, and Johnson
didnt own his own equipment until the following year. It
wasnt serious anyway: they named the group Squirrelbait
Youth, in simultaneous emulation and parody of the DC
hardcore scene, not to mention the local bands who were
aping the anti-authoritarian rage with all the suburban navet
they could muster. Our first song was Tylenol Scare, right
after the Tylenol thing. And That Badge Means You Suck,
things like that, Johnson told the Pope. Most of the energy
put into Squirrelbait Youth was in concept it was more of
an inside joke between Johnson and Grubbs, mocking the
26
local punk scene. Besides, Grubbs was in a more serious band
at the time, a new-wave group called the Happy Cadavers.
They had just self-released their debut 7, With Illustrations.
Grubbs was not taking [Squirrelbait Youth] seriously at all
and not putting any time into it, said Johnson. But the Happy
Cadavers soon dissolved, and Johnson pressed Grubbs into
putting more stock into their venture. We dropped the
Youth, and I
bought a bass. It was impossible to be more serious, though,
when their drummer could only practice on spring break and
winter and summer vacation. They needed to find a
replacement.
* * *
By late 1982 the Languid and Flaccid had already been
around for more than a year, and Walford, McMahan, and
Oldham were growing up and growing restless. They wanted
to make music that was louder, faster, more aggressive. So
they started a second band which they dubbed Maurice. Rat,
who had become utterly enamored with the Languid and
Flaccid, saw an opportunity to ingratiate himself into the new
act. I just kind of pushed my way in. They didnt need [a
frontman], I just insisted they did. I was like, Man, Im doing
it.
If their intent was to create a more aggressive band, then the
addition of Rat was a coup. My level of rage was so much
higher than theirs, it must have seemed comical. Just like their
lack of rage sometimes seemed comical to me, Garrison
recalled. Back then I didnt realize that the angst or the fury I
had, it definitely wasnt teen angst. I was way beyond that.
27
Indeed, Rats background could not have been more different
from that of his bandmates. Walford, McMahan, and Oldham
all grew up on Louisvilles East End, a middle-class and
upper-middle-class part
of town filled with tree-lined streets and well-kept lawns. As
evidenced by the boys enrollment in the Brown School, their
parents viewed their childrens potential as unlimited. They
encouraged their kids to learn music, literature, and art. None
of this described Rats childhood. Louisvilles South End was
a more working-class, blue-collar part of town and Rat
lived south of there, in Pleasure Ridge Park, twenty miles
beyond what was then the city limits. His father was an
ex-marine who worked at the local ironworks. I come from a
family where if you didnt have a dangerous job and you
didnt bust your ass, then you were a pussy. The danger of
daily life was no exaggeration Garrisons father, like his
grandfather, died on the job. Garrison launched himself out of
his home and out of his neighborhood like a juggernaut,
plowing his way into the Louisville punk scene. He landed in
Maurice, where his shrieking caterwaul both compelled and
alienated audiences and his bandmates. Oldham left the
band soon after Rat joined. He was replaced on bass by a kid
named Mike Bucayu.
* * *
If the primordial period of Slints history could be described
as a game of musical chairs, Mike Bucayu might have
unwittingly been the one controlling the music. In 1983
Bucayu was friends with Clark Johnson and David Grubbs,
who were looking for a replacement
for Rich Schuler. It was through Bucayu that they met Britt
Walford.
28
Right off the bat, Johnson was impressed with the
eighth-graders all-around talent: He was a classically
trained piano player. He can play circles around just about
anybody, including Marvin Hamlisch. As a musician, he can
play any instrument perfectly.
It was around this time that Squirrel Bait brought in a fourth
member, Peter Searcy, to take over vocal duties from Grubbs.
By now the band had shed its impulse to parody hardcore,
instead opting to simply be hardcore. Grubbss early songs
were thrashy, shout-along rants with titles like Insult to
Injury and Rage for Life. The addition of Searcy gave
those songs a more melodic dimension. He sounded a lot like
Paul Westerberg, too not a bad thing.
1 Squirrel Bait was developing a sound clearly influenced by
Minneapolis bands like Hsker D and the Replacements,
with the lyrical directness of DC bands like Minor Threat.
But they didnt make it out of the garage much. In six months,
Walford had only joined his new band onstage two or three
times. Meanwhile, Bucayu and Garrison werent happy with
Squirrel Baits infringement. It was
impacting their ability to practice and play out, not to mention
Walford was an essential part of Maurice their sound was
driven largely by his songwriting and they didnt want to
share him. Too, Garrison and Grubbs were like oil and water,
making it difficult for the two bands to develop much
camaraderie. It was this social component that may have
determined Walfords choice to give up on Squirrel Bait. I
think he wanted to be in their band, Garrison told me. I
think he didnt quit Maurice out of loyalty to me.
29
But Walfords near defection was not the only trouble
Maurice faced. Despite his longtime friendship with Walford,
McMahan had had enough of Bucayu and Garrisons more
extroverted, obnoxious behavior. He quit Maurice, according
to Garrison, in hopes of following Walford to Squirrel Bait,
but Walford chose to stick with Maurice instead. McMahan,
for the moment, was left in the lurch. Things for Maurice,
meanwhile, were about to transform.
* * *
When McMahans exit opened a vacancy in Maurice, Bucayu
saw an opportunity that the band couldnt pass up. Bucayu
tells us, Look, I know a guy, and he can really play guitar,
like, for real, Garrison recalled. Walford and Garrison were
skeptical, but Bucayu promised it was the real thing. He
brought the new guy in to practice with Walford Garrison
stayed away for the audition.
The kids name was David Pajo. At the time he was in a Top
40 cover band called Prophet. His front four teeth had been
knocked out of his mouth in the pit of an Iron Maiden show a
year earlier and he had an adorable mullet, according to
Garrison. He loaded his gear into the practice space a full
stack, far more impressive than McMahans small amp and
told Walford how much he liked Maurice. Hed seen them
play a show before Brian left the band. I know your whole
set, he reportedly said. Just click the sticks.
Britt calls me and hes laughing this hysterical, demented
laugh, Garrison said. He says, Listen to this shit. He
already knows it! He sets the phone down and they do three
songs right off the bat.
30
Pajos technical skill level, particularly for a fifteen-year-old,
was off the charts. I was a guitar geek, he told me. When I
entered that scene I was a total shredder. But to call Pajo a
geek or a shredder is to grossly understate how seriously he
took his instrument. At the time he joined Maurice, he had
just dropped out of high school because it was interfering
with his ability to play guitar. I was complaining to my mom
that I was only getting in six hours of practice every day.
Only six hours was a bad day of practice. His parents agreed
to relieve him of the obligations of high school on the
condition that he pass the GED (General Equivalency
Diploma) and that he spend the summer really studying the
guitar at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
If Walford was still considering Squirrel Bait, Pajos audition
obliterated the option. Pajo changed everything, Garrison
said. He transformed the whole city.
* * *
Walfords rejection was a blow to Squirrel Bait, who more
than a year after forming had yet to have its shit together.
Whats more, Walfords skill made the band realize their
songs were good. What began as a joke was becoming more
serious in their mind. Adding to their sense of mission, a tiny
label called Upstart Records offered to release Squirrel Baits
debut. With dreams of the studio in mind, the band auditioned
one or two replacements for Walford, but none could match
what theyd become accustomed to. Desperate, they asked
Walford to sit in to record their debut. He agreed, and in the
fall of 1984 Squirrel Bait entered the studio to record the
nine-song, fifteen-minute Nearest Door EP. The album never
saw the light of day: catastrophically, Upstart Records went
31
bankrupt before it ever started up. Once again Squirrel Bait
was at an impasse. Walford was gone again.
It was not until October of 1984 that the band was finally up
and running and they were about to run like never before.
They found their permanent drummer in the form of Ben
Daughtrey. He wasnt a perfect fit at first he was more of a
Talking Heads fan than a hardcore kid, and his simple,
pounding style was a far cry
from Walfords blasts. But soon enough they found their
groove, and for the first time ever the band felt like a fully
formed unit. Daughtrey was the force both in percussion
and in personality that pushed Squirrel Bait onto the stage,
onto the road, and back into the studio.
Daughtreys first priority was getting the band to play out
to generate a following. Despite technically being together
since the winter of 8283, Squirrel Bait rarely performed
live. The original trio of Grubbs, Johnson, and Schuler only
played house parties when Schuler was down on breaks from
college. Even with the addition of Searcy and Walford, they
hardly did shows. When Daughtrey joined, that all changed.
They debuted their new lineup in January 1985 in Cincinnati,
opening for Articles of Faith. It was the first show of a busy
year: the next two months were filled with as many local gigs
as they could get, then back to Cincinnati in March to open
for Chicago punks Naked Raygun. Their transformation from
basement band to a serious touring and recording act
happened almost overnight. Their sound was gelling like
never before; looking to fill it out even more, they added
Brian McMahan as second guitarist.
32
McMahan hit the ground running. Though Grubbs was still
the bands primary songwriter (both music and lyrics),
McMahan showed up to their early practices with a song hed
written called Hammering So Hard, a two-chord thrasher
that also contained one of the groups catchiest shout-along
choruses. Within a month of McMahans joining the group,
Squirrel Bait
were back in the studio, recording Hammering So Hard and
five other tracks.
The band was running full throttle. Theyd hit it off with
Naked Raygun at the Cincinnati show, and the Raygun guys
recommended Squirrel Bait to their friend (and, for Santiago
Durango, Big Black bandmate) Steve Albini. Albini was
given a copy of the Nearest Door demo, which he liked, so he
invited Squirrel Bait up to Chicago to open for Big Black and
Minneapolis act Rifle Sport.
Albini quickly became a booster for Squirrel Bait and
encouraged them to get in touch with a guy named Gerard
Cosloy, the brains behind a new label out of New York called
Homestead Records. Talking to the Pope in 1986, Johnson
recalled the night: Even though they hadnt put out a lot of
records, everyone was saying this was going to be the hot
label, because Raygun had signed, Big Black had signed, and
Albini was like Go to Homestead. These guys are the best,
and Gerard is the greatest. Members of Big Black, Naked
Raygun, and Breaking Circus (another Chicago-based act on
Homestead) each started putting Squirrel Bait in Cosloys ear.
It wasnt that simple though. Bob Mould almost fucked it all
up for them.
33
It was May of 85, a month since Squirrel Baits show in
Chicago. Though the band had sent their recent recordings off
to the Homestead office in New York, and they felt
encouraged by Albini and their other friends who were on the
label, theyd yet to have much, if any, direct contact with
Cosloy himself. Theyd
found themselves back in Cincinnati once more, the third time
in five months, this time opening for Hsker D, who were on
tour for New Day Rising. Fresh off their six-song session,
they handed Bob Mould a copy of their recording. Impressed,
Mould offered to sign the band to his own label, Reflex
Records. Still feeling the buzz around Homestead, however
despite having little to no contact with anyone actually at
the label the guys turned Mould down, explaining that they
were looking seriously at Cosloys label and needed to see
how it would play out.
Mould was happy for them. So happy, in fact, that when
Cosloy caught up with Hsker D at their New York show,
Mould congratulated him on his new signing. This was news
to Cosloy; to make matters worse, just days later he came
across a copy of a zine out of Ohio called Offense Newsletter
that included an article about Squirrel Bait which noted that
theyd signed to Homestead. Johnson recalled, Gerard read
this and was like, Fuck, who are these guys?
Ultimately it all worked out; perhaps due to so many people
talking Squirrel Bait up, perhaps due to the strength of their
demo (probably both), Cosloy signed the band on Monday,
May 20, 1985. Johnson remembered the date clearly because
he and Grubbs graduated from high school the day before.
34
It was the cap of an incredibly productive six months. They
solidified their lineup, wrote an albums worth of material,
played a dozen shows in and out of
town, made connections with some of the biggest indie bands
of the day, recorded their debut, and signed to Homestead.
The momentum didnt last.
* * *
Though Maurices star did not rise to the same heights as
Squirrel Bait, Pajos addition to the band gave them a boost in
a different way: he became a collaborator and able conduit for
Walfords songwriting. Walford, though technically the
drummer, had become Maurices primary songwriter. He was
an accomplished pianist already. Garrison has memories of
waiting in Walfords backyard while the young wunderkind
finished practicing his Rachmaninov. During Maurices
formative period, when Oldham and McMahan were still in
the band, their sound was straightforward, Circle Jerkslike
hardcore. But soon Walford began teaching himself to play
guitar. I could see it when Britt started playing guitar on his
own, just goofing around, his approach to the guitar was
unlike anything I had ever seen before, Garrison told me. I
guess he was approaching it like it was a piano or something,
I dont really know. I just know he was starting to mess
around with types of sounds that were completely different
than anything I was interested in.
By the time Bucayu was in the band, Walford had grown
more assured on the guitar, and Maurices sound was
becoming more and more adventurous. The
music got faster and incorporated more stops and starts
similar, Garrison told me, to groups like Die Kruezen or
35
Void. The Void similarities extended to Garrisons vocals,
too. John Weiffenbach [Voids singer] was my hero. I loved
that superhuman caterwauling. Not just shouting but . . .
outright screaming. It was Peter Searcy who taught Garrison
to widen his arsenal by actually singing. [Peter] was
incredible. People dont even know. That guy doesnt get his
due. According to Garrison, Searcy was the reason to catch a
Squirrel Bait show. They were boring, except for the singer .
. . Peter was always just over the top one of the best live
singers I ever saw in my life . . . You should have been
standing in front of the stage when those guys would play.
Your eyebrows would hurt from the force of his voice. One
day after seeing Maurice play, Searcy advised Garrison to
stop screeching and see what happens if you sing. Garrison
took the advice and quickly transformed into an even more
dynamic front-man, shifting between a lower-register,
Danzig-like moan to the pained shrieks he had already
perfected.
Still, with McMahan and Bucayu on guitar and bass,
Maurices sound was sloppier and rougher than Walford
desired. Pajo, on the other hand, was a trained musician. It
was rare for a player in the Louisville punk scene to be
classically trained on any instrument, and now two of
Maurices four members shared that in common. The music
immediately got tighter, cleaner, and more electrifying.
Pajo came from a metal background, more so than the
hardcore punk the others had been weaned on. Thus he
brought hyperspeed guitar solos unlike anything else the
scene was used to. Coupled with Garrisons melodramatic,
religion-obsessed lyrics, Maurice took on a much more
menacing heavy metal sheen. They recorded a demo in
36
Walfords basement, dubbed The First Shall Be Last, in 1985
about a year after Pajo joined the band. Songs like Imitate
Christ, Confession, and No Exit demonstrate the
brutality of the early WalfordPajo collaborations. The songs
shift from lightning-fast riffs to doomy sludge, Pajo
punctuating all of it with piercing harmonics and dazzling
leads.
Maurice was a powerful, formidable band. It made for a live
show not to be fucked with. It was thunderous. We were the
first band to have giant amps, Garrison told me. Maurice
gained a small but dedicated following. We were [popular]
with a certain group of people. But most of the kids were
really alienated by what we were doing. They wanted the
Dead Kennedys.
* * *
Johnson and Grubbs were now through with high school, and
despite signing to Homestead they had no intention of
skipping college. The summer of 85, then, had an ominous
cloud. Things fell apart completely, Johnson told the Pope.
We really stagnated. We spent
so much time writing songs to record that we just stopped
[once the recording was done]. They played two fairly
abysmal shows in town, but otherwise the summer saw
Squirrel Baits activity come to a halt.
Though the band was not breaking up, Grubbs and Johnsons
imminent departure Grubbs to Georgetown, Johnson to
Northwestern cast a pall on everything they did. It was
during this time that a line began to develop between the
members of the band Searcy and Daughtrey, both of whom
37
were happy to indulge in the more social aspects of being in a
band; and Grubbs, Johnson, and McMahan, all more
interested in the music itself. The division became explicit for
the first time when Grubbs set up a show in Cincinnati with
the Meat Puppets. It was to be the bands last show before
Grubbs and Johnson left for school, and it felt like it could be
their last show ever. But Daughtrey and Searcy pulled out just
a few days before the gig.
McMahan, Grubbs, and Johnson couldnt pass up an
opportunity to play with the Meat Puppets. In a panic over
Searcy and Daughtreys cancellation, they called Britt
Walford. We practiced with him twice and went up there and
played, Johnson recalled. It was the only show in Squirrel
Baits history in which McMahan and Walford actually
shared the stage, according to Johnson and it might have
been a prescient experience. Lacking a frontman, the
foursome played all their songs as instrumentals, while
Grubbs simply told stories over the music.
For the rest of the year, Squirrel Bait was in limbo. Then, the
record came out.
Squirrel Bait was released in November of 1985
Homesteads twenty-eighth release. In retrospect the
eight-song, seventeen-minute blast is probably the bands best
achievement. Its raw, urgent, and young. The bulk of the
album was comprised of the six songs theyd recorded that
April, just after McMahan had joined the group. The tracks
were recorded with Howie Gano (who also did the original
demo as well as Skag Heaven) at Sound on Sound Studios
aka Ganos basement for $400. Though they had more
songs, the band lacked the funds and the time to record them
38
for the debut. To fill out the record, then, they added two
tracks from the old Nearest Door sessions, When I Fall and
Disguise. Walfords name found its way into the liner
notes, and Squirrel Bait would forever be known as the
progenitor of Slint despite 95 percent of the record, both
music and lyrics, coming from the mind of David Grubbs.
2
Cosloy wanted Squirrel Bait to make its New York debut in
support of the new record. It was the kick in the pants the
band needed, so that Christmas Grubbs and Johnson returned
to Louisville to reconnect with their bandmates. After nine
months of not playing a show, Squirrel Bait headlined a
Sunday-night gig to a hometown audience numbering to
their utter shock 300 people. Prior to their albums release,
they had never drawn more than forty people to a headlining
show. But the kids in Louisville had had a month to get into
their hometown bands record released on the same label
as fucking awesome bands like Big Black, Dinosaur, and
Sonic Youth. Squirrel Bait had been anointed.
The show was a major confidence boost after so much
inactivity, and it prepped them for their trip to New York in
January. Coinciding with their arrival in New York, the
newest issue of Spin had hit the stands. It contained the first
official Squirrel Bait review, a rave. It wasnt the first time
their name had appeared in Spin, though; two months earlier
in a feature on Hsker D, Bob Mould called Squirrel
Baiton par with anything weve done; elsewhere Grant Hart
called the EP the best $400 Ive ever heard. Such a ringing
endorsement from one of the most revered punk bands of the
day put Squirrel Bait on everyones radar. Johnson recalled
the bands attitude once they hit the city: I think we were all
39
pretty scared. Even the first show in Louisville in front of
three hundred people. It was like we put out this record and
everyone loves it, and then
we go to New York, and every fucking rock critic in the
country is here. They were: reviews and features in the
Village Voice, NME, and Maximum Rock n Roll, among
others, all followed in quick succession. They were all
positive reviews, Johnson noted, but we got pretty sick of
the Hsker D comparisons.
The weekend in New York one show at CBGBs, another
at Maxwells in Hoboken was a success (barring the theft
of two of McMahans guitars after the second show). Squirrel
Bait were reenergized. Over the holidays theyd written two
new songs, Kid Dynamite and Slake Train Coming,
which they ironed out during the New York gigs. That March,
over spring break, they recorded the songs for release on a
Homestead 7 later that summer. Theyd have it in time for
their first bona fide tour. These Louisville boys were making
good but they werent the only ones. While McMahan was
sitting around waiting for his band to play in the big leagues
during school breaks, his classmate Britt Walford was busy
making his own connections with punk legends: Maurice was
about to go on tour with Glenn Danzig.
