Stephen Malkmus / Photographed for Spin in Portland, Oregon, by John Clark

For most of the '90s, Stephen Malkmus may have been the perpetually smirking face of indie rock. Pavement, the quintet he formed in his hometown of Stockton, California, with fellow singer/guitarist Scott Kannberg, became the figureheads of a scene, as passionate about elegantly formed pop songs as they were about noise, chaos, and diffidence. When they broke up in 1999, Malkmus stepped back from the spotlight a bit -- "It seems like someone else's world now," he says of the band's glory days -- and formed the Jicks. (With a lineup that includes bassist Joanna Bolme, keyboardist/guitarist Mike Clark, and former Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss, his fourth post-Pavement album, Real Emotional Trash, is out now.) On a rainy afternoon in the toy-strewn Portland, Oregon house he shares with his wife, Jessica Hutchins, and their daughters, two-year-old Lottie and seven-weekold Sunday, the formerly itinerant Malkmus, now 41, looks back on his 20-year career, careeah, Korea, Korea.…

What was it like growing up in Stockton in the '70s and '80s?
Well, it was the time of John Hughes movies and skateboard culture. It was a much more Los Angeles-influenced place than San Francisco -- kids would wear Quiksilver surfer shorts and ride skateboards. It was hot and flat. My parents moved there because they wanted to raise a family, and in Los Angeles in the '70s, there was a gas crisis and the Watts riots and Manson -- not that that really affected them much, but they were just a middle-class family who wanted space for their kids to ride bikes over to another kid's house.

Were you one of the skaters?
Yeah. We had a place called Inland Surf; I went there. But I wasn't finding abandonedpools. There was a half-pipe my friends had. I was a little scared, because there was an early episode in Sacramento. It was a birthday party, this guy wiped out, and his braces went up into his mouth. He was bleeding down his face, and I was like, Man! I don't really have the body type. I guess Tony Hawk is tall and thin, but it seemed like the littler, lower-center-of-gravity guys were having more success on skateboards.

When did you start buying records and getting into punk?
I guess a little bit in high school. Devo were the sort of gateway band that broke into punk for me. Dead Kennedys were the band that came to Stockton first. They had a lot of appeal to a teenager: very sarcastic and infantile, but also there was some social commentary, and their records were really great. That was when I started playing guitar. I had a soft-string Spanish guitar or something. I had some lessons, but then I played bass in a Stockton band called Straw Dogs. They had already been performing -- they were called the Young Pioneers, and they were kind of the older generation of guys who were into the Damned and Johnny Thunders. They seemed old then, but they were 19 or 20. Back then, you sort of wanted to have a little gimmick, so the Young Pioneers were communists. But the Straw Dogs weren't -- we were more melodic. And we had some thrash songs, but no dogma, really, other than that our singer had a mohawk.