* * *
Despite not having a single recording to their name, Maurice
had attracted the attention of the former Misfits frontman who
was now cultivating a more macabre sound with his band
Samhain. It was Garrison
who made the connection. Louisville was lousy with Misfits
fans, and Garrison might have been the biggest. Rat was a
40
huge fan, Pajo said. He would buy all this stuff from them,
which led to he and Glenn talking on the phone. They became
friends somehow. When he heard that Samhain was touring
through the Midwest, he told Glenn that he had a band. They
made their one and only recording at Danzigs request, so he
could verify that they were the real deal, and when Samhain
played the Jockey Club in nearby Newport in November of
1985, Maurice opened. Danzig liked what he heard, so when
Samhain came through the Midwest on tour the following
spring the Unholy Passion EP had just come out and
November-Coming-Fire was on the horizon Maurice
tagged along for a weeks worth of shows. They were on
board for a string of shows through Kentucky, Ohio,
Michigan, and Indiana. Along for the ride as roadie was
Walfords childhood friend Will Oldham. Neither Walford
nor Oldham was old enough to drive.
To be asked on this tour went beyond any of the boys wildest
dreams. Both the Misfits and Samhain were unanimously
regarded as the greatest. Will had a blonde devils lock, and
Britt did as well, Pajo recalled. Reminiscing to Pitchfork in
2005, Oldham expanded on his level of fanaticism: There
wasnt a day went by we didnt talk about the records, about
Glenn. At one point, I put together a huge collage of images
pulled from school encyclopedias . . . voodoo and gargoyles,
lots of blood and nastiness. I sent it to Glenn, along with a
cow skull and ten dollars, hoping against hope for something
to come back. Well, not too long after, the mailman brought
me a package from Lodi, and in it was a Cough/Cool single
and a beautiful pale-yellow Samhain t-shirt. For a kid willing
to mail a cow skull to his favorite band in return for a 7 and
t-shirt, to be a participant on an honest-to-God tour was a
miracle.
41
Musically, it seemed like it would be a good fit: Garrisons
voice occupied a similar range as Danzigs, while Walford
laid down beats shifting between dirge-like tempos and
hardcore blasts. Pajo, meanwhile, fucking shredded. Nearly
every song Maurice pounded out featured his flashy style:
dexterous solos and shrieking harmonics alternating with
dark, Swans-like riffs. Though coming out of the hardcore
scene, Maurice was clearly enamored with a more metallic
strain. It was a direction that Danzig himself was moving in
as well.
The week of shows largely lived up to the boys dreams. The
shows blew my mind, every night, wrote Oldham. Death
Comes Ripping, Bloodfeast, and Die! Die! My Darling
thrown in with the songs from the three Samhain records.
Powerful, awesome. Always front and center we were,
screaming, sweating, singing along with every song. The
band was a united front. I have never seen such great songs
played so fiercely just for the audience that was right there.
Offstage, Walford and Oldham would entertain the Samhain
guys with their impressions of people with
cerebral palsy (bear in mind, they were fifteen); Danzig sat on
a porch in Bloomington strumming a guitar and singing I
was born with a small dick to the tune of John Cougar
Mellencamps Small Town (bear in mind, he was
thirty-one) eminently profound experiences for the
Louisville juveniles.
But there were also darker moments. Garrison recalls the tour
differently from Oldham; he found Danzig to be surprisingly
bitter. I think Glenn had become very hyper-aware of the
fact that he was going to miss his window of opportunity to
42
make a national dent, to actually have a career . . . And it
made him extremely bitter. He was very pissed off about
something that he knew was happening. He was cognizant of
it . . . Its very hard to deal with a guy that age who is that
bitter.
Pajo agreed. It was amazing to play with Glenn Danzig, but
in some ways it sort of deflated what I thought of him at the
same time. He was an aggressive guy. Hes got this New
Jersey thug attitude. At their show in Columbus, Pajo
witnessed the thug attitude firsthand. This guy Kevin
Mitchell, a friend of ours from Louisville, was supposed to
bring some t-shirts Glenn had sent him up to the show in
Columbus, and he forgot them. When he told Glenn that he
forgot them, Glenn hit him in the neck with his forearm and
got him in a headlock in one motion. He had him in the
headlock on the ground and was yelling at him, Are you
fucking with me?! And he was like Glenn Im sorry, Im
sorry! I remember thinking, That is totally
uncalled for. That would not be my first reaction. I would be
disappointed, but I dont think I would put someone in a
headlock, first thing. In a post to his blog in 2008, Pajo
recalled a second event at the same show, where Danzig and
bassist Eerie Von leapt off the stage mid-set and ran into the
parking lot, brandishing baseball bats as they went after a
skinhead who had allegedly slashed their vans tires.
In addition to battling Danzigs personality, Maurice also had
to deal with the audience. At each show, as with their local
shows, Maurices strange hybrid of metal and punk confused
the audience more than anything else. There was one show
we played with Samhain in Bloomington, Pajo recalled, in
the basement of a library, which was really weird. That was
43
the only show where I saw people who had never heard us
before totally reacting to the music. They invented this dance
while we were playing: they all started doing this weird sort
of caterpillar, slithering all over each other on the floor. I
remember playing and just being like, thats the only way you
can move to this music. Theres no other way to respond.
The biggest show was in Detroit. As Garrison remembers it,
the audience numbered more than 500, including, it was
rumored, the guys from Metallica.
3
Maurice hit the stage and promptly baffled them all. The
place was packed, and nobody knew what to do when we
played. They just didnt know what it meant, Garrison
recalled. It was a reaction they were used to, even when they
played locally, though perhaps felt more acutely at the Detroit
show. They never booed us, Garrison clarified. The
competence of Britt and Dave was so overwhelming that
nobody really knew what to do . . . People would just stare at
us. They didnt boo. Theyd clap very nicely, but nobody
knew what to do. You couldnt dance to us, you couldnt fight
to us. You definitely couldnt fall asleep . . .
The audience were not alone in their confusion. The more
material Pajo and Walford wrote, the stranger it got, leaving
Rat and Bucayu in a fog. Much like Squirrel Bait, a line was
being drawn through the middle of the band.
* * *
When Grubbs and Johnson returned home from college that
summer, Squirrel Bait was ready to go on a belated tour in
support of their eight-month-old album. Along the way they
44
opened for Dinosaur and Sonic Youth in Cleveland and the
Descendents in New Jersey, as well as a string of dates with
Bostons Volcano Suns. Overall the band couldnt have asked
for a better tour, though the unspoken division between
Searcy and Daughtrey the party animals and Grubbs,
Johnson, and McMahan the music heads continued to
make itself more apparent. When music journalists came
around, Searcy and Daughtrey were the most eager to put
their mouths in front of the microphones and faces in front of
the photographers. The other three members, while not
against publicity, were more modest. This might have been a
fine proposition in any other band, but Searcy, for one, didnt
even write the lyrics to his songs Grubbs truly was the
brains behind the whole operation.
The friction in the band continued for much of the tour.
Grubbs held out hope that things would get better once the
band returned to the studio. They spent that tour road-testing
new material, and in August they returned to Howie Gano and
Sound on Sound to make their second album. As with the first
album, though, they didnt actually have enough new material
to fill out a full-length. So the already released Kid
Dynamite and Slake Train Coming were added to the track
list, along with the sub-par Too Close to the Fire, an old
song from January 85 which featured Searcys sole lyrical
contribution to the bands output, and a re-recorded version of
Black Light Poster Child, a song which dated back to the
Nearest Door days. Certainly due to the fact that the band
rarely had time to practice and write together owing to their
long-distance set-up, they also threw in a cover of Phil Ochs
Tape from California.
45
With the recording sessions behind them and sophomore year
ahead, it seemed that Squirrel Bait were in exactly the same
scenario theyd been in a year prior: a record in the can but
not yet released, and college splitting the band up for at least
another five months. For Grubbs and Johnson, things seemed
to come full circle. Back in 1983 theyd dismissed Rich
Schuler precisely because college kept him from committing
full-time to the band. Now they were guilty of the same
opposing priorities. Although Squirrel Bait had gotten good
buzz and the band was feeling good about their new album,
neither Grubbs nor Johnson were willing to quit school and
devote themselves to the band. Grubbs was the first to realize
the situation was untenable. He confided to Johnson that he
was weary of the band. Id gotten the feeling all along he
wasnt really into doing it that much, and the only reason he
was still doing it was because I wanted to do it, and we were
really good friends. Not that he didnt want to tour and put
out records, but he wanted to be freer to do other stuff, to do a
band in Washington and put all his songwriting into that, you
know? That would be better than only doing it three months
out of the year.
It came as no surprise to McMahan, whod seen the writing
on the wall. But Daughtrey and Searcy were blindsided,
according to Johnson. Ben and Peter were like, I can feel it.
I can taste the top now. Were going all the way. Were going
to get signed to a major
label really soon, its going to be great. It came as quite a
shock to them.
There was no final show. Skag Heaven, released on
Homestead later that year, was dead on arrival.
46
* * *
It turned out to be a tough summer for the Louisville scene.
Walford and Pajo, firmly in control of Maurices musical
direction, were moving down stranger and stranger avenues.
As Pajo tells the story, I started getting into this mindset that
the weirder it was the better it was. Wed come up with a part
that was in some totally bizarre time signature that was so
difficult we couldnt even play it. I think I probably should
have started noticing [Rat and Mikes displeasure], but we
were so lost in our own world. The farther down those
avenues Walford and Pajo went, the less Rats rage-fueled,
religious-themed lyrics never mind his entire stage persona
seemed to fit. Once Dave shows up, everything is
different, Garrison explained. You could just see the lights
in Britts head go off . . . They were so ahead of the pack that
nobody even knew what it was. Some of the Maurice songs
are very definitely Slint songs. They were so strange I
couldnt do anything with them.
By the time of the Samhain shows, the distinction between
Walford and Pajo and Bucayu and Garrison
was clear to anyone who saw the band play. [On stage,
Bucayu and I] are hoping something happens, that the place
burns down, and [Walford and Pajo] are just weird, freaking
out on their instruments. [Maurice was] two extroverted
people who want to kick you in the balls and two guys who
are like, just leave me alone, Im playing. Reaction from
the audience and from other bands made it clear to Garrison
that Walford and Pajo were onto something and that he
was not a good fit for it. Nobody from that era who saw
those two knew what to do. The guys from the Descendents
47
were flabbergasted. Scratch Acid? Flabbergasted. Everybody
from the generation before us who would see those guys play
couldnt believe it. Period. Shocked. Jaws open. Trust me.
Like, Im not really into the other two guys, but my god, you
two! It was hard to deal with, but what can you do?
One thing you can do is start another band, which is exactly
what Bucayu did. Though he didnt quit Maurice, he did start
a new group in which he was the primary songwriter. They
were called Solution Unknown, and their ambition seemed to
be the antithesis of Maurice that is, they were purely
focused on having fun and making the crowd go crazy.
Perhaps as a sign that the split in Maurice was purely along
musical lines and not based on a personal schism, Bucayu
enlisted Pajo to play drums. The band was filled out with
friends Kent Chapelle on bass and Eric Schmidt on vocals. It
was a fairly straightforward hardcore
band, influenced by the likes of Minor Threat, the Faith,
Black Flag, and the Circle Jerks.
The band formed in late February of 1986, largely on a dare.
Before their first practice, theyd booked a show for March 15
at a local pizzeria, Charlies. They gave themselves two
weeks to write a sets worth of material. Like Squirrelbait
Youth four years earlier, the band had begun as a lark, almost
as a parody of punk. And like Squirrelbait Youth, things got
serious quickly. Back from Maurices tour with Samhain,
Pajo and Bucayu gave Solution Unknown its next challenge:
make a recording. Maurice by now had been together for two
years, with no recordings to show for it other than a demo
recorded on Walfords jam box. Yet within two months of
existence, Solution Unknown were already in the studio. They
self-released the eight-song Taken for Granted 7 a few
48
months later. The EP made the rounds in punk rock circles,
garnering praise in Maximum Rock n Roll and airplay on
John Peels radio show in the UK.
Solution Unknown played out frequently, unlike Maurice, and
they quickly gained a reputation around town for their lively
performances. Though Garrison was not in the band, the way
audiences reacted to Solution Unknown threw into relief his
own dissatisfaction with Maurice. [Solution Unknown] was
a side project for Dave, but not for Mike. For Mike it was his
band. He wanted to do a band that would cause large crowds
to go apeshit . . . And thats not what Pajo
and Britt had in their heads. They were not interested in
causing a riot where 800 kids would wreck a joint. Thats just
not what they wanted. They wanted to make fucked-up
music.
Pajo and Walford were growing out of metal, and hence out
of the sound of their own band. Britt and I started writing
these songs that had clean guitar sounds and were more like
Minutemen and Meat Puppetsinfluenced, and Rat wasnt
sure how to sing over it. He was just like, this is jazz or
something. I think thats when he quit the band. He just
didnt know what he could do for that. Pajo had it about
right. Garrison put it to me even more explicitly: I mean,
goddamn it, I dont even like music, dude! I dont even really
like music that much, you know what I mean? To me, its like
being on a Viking ship. I have come to fucking humiliate you
with our band. Were fucking shit up. And thats just not what
they were doing. They were into music, for real. And that was
very huh? to me. I was like, What? I didnt know we were
actually trying to be musicians, because Im out! I cant sing a
lick!
49
Things came to a head when Pajo and Walford had worked
out a new song and brought it to practice in the summer of
1986. It was completely free of distortion; it wasnt even
particularly eerie or menacing. Pajo played a complicated
arpeggiated riff as Walford drummed in a herky-jerky,
Minutemen-like style. The songs structure was linear,
moving from Pajos arpeggio to a breezy, jazzy guitar solo to
an angular motif in
which the bass and guitar doubled up on a rolling, almost
surf-guitar, vamp. Ambitiously, the song even contained a
middle section which required bass and guitar to re-tune from
drop-D to standard, then back down again for the conclusion.
To Rat, it must have seemed baffling: there was absolutely no
entry point for vocals. There was no clear verse or chorus
section to hook into, and the relaxed, meandering pace and
lack of distortion was diametrically opposed to his aggressive
vocal style and stage persona. Bucayu and Garrison had
finally had enough. They walked, and Maurice was no more.
4
Maurice was banished to local-legend status, without a single
legit recording to document their celebrated run. Ironically,
one song did eventually make its way to the masses that
last, cataclysmic track. Walford and Pajo eventually named
the song Pat; it was the first song their new band would
learn, and it appears on that bands debut, Tweez.
50
51
Please Give Me Some New
Headphones
Interviewer: What are the other guys doing now?
Clark Johnson: Ben and Peter are in a band called Fancy
Pants, kind of like Run-DMC with a little bit of Beastie Boys.
They do a cover of Play That Funky Music, and I think they
do the Fat Albert song. Their plan is that theyre going to
record real soon, real major label shopping . . . Daves in a
band thats looking for a name; theyre working with the
name Sweet Husk, but everyone says Sweet Hsker D, so
theyre not going to use that. Instead theyre going to call it
Dulcino, which I think means little boy in Spanish or Italian
. . . Brian is in a band called Bead in Louisville, with Britt and
a guy who was in Maurice [who] can play circles around
Eddie Van Halen. Theyre really quiet and subtle, but other
times theyre really angular, too, so its kind of cool.
Bucayu and Garrisons exit hardly seemed to have slowed
Pajo and Walfords new path. Their new sound was positively
alien to where they were coming from and alien to the rest
of the Louisville scene, too. And thats just what they were
going for. The thing that I always liked about Louisville,
Pajo told Punk Planet in 2005, was that nobody wanted to
sound like anybody else. If you came out and it was obvious
that you were ripping off the Clash or Minor Threat, nobody
paid any attention to you. The bands that had their own sound
were the really respected ones.
52
Pajo and Walford were certainly achieving that. Soon the duo
expanded to a trio when Pajos friend Ethan Buckler came
into the fold to take the bass. Buckler had already been
playing in the local scene, but was growing frustrated with the
copycat sounds of so many bands. Speaking to Alternative
Press, Buckler said hed wanted to get away from stuff that
sounded like Minor Threat or Dead Kennedys or Black Flag,
which we had been playing for a long time, and steer towards
more musical, delicate-sounding stuff, like Dinosaur, Sonic
Youth, the Meat Puppets, Minutemen music girls can
listen to. When Pajo heard Buckler voice these frustrations
with the scene identical to what he and Walford felt he
invited his friend to practice. They hit it off and the band that
would be Slint was formed. They gave themselves the rather
ungainly moniker Small Dirty Tight Tufts of Hair: BEADS.
We practiced a lot, Buckler told Alternative Press.
We wanted to be the vanguard of some new kind of sound.
Paradoxically, though, Pajo was still moonlighting in a band
that wanted nothing to do with the vanguard.
* * *
Despite Maurices dissolution, Bucayu and Pajo remained on
the same page with Solution Unknown. Like Squirrel Bait a
few years earlier, Solution Unknown was evolving from a
joke to something more serious. Looking to fill out the band
in order to sound fuller, tighter, and better, they chose to bring
in a second guitarist a Ballard High junior named Todd
Brashear.
Brashear was a relative newcomer to the scene. He too lived
on the East End, not far from Pajo and Bucayu, but he didnt
start going to shows until he was old enough to drive himself.
53
He was a fan of Maurice before hed ever met anyone in the
band; after seeing so many of their shows, he eventually
befriended Bucayu and Pajo, which led to their choosing him
for Solution Unknown.
He was a welcome addition to the band. Throughout the fall
of 86 and winter of 87 Solution Unknown played out near
constantly, writing prolifically and becoming tighter and
tighter. By February of 87 they were ready to record a
full-length. Bucayu knew people in the thriving Washington,
DC, scene and wanted Solution Unknown to make a
pilgrimage to that punk
mecca to record their album. We were trying to get Ian
MacKaye to produce it, but it never happened, recalled
Brashear. Mike Bucayu was in with all the Dischord people
and he talked to Ian on the phone a lot, but it never panned
out. Instead, they went to Don Zientarra, the producer
responsible for so many of their favorite records. That spring
Brashear borrowed his uncles furniture delivery van and
drove the band to DC braving a freak blizzard to get there
and in the span of a few days they recorded thirteen songs.
They named the finished product Karen, after a friend of
theirs from the local scene adopting a similar knack for
titles as Pajos other band was displaying.
It turned out to be their last hurrah. By the fall, Brashear was
off to college and Solution Unknown fizzled out.
* * *
All the better for Pajo, whose band with Walford and Buckler
was gelling like no other hed been in. They were succeeding
in creating music unlike anything else in town so unlike
54
anything else that their first show, on November 2, 1986, was
not at a club or a house party but the Thomas Jefferson
Unitarian Church. On a Sunday. During mass.
Will Oldham and Brian McMahan were both present for the
show McMahan in the audience, Oldham onstage. The trio
had flirted with the idea of
having Oldham join the band as either the singer or second
guitarist, though he didnt know how to do either. Instead, he
sat onstage in front of Walfords kick drum, holding it in
place. The set was short, just three songs Ron,
Darlene, and Charlotte. Pajo reminisced to me, It was a
weird show to begin with because it was actually part of the
service. The theme was rock and roll music, [but] they didnt
realize what they were getting.
Theyd gotten the gig through Buckler; he and his family
were regular congregants. They would have some kind of
music usually classical to open and close the service;
so, one Sunday it ended up being [us], Buckler explained to
Alternative Press. Some of [our music] was very quiet and
introverted, so it turned out not to be totally inappropriate.
Unitarians are open-minded.
Aside from their friends who showed up to see them, you
could imagine the congregations reaction. Pajo described the
set: Our songs were primarily just feedback at that point.
And Britt had his huge drums they were like cannons. At
least one person in the audience liked what he heard; within
two months McMahan had joined the band. Pajo did not
expect McMahan to be so enthused. I thought he would hate
it because it was like an extension of Maurice. I was surprised
55
that he liked it as much as he did; I was happy that he was
even interested in joining the band.
Now a quartet, the band settled on a new, far more succinct,
name: Slint. In an interview with FILTER in 2005, Walford
explained that it was the name of a pet fish. I made it up . . .
There were a couple of other fish I recommended, but the
guys liked Slint. They were just names I came up with
depending on what kind of fish it was and what it looked
like. It was a strange name; fitting for a strange band.
1
One unique thing McMahan brought to the table were
connections from his days in Squirrel Bait specifically,
connections to Steve Albini. So when Big Black came down
to Louisville for a show in May of 87, Slint opened.
Speaking to Alternative Press, Albini recalled their sound at
the time: During their formative period, they had almost this
heavy metal undertone. I thought it was interesting, but it also
seemed unformed; it seemed incomplete. In a way, it was.
Though their set was comprised of many songs destined for
Tweez, Pajo recalls that McMahan played an acoustic guitar
for the whole show. Steve hated it. He thought we were a
prog rock band. I think it was Brians acoustic that threw him
off.
Not everyone hated it. Brashear was in the audience and was
already a convert. He knew what to expect because hed just
seen them a month earlier opening for Killdozer at
Tewligans Tavern, a legendary Louisville punk venue. Also
in the audience at the Killdozer show was Pajo and Walfords
old bandmate, Rat. It was the one and only time he saw Slint
play. They sounded like Maurice without me yelling, he
56
told me. A homegrown, mostly hand-written, zine called
Conqueror Worm published a review of the same show, also
remarking that the band sounded like a jazzy Maurice. The
same zine also contained reviews of the Big Black show and a
battle of the bands show at St. Francis High School. For the
latter it noted that it was the first time the band opted not to
do a Maurice opening for the first song, indicating once
more that Slint, at this early stage, was clearly an outgrowth
from Walford and Pajos original band. Garrison, however,
appreciated the differences. It was better, because I wasnt
interfering with it. I wasnt trying to caterwaul above it about
whatever crazy Jesus/Satan shit I was thinking about my
urge to drown in a sea of my enemies blood or whatever. It
was nice to have me removed from the equation, but at the
same time I was like, these poor fuckers, Jesus. This is not
going to fly. It was like looking at the most beautiful ship
you ever saw in your life, and knowing it was going to sink.
Brashear, on the other hand, saw a band he wanted to follow.
When he went to the Big Black show he
came armed with a four-track to record Slints set. A few
months later, McMahan called him for a copy; he needed to
use it as a demo over which he could practice vocals. Slint
had set a date to go into Albinis studio.
* * *
Thinking of Slints Tweez-era material as metal perhaps
more aptly un-metal or anti-metal goes a long way toward
making sense of their early sound. Recorded in the fall of
1987 by Steve Albini and released in 1989 on Jennifer
Hartman Records and Tapes, Tweez has always sounded like
an alien in the musical landscape. Even more than twenty
57
years later its hard to find another album since that could be
perceived as having a direct link to Tweez. Quite simply, its a
fucking weird record. Its even stranger when trying to
connect its sound to Spiderland, released four years after the
first album was finished a lifetime for teenagers. There is a
hint of things to come in songs like Kent or Darlene
(each song is named for the four boys parents and
Walfords dog, Rhoda), but in the context of the rest of Tweez
that path is difficult to foretell.
So what is the proper context in which to understand Tweez?
There are a few key ingredients not least was Albinis
presence behind the boards and the young bands general
adoration of Big Black but first and foremost Tweez is a
record made by metalheads.
Recovering metalheads, perhaps, but metalheads nonetheless.
Were you to re-sequence its nine songs so that the first half
ran Ron, Carol, Charlotte, and Warren, the
metal-ness of Slint would be more clearly telegraphed. Pajos
virtuosic playing permeates the record, and especially these
songs, as he hurls a torrent of pick-harmonics like a champion
dart-thrower. Ron opens the record with a crushing riff built
around a drop-D chord and a run of artificial harmonics. As
Pajos guitar drifts into a sustained chord that melts into
textural feedback, his hands move to the whammy bar for a
little flare as the note fades out. During the verse Pajo shifts
into a jazzy, note-filled riff punctuated with more
pick-induced screams.
Carols opening riff is a revision of Rons slower,
more drawn out, but the same chord-plus-harmonic-run, set in
a minor key. Albini does his best to distract from the metal
sound by adding sounds of crashing noises and an
58
exceptionally Big Blacklike bass sound, but by the
two-minute mark Pajo and Walford reassert themselves with a
sinister circular rhythm played in half time. Rhoda, the last
song on Tweez and also the last song the band wrote before
hitting the studio, is the only track on the album that succeeds
at being aggressive without being heavy. The song sees Pajos
predilection toward artificial harmonics taken to the extreme,
turning the technique into a series of riffs without ever
descending to chunkier low-end chords as he does on the rest
of the album. The sound of the
instrumental clearly appealed to the band as an avenue worth
pursuing post-Tweez, as they re-recorded an extended version
of the song two years later.
Also distracting from the at times brutal sounds of songs like
Carol or Charlotte are McMahans lead vocals. Far more
ingratiated in punk, McMahan didnt sing with a hint of metal
trappings. One could imagine Rat singing over Charlottes
sludgy and dense percussive verse riffs, all shrieks and moans
and howls, but McMahan had no interest in such theatrics.
His vocal delivery throughout Tweez hews much closer to a
hardcore bark.
That is, when he sings at all. Slint seemed clearly more
interested in being an instrumental band from the start.
McMahan only performs the duties of a frontman singing
lyrics that seem intentionally written and intended to be up in
the mix on three tracks (Ron, Carol, and Charlotte).
The rest are either instrumental or feature spoken monologues
or incidental voices recorded by Albini when the band wasnt
looking. Elsewhere McMahan steps aside, letting Buckler
take the vocals on Kent and Edgar Blossom, of the band
Flour, speak over on Warren (not that you could tell:
59
Blossoms voice is pitched down to half speed, rendering his
lyrics almost unintelligible).
Its decisions like these that keep Tweez from ever feeling too
metal. Tweez is a fun, often surprising, record thanks to the
bands (and Albinis) efforts to sidestep all the genre tropes
that Maurice (metal)
or Squirrel Bait (punk) traded in. Part of how they
accomplished this is that they didnt sequence the record so
that the heavier songs ran in succession. Instead, each is
paired with a track comprised of all clean-tone guitars. Not
necessarily quiet tracks, but more whimsical. Nowhere on
Tweez do Slint employ the clear-cut dynamic juxtaposition of
loud and quiet the way they would on much of Spiderland
most of the songs on Tweez are just a couple minutes long,
getting across a single idea in one or two riffs and then done
(Ron, for instance, is an intro, a verse, and an outro) but
you do begin to see the experiments in juxtaposition in the
way the record is sequenced, and how that affects its overall
pace and vibe. There is a fairly consistent ebb and flow to the
album, from the aggressive to the ponderous and back again.
Tweez is a record made by young kids who seem to be
simultaneously running toward and away from the sounds of
their record collections. McMahan and Pajo were both using
EMG pickups in their guitars a standard feature for
guitarists in bands like Megadeth, Anthrax, and other metal
gods of the 80s, but not so in vogue among the Gibson- or
Fender-wielding punks and indie pioneers. Walford
meanwhile played Samhains Initium for Albini as an
example of the drum sound he was going for. (Albini declined
to accommodate the request.) At the same time, the band
60
lionized bands like the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, and
especially Big Black; and they made a concerted effort,
regardless of their equipment, to try and find a sound that
nodded in that direction.
In making Tweez, they managed to accomplish this in a
couple ways the first and most obvious being the choice of
Steve Albini as producer. Most of Albinis seminal
production jobs roughly everything that wasnt his own
bands output were still ahead of him at this point, though
his reputation as an engineer still preceded him even in 1987.
(For context, Pixies Surfer Rosa was recorded a few months
after Tweez.) As Ethan Buckler would later put it, Slint went
to Chicago [and] got Albini-ized. That is: a razor-sharp
guitar sound less heavy metal than crackling aluminum
a well-defined but dirty bass sound, beautifully rendered
drums, and vocals mixed in at equal (or lower) volume in
relation to the music. While the phrase Albini-ized has a
tacit meaning to anyone who listened to indie rock in the 90s
and beyond, it couldnt have necessarily loomed as an
expectation in 1987. Still, by the time he was done with Slint
there were plenty of sonic similarities to Big Black or
Albinis new band, Rapeman. Much of Albinis early work
can sound tinny and cold; its an aesthetic choice, not a flaw
unless youre Ethan Buckler and you feel a record without
mid-range is excuse enough for quitting a band.
In fact its not that terrible a reason. (And in fairness to
Buckler, he was also ultimately drawn to a completely
different style of music, pursuing a more danceable,
light-hearted muse with King Kong, who
have numerous records out on the Drag City label.) Tweez is a
very odd-sounding record that takes a lot of getting used to,
61
and half the reason for that is Albinis production. His
influence on Tweez stretches beyond his abilities behind the
boards, despite his claims elsewhere that the final version of
the record is not far removed from the demo the band sent to
him prior to their session. We all looked up to Steve a lot,
Pajo told me. We were huge Big Black fans. When we went
up there we wanted to let Steve do whatever he wanted. We
were open to experimenting and trying everything. . . . The
songs became, for better or worse, almost a backdrop for
some of the production effects we were doing for fun. One
such example is the way they recorded McMahans vocals on
Ron: We had two mics swinging back and forth Brian
would have to keep pushing them as he sang so they were
going in and out of phase. We were up for trying any weird
recording technique. We wanted to collaborate with Steve on
the songs, and it sounds like it.
Many of Tweezs most memorable moments and defining
characteristics happened spontaneously in the studio, and the
only reason theyre on the record is because Albini thought to
turn his microphones on. We didnt have any lyrics,
Buckler explained to Alternative Press, so Steve recorded
Brian jabbering on a scratch track and put it in the mix. He
also would secretly record all of us chatting in the snack
room. This was our first recording, and Steve Albini was a
superstar. Steve saw us as this goofy math-metal band from
Louisville who idolized him. He tried to capture our odd ways
and put it on our recording. He was making fun of us, and it
worked.
When Slint showed up to the studio, many of their songs were
either unfinished or the band was open to manipulating them.
They never rehearsed with vocals, so many of the vocal parts
62
were written on the spot (perhaps explaining the line Ive got
a Christmas tree inside my head). Elsewhere Albini added
incidental voices (as in Nan Ding) or noises (as in Carol)
to give the songs more density.
The first minute of Ron, the opening track, captures the
whole aesthetic of Tweez. It begins with the band ill prepared
McMahan stammers Oh, oh, all right, as if caught off
guard before the opening chord strikes. Even as the song gets
going, McMahan is still not settled. Steve, these headphones
are fucked up. Theyre only coming out of one side, like the .
. . Should I just bear with it or what? Shit. Theyre fucked.
The music keeps going and McMahan quiets down, as if
considering whether or not to deal with his faulty headphones.
Then: Man, no, wait. Please give me some new
headphones.
Its probably the most classic moment on the album. No
matter ones opinion of the record and there are a lot of
Slint fans out there who hate Tweez Ive never met anyone
who doesnt at least crack a smile at this intro. That very act
smiling or laughing with
Slint might even be part of the reason why some dont like
Tweez. Its not Slint, its not Spiderland. Its not the
anguish of Washer or the creepiness of Nosferatu Man or
the anxiousness of Don, Aman. Spiderland, while not
completely dark, is not a terribly funny album, nor is it
boneheaded. Tweez is.
All four guys in Slint were just finishing high school when
they made Tweez. Speaking to Alternative Press, McMahan
described himself and his bandmates as very playful, with a
boundless sense of optimism. Albini, in the same article, put
63
it this way: They were about what you would expect from
smart kids in a supportive peer group: prone to ass humor,
practical jokes and absurdity on many levels. Ass humor
and absurdity are all over the record. Its very title is a
reference to Walfords odd collection of tweezers. A minute
and a half into Warren the song ends abruptly and the
listener is treated to thirty seconds of what sounds like
someone jerking off (or, more accurately, indulging their
tweezer fetish). The song is followed by Pat, which
confirms the, uh, fixation of the jerker as an electronic
Speak-and-Spell voice intones canker loaf . . . snatch beast . .
. tweezer fetish. (How did Warren and Pat Buckler
good-hearted Unitarians, mind you feel about being named
for both of the tweezer fetish songs?)
Darlene, while not absurd or dirty, also points to the bands
level of maturity. Musically the song is one of two on Tweez
that hints at where Slint were
headed its the quietest song, driven by a slightly eerie
guitar line of arpeggios wrapped around a tightly locked
rhythm section, as McMahan leads the way (or tags along)
with a monologue. Missing here is the literary aspiration
found on Spiderland in songs like Nosferatu Man or Good
Morning, Captain. Rather, McMahan talks of two platonic
friends who become romantically involved. Its the kind of
topic a high school senior might have on his mind, as opposed
to the content of Spiderland, which seems to come from the
head of a college kid immersed in lit studies.
Darlene ends with McMahan ominously repeating We
know what happened to them. We know what they did,
hinting at the creepy monotone that would permeate
Spiderland. Kent is the other song on Tweez that
64
foreshadows some of the ideas the band would explore in the
next few years.
2 At nearly six minutes, it is the longest track on the album.
Its also the only song that really shifts into more than one
movement, compared with the other tracks which are mostly
built on two riffs each. It begins (after the sound of someone
sipping a refreshing beverage) with a cool, almost groovy,
clean-tone vamp that Walford quickly cuts off with a snare
hit, propelling the band into a jaunty, playful instrumental
jam. At one point the band pauses, Walford hits the snare
again, and they resume the romp. After a second pause,
however, Kent moves
into a whole other territory. Buckler hits a stray note on his
bass which prompts him and Walford into a tense one-note
build. One guitar drops in and out with moody volume swells
while the other plays a minimal but discordant lead. Bucklers
voice comes in and cryptically says, Dont worry about me /
Ive got a bed / Ive got a Christmas tree / Inside my head,
sending the song back to that original intro groove, now in
full swing as Walford pounds his kick and snare to slowly but
forcefully drive the rhythm. McMahans guitar enters,
doubling the main groove higher up on the neck before
moving into a solo that is alternately menacing and disjointed.
McMahans lead (written by Buckler), all mood and texture,
is a contrast to Pajos flashier, harmonic-heavy leads on the
rest of Tweez. In its length, texture, composition, and mood,
Kent seems to point the way forward for the band.
65
66
A New Sound
Slint returned to Louisville in the fall of 1987 with a finished
album, but the recording experience created a fissure within
the band. Buckler left the Tweez sessions incredibly deflated
by its outcome. [Albini] had a kind of sonic ideology he
applied to all the groups he produced, which I dont think was
meant for Slint, he told Alternative Press. He would
produce bands to sound raw and abrasive; I wanted Slint to
sound warm and delicate. Pajo noted to me that, though all
four bandmates went into the studio eager to work with
Albini, Buckler grew more and more frustrated as the session
progressed. All [the studio experimentation] was done after
the basic tracks were recorded, so Ethan didnt envision the
record sounding like that. He wasnt into the end product at
all . . . We wanted the record to sound like youd hit the
loudness button on your stereo, which scoops out all the mids
all low end and high end, no midrange and he was
really mad
about that. He thought it sounded really false . . . He thought
it made a joke or a novelty of the songs; he liked the songs the
way they were. Angered by Tweezs outcome, Buckler left
the group.
The band found Bucklers replacement in the summer of the
following year, when Todd Brashear returned home from
Indiana University in nearby Bloomington. Still good friends
following Solution Unknowns breakup, Pajo had given
Brashear a copy of Tweez soon after it was recorded. Unlike
Buckler, Brashear was instantly on the same page as Pajo and
the rest of Slint. I liked it; I thought it sounded unique . . .
67
The Albini influence was pretty obvious, [but] there was still
a lot of cool musical stuff going on. Thats what drew me to
it.
Brashear soon developed stronger musical and personal
relationships with all three guys. His friendship with
McMahan and Walford grew as they visited him at his job at
a local video store, hanging out for hours watching and
talking movies.
Slint spent the summer getting comfortable with Brashear,
teaching him the Tweez material as well as a couple of new
songs, which they named for Brashears parents, Pam and
Glenn. I remember the first show I played with the band,
Brashear told me. My manager from the video store came. I
remember warning him, this is going to be short. I dont
remember who decided, maybe Britt, that we only knew two
songs really well. So we got on stage, played those two songs,
then walked off the stage. The people who booked the show
were really upset with us.
It was an indicator of an evolving sense of perfectionism
within the band. By the fall of 1988, as all four members set
off for college, Slint had entered a new era. The dynamic of
the group was about to change.
* * *
When McMahan joined Slint a year earlier, the bands sound
was driven by the songwriting partnership of Pajo and
Walford, who by that point had been playing together for
three years. Pajo, Walford, and Buckler had been writing
songs for a good six months before McMahan entered the
68
equation in the winter of 8687, and they were in the studio
within six months of him joining. Vocals aside, a number of
the songs on Tweez were more or less written before
McMahan had a chance to exert much of his own influence.
By the fall of 1988 Slints makeup was totally different. As
college beckoned, the quartet was ostensibly reduced to a
duo. Brashear returned to Bloomington for his sophomore
year; Pajo, who had gotten his GED, also moved to Indiana to
attend the University of Evansville. That left childhood
friends Walford and McMahan, who together moved to
Evanston, just outside of Chicago, where they enrolled at
Northwestern University. Sharing a dorm room, the two
began sketching out the songs that would make up most of
Spiderland.
Living on their own, away from hometown distractions and
surrounded by academia, McMahan and Walfords sensibility
began to evolve away from tweezer fetishes, toward
something more highfalutin. We were just getting out in the
world and we all went to relatively stodgy, conservative
colleges, McMahan told Alternative Press. It was this
whole rude awakening period that gave rise to Spiderland.
We were becoming adults; we were geeking out on
mythology and the idea of archetypes.
For the fall of 88 and spring of 89, McMahan and Walford
(by now an accomplished guitarist as well as drummer)
hashed out the skeletons of songs that would appear on
Spiderland. These new songs were longer and more complex
than before. The instrumentation was also more skeletal,
perhaps due to the lack of other players piling on their own
ideas. McMahan had come a long way since Squirrel Baits
69
Hammering So Hard. He was a fan of players like Neil
Young and Leonard Cohen songwriters whose music
managed to exude emotion without very many chords or
notes. It was a totally different approach compared with Pajo
and Walfords process in Maurice, which was technically
difficult and densely packed. Pajo described the partnership
that bloomed between McMahan and Walford: Both Britt
and Brian had such strong opinions and ideas about music.
Brian was very detail-oriented; a very critical listener. Britt
and I thought more alike. If Britt or I had an idea, we usually
settled on that idea. Brian took more
convincing. He and Britt would trade ideas back and forth
before finally coming up with a solution.
* * *
That year the band would get together only sporadically,
usually during winter or spring breaks. During that time they
squeezed in a couple of shows one in Bloomington,
arranged by Brashear, and another in Chicago in the spring of
1989. The latter was organized by McMahan and Walford,
who were folding themselves into the Chicago scene during
their time at Northwestern. Their old friends Clark Johnson
and David Grubbs were fellow students (Grubbs had
transferred there for grad school); the two had reunited in a
new band, Bastro, along with a drummer named John
McEntire. Also in Walford and McMahans circle of friends
was Steve Albini, Nathan Kaatrud and Eddie Roeser of Urge
Overkill, recent Austin transplant David Yow late of
Scratch Acid, now forming a new band called the Jesus
Lizard and Touch and Go label head Corey Rusk.
70
All of these friends were boosters for Slint. Albini would play
Tweez for anyone whod listen, and Bastro and Urge Overkill
often shared bills with the band. Perhaps no one showed more
tangible support for the band at the time than another friend
of McMahan and Walfords named Jennifer Hartman. After
Tweez languished unreleased for more than a year, she fronted
the money for the band to press 500 copies of the album on
vinyl. With an official release finally in the pipeline, the band
planned its first and only real tour, to coincide with their
upcoming summer break.
* * *
Prior to the tour Slint had a sudden opportunity to enter the
studio once more the result of a quickly assembled session
organized by Albini. According to Brashear, Albini had
studio time left over from a completed session, so he invited
Slint up to keep the paid-for studio from going to waste. The
band had a dearth of new, finished material at that point, so
they opted to record a reworked, longer version of Tweez
closer Rhoda and one of their two new songs, Glenn.
Clearly the band had some affinity for Rhoda, feeling it
worthy of a second recording. In the scope of their
discography the song stands apart as a unique entity not as
heavy or as juvenile as the other Tweez material, not as
brooding or epic as anything on Spiderland. Knowing that it
was the last song theyd written before recording Tweez,
Rhoda feels in a way like the path not taken. Slint had one
other song written at this time, Pam, which is sonically
similar to Rhoda. For whatever reason, they opted to record
Glenn instead, and the result is a bolder statement of intent
for the direction the band was taking. Although
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the single wasnt released until 1994, well after Slint was no
more, its important to understand Glenn in context of the
trajectory Slint were on in 198889. Glenn was not a
posthumous afterthought it was the creative breakthrough.
From the first notes softly bubbling out of Brashears bass,
Glenn quietly announces itself as a distinct animal from
Tweez. For the first time Slint display a kind of confidence
a patience in their playing. Brashears bass plays
unaccompanied for the first twenty-five seconds of the
six-minute mini-epic no other instruments, no incidental
voices or clearing of throats, no sound effects, no nervous
energy whatsoever. When Walfords drums come in one of
the best-sounding drums Albini has ever recorded, by the way
one senses a level of discipline among the quartet that is
totally absent from their debut.
In other words, it is immediately clear that Slint, one year
later, had become more sophisticated players. But it wasnt
just them: Albini, too, seems to have gained confidence in the
studio. By now hed done a few more albums by bands other
than his own Pixies Surfer Rosa, Urge Overkills Jesus
Urge Superstar, and Pussy Galores Dial M for Motherfucker,
among others. He had likely gained the experience of working
with other bands who may or may not have had their own
strong opinions on their own aesthetics. In Fool the World:
An Oral History of a Band called Pixies, Albini talks in
retrospect about his attitude toward recording Surfer
Rosa, an album which features some of the same studio tricks
used on Tweez, recorded just a couple months prior, such as
break-room banter recorded on the sly. Albini felt that he
indulged in a selfish part of [his] personality in the
recording of Surfer Rosa and that he warped the Pixies
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songs in a misguided attempt to suit his own tastes rather than
the bands.
1 The statement could possibly apply to his other work from
this period, including Tweez, and if so would certainly lend
credence to Bucklers criticisms of the experience.
All signs indicate that, for Tweez, Slint did not have strong
opinions about how their record should ultimately sound.
Their guitars took on a tone that could be dropped directly
into a Big Black or Rapeman album. They wanted vocals on
their tracks but didnt write lyrics until just before they were
in the studio. Albini recorded crashing utensils and stray
conversations to
add density to many of the songs and convinced the band to
go along with it. Whether it was a willing collaboration or a
scam it doesnt matter which Albini may as well have
been the fifth member of Slint for their first record. Not so for
Glenn.
Did Albini grow as a recording engineer? Did Slint develop a
more firm idea of their own sonic aesthetic? Likely the
answer is yes to both questions. Whatever the case, Albini
seems to have gotten totally out of the way of the song itself,
concerning himself more so with making each component
sound perfect. He succeeds, utterly.
How much of Glenns dramatic progression away from the
sound of Tweez was due to Slints progression as songwriters,
now with greater influence from McMahan, and how much
was due to the production? You could ask this question not
just of Glenn but of Spiderland as well. Clearly there is a
progression in the nature of the songs the band wrote; but its
an interesting exercise to listen to bootlegs from this era,
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where the band shifts from Tweez material to Glenn and
early versions of Spiderland tracks and back again. The new
songs are longer and more dynamic, but they arent so starkly
distinct. Listening to Slint move from Ron to Nosferatu
Man in the live setting feels natural not at all the harsh
juxtaposition that would come from playing the album
versions in succession.
This gives some credence to Bucklers complaint that Tweez
did not come out right it didnt come
out like Slint. Was Slint, all along, supposed to sound cool,
unadorned, starkly produced? Should Tweezs quiet moments
have been allowed to be, simply, quiet? No voices, no
crashing sounds, not even the minimal effects coloring Pajo
and McMahans guitar tones? Was Tweez supposed to sound
like Glenn?
Its difficult but not impossible to imagine. Glenn possesses
at least a few ingredients that are absent from Tweez but
would later appear in Spiderland. Most obviously it is a long
song, given the time to unfold, and it is the bands first
instance of employing the loud/quiet dynamic in the space of
one track. Yet there are also a couple of elements that
resemble Tweez. Most obvious, the metal that thick,
palm-muted chord that crashes into the middle of the song. It
begs you to curl your lip, raise your devil horns, and bang
your head. Its also a simple song, more or less built around
one bassline and drum pattern. Like many of the songs on
Tweez, Glenn follows a single pattern through an almost
linear song structure until its worn itself out. The difference
here is that the band displays the patience to allow that
process to stretch out over six minutes instead of jumping in
and out in two.
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This is how Glenn can be viewed as a bridge between
Tweez and Spiderland. On Tweez most songs were over just
after theyd begun, as if they were just exercises or
experiments. Think of Ron an intro, a verse, an outro.
Its a minimal form of songwriting (and the song certainly
didnt need more). With Glenn,
Slint hit upon another, more effective, form of minimalism,
which theyd employ to dramatic effect on Spiderland in
songs like Don, Aman and Washer.
Listen to Glenn with an ear to two elements: the relentless
repetition of the rhythm section and the illusion of song
structure created by McMahan and Pajos changing guitar
parts. Start with Brashears bass: the song begins with his
harmonic-laden intro, which then morphs into a slinky
arpeggio which Brashear more or less repeats for the duration
of the song, excepting a brief reprise of that harmonic riff in
the middle and a final change at the end signaling the songs
conclusion. Next, isolate Walfords drums: theyre like a
locomotive that will not be stopped. Walford plays roughly
the same insistent beat for the entire song, adding cymbal
crashes during the heavier moments but otherwise keeping to
the same pattern at all times.
The guitar lines are another story. Here the song becomes
much more complicated in its structure. It begins with a
skeletal, fragile series of notes (which Ill call the A riff),
which later shifts to mimic Brashears bassline (B), upon
which crushing palm-muted chords (C) then come in
overtop. Now, note the order in which these parts are played:
bass intro, A, B, C, bass intro reprise, C, B, A, B, B (with a
textural lead), B (with bass outro). Walford and Brashears
repetition create the tension of the song; McMahan and Pajo
75
build a rising/falling pyramidal structure (ABC-CBA) before
falling in line with the repetition
for the final two minutes. The ultimate effect is one of the
most ominous songs Slint ever put to tape.
* * *
Tweez was finally released in July 1989, almost two years
after it was recorded. To celebrate, the band had an album
release show in Chicago, at a Thai restaurant called Bangkok
Bangkok. Opening the show was Walfords friends new
band, a trio of bass, guitar, drum machine, and maniacal
frontman making their debut as the Jesus Lizard. The
restaurant was strewn with banners that read
CONGRATULATIONS GRADUATE; McMahan had
booked the space by telling the owner that it was his
graduation party.
Two weeks later the band played a hometown show at Caf
Dog, supported by local acts Crain and King Kong, the latter
the new project from Ethan Buckler. It was at these shows
that audiences first got their taste of the direction in which the
band was headed. In addition to playing much of Tweez,
Glenn, and Pam, Slint also played a few of the songs that
Walford and McMahan had been working out over the past
year. This included Nosferatu Man, instrumental versions
of Good Morning, Captain and Breadcrumb Trail, and a
very rough sketch of what would eventually become
Washer.
The following month Slint set out on tour, doing two
back-to-back ten-day sojourns to the Midwest
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and East Coast. The first circuit took them back to Chicago,
then Madison, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and St. Louis; after
a short break in their hometown, they ventured east for shows
in Philadelphia, New Brunswick, New York, and Boston.
For all the sophistication the band were showing in their new
songs, the tour proved that college hadnt totally brainwashed
the immature goofs who made Tweez. It was a weird tour,
Pajo said. It was a lot of fun. We were just kids who were
able to get away from our parents and freak out. They rode
in a black Dodge van Walford had acquired. There were
bullet holes on one side and the front end was badly dented
due, Walford swore, to the previous owner running someone
over. Adding to the suspicious nature of their ride, the boys
would make signs to hang in the back window, competing
with each other to come up with the most offensive slogans.
One day on tour, while fueling up, Walford ushered everyone
into the van and drove off after realizing the clerk failed to
charge him for the gas. Within minutes they were pulled over
by a highway patrolman. The cop approached the dented,
bullet-ridden van with a sign in the back window proclaiming
JESUS CAME DOWN IN MARYS ASS and found Walford
in the drivers seat. He ordered them to remove the sign and
escorted them back to the gas station.
It wasnt the only memorable run-in the band had while on
the road. Pajo recalled that, in the spirit of
keeping things interesting, the band would pick up any
hitchhiker they saw. I remember picking up this really old
man he must have been eighty. When he got in the van
there wasnt any music playing and we all just talked to him.
He was telling stories and he really liked us, and we liked
him. Then Britt or Brian put on the first Suicide album at full
77
volume, so loud you couldnt even talk. The poor guy made it
through Frankie Teardrop but then he wanted out.
The boys had to amuse themselves somehow, because the
shows were often depressing. Slint were virtually unknown
outside of Louisville and Chicago; their album was not
available in stores in advance of their shows, and they didnt
share the bill with any well-known bands at any point on their
tour a far cry from McMahans last outing with Squirrel
Bait a few years earlier. I remember Slint played in Madison,
Wisconsin, Pajo told me. Thats the kind of show that I
dont think would ever be remembered. It was just a shitty bar
and the marquee said Flint. We drove a long way and didnt
get paid; it was just three old men at the bar with their backs
to us the whole time.
Brashear recalled that the band would do their best to have
fun during their sets, even if no one else in the club was.
Wed throw joke covers together. We used to open with
Rise Above by Black Flag, with no vocals. When we played
in Boston we played this really bad, instrumental version of
Roadrunner by Jonathan Richman. If people did show up
to see them,
it didnt guarantee a positive reaction. I remember some
feedback from that tour; someone saw us and said we were
too young and too clean. People were like, Whats up with
these guys? We werent real angry. We were nineteen years
old, we were all shy, and they didnt like it. They didnt like
an indie rock band that was young and clean.
Its worth remembering that in 1989 the trend in underground
rock was heavily slanted toward the macho and the abrasive,
especially in the so-called pigfuck scene populated by friends
78
of Slint like the Jesus Lizard, Rapeman, and Killdozer. When
the four Kentucky kids in Slint took the stage and, standing
stock-still for their entire set, played mostly instrumental
songs that shifted between technically difficult exercises and
slow-building epics, it was totally removed from the sounds
their peers and audiences were used to. All of those bands
were taking risks with their music; we were just doing it in a
different way, Pajo said. It was risky to be a quiet band,
especially in that scene. There was a macho element to [the
scene]. If you were playing melodic, quieter stuff, you were
kind of a pussy.
* * *
With the tour completed, Slint again went on hiatus. Pajo and
Brashear returned to their respective schools in Indiana.
Walford and McMahan returned
to Chicago, but not to Northwestern. That year they both
dropped out and got jobs in the city while rededicating
themselves to writing together and continuing to develop
friendships with others in the Chicago scene.
That winter Steve Albinis affinity for Slint manifested itself
again when he introduced Walford to Kim Deal of the Pixies,
who with Tanya Donelly of Throwing Muses had put together
a new band, the Breeders. They were scheduled to record
their debut for 4AD but were in need of a drummer. Walford
was game and was soon off to Scotland for two weeks of
studio time with the band and Albini.
Pod was released six months later, in May 1990. Walford was
hardly more than a session player he appears in the liner
notes under a pseudonym, Shannon Doughton but his
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stamp is all over the album. Albini recorded the drums with
the same open, roomy sound of Glenn, and Walfords
drumming remains stark, disciplined, and minimal a far
cry from the bounce of the Pixies David Lovering and a
continued maturation from Walfords busier, jazzier
drumming on Tweez.
In the six months between recording Pod and its release,
Walfords dedication to Slint only grew, as it did with the
other three members. Though Slint did not play out or
practice much between September 1989 and May 1990,
wheels turned nonetheless. Walford and McMahans friend
Corey Rusk agreed to
release Slints next album. He also promised to arrange a
more substantial tour, including Europe, in support of the new
record. Suddenly Slint had become a serious enterprise.
Perhaps recalling the frustrations of Squirrel Baits
experience while on Homestead, McMahan quickly surmised
that the model Slint had worked under for the past two years,
functioning only during school breaks, was untenable. Brian
and Britt kept pushing things along and making us a
productive band, Pajo said. We suddenly had a deadline. It
was a Touch and Go record, and we all loved Touch and Go
records. We understood that it was a big deal.
As Pajo and Brashears school year ended, all four members
returned to Louisville to prepare for their next album, which
they planned to record in the fall for a release after the new
year, to coincide with a European tour. Pajo and Brashear
both agreed to take a full year off of school in order to focus
completely on Slint. That was the big Spiderland year,
Brashear said. I was in an audio engineering program [at
80
Indiana University], and the program was pretty hard to get
into. I had to convince my professor that this had a lot to do
with what I was studying.
They spent the summer practicing intensively, five days a
week in six- or eight-hour stretches. Brashear remembered the
exhausting schedule: I had this job at a wood wall-covering
plant in Indiana [just across the river from Louisville]. Id
work from 7:30 to 3:30,
then I would go home, take a nap, eat dinner, and go to
practice. It was grueling. It was rigorous, but to hear the
band members talk about it, the practice space is where they
thrived. Given their small discography and rare live
appearances Pajo estimated to Punk Planet that Slint
probably played just thirty shows in four years most of the
bandmates memories are wrapped up in their practices. It
was almost like the practices were more important than the
final product, Pajo told me, echoing a sentiment voiced by
McMahan and Walford to Alternative Press in 2005.
The band immersed themselves in the songwriting process. A
year earlier Slint was already playing four of the songs that
would appear on Spiderland. In the summer of 1990,
however, the band revisited each song with new vigor,
analyzing every note and transition. Pajo told me that it was
all about practicing and working out those details. You can
see how we could spend a couple of years trying to get all the
details right. It seemed like even if the most logical answer
was the one we began with, we still had to try every option to
go full circle, on every decision . . . We could spend three
days of practicing trying to find this micro-second between
two basslines. It would be a really small detail but it would be
important enough to us to spend that much time on it. That
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level of attention was not natural to Pajo, who told me that
hes never been in another band situation, from the Palace
Brothers to Tortoise to Zwan to his own solo material, that
examined every nuance of
its songs to the degree that Slint did. I think a lot of that is
partly because Brian was so detail-oriented. He brought out
the OCD in Britt and I as well.
McMahan was extremely critical of both his own ideas and
those of his bandmates. His constant examination of every
note, chord, and transition, according to Pajo, forced everyone
to raise their game. That was the fun part. I had to come up
with better stuff because I knew it was going to be put under
the McMahan Microscope . . . It definitely brought things up
to another level, where we couldnt just settle on the first
thing we came up with.
Part of McMahans skill was in taking parts written by his
bandmates and developing those segments into a cohesive
whole. Brian was really good at arranging, Pajo said. I
remember coming in with some ideas three or four parts
that fit together into a song. The way I would have arranged it
would have been really basic, but he hammered it into a really
dramatic, epic song, using all the same riffs that I came up
with. Brashear had the same experience with his sole
songwriting contribution to Spiderland. Though his basslines
were typically written by Walford, Brashear brought the basic
guitar parts for Breadcrumb Trail to the band. McMahan
and Walford then took those riffs and structured them into the
final version. Im kind of amazed that I even had it in me to
say, Hey, Ive got this song, and that its actually on the
record, Brashear confessed.
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Hearing Pajo and Brashear talk about Slints songwriting
process and what each member brought to the table
especially Walford and McMahan illuminates what makes
the songs on Spiderland feel so transcendent compared with
other bands who mined a similar sound in that era, like Bitch
Magnet or Codeine, as well as compared with much of the
work that members of Slint would later create on their own.
Both Pajo and Walford were so technically skilled that they
approached their instruments with a level of complexity that
escaped the average punk. McMahan, on the other hand, had
an intuitive understanding of the nuances of songwriting, of
how to wring the most drama out of the smallest detail. The
combination of Walford and Pajos technical skill coupled
with McMahans refusal to be satisfied by their ideas pushed
all three to examine and reexamine everything they did. No
detail was too small.
Its easiest to see the effects of this laborious collaboration in
the evolution of Pajos playing from Tweez to Spiderland. His
ostentatious style defined the sound of Slints first album, but
Walford and McMahan refused to repeat themselves. I dont
know if they were very impressed with any of that flashy
stuff. Theyd just look at me, like, Youre a fucking idiot.
Any [guitar store] guy can do that. It was an 80s thing, that
sort of playing. Seeing things from their perspective made me
want to do stuff that was cool but not flashy. It took a while
for me to dampen that part of me, to refocus it.
You can hear the result of that refocusing on Spiderland, as
Pajos leads are more sporadic, shorter, and more nuanced.
The simple recurring note-bending lead riff on Nosferatu
Man, for instance, contributes greatly to the songs overall
eeriness; and the gloriously screaming lead at the climax of
Washer takes that song to its gut-wrenching height. Pajos
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style of playing, once overwhelming, had become a carefully
curated selection of perfectly placed harmonics and off-notes.
Pajos guitar work was enhanced by McMahans, who had a
very different approach. Im a really mechanical player,
Pajo said. I like emotionless, machinelike playing. But Brian
brought more of a human feel to it. That juxtaposition was
exemplified not only in how they played, but how their
guitars sounded another detail the whole band labored
over. Pajo played through a solid-state amplifier, which had
the effect of making his guitar tone colder, while McMahan
honed a warmer, more natural sound from his equipment.
And the attention to detail, with Walfords input, got still
smaller down to the way Pajo and McMahans picks hit
their strings. One facet of Spiderlands legacy is the legion of
bands born in the mid 1990s who insisted on playing their
clean-toned guitars with all downstrokes, influenced by the
tension created by the guitar strums of Don, Aman and the
hypnotic grace of For Dinner . . . All the more fascinating,
therefore, to learn that Slint carefully considered this level of
minutia and that they chose a more subtle tactic. Britt
liked to up-pick, Pajo explained. If you were playing a
Ramones riff, for instance, most people would down-pick it.
But Britt would always up-pick everything, which
emphasized the higher strings. Inspired by Walfords
manner, Pajo and McMahan would play the same guitar part
but McMahan would up-pick while Pajo down-picked,
making for a fuller sound.
How the guitar player literally plays his guitar is usually an
individual, unspoken choice in rock bands, but in Slint this
was the kind of decision made as a unified entity. Slint had
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enveloped themselves, utterly, in their process, savoring the
many small pleasures of refining every element of each song.
Often when preparing for the studio a band will write dozens
of songs and then whittle them down to the ten or twelve best
for a proper album. This was not the case for Slint. Aside
from Pam (which they did record during the Spiderland
sessions), Slint was not working on anything other than what
wound up on the final product. When you consider that Don,
Aman and For Dinner . . . were not written until just
before they hit the studio, the painstaking intensity of Slints
practices from May to September 1990 is all the more
mind-boggling. For four months, five days a week, eight
hours a day, Slint more or less worked on just four songs.
Absolutely every facet of Spiderland every off-note, every
snare
hit, every whisper and shout, was deliberate. The band had
become a machine.
Which was a good thing, because Spiderland was recorded
and mixed in just four days.
85
86
River North
Corey Rusk paid for Slint to record Spiderland, but that didnt
mean that the recording budget was luxurious. The band still
had to call in a few favors to make the album happen, and
they had to be totally focused when it came time to work.
They arranged to record at a studio in Chicago called River
North, where McMahan had interned. Brian somehow
worked it out so we could record there, even though they
didnt do that kind of stuff, Pajo said. They didnt do rock
bands; they were a jingle studio. I dont think Ive ever heard
of another band recording there. Unable to afford the
studios day rates, Slint were only permitted to record at night
over two weekends in September. They recorded the basic
tracks over the first weekend, then returned the following
weekend to mix.
Behind the boards for the session was an engineer named
Brian Paulson, a Minneapolis transplant who befriended
McMahan and Walford through the
Chicago music scene. Earlier that year he had recorded
Bastros second and final full-length, Sing the Troubled
Beast; he was also a friend of Steve Albini, who had turned
Paulson onto Slint not long after Tweez was recorded yet
another instance of Albini proselytizing on Slints behalf.
Albinis influence over whatever opportunities Slint had
cannot be overstated. Going back to his first meeting
McMahan in 1985, Albini was the one who first brought
Squirrel Bait to Chicago and who put the bug in Gerard
Cosloys ear at Homestead. When Squirrel Bait disbanded
87
and McMahan joined Slint, Albini became even more of a
booster. It seems like more people heard Slint not because
they caught a live show but because Albini played them the
then unreleased Tweez recording. Albini recorded the
Glenn/Rhoda single for free. When McMahan and
Walford moved to Chicago he introduced them to many of the
major players in that citys music scene. He arranged for
Walford to record with the Breeders in Scotland, no less!
He was so close to Walford that he let him house-sit while
Albini went on tour (the tale of which is recounted in the
Jesus Lizard song Mouth Breather). Albini was Slints
champion as well as their friend. And yet he did not record
Spiderland.
Neither Pajo nor Brashear would answer why the band chose
to go with Paulson over Albini, each claiming that it was a
decision made by Walford and McMahan, both of whom
declined to be interviewed
for this book. Its difficult to say whether they opted for a
different engineer for aesthetic or personal reasons or simply
due to a scheduling conflict Albini was engineering the
Jesus Lizards second album, Goat, at the exact same time,
literally just a few blocks from River North. Pajo remembers
Albini and the Jesus Lizard guys dropping in to the studio to
see how the session was going. I remember feeling like
Steve was kind of bummed that we didnt have him doing the
record. He was the biggest Slint fan on the planet, and he did
a lot for us. And then we went with somebody else.
Not that Paulson was a slouch. In fact he was an extremely
talented engineer in his own right, as the final product clearly
attests. Albini himself acknowledged to Alternative Press that
they certainly made a better record without me. And Slints
88
friendship with Albini seems not to have suffered; he
continued to champion the band, penning the Melody Maker
review of Spiderland that is widely credited with launching
Spiderlands status as one of the most influential records of
the decade.
* * *
Following the path set by Glenn, Slint had a clear idea of
how they wanted their record to sound. Citing the bands
growing affinity for old folk and delta blues of the 1930s and
1940s, Pajo said the band wanted to capture a similarly
unaffected sound. We had a purist approach to [Spiderland].
We wanted it to be
natural the opposite of Tweez. The blues songs the band
had become so fond of were recorded simply someone put
a microphone up and the performer played live, then it was
done. There were no multiple takes, no studio trickery, no
reverb or compression, no click tracks or punch-ins. All the
beauty of a recording came from the performance.
Approaching the Spiderland session, Slint had spent the
summer putting their songs to tape in a similarly simplified
manner. Using Walfords jam box, they had recorded their
practices so that Walford and McMahan could work on lyrics
and vocals. They had been recording with the jam box for
years, going as far back as the demo Maurice recorded for
Glenn Danzig, and they had grown accustomed to the way
they sounded via those recordings. Brashear went so far as to
claim that there is a version of Glenn recorded on the jam
box that he prefers to the Albini-produced version. We were
all really hot on how this jam box recorded stuff, so maybe
that had something to do with keeping [Spiderland] pretty
89
stripped down. We just liked that unadorned sound so much,
Brashear said.
It was fortunate that the band preferred this aesthetic, because
time was not on their side. Had their sound hinged on studio
experimentation, the album likely wouldnt have been
completed. Not that they didnt have ideas, Pajo recounted:
There was a piano in the room that we were thinking of
micing up putting bricks on the pedals, then recording the
strings that
would resonate in response to the drums. We were still up for
trying stuff like we were on Tweez, but there was a lack of
time.
The lack of time weighed on everyone, making for an
incredibly tense session. Pajo claims that Spiderland is only a
snapshot of where Slint was at that exact moment that
even by that point the band did not consider the songs totally
finished. He emphasized that Slint thrived most not in the
studio but in the practice space, crafting their songs finer
points. Speaking to Alternative Press, McMahan also
downplayed the act of recording in regard to Slints existence
as a band: We tended to refine stuff a lot, but I dont think
we ever thought, Gosh! Weve gotta unload this new batch
of material so we can move on!
Yet its impossible to believe that finally putting these songs
to tape in such a compressed period of time did not
create massive anxiety among all four members. Whether the
band considered the songs finished or not, this was going to
be the permanent document. And it was going to be released
internationally on a label that everyone in the underground
knew and respected. The members of Slint had made
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life-altering choices because of these six songs. No more
college. No safe career path. Forms filed at the passport office
to enable them to tour their new album on the Continent. Here
were four twenty-year-olds who had put the rest of their lives
on hold so they could be Slint. So they could make
Spiderland. And they had
two weekends. No wonder rumors spread years later that
members of Slint were committed to a mental institution
following the recording of Spiderland.
Adding to the stress were the dueling factors of the bands
sense of perfectionism and their seemingly tenuous
understanding of exactly how McMahan and Walfords
vocals would work. Since the band did not own a PA, they
never rehearsed vocals; and the vocal parts they did have
were too difficult for McMahan to sing while playing his
often elaborate guitar parts during live shows. Going into the
studio, neither Brashear nor Pajo had a firm idea of what
McMahan and Walford had planned.
Thats not to say there werent plans, however. McMahan and
Walford had a vision for how their words would sync up with
the music. The two would privately rehearse using practice
recordings and a four-track. Although they would share some
of these demo recordings with Pajo and Brashear for their
feedback, the lyrics and vocal performances were largely a
private collaboration between the two, and were still a work
in progress when they entered the studio.
In an environment where the band couldnt afford to dwell for
too long on any one song, this complicated matters, as Pajo
described: We were changing the songs even in the studio. I
remember Brian kept changing the lyrics for Good Morning,
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Captain, and the whole arrangement would have to shift in
response to his lyrics. He would say a couple of lines and then
wed do a guitar
break and then hed say some more. So if he changed the
words or if he added or took away a verse wed have to
change how many times we did a section.
Other frustrations arose, adding to the general sense of
anxiety. Brashear, known among the band as a very
business-minded, hyper-responsible guy, became agitated by
the painstaking perfectionism of his friends. His eyes were
constantly on the clock. There was a lot of time spent tuning
drums and tuning guitars . . . I remember Britt, right when we
got there, decided he wanted to get all new cymbals. So on
the studio time we had to go to some music store and wait for
him. Im like, Coreys paying this bill, and youre down here
picking up cymbals?! At the end of the day it turned out to
be a good record, so who am I to say he shouldnt have? [But]
back then I thought, God, I cant believe hes doing this.
Whatever time was eaten up by prepping and tuning and
massaging the vocals was made up for by the bands sheer
musical prowess. The months of constant practice had turned
Slint into a machine. They recorded everything live Pajo
says he may have done one overdub on the whole record
and in very few takes. Im sure some of the stuff on the
album is the first take, Brashear told me. Pajo agreed, citing
again the documentarian approach of the old blues records
the band were into at the time. If it sounded right enough, if
there wasnt a major mistake, we moved on to the next song.
Once again the disconnect between how Slint functioned
leading up to the session and how they functioned in the
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studio makes itself apparent. After spending months laboring
over the most minute details, the brevity of the session
seemed to transform their mindset. How a band could go from
spending an entire practice day thinking about how their
guitarists pick their strings to accepting a take that is right
enough seems mystifying. When I phrased this schism to
Pajo during our interview, he laughed as if hed never
considered it this way before, offering only that we werent
thinking straight. Given the time constraints, thinking
straight was likely not an option.
Further discombobulation came in the form of two new songs
Walford and McMahan unveiled at the last minute a serene
instrumental called For Dinner . . . and a drumless
story-song written by Walford called Don, Aman. Theyd
practiced the former at least a few times prior to entering the
studio, but Pajo learned Don literally right before they
recorded. It was Walfords brainchild: he wrote the lyrics and
music and spoke the lead vocal part. Brashear recalls that
Don was the most time-consuming of the songs they laid
down that weekend, especially because of a small detail at the
end, where Walford wanted a distorted guitar to briefly fade
back in after the song was over.
Over the course of my interviews with them, both Pajo and
Brashear took pains to emphasize that McMahan and Walford
were responsible for the lions
share of the material on Spiderland drums, bass, guitars,
lyrics, and vocals. Pajo even went so far as to say that
McMahan and Walford are Slint. Its not unusual for one or
two band members to guide the sound and direction of a band,
but hearing stories of Slints time in the studio brings to light
how much of a grasp McMahan and Walford had on the big
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picture, above and beyond Pajo and Brashears
understanding. Slint practices so intensely for months,
shaping all four members into a unified entity with a finger on
every nuance, entering the studio only to have Walford pull
out a totally new song that seemed to spring whole cloth from
his mind; to have McMahan experiment with the arrangement
of Good Morning, Captain to suit lyrics he had barely
shared prior to recording; and, in the case of Washer, to
have McMahan introduce a totally new element that had
never been done in a Slint song before singing. McMahan
and Walford seemed to possess an ambition for the album that
their bandmates had only glimpsed prior to entering the
studio.
McMahans performance on Washer is the surest indication
of this ambition. Though considered the bands singer,
McMahan had never actually sung before. Everything on
Tweez, and the Spiderland songs theyd demoed, featured
McMahan speaking or screaming (aside from Walfords
spoken contributions to Nosferatu Man). McMahan was not
comfortable doing lead vocals of any kind, especially
considering
hed only practiced in privacy, performing for no one except
perhaps Walford. It only added to the level of stress in the
studio. Id never heard any of those lyrics until we got in the
studio, Brashear said. Im sure he was stressed out about
recording vocals because thats not something he was ever
comfortable with. It even said on the record, Interested
female singers . . . Even after the record was out, he was still
[trying to find someone else to do the job].
Washer had to have been the most nerve-wracking for
McMahan. His performance is incredibly naked, its
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awkwardness only enhancing its honesty. Yet Pajo says the
performance is a quintessential example of McMahans
exacting nature. Though no one in the band had heard him
sing the song before, that didnt mean he hadnt rehearsed
obsessively. He was actually really deliberate about the way
he phrased everything [on Washer], even which verses to
pull back on. Thats where hes a genius. He knows how to
get a lot of drama out of a performance. He wrote these
amazing lyrics and then he was able to present them in a way
that got the most emotion out of it.
For anyone who knew Slint already, Washer was shocking.
Quiet, dramatic, sensitive, gut-wrenching none of these
adjectives described the Slint that had existed from 1986 to
mid 1990. The song is the most explicit distillation of what
Slint had become. Spiderland was an album to be reckoned
with. In its preparation, composition, production, and
performance, Spiderland
was an astonishing departure from Tweez not to mention a
departure from the sound any of Slints peers were making at
the time. In two weekends, Slint had unknowingly made a
record whose reverberations are still being felt today.
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Spiderland
Spiderlands legacy will forever be linked to its dynamics.
Although the shift from quiet to loud passages can be traced
back to rocks earliest days (never mind classical, opera,
gospel, Broadway, and blues), Slint may have been the first to
make the tactic explicit to play really quiet, then really
loud and to make it doubly pronounced by using the same
exaggerated juxtapositions on almost every song in the course
of one album. Rock bands of every era utilized dynamic
changes: the Beatles dropped I Want You (Shes So Heavy)
into the middle of Abbey Road; the Velvet Underground
closed out Loaded with the slow-building O! Sweet
Nuthin; psychedelic acts like Pink Floyd and the 13th Floor
Elevators bounded from simmering looniness to balls-out
crazy; Joy Division, Wire, and the Fall all employed dramatic
breakdowns against their usual post-punk paces; Talk Talks
Spirit of Eden, released in 1988 and considered another early
landmark of the post-rock genre, resembles Spiderland in
some ways thanks to its atmospherics, slow builds, and
occasional bursts into high volume. Even contemporaries of
Slint, like Bitch Magnet or Codeine or Galaxie 500,
experimented with turning the volume way down in the
context of punk rock.
1 Yet Spiderland somehow makes its use of dynamics feel
new, making it a kind of calling card for the band. Twenty
years later, any band that makes a pronounced shift from
spare to discordant passages in the space of one track runs the
risk of being dubbed Slinty.
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To describe Spiderland in such terms, however, risks the
implication that the album is formulaic, which it certainly
isnt. Sloughing off Slint as a band that gets quiet, then loud
paves over the sophistication of their arrangements. The band
employed a number of subtle tools and tricks on each of
Spiderlands six songs, all of which enhanced the large-scale
drama and
small-scale nuances. Quiet, then loud could not be more
limiting in its description. Spiderland is (roughly in order)
innocent, soaring, creepy, disorienting, tense, maddening,
lush, harrowing, somber, ominous, surging, and desperate. In
other words, for all the manner in which Slint travel from
quiet to loud and back again, they never really do it the same
way twice. A closer look at how Slint treated their dynamics
gives some insight into why Spiderland has endured as an
influential album while so many Slint-like also-rans, many of
whom simply played quiet, then loud, have faded away.
No song on the album illustrates Slints dynamic legacy more
literally than the opening track, Breadcrumb Trail. In the
song McMahan narrates, in first person, the story of a visit to
a carnival full of rides, games, and professional parlor
tricksters. When the songs protagonist enters the tent of a
fortune-teller, he impulsively asks her if shed like to ride a
roller coaster instead. She agrees, and they share the thrill of
the ride, clutching hands and screaming to each other as the
car rockets up and down. When its over, they part ways.
The plot of Breadcrumb Trail follows a bell-like arc:
peaceful and unassuming at the beginning and end (meeting
and saying goodbye to the fortune-teller); charged and electric
in the middle (riding the roller coaster together). Musically,
the songs structure mirrors the rising and falling action. It
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opens with a warm, almost nursery-rhyme-like riff while the
protagonist
walks the midway, then explodes into a swinging middle
section while the couple takes the thrill ride. Swooping in
waltz time from a low D chord to a high-pitched zing a few
octaves up, the guitars here literally take on the action of a
roller coaster, crashing down and whisking up over and over.
Punctuating the roller coaster ride is the songs subplot
yes, it has a subplot signaled by the musics shift into a
jagged stop-start riff in 5/4 that moves the action from the
peak of the roller coaster to the ground, where a ticket-taker
observes the other fairgoers as he exerts his control over the
ride. The character adds a more menacing element to the story
he teases a sickened girl and tells her she must stay on the
ride though his presence ultimately amounts to nothing.
When the couple exits the ride and returns to the ground, so
too does the music return to its original innocent riff.
Though the ticket-taker is not terribly essential to the songs
story, his presence does underline the way McMahan and
Walford wrote their lyrics in response to their arrangements.
The characters and action in Breadcrumb Trail are married
to their riffs with the attentiveness of a Broadway musical.
The action on the roller coaster is confined to the roller
coaster riff; the ticket-taker only appears in the ticket-taker
riff; the protagonist and fortune-tellers feet are on the
ground only during the segment that opens and closes the
song. Paired with its lyrics, the music of Breadcrumb Trail
seems almost manipulative in the
ease with which it carries the listener from one part of the
carnival to the other.
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The direct connection between character or action and riff or
song section shows up elsewhere on Spiderland as well. All
of Slints songs were methodically honed as instrumentals,
with the lyrics painted over top by McMahan and Walford
well after the mood of the song was set. This is why the
content of the lyrics might seem so rigidly pinned to the way
the instruments interact with each other. You can imagine the
thought occurring to McMahan or Walford, Hey, the middle
section of Breadcrumb Trail swings up and down; lets
make the song about a roller coaster; likewise the sinister
sound of Nosferatu Man, the earliest developed song on the
album, must have begged for a sinister story line. Decidedly
darker both in its music and lyrical content, the songs gothic
imagery is accentuated by Pajos spindly lead motif which
creeps over McMahans churning chords, mechanically
rolling in time to Walfords disorienting beat.
As with Breadcrumb Trail, the action of the story seems
tailored to each riff. Vice versa, the music does its share of
work in filling in the storys details, such as in the first verse:
I live in a castle.
I am a prince.
On days I try
to please my queen.
The simple lines are notably free of adjectives; instead, all
descriptive duties are left to the music. Anyone with even a
passing familiarity with vampire stories fills in the details of
what kind of castle this is dreary, dark, foreboding
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because the music has set the scene. Walfords snapping snare
propels the music forward while McMahan, Pajo, and
Brashear each play mutated versions of the same riff
McMahan plays an ascending chord progression, Pajo
descending, while Brashear picks at a higher note to add an
eerie undertone to the guitars interlocking chords. Between
every four spoken lines Pajos high-pitched lead enhances the
chilling atmosphere with its distorting half-notes and bending
strings.
As in Breadcrumb Trail the action and the characters seem
tied to which riff is being played. Both verses depict a
relatively static portrait of the prince and queen, inside their
castle. With the shift to the chorus sections loud,
aggressive, more muscular than scary so too does the
scenery and character dynamic change. In these sections the
prince is outside of his castle, caught up in a chase with a
mortal girl, the queen nowhere to be seen. Meeting the girl in
the first chorus, she is a trespasser on the castle grounds,
frightened away by the prince:
Like a bat I flushed the girl
as I flew out my back door.
I came to no one no more
she ran with no glances
and railed like a red coal train.
In contrast to the inert content of the verses, the chorus
sections are all action, matching the ampedup music. He
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flew; she ran with no glances and railed like a red coal
train. In the second chorus the tables are turned and the girl
chases the prince away. The prince is set in a whirl; the girl
set[s] a fire burning as the prince railed on through the
night. The verbs in the chorus sections are more aggressive,
the characters are moving at a clip. As the music shifts from
quiet to loud, the lyrics also shift from static to active verbs.
Nosferatu Man contains probably the most rudimentary
quiet verse / loud chorus on the album. On the heels of
Breadcrumb Trail, it becomes apparent how this element of
the bands sound became synonymous with Slint-as-adjective.
But at the same time Nosferatu Man feels less concerned
with its juxtapositions and more focused on creating intensity
through rhythm. The song is dizzying in its jumps from one
time signature to the next. The first verse is in 5/4, followed
by a pause in which Walford clicks a single bar in 3/4 before
the band launches into a chorus in 6/4. They repeat this
pattern for the second verse and chorus before moving to the
bridge, where things get especially complicated. Story-wise
the chase between the prince and the girl escalates into a
cat-and-mouse
game. The music reflects this polyrhythmically as the band
splices into two separate but simultaneous meters, in effect
circling each other. Walford hunkers down into a
quarter-note-based kick/snare rhythm while Pajo, McMahan,
and Brashear play a series of triplets, floating in and out of
phase with Walford, who occasionally adds an extra beat to
keep things from spiraling into cacophony. They sync up
again for a third verse in 5/4, in which the princes teeth
touched her skin, then unravel again into an extended
polyrhythmic bridge this time evened out to stay locked
into Walfords steady quarter note before Walford and
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Brashear return to the 6/4 chorus section while Pajo and
McMahan continue to stab at their stop-start chords in three.
The song finally concludes with the girl gone and the prince
holding his dead queen. The band lands together on a final G
chord, dangling ominously in the air as the prince remains
alone.
One can look at the two halves of Nosferatu Man and see
the two sides of Slints reverberating influence: the
easy-to-duplicate dynamic back-and-forth of the first two and
a half minutes, followed by an escalation to a level of
musicianship that is the antithesis of indie or alternative
rocks roots in punk, a genre born from an embrace of attitude
at the expense of technical skill. Spiderland is a fork in the
road for the evolution of underground rock: an album that
inspired countless kids previously weaned on the ethos that
anyone can do it, made by a band of musicians who did it
better.
While the rhythms on Spiderland dont get any more
complicated than the dazzling conclusion to Nosferatu
Man, the bands skill remains on display. This is especially
apparent in the way that much of the rest of the album
deviates from the template set by the opening pair of songs.
Don, Aman is the most explicit departure. Where every
other song on Spiderland is precisely composed, the entire
band turning up and down like a machine, Don is rough and
rushed. In the overall sequencing of the album, the foreboding
tone of Nosferatu Man might be heard as a bridge from the
niceties of Breadcrumb Trail to the alienation of Don.
Closing out the first half of the album, Don is a pivot point
away from the dramatic rises and falls and toward an
interior-minded, self-conscious, depressed atmosphere.
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Though the song features no drums whatsoever, the spotlight
here is almost entirely on Walford, who wrote the music and
most of the lyrics.
2 Here the drummer, a driving songwriting force dating back
to Maurices earliest days, finally steps away from his drum
kit, taking up lead vocals as well as playing McMahans
guitar. Pajo is the only other musician on the track, essentially
following Walfords lead.
Despite the skeletal nature of the song, it still contains no
small amount of drama. Telling the story of a man
quietly suffering a paranoid panic attack while at a party, the
song is a giant frayed nerve. Walford and Pajo play a halting,
fragile guitar riff full of pauses and awkward phrasings as
Don stands outside of a house, alone, kicking himself over
something hed said while inside. Unlike the prior two songs,
which involve a cast of characters, Walfords lyrics stick
tightly to the psyche of a single man who is at odds with
himself. Don is conflicted, and the drama of the song lies in
his battle with himself, choosing at different times to conquer
or embrace his self-hatred. Evoking this split in Dons
personality, Walford and Pajos guitars are mirrors of each
other literally, they are played like reflections. The tones
of the guitars are in stark contrast to each other, one warm,
one cold. Walfords guitar is panned slightly toward the right
in the mix, Pajos panned left. Additionally, Pajo hits every
chord on the downstroke, Walford on the upstroke; you can
hear the scrape of Walfords fingers on his strings, while
Pajos downward strum emphasizes the bassier element of the
same chord.
These subtle, premeditated differences keep the two guitars
from sounding like mere overdub. Often on recordings a
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guitarist might record the same part twice as a way of making
the instrument sound thicker, meatier (similar to the way a
singer like Elliott Smith might double-track his vocal to make
his voice sound fuller). By playing the same part in two
contrasting tones, separated in the mix, the notes specifically
picked from opposing angles, Walford and Pajo effectively
make the
music sound like a fractured version of what should be a
singular, unified whole. Its a perfect complement to poor,
nervous Don, who manages to convince himself to return to
the party.
When he re-enters the house the pace of the song, like his
pulse, accelerates. As Walford describes Dons
hyper-sensitivity, the guitar strums quicken to a steady,
anxious rhythm a single chord, only the root note changing
every two bars. The hypnotic high notes become tense, the
shifting root note a tick-tocking paranoia. As Dons silent
panic becomes more and more acute, Pajo adds a few
rhythmic, sharp harmonics, like tiny daggers stabbing at
Dons ego. Soon enough Dons anxiety overtakes him and he
once again ejects himself from the party, this time for good.
As he gets into his car and drives wildly into the night,
literally howling at the moon, Walfords guitar tumbles into
distortion to reflect Dons unhinging.
This is hardly the towering dynamics of Breadcrumb Trail
or the anguished climaxes of Washer or Good Morning,
Captain. The upward shift here is clumsy, even weak. No
bass or drums kick in to bring Dons wild ride to an apex.
You can practically hear Walfords foot click on his distortion
pedal, just a hair behind the beat, accentuating the
awkwardness of the transition. And it doesnt last. The song
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soon winds down, as if, like the car Don is driving, it has run
out of gas. In the light of the morning, the guitars again
unified yet distinct, Don has come to terms with himself: In
the
mirror, he saw his friend. Were the song to end on this
plodding riff, the guitars in quiet unison as Don reconciles his
two sides, one might think that Don has seen the error of his
self-loathing. But like a trick movie credit The end . . . or
is it?! that maddening distorted guitar briefly fades in,
then back out, leaving Dons story open and unsettled.
Spiderland is a tense album, and that is due in large part to the
way Slint withhold one element or another during their louder
moments, such as the clumsy and brief single-guitar outburst
in Don, which makes the characters alienation and
impotence all the more deeply felt. Washer, which begins
the albums second half, is an even more compelling
illustration of how such withholding dramatically increases
the impact of its climax. Though the song may begin as a kind
of lullaby, it unfolds as something altogether more tortured,
eventually reaching a plateau as powerful and affecting as the
more celebrated conclusion to Good Morning, Captain. The
reason the songs zenith is so visceral is because of the way
its drama is earned. Washer attempts, three times, to reach
some sort of sonic release, but it only succeeds once. Where a
song like Breadcrumb Trail is a symbol of the ease with
which a band can manipulate the dichotomy of quiet and loud
as easy as riding a rollercoaster up and down Washer
is the best example of why Slint transcended their dynamics.
The band spends nearly seven minutes laying the groundwork
for its eventual payoff.
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Washer begins quietly so quiet, in fact, you might not
realize the band have even begun if your volume is not high
enough. Its an all-downstroke descending chord progression
a subtle bit of fore-shadowing for the songs eventual
climax, though at the start it seems to be played so casually
you might think Pajo or McMahan were just noodling around
waiting for the rest of the group to start up.
Twenty seconds in they do, as Washer announces
Spiderlands second half with a new lushness. Pajo and
McMahans guitars intertwine in intricate, ringing arpeggios
while Brashears minimalist bassline accentuates Walfords
sparse drumming. Though not without an underlying
melancholy there is a string of despair running from Don
all the way to the end of the record Washer feels warm.
Following Dons anxious strumming, the first few minutes
of Washer are a welcome comfort. When McMahans voice
comes in singing, up high in the mix Washer reveals
itself as a totally different animal from Spiderlands other
tracks. Of the sixteen songs that Slint ever put to tape,
Washer is the only one that features actual singing
tentative, naked, honest singing. McMahans high voice and
sometimes awkward phrasing only adds to the intimacy. It
doesnt feel like a song the rest of us are supposed to hear.
All of the other songs on Spiderland are told, in a way, at
arms length. Aside from the somnambulant instrumental
For Dinner . . ., each of the other four
songs on the album feature vocals spoken like short stories,
and most are in third person. Their fictional settings transform
them into movie-like entertainments. Nosferatu Man and
Breadcrumb Trail dazzle with their odd time signatures,
Good Morning, Captain with its inspired arrangement.
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Don, Amans stripped down intensity is upsetting.
Washer, by contrast, is played softly in 4/4 time with
discernable verse sections in which McMahan sings lyrics
rather than speaks sentences. Even the subject matter is
comforting in its familiarity: How many songs in your
collection are about losing love? How many are about
vampires or shipwrecks?
Slint use this familiarity to their advantage, lulling the listener
with a prettiness heretofore unheard on the album. Yet as the
song progresses its dark edge is revealed; though the lyrics
are often elliptical and vague, by songs end Washer feels
less about a lover skipping out in the dead of night (fill your
pockets with the dust of a memory / that rises from the shoes
on my feet is about the most poetic kiss-off Ive ever heard),
and more about suicide by sleeping pills. The gravity of the
situation seems to increase with each verse the first two
about a lover walking boldly into the darkness; the third, told
from the partners perspective, a desperate plea (please,
listen to me / dont let go); and the final verse the lovers
acceptance of his fate (Im too tired now / embracing
thoughts / of tonights / dreamless sleep).
The music of Washer teases out the drama by dropping into
a series of builds with each passing verse, each more
emphatic than the last yet denying a crescendo. By contrast,
McMahans vocal delivery seems to get quieter as the song
goes on. His performance is perfectly attuned to the content
of his lyrics. The first two verses are sung with some level of
conviction he enunciates every word, singing at an
intelligible volume. His lyrics are brave I know its dark
outside / dont be afraid / every time I ever cried for fear / was
just a mistake that I made. Meanwhile the music of
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Washer, up to this point, has been fairly straightforward.
Pajo and McMahans intertweaving arpeggios, a mixture of
romance and melancholy, have been the definitive musical
element. For the first three and a half minutes of the song, its
the only significant riff other than the near-silent introduction
and a few simple chords letting McMahans voice carry each
verse. The song retains a simple pattern riff/verse/riff/
verse/riff through the tail of the second verse, at which
point the music shifts to reflect the increasing gravity of the
story. Walford switches to his toms, creating a rolling tension
as Brashear, Pajo, and McMahan each begin a slow build. But
this rising wave dissipates before it can crash, morphing into
another entwined riff one guitar picking a complicated
arpeggio while the other drops in a few well-placed chords,
Brashear pushing things along as he slides up and down the
neck of his bass. The new riff lasts just two bars before
returning to the original anchoring arpeggio.
The third verse, a plea from the partners perspective, is sung
with more desperation. Its first word please barely a
whisper, and the rest of the verse only slightly more audible
than that. For the first time in the song there is a real inkling
of finality. Where in the first verse McMahan sings I wont
be back here / though we may meet again, here the partners
words are more fatalistic: promise me the sun will rise
again. McMahans voice by now is weak, absolutely without
strength, as if the partner lacks any belief that the promise
could be fulfilled. Through his change in inflection,
McMahan has tapped into the despair that has underlined the
song from the start.
As if in answer to the newfound tone of finality in the lyrics,
the music becomes more intent. Where each of the first two
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verses landed on the cushion of the songs main riff, the third,
with urgency, falls right into the darker riff introduced earlier,
in which one guitar plays an arpeggio while the other
punctuates with chords; this time the second guitar plays with
more insistence, while Walfords kick drum gains prominence
in the mix. This subtle change adds a layer of fatalism
there is no going back. We march forward. As the guitar
playing the more complicated part changes back to the songs
main riff as if trying to steer back to safer waters the
second guitar, bass, and drums continue their march. Then,
for the second time, the music drops into near silence, steadily
building toward a climax, rising higher than before only
to be squelched by two sharp hits from Walfords snare, like a
slamming door.
The snare pushes everything to silence as McMahan utters the
final verse:
Im too tired now
Embracing thoughts
Of tonights
Dreamless sleep
My head is empty
My toes are warm
I am safe
From harm.
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Again McMahans performance is a deliberate reflection of
the action. Gone is the boldness of the first two verses. His
voice becomes weaker, his phrases more elongated.
McMahan literally sings as if hes fighting sleep; you can
hear the lovers pauses as he trickles out the words
Embracing thoughts . . . of tonights . . . dreamless sleep.
That last phrase is, obviously by now, yet another indication
that the sun, in fact, will not rise again. Lyrically McMahan
connects back to the fearlessness described in the second
verse. He knows its dark, he is not afraid. Passing from life
to death, he feels safe from harm. McMahan holds the note of
the last word literally, the lovers last word and then,
midway through the hold, drops in an overdub of himself
singing that word again, to ghostly effect.
Underneath McMahans words, the band plays the original
descending chord progression that began the song. At first
they play it so quietly that you might think McMahan was
singing a cappella but over the course of the forty seconds
it takes for McMahan to sing the last verse, the progression
gradually intensifies. As McMahans final word reverberates
the build increases more and more until finally finally
Washer hits its crescendo. The band is at full roar as Pajos
lead guitar lets out an anguished wail it could not be a
more visceral embodiment of grief.
By now the truly epic nature of Spiderland is apparent. But
this is not accomplished solely by Washers traumatic
climax. The overall pacing of the album is a display of Slints
grasp of dynamics on a macro scale. The CD issue of
Spiderland contains the message This album was meant to
be listened to on vinyl. Surely its a statement of the bands
audiophile nature, but it also speaks to the composition of the
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six tracks. Spiderland was devised as two halves. Side A is a
descent from the top of the rollercoaster in Breadcrumb
Trail to the depths of Dons depression. From this rock
bottom, the second side rises dramatically with Washer,
which concludes with one of the albums highest peaks. Yet
just as the individual songs need their quiet moments to
enhance the drama of the loud, so too do the albums peaks
need their valleys. The quiet simplicity of the instrumental
For Dinner . . ., in contrast to the rest of the record, makes it
an all the more essential track.
For Dinner . . . is sandwiched between Spiderlands two
most dramatic songs, giving the listener a needed mourning
period following from Washers conclusion and the chance
to regroup before the albums grand finale still to come. In
some ways it feels like a connecting thread between the two
songs. The rising and releasing builds resemble the three
builds in Washer, while the steady pace of the guitar strums
match the intro to Good Morning, Captain. It is the shortest
and simplest song on the album, and also the most elegant.
For five minutes the track ebbs and flows, a series of softly
rising builds that evaporate before they can release. The song
is the low tide to the rest of Spiderlands tsunami waves.
The constant waxing and waning of For Dinner . . . is more
than a mere holding pattern. It is also a subtle take by the
band on Spiderlands most defining element, its dynamics.
For Dinner . . . is dynamic in its own right, actually
containing more ups and downs than any other track on the
album the only difference being the short journey from the
quietest moments to the loudest. Its not the stark
juxtaposition of whispering and shouting, but rather the
dramatic distance between a breath and a sigh.
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Brashears lulling bass, a constant picking of one note at low
volume kept in time by a simple hi-hat count from Walford,
acts as the baseline (excuse the pun) from which the action of
the song constantly rises and returns. From this zero point the
song swells
nine times in five minutes. The first build, and another near
the two-minute mark, rise a little higher and last a little longer
than the rest in the first half of the song. The others are short
inhalations, each building for a few seconds but always
receding back to the baseline. At the midpoint of the song,
following one of these soft swells, the band drifts below the
zero point to near silence, then builds up to the most jarring
point a terse punch of chords that abruptly end, only for
the band to once again start back at equilibrium. Another soft
build and return follows, and finally the volume rises again, a
single, bright major chord that the band plays repeatedly for
the final minute of the song. If For Dinner . . . has the rising
and falling rhythm of someone fast asleep, then the last sixty
seconds are the sound of awakening, the filling of ones lungs
with new air. This last minute is Spiderlands most serene
moment a hopeful conclusion in contrast to the hanging
chord of Nosferatu Man, the lurking distortion of Don,
Aman, the traumatic climax of Washer, the anguished
screams of Good Morning, Captain.
For Dinner . . . is so unassuming it threatens to pass by
unnoticed. Yet when you consider the long gestation of
Spiderland, its minimalist nuance gives some indication of
where Slint might have been headed had they remained
together. Consider the order in which these six songs were
written: Nosferatu Man, Good Morning, Captain, and
Breadcrumb Trail are the
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oldest songs on the album, all dating back to 198889. These
are, not coincidentally, also Spiderlands most sonically
similar tracks. In their quiet/loud formats and storyteller
lyrics, these are the most definitively Slint-like the
sound one has in mind when describing something that
sounds like Slint. Washer was the next to be written; an
early live version dates back to early 1989, though it is far
less developed than the other three songs which also appear
on bootlegs from this era. This early version of Washer is
much more rudimentary, moving straight from the main riff to
a clear-cut build that lacks any of the finesse of the final
version. By the fall of 1990 Washer had been ironed out
into a vastly more accomplished work.
That leaves For Dinner . . . and Don, Aman, both of
which indicate that Slint was ready to move on to less overtly
dynamic material. Don was the very last song to come
along, but it sprang almost entirely from Walford at the
eleventh hour. For Dinner . . . was also a recent
composition; it was the last song to be written during Slints
summer of intense practices. Unlike Don, the instrumental
was worked out by all four members of the group, then
arranged by McMahan and Walford.
The subtleties of For Dinner . . . might have been a destined
direction for Slint, if their post-Slint solo work is any
indication. For McMahan in particular, it seems a direct
forebear to his later work under the moniker the For
Carnation. In his three releases, which
at times included contributions from Pajo (1995s Fight
Songs) and Walford (2000s self-titled full-length), McMahan
mined to great effect songs whose drama was earned not by
dynamic changes but by nuance and repetition. The roots of
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For Carnation songs like Get and Stay Get March or
Preparing to Receive You (from Fight Songs and 1996s
Marshmallows, respectively) can be discerned in For Dinner
. . . Pajo, too, largely abandoned the obvious dynamics of
Spiderland in his solo material as M, Aerial M, and Papa M.
Aside from Safeless, from his debut 7, Pajos moody
instrumentals rarely scale such dramatic arcs as so many of
the songs on Spiderland do.
Of course, neither the For Carnation nor Papa M are Slint.
Yet there is still evidence that Slint were more attracted to
repetition and a kind of rock minimalism than they were to
Spiderland-esque rises and falls. Walford, McMahan, and
Pajo did briefly reform Slint in 1994 (with Walfords
Evergreen bandmate Tim Ruth rounding things out),
coinciding with Touch and Gos release finally! of the
Glenn/Rhoda EP. Unfortunately the reunion didnt last
long, as Walford exited the project early on. During this
period of renewed activity, however, the trio worked out a
new song, Kings Approach, which was not officially
recorded but did show up during Slints reunion tours in 2005
and 2007. The song, as performed on those tours, is a
ten-minute epic instrumental with sudden tempo shifts and
slowly unfolding motifs. Though it
hardly resembles the graceful For Dinner . . ., it is similarly
built around repetition the songs middle section stretches
out for most of the ten minutes before finally picking up into
a fast-paced denouement.
In other words, for anyone who wished Slint might have
remained together so as to squeeze out one more Good
Morning, Captain, it arguably wouldnt have been in the
cards. Its ironic to think how influential Spiderlands
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dynamics turned out to be, inspiring younger, less imaginative
bands to build their sounds around crescendo after crescendo;
meanwhile it seems that by the fall of 1990 Slint had already
grasped, first, that Spiderland needed songs like For Dinner .
. . and Don, Aman so as not to come off as formulaic; and
second, that such peaks and valleys were not what interested
them the most. No one affiliated with Slint ever bothered to
write another song like Good Morning, Captain. After
writing a handful of songs of that nature, they seem to have
tired of the format before they even entered the studio.
Regardless, Good Morning, Captain has become the most
widely identified and cherished Slint song. This is due in part
to its inclusion on the soundtrack to Larry Clarks
controversial 1995 film Kids, which depicted the scandalously
irresponsible sex lives of a clutch of unsupervised New York
City youngsters. Today both the film and the soundtrack are
memorable if not especially influential relics of the mid 90s.
Shocking plot points aside, the titular kids in the film,
all non-actors at the time, carried themselves like an authentic
subset of teens of that decade skaters, slackers, goofs. The
music permeating the film matched the sensibilities of
post-grunge white kids of the era hip-hop by the likes of
the Beastie Boys, Tribe Called Quest, and Jeru the Damaja,
shuffled un-self-consciously with (mostly lo-fi) indie rock.
The soundtrack was assembled by Lou Barlow, himself a
poster child for underground rock in the 90s (the guy wrote
Gimme Indie Rock, after all, on Sebadohs 1991 album III).
In contrast to the actual music in the film, the soundtrack
leaned much heavier toward indie rock, especially the music
of Barlows band with John Davis, Folk Implosion. A lone
hip-hop track by unknown duo Lo-Down accompanied two
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tracks by Daniel Johnston, an old Sebadoh song, eight Folk
Implosion songs and Good Morning, Captain.
Ever the band to flirt with obscurity, Slints song doesnt
actually appear anywhere in the film; you had to buy the
soundtrack to be exposed to it. Fortuitously, Kids scored one
big hit, Folk Implosions Natural One. The song made it to
#29 on Billboards Hot 100 and #4 on its Modern Rock chart.
Its ubiquity assured that the soundtrack would sell, and thus
Good Morning, Captain weaseled its way into the stereos of
kids across the country, many of whom, in 1995, were likely
still unaware of Slint or Spiderlands existence.
Its the closest Slint ever came to releasing, in a way, a single
an odd proposition for an album as
inaccessible as Spiderland seemed. If ever there were a
calling card for the album, however, Good Morning,
Captain is it. It is the quintessential Spiderland song,
containing all of the albums archetypal elements epic
structure, short-story lyrics, mountainous dynamics, an
unpredictable and sophisticated arrangement plus the
unique bonus of a totally fulfilling climax. Good Morning,
Captain brings Spiderland full circle, returning to the sonic
stylings of the first two tracks, wielding the emotional impact
of Washer, and finally providing a cathartic release for all
the tension that had been building to mostly unsettling
conclusions for the rest of the album.
The song tells the story of a stranded seaman trying to find
shelter after a storm has taken his ship and his crew. The
hobbled captain pleads from outside the front door of a house
on the coastline, at first to no answer and later to a child who
seems to recognize him but does not let him in, leaving the
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captain to wail in desperation outside. It has been said that
McMahans lyrics are a riff on Samuel Taylor Coleridges
179798 poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Its possible
thats true, though the connection is tenuous at best. In
Coleridges poem, the mariner recounts a sea voyage toward
the South Pole. Caught in a horrific storm, the ship is forced
further south to escape the foul weather. Though safe from
the storm, the ship finds itself trapped among ice floes
until a bird, an albatross, appears from the mist to guide the
crew to safety. The
bird stays with the ship for nine days as they head to warmer
waters yet in a sudden and senseless act of violence, the
mariner casually shoots it dead. With this act, the ship is
cursed. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, now under a
burning sun, the winds cease and the ship is left adrift. A
skeleton ship approaches and as it passes, the mariners
shipmates all 200 of them drop dead. For seven days
the mariner is stranded in the still water with his ship of
corpses, until he sees and blesses some ocean creatures,
thankful just to see a living thing. With that, the dead crew
rises and, as zombies, steer the mariner back to his home. He
lives his remaining days telling his ghostly tale to any who
will listen.
This is clearly not the plot to Good Morning, Captain. Still,
one might detect the kernel of the idea for the song, though
McMahans tale goes far afield. As in the poem, a storm
wreaks havoc on a ship in icy waters. But in the Slint song the
vessel is lost and the action of the story takes place on land.
The content of the song is so far removed from Coleridges
poem that its almost laughable to try and connect the two.
However, there is one other surface similarity to the poem
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Good Morning, Captain is a ghost story, as revealed in the
last verse of the song:
From behind the edge of the windowsill there appeared the
delicate hand of a child. His face was flushed and
timid. He stared at the captain through frightened eyes. The
captain reached for something to hold onto. Help me, he
whispered, as he rose slowly to his feet. The boys face went
pale. He recognized the sound. Silently, he pulled down the
shade against the shadow lost at the doorstep of the empty
house.
The boy is frightened by the captains appearance, then is
startled to recognize the captains voice, at which point he
pulls down the window shade and does not open the door.
The captain is nothing more than a shadow whom the boy
fears and rejects. This isnt the ghost crew of Coleridges
poem, but a supernatural element is nonetheless implied.
Whether the gloss on Rime of the Ancient Mariner is
intentional or coincidental, one thing that is clear is how far
Slint had come since Tweezs Darlene, their first shot at the
story-song form. No longer stammering I knew these two
people, a guy and a girl, Slint were now onto brief
encounters, Oedipal vampires, a character study of a paranoid
misanthrope, a suicidal lover, and ghostly seafarers. Walford
and McMahan had grown confident enough in their writing to
introduce multiple characters, subplots, scene-setting, and
narrative arcs.
The spoken-word song has a history in rock music that well
predates Slint going back to the Velvet Undergrounds
story-song The Gift from 1968s
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White Light/White Heat, through (among other examples) Lee
Renaldo narrating In the Kingdom #19 on Sonic Youths
1986 album EVOL, all the way up to R.E.M.s Belong,
from Out of Time released the same month as Spiderland
in March 1991. In all of those instances the emphasis is
weighted toward the words, which aspire to more developed,
literary heights than Breadcrumb Trails undercooked
ticket-taker, Nosferatu Mans muddled ending, or the
opacity of whatever it is Don knew what he had to do.
Musically, however, those precedents seem nothing more
than cushions on which the words can comfortably rest. The
Gift, for instance, is basically an eight-minute vamp
designed to stay out of the way of the storys well-crafted
build-up and punch line; In the Kingdom is noisy and
abstract as Renaldo breathlessly narrates; Belong, though it
contains an identifiable (wordless) chorus, is otherwise
monotonous, in service of Michael Stipes poem-like lyrics.
Slints approach to the relationship between spoken words
and music is very different. In the sense that Slints songs feel
like short stories rather than impressionistic poems, they
might be more closely linked to a song like The Gift. But
there is one crucial difference: Slints stories dont hold up
when removed from the music. One could read the words to
The Gift and get everything that song has to offer, the same
way you could choose between pulling a novel from the shelf
or downloading an audio book. The
words to Breadcrumb Trail, Nosferatu Man, and Good
Morning, Captain, on the other hand, could not be removed
from the music of Spiderland and feel like well-crafted short
stories. Characters are underdeveloped, plots dont always
resolve themselves, even some individual lines that work as
shouted lyrics dont totally make sense as discrete sentences.
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Yet the stories on Spiderland have the effect of a finely tuned
drama. Where songs like The Gift or Belong are
interesting once or twice, they become more and more
skippable with subsequent listens due to their monotony.
Slints fractured storytelling is compelling because the
narrative arc is studiously intertwined with music that is
anything but monotonous.
The arrangement for Good Morning, Captain is Slint at
their most confident. Riffs mutate, shuffle, invert, and pound.
Unlike many of the other songs on the album, the music is not
a manifestation of the words you dont intuitively connect
shipwreck or stormy weather to Walfords rhythms or
Pajo and McMahans guitars the way Breadcrumb Trail
mimics its rollercoaster or Nosferatu Man implies a gothic
creepiness. Rather, the music of Good Morning, Captain
leads the listener on like a master storyteller. From the quietly
picked notes of the intro to the bounding rhythm section in
the verses to the following thunderous riffs and oddly paired
guitar harmonies, the music teases and distracts all while it
lays the foundation for its eventual climax.
More so than any other track, the story of Good Morning,
Captain is relayed with great patience, which adds to the
drama. On each of the first three tracks on Spiderland, once
the story gets going it really doesnt stop; whatever musical
changes might occur, McMahan or Walford continue to move
their plots forward whispering, speaking, or screaming as
needed. In Good Morning, Captain McMahans words trade
off with the music. He metes out a few lines at a time,
stepping back to let the guitars flourish for a few bars or for
whole passages. These instrumental breaks act as a series of
intermissions in McMahans story, like the white space on the
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page at the end of a chapter, allowing you to process what
youve learned and anticipate whats to come. Each time
McMahan steps back he ends on a line of intrigue that keeps
that listener engaged, wondering what will happen next. Take
for instance the first verse, in which McMahan sings over just
bass and drums:
Let me in, the voice cried softly from outside the wooden
door. Scattered remnants of the ship could be seen in the
distance. Blood stained the ice along the shore.
Here McMahan pauses as the guitars come forward and the
words are given a chance to sink in. These
few lines are vivid and compelling scene setting youre on
the bloody shore, outside the house with this unknown but
sympathetic character. The guitars subside and McMahan
continues:
Im the only one left. The storm took them all, he managed
as he tried to stand. The tears ran down his face. Please, its
cold.
Through dialogue McMahan fleshes out the character hes
injured, distraught, and fearful. (An interesting detail, by the
way: McMahans voice is panned right in the mix whenever
he speaks a line of dialogue.)
Again the music takes over before we learn whether the
captains plea is heard. With the move into the first extended
instrumental passage, the band sets to work laying the
foundation for the eventual payoff. They burst into a wordless
blast of thick chords and distorted harmonics, the first of three
instances in which the band will hit this particular crescendo.
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As with the increasingly emphatic rises of Washer, the band
builds the dramatic effect of these sections gradually and with
restraint. They play the riff for just four bars before taking an
abrupt left turn into a second wordless passage in which Pajo
and McMahans guitars dance around each other in playful
yet strange off-harmonies.
Returning to the next verse, the guitars again recede to let
McMahans words move the plot forward.
When he woke, there was no trace of the ship. Only the dawn
was left behind by the storm. He felt the creaking of the stairs
beneath him that rose from the sea to the door.
There was a sound at the window then. The captain started,
his breath was still. Slowly, he turned.
Its a cliffhanger of a last line, and the band revels in the
opportunity to let it dangle as they shift again to an
instrumental passage, this time inverting the structure of the
previous section by playing first the off-harmonies, then the
monster riffing. The upward climb toward a climax continues
as they elongate the riff this time to twelve bars instead of
four. In another instance of employing a structure similar to
Washer, they follow this second, more dramatic rise with a
sudden drop to the songs quietest moment. McMahan softly
plays a version of the two-chord verse riff, now in a
descending pattern and a different key, as Pajo picks a single
note in a sixteenth-note harmonic, slowly moving his finger
down the neck of his guitar and changing the quality of the
tone from a natural, ringing harmonic (on the seventh fret) to
a flat, artificial harmonic (sixth fret), and back to another
natural
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harmonic (fifth fret). Brashear and Walford re-enter with the
verse rhythm to bring the story back on track. The second
character, the boy, makes his appearance and, chillingly,
recognizes the captain but does not let him into the house.
Unlike the first two verses, the music is no longer trading off
with the words. Midway through this last verse McMahan
continues to speak where previously he had paused; beneath
his words the guitars jump into their off-harmonies. The
buoyant pace and new confluence of words and music signals
that the denouement is nearing.
Stranded on the doorstep, the dejected captain seems also to
have recognized the boy, as he proclaims, Im trying to find
my way home. Im sorry, and I miss you at which point
the band explodes for the third time into the wordless chorus,
this time stretching it still more to sixteen bars. As the band
churns on McMahan continues to speak, though most of what
he says is obscured. He has overdubbed himself speaking
different lines, making for a cacophony of thoughts and words
mixed below the din of the music. As in Washer, the
overdub has a ghostly effect. The multiple voices here
multiple versions of one mans voice are a blurring of the
captains thoughts, words, reality. Here and there you can
hear more regrets from the captain Ill make it up to you.
I swear, Ill make it up to you. As Walfords drumming
intensifies, lifting the music higher still toward the climax, the
multitude of voices and throbbing music breaks just
long enough for McMahans sudden scream I miss you!
to ache with a heartrending clarity. These three words, this
simple emotion, are the last we hear from the captain, the lost
shadow looking for his way home but damned never to find it.
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As with most of the other songs on Spiderland, Good
Morning, Captain concludes on an inconsolable note. It is a
stunning and affecting conclusion to an epic song. Even more
profound is how it functions as a conclusion to Spiderland as
a whole. The final minute of Good Morning, Captain chugs
away like a classic thrasher, McMahan shouting those three
words over and over. Unlike nearly every other moment on
the record, you can picture yourself in the audience for this
moment, holding your fists aloft and screaming right along
with McMahan. I miss you! Its not the rousing middle
section of Breadcrumb Trail or the shouts of Nosferatu
Man, neither of which ever repeat a line; the shouts in those
songs serve the same end as the spoken lyrics to move the
plot forward. Nosferatu Man flirts with a little fist-pumping
repetition She set a fire burning / And I railed on through.
the. night. but McMahan subverts such pleasures by
speaking the lines rather than shouting. Then theres
Washer, a song every bit as anguished as Good Morning,
Captain but whose climax is, aside from being instrumental,
all too brief. Every song on Spiderland every song foils
all standard rock expectations. There are no classic choruses,
no real hooks,
hardly anything to sing along to, nothing to dance to. Most of
the lyrics are written as paragraphs. The rhythms, the
resolutions, the arrangements all are miles off from typical
rock n roll tropes. Spiderland is a cold, haunting album
made by a bunch of punk rock and metal dudes who had zero
interest in embracing the machismo or bravado of those
forms. So, when, in the thirty-ninth minute of this
thirty-nine-minute album, the band finally locks into a
fucking rock rhythm and the fucking singer screams his
fucking head off and repeats the same fucking three words
over and fucking over . . . fuck, man. I MISS YOU!
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126
Brian Stepped Outside
More bad news on the band front.
Slint, a band originally scheduled to perform on the Cool
Christmas show, had a falling out and split up as of last
Monday. Slint is signed to the Touch and Go label and was on
the eve of a European tour. Were losing a band per week
around here, so you might want to check out any remaining
favorites before they check out.
Jeffrey Lee Puckett, Night Life, Louisville
Courier-Journal, December 15, 1990
Spiderland was finished by the end of September. The band
returned to Louisville and their daily lives as they prepared
for the album release in the spring, to coincide with their first
European tour, organized with Touch and Gos help. This
wasnt a ten-day road trip on summer break: Slint were about
to take the leap into being a truly serious band.
In the meantime they finalized the artwork for Spiderland.
For the album cover the four boys and their longtime friend
Will Oldham traveled across the Ohio River into Utica,
Indiana, to a hidden quarry they knew and liked to swim in.
All five got into the water as Oldham held his camera aloft,
snapping the bands picture with only their heads visible
above the water. The sky and water were vivid blue, the
towering quarry cliff a golden brown, lined with a crown of
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golden trees across its top. But Oldhams black-and-white
shot drained all the color out of the day.
The rest of the albums design, or lack thereof, came courtesy
of Brashear. He wanted the cover to be totally free of copy
no band name, no album title an idea he lifted from the
original British issue of the Rolling Stones debut album. In a
nod to one of his all-time favorite records, the Flamin
Groovies Teenage Head, he suggested that they add a
letterbox effect to the top and bottom of Oldhams photo.
The absence of information, the letterbox, the colorless photo
all add up to capture the mood of Spiderland. In retrospect
the cover also encapsulates the story of Slint. In the photo the
young men are smiling the swim in the quarry is youthful
and fun. Their grins hint at their juvenile past; these are the
guys who overwhelmed a church congregation in their first
show, who goofed about tweezer fetishes on record, who
picked up hitchhikers while on tour only to blast them with
Suicide. But the carefree nature
of the moment is made overcast by the absence of color. The
sky is a blank white, the trees a dark mass atop the cliff, itself
an imposing gray that matches the gray of the band members
faces. The black bars framing the photograph make the image
feel more like a document of a past moment, not a composed
album cover (compared with, say, the frowning heads of Meet
the Beatles! or the faces and bodies emerging from the black
of The Doors). The setting is placeless and timeless, saying
neither Louisville nor 1990. Likewise the disembodied heads
obscure just who these four people are they are nothing
more than four anonymous swimmers in an anonymous lake
in an anonymous era. The image feels both nostalgic and
foreboding a frozen past and an unknowable future.
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* * *
Slint stayed busy for the latter half of 1990 as they waited for
Spiderlands release. They played a few shows in Louisville
and continued with their constant practice schedule. Signs
seem to indicate that the band was almost immediately ready
to push into totally new musical territories, far beyond the
songs theyd spent the last two years refining. McMahan,
always uncomfortable with his vocals, wanted to seek out a
new singer for the band, so they put an advertisement in
Spiderlands liner notes for interested female
singers.
1 They also began laying the groundwork for a new musical
direction. With Pajo and Brashear back in Louisville full-time
since theyd both committed to taking a year off from college,
Slint were not slowing down. They continued their intensive
practice schedule. Speaking to Punk Planet in 2005, Pajo
admitted his memory of the bands post-Spiderland material
was foggy, though McMahan had reminded him: [Brian]
asked me if I remembered any of those songs . . . he said
[they were] as different from Spiderland as Spiderland was
from Tweez.
And then suddenly it was over.
* * *
Though they didnt know it at the time, Slints last show was
a house party in Evanston on November 27, 1990 almost
exactly four years after Small Dirty Tight Tufts of Hair:
BEADS blew the doors off of Thomas Jefferson Unitarian
Church. Two weeks later they would be no more. As was
routine the band had gathered at Walfords parents house to
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practice. But when McMahan arrived he launched into a long,
meandering monologue about the future and his changing
priorities. It was so convoluted, Pajo told me. We
werent sure what he was talking about. Brashear shared the
same memory: He talked to us for thirty minutes, and then
he left. I remember Britt and Dave being like, What was that
all about? And I was like, Man, he just quit.
One can only imagine what McMahans exact reasons were
for leaving the band at such a pivotal point. The artwork for
Spiderland had been finalized and was printing; the European
tour was booked. All four guys had put their lives on hold so
they could make Slint their number one priority. It was a huge
leap.
Maybe that was just it. McMahan wasnt just taking a break
from college like Pajo and Brashear were. He had dropped
out completely. He was also the only one in the band for
whom releasing an album on a legit, nationally distributed
label and touring with a modicum of label support was not a
new experience. What did it mean to dedicate oneself entirely
to the band? Brashear may have inadvertently justified
McMahans reasoning when he expressed his own
disappointment to me. I was truly into [Slint] because I liked
the music. I dont mean this from a money point of view, but
I was ready to conquer the world. I was like, Man, this band
is awesome . . . I was ready to go all the way. Then again,
what was all the way before Nirvana? All the way didnt
mean much of anything.
Nevermind was still almost a year away from dropping into
the pop music landscape like an H-bomb. In 1990 the major
labels were not yet looking under every
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rock in any old local scene they could scour, searching for the
Next Seattle. Nor had indie labels yet grasped their full
potential, first displayed when Epitaph sent the Offsprings
Smash to #4 on the Billboard charts in 1994. The idea of
success for Slint as of December 1990 was, frankly, not that
far removed from failure. Pajo felt that this was precisely
McMahans concern Slints prospects were not especially
bright, even if they could foresee that Spiderland would be
well received. [The day McMahan quit the band], he said all
this stuff about how he was worried about his future. He was
thinking about the future and we werent at all. I remember
that being a bizarre concept because we were all still pretty
young. They truly were: McMahan and Walford, the
youngest of the bunch, were barely able to buy beer. We
were like, God, youre worried about your family and how to
make money? We were still trying to get through college.
Its not accurate to say McMahan desired sellout-level
success, but rather that he wanted, simply, an income. Slint
had become, as of the previous seven months, a full-time,
totally unpaid job. The band had rehearsed five or six days a
week, six to eight hours a day, roughly from May to
December of that year; and if Slint was only to become a
bigger priority for all involved, then that schedule was not
going to change. Thats a lot of time to spend in one room
with the same three guys every day time that could be
spent making an actual living. Tension had naturally been
rising within the band. It should have hit its zenith during the
two pressure-filled weekends spent recording Spiderland, but
the band instead kept up their full-time schedule, not giving
themselves a break. Now they had real goals a record, a
tour, possibly a real career as a band.
131
These goals might have meant the most to McMahan. During
our conversation Pajo had described the personalities of the
four members of Slint. McMahan was the most difficult to
please, but he was also the one who cracked the whip on the
rest of the band. [Brian] was always the one who kept
pushing things along and making us a productive band.
Otherwise it would have been Britt and I just practicing and
never getting out of the basement. Its telling, in retrospect,
to look back on the boys pre-Slint bands. McMahan was part
of a hardworking band that toured, signed to Homestead,
recorded two albums all by the time he was seventeen. In
the same span of time, Pajo and Walford played their share of
local shows with Maurice but never recorded anything,
managed just a week of out-of-town shows with Samhain, and
eventually alienated their bandmates by devoting themselves
to songwriting and practicing rather than performing or
otherwise engaging whatsoever with an audience. Slints
dysfunction was written into their DNA.
Even with McMahan pushing the band forward, they still
remained in their rehearsal space with an almost agoraphobic
mania. Between May and December of
1990, the period in which all four members of Slint lived in
the same town, they played just four or five shows one
with Urge Overkill in Chicago and the rest in Louisville. The
Chicago show was the best-paying show the band had ever
played they took home a whopping $250. Split four ways.
On top of that the band seemed to be losing focus in the
practice space once Spiderland was finished, according to an
interview McMahan gave to Alternative Press. Pajo relayed
to me an anecdote McMahan had told him a few years after
Slints breakup: Brian came to practice once this is just a
sign of how idiotic we still were and Todd and Britt and I
132
started playing the Batman TV theme. We thought it was so
funny; we were jumping into different intervals and making
these stupid harmonies. He said we were doing it for so long
and just laughing our heads off that he got frustrated. So he
went upstairs and put on some headphones and listened to
both sides of Neil Youngs On the Beach, and when he came
downstairs we were still playing the Batman theme. And it
was at that point he decided he had to leave the band.
Pajo told the story with a laugh and reiterated that McMahan
had reminisced about that day in jest, and that he didnt know
how much stock to put in its veracity. Still, the story seems to
illustrate perfectly the personality of the band. Obsessive yet
juvenile; intent on the detail of making music yet
unconcerned with real productivity. If McMahan was the one
in the band
who was the most concerned with getting results, it wouldnt
be surprising to find that it was his back broken by the last
straw. Though the timing couldnt be worse cold feet, now
that something was finally going to happen? perhaps
McMahan saw the writing on the wall. These were four good
friends whose personalities were never going to mesh into a
properly functioning band.
To the rest of the band, McMahans exit seemed in and of
itself not surprising; it was the timing that was the most
upsetting thing. I could have been really resentful, Brashear
said. Id taken a year off from school and we had a European
tour getting ready. I remember we had to fill out all these
forms I had a passport and everything. I could have been
pretty bitter about that. [But] if you practice every day, its
not an easy experience . . . I wouldnt have been surprised if
anybody had quit. Bands are hard to keep together. Though
133
twenty years of hindsight were evident in Brashears
explanation, there was still a trace of regret. I was convinced
we were really doing something. I really believed in us, I
guess you could say. Back then it was a punk rock thing.
Nobody made money off that stuff. I was just excited to go
Europe. Ive still never been.
Pajo too was sad to see Slints time cut short, but like
Brashear he didnt have any inkling of Spiderlands potential
impact beyond it being a punk rock thing he and his
hometown friends making music together.
Shortly after the breakup Pajo went to England for a semester,
then returned to Louisville to once again play with his
hometown friends. [When I came back], the Palace Brothers
were starting and King Kong was starting, he told me,
referring to Will Oldham and Ethan Bucklers bands,
respectively, both of which featured some combination of
Slint members backing them on their early singles and
albums. Things felt, in some ways, the same as theyd ever
been. Slint was just another blip.
* * *
In the course of our conversation Brashear and I had gotten
on to the subject of the Chicago scene circa 198889, when
Walford and McMahan still lived there and Pajo and Brashear
were living in Indiana. Steve Albinis first postBig Black
band, the shortlived Rapeman, was playing a show in Clark
Johnsons basement in Evanston. All their friends were there,
so Pajo and Brashear drove up for the party. But by the time
they got there it was getting late and they were exhausted, so
they opted to crash out rather than catch Rapeman. We just
went to sleep. We didnt even care. But if you tell somebody
134
that now, theyre like no way!, because now it has all this
weight to be part of this legendary thing. I told Brashear
that he could say as much for his own band. Pretty much,
he said. History adds weight to things.
When Spiderland was released in March of 1990, it was
noticed by almost no one. The music press wasnt interested
in writing articles about Slint; even a hundred words in a
zines densely packed reviews section was hard to come by.
One review did get noticed, however: Steve Albini, once
again, raved about Slint, this time in the pages of the British
magazine Melody Maker. Packing his review with 600 words
of ebullient praise, he wrote,
In its best state, rock music invigorates me, changes my
mood, triggers introspection or envelopes me with sheer
sound. Spiderland does all those things, simultaneously and in
turns, more than any records I can think of in five years.
Spiderland is, unfortunately, Slints swansong [sic], the band
having succumbed to the internal pressures which eventually
punctuate all bands biographies. Its an amazing record
though, and no one still capable of being moved by rock
music should miss it. In 10 years it will be a landmark and
youll have to scramble to buy a copy then. Beat the rush.
In the face of Slints impending date with total obscurity,
Albinis review as evidenced by the very book youre
reading turned out to be prescient. Pajo recalled a
conversation with Albini in 1989, when Slint
were playing many of the Spiderland songs live, where Albini
presaged what he would later put in print. I remember Steve
saying he never thought wed be a big band but wed be a
135
really influential band. He said we were the sound of the 90s
which in 1989 seemed like some far-off, unknown future.
[I was] like, No way man. What? It seemed so different
from whatever was popular. I didnt expect it.
Albinis review didnt start a revolution, but it did spark a
kind of whisper campaign. In the pre-blog era of the early
90s, Spiderlands success was due to honest-to-God word of
mouth. No one in the band realized that people were imbuing
Spiderland with any real significance until a few years later,
1993 or 94, when they noticed their royalty checks from
Touch and Go were still coming in. They werent big checks,
but they were checks. Spiderland hadnt quite disappeared
into the bargain bin. Slint started getting name-dropped by
other bands in interviews. Critics started using terms like
post-rock, math rock, and slowcore, citing Spiderland
as an example in each case. More and more bands started
cropping up who employed an unadorned, slow, quiet sound
maybe with spoken word over top often juxtaposed
against ripping chaos.
Though Spiderland had come out a few months ahead of
Nevermind, Ten, and the grunge explosion, its impact didnt
surface until a few years later, when many formerly
underground bands Pavement,
Jawbox, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and more were
jumping into the mainstream. Where did that leave the
underground? Coincidence or not, many young bands latched
onto Spiderland at this time. In this sense perhaps
post-grunge, rather than post-rock, is a more accurate
descriptor for Spiderlands influence in the 90s. Nirvana
brought the noisy crunch of the late-80s underground to the
mainstream. In an era when the schism between punk and
136
popular was still deeply, proudly, self-consciously felt, many
in the underground couldnt reference the Stooges or the
Clash without risking the appearance of being no more than
Alterna-wannabes. The cold detachment of Slints clean
guitars, their subverted vocals, their dramatic juxtapositions
more exaggerated than, say, a Pixies chorus was like an
avenue out of the sound being co-opted by the major labels. If
the mainstream, through Nirvana and Green Day, was going
to scavenge four-chord punk, feedback-laden noise-rock, and
fuck-you slacker attitude, then the punkest thing to do was to
turn off your distortion pedal, slow your tempo, and speak in
paragraphs rather than shout in slogans. It was a total
effacement of personality, statement of intent, and
accessibility.
Louisvilles Rodan was probably the first and most obvious
descendant of Slint. Their epic Everyday World of Bodies,
from 1994s Rusty, is like a catalogue of every technique Slint
employed on Spiderland dynamics, harmonics,
story-lyrics, all the way down
to the cathartic scream at the end, I will be there! rather
than I miss you! Washington band Codeine traveled to
Louisville to record their final album, The White Birch,
released in 1994. Other bands gravitated toward the sound as
the 1990s progressed: Seattles Engine Kid, Austins
Bedhead, San Franciscos A Minor Forest, North Carolinas
Seam, Duluths Low, San Diegos Tristeza. Louisville, in the
interim, flirted briefly with being a Next Seattle thanks to a
New York Times profile on the local scene, as more and more
bands cropped up from under Slints growing shadow: June
of 44, the Sonora Pine, Rachels, and Palace, along with
McMahans the For Carnation and Pajos Papa M. Now living
in Chicago, Pajo hooked up with Tortoise a band that was
137
a cottage industry for the second half of the 90s, spawning
more side projects than was possible to keep up with.
2 Labels like Drag City, Quarterstick, Thrill Jockey, and
Touch and Go were largely sustained by a collective of bands
with connections to the ChicagoLouisville axis that could be
traced back to Slint, if not to Squirrel Bait. Spiderlands DNA
coursed through a huge swathe of the underground. The
formula made its way out of
the US, showing up in British bands like Hood and Scottish
acts like Arab Strap and Mogwai. Mogwais 1997 album
Young Team made its Slint-like dynamics ever more
pronounced, a trend taken even further with Canadian
collective Godspeed You! Black Emperors 1998 debut
F#A# and still further on their 1999 EP Slow Riot for a New
Zer Kanada. Dramatic dynamic shifts had, by the end of the
decade, become de rigueur for so many indie rock bands,
finally taken to ethereal heights by Icelands Sigur Rs on
their 1999 album gtis Byrjun.
By the twenty-first century, the post-rock trend in indie rock
had become less overtly popular. Mogwai and Sigur Rs had
mostly abandoned their peaks and valleys, while many of the
other most obvious Slint imitators had disbanded and faded
from memory. Writing for the New Yorker in 2005, Sasha
Frere-Jones keyed in on why, to Slints credit, the genre
spawned by Spiderland did not take hold:
[Spiderland] was partly responsible for the enervation and
increasing insularity of independent rock music during the
nineties, a decade in which hip-hop, teen pop, and dance-hall,
by contrast, became ever more formally omnivorous and
pleasurable. The problem was that Slint did not create a
simple, easily imitated beat like Bo Diddley, or an elemental
138
song like the Sex Pistols Anarchy in the U.K., which
anyone could
learn to play. Slint or Spiderland, because the two had
become interchangeable was like that grilled-cheese
sandwich bearing the face of the Virgin Mary: an unlikely and
irreproducible marvel.
Yet in some ways some of the ingredients to Spiderland
the unadorned sound, the complicated rhythms, the moody
atmospheres, and yes, the dynamics have become so
ingrained in the way so many bands make their music, its
impossible to really identify whether Spiderland, specifically,
still resonates today, or if contemporary bands are reaching
toward Slints own antecedents or descendants.
In the end it doesnt matter. All the better if the clutch of
bands trading in Slintisms in the 90s have since disbanded,
and that bands of the twenty-first century have filtered
Spiderlands best traits through a prism of other influences.
Meanwhile Spiderland remains, two decades later, singular
and utterly affecting. Nothing sounded quite like Spiderland
when Slint created it in 1990. Nothing sounds quite like it
today.
* * *
When I visited Louisville in the fall of 2009 I took a drive out
to Utica Quarry. As I followed the road into town, my eyes
caught small signs posted at every intersection pointing the
way to Quarry Bluff. Driving
along the Ohio, the signs led me up an inclined road
culminating at an imposing brick wall embedded into a hill,
Quarry Bluff Estates emblazoned in gold letters across an
139
ebony backing. The road curved past the sign and from my
window I could see the lake come into view below. I was on
the cliffs which rise behind the four heads on the album cover
Id known for roughly half my life. Ringing the top of the
quarry were a smattering of ornate McMansions dotted with
empty lots still for sale. The neighborhood landscaping was in
progress, the streets and cul-de-sacs still half-formed. From
my vantage point I had dramatic views of the quarry lake to
one side, the Ohio River to the other, where the auburn
treetops of Louisville lined the opposite bank.
I followed another road down to the lake itself, quietly
secluded on all sides by the bluffs. More houses lined the
water, small docks built into their backyards so the families
could take leisurely boat rides maybe the kids could go for
a swim. It was the perfect place to create memories.
140
1 Though no recordings of the original Squirrel Bait trio exist,
Grubbss vocal delivery in his later band, Bastro short
shouts la the Minutemens D. Boon likely gives a good
hint at what the original formation sounded like. Hearing the
Nearest Door demos, its easy to imagine Grubbss
monotone, shouty delivery over many of the tracks.
141
2 Its impossible to draw a sonic line from Squirrel Bait to
Slint, but one can do it with Grubbss output. Skag Heaven is
an obvious maturation from Squirrel Bait; the mathy sound of
Kick the Cat, which appears on Skag Heaven and is one of
the last songs the band wrote, anticipates the more
complicated style of playing Grubbs would stake out with
Bastro; Recidivist, which appears twice on Bastros third
album, Sing the Troubled Beast once as a rocker, once as
an instrumental solo piano piece seems to point toward the
more deconstructed nature of music he would create in Gastr
del Sol; which in turn led to the avant-garde music he makes
today.
142
3 The Detroit show was put on by none other than Tesco Vee
and Corey Rusk, the once and future impresarios
(respectively) of Touch and Go. According to Pajo, they did
not actually meet Rusk at the show.
143
4 Maurice was hardly the last Louisville would hear of
Garrison and Bucayu. Within a couple of years they would
form Kinghorse arguably the most legendary Louisville
band of its era, as far as locals are concerned. Their local
following was positively huge, and they were soon signed to
Caroline Records. Their debut album was produced by none
other than Glenn Danzig. Due to trouble with their label, the
record never really got its due, and Kinghorse broke up by the
mid 90s. Still, they loom large in Louisvilles collective
memory larger than Slint.
144
1 The story inevitably raises the question, where did Walford
get the name for his fish? But Pajo insists there is no deeper
meaning. Sometime in the 80s I was at Guitar Emporium in
Louisville and an employee asked me the name of my band.
When I said Slint he didnt bat an eye and replied Oh, I get
it: slut, bitch, and cunt all in one word. I thought it was
hilarious but it wasnt our intention!
145
2 Ironically, much of Kent was written by Buckler.
146
1 . . . I think I indulged a selfish part of my personality
during the making of [Surfer Rosa]. I dont think that I
regarded the band as significantly as I should have. And I felt
at the time like I was making a better record for the band. I
recognize now that what I was doing was actually warping
their record to suit myself. And I think that having gone
through that experience and recognize that impulse in myself
Ive been able to weed it out a little better. Which means that
Ive gotten better over time at doing things in the bands best
interest rather than doing things to amuse myself. And being
perfectly frank, there were things that I did while making that
record that I did to amuse myself and I dont think it speaks
well of me. I think that portrays a weak part of my personality
at the time. (Frank and Ganz, p. 107)
147
1 Bitch Magnet is a band that has never really gotten its
proper share of credit for its influence on the early 1990s
scene that developed in the Midwest. Sooyoung Park, the
bands primary songwriter, would later go on to form the
better-known (and quieter) Seam, but Bitch Magnet was
experimenting with dynamics, atmosphere, and complex time
signatures concurrent with Slint. 1989s Umber featured a
couple of forays into quieter territory, while their 1990 swan
song, Ben Hur featuring David Grubbs on second guitar,
as well as a guest appearance by Britt Walford on guitar for
one track in some ways feels like a missing link between
the metal-inclined Tweez and the epic dynamics of
Spiderland.
148
2 Astute ears may notice that McMahan speaks a couple of
lines in two verses; Pajo told me McMahan took those lines
because he wrote those lyrics.
149
1 According to Pajo the band received a number of letters,
most of which they did not bother to open since Slint had
broken up. Well after the fact, however, someone in the band
realized that one letter came from none other than Polly Jean
Harvey.
150
2 It might be worth noting that Tortoise, which became a kind
of clearing house for so many post-rock projects, had more
ties to Louisville than Pajos brief tenure. The group was born
in part from a collaboration between John McEntire and
Bundy K. Brown, both previously two-thirds of David
Grubbss Gastr del Sol and Bastro.
151
152
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156
Also available in the series:
1. Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes
2. Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans
3. Harvest by Sam Inglis
4. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by
Andy Miller
5. Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice
6. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh
7. Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli
8. Electric Ladyland by John Perry
9. Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott
10. Sign O the Times by Michaelangelo Matos
11. The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard
12. Let It Be by Steve Matteo
13. Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk
14. Aqualung by Allan Moore
15. OK Computer by Dai Griffiths
157
16. Let It Be by Colin Meloy
17. Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis
18. Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz
19. Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli
20. Ramones by Nicholas Rombes
21. Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno
22. Murmur by J. Niimi
23. Grace by Daphne Brooks
24. Endtroducing . . . by Eliot Wilder
25. Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese
26. Low by Hugo Wilcken
27. Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes
28. Music from Big Pink by John Niven
29. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper
30. Pauls Boutique by Dan LeRoy
31. Doolittle by Ben Sisario
32. Theres a Riot Goin On by Miles Marshall Lewis
158
33. The Stone Roses by Alex Green
34. In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar
35. Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti
36. Loveless by Mike McGonigal
37. The Who Sell Out by John Dougan
38. Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth
39. Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns
40. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson
41. Use Your Illusion Vols 1 and 2 by Eric Weisbard
42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy
43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck
44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier
45. Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier
46. Aja by Don Breithaupt
47. Peoples Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by
Shawn Taylor
48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz
49. Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite
159
50. If Youre Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef
51. Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich
52. Lets Talk About Love by Carl Wilson
53. Swordfishtrombones by David Smay
54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel
55. Horses by Philip Shaw
56. Master of Reality by John Darnielle
57. Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris
58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs
59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron
60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen
61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl
62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate
63. XO by Matthew LeMay
64. Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier
65. Radio City by Bruce Eaton
66. One Step Beyond . . . by Terry Edwards
160
67. Another Green World by Geeta Dayal
68. Zaireeka by Mark Richardson
69. 69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol
70. Facing Future by Dan Kois
71. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by
Christopher R. Weingarten
72. Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles
73. Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo
74. Song Cycle by Richard Henderson
161