The SPIN Interview: Stephen Malkmus
Magazine
Stephen Malkmus / Photographed for Spin in Portland, Oregon, by John Clark
By the time you started recording, there wasn't really any of that California punk sound in what you were doing.
Yeah, I went away to college. Your tastes change -- you go to school and people are like, "You like this? You gotta hear this," you know?
The first couple of Pavement records seemed mysterious: "Who is this S.M.? Who's this Spiral Stairs?"
That was kind of taken from Swell Maps and Chrome, and the hipper edge of college radio, where some big brother was saying, "You need to be into the Fall." The early Pavement wasn't, "We're gonna start this way. First we'll release this, then we'll get picked up by a bigger label and get signed." It was more like, "Well, we'll just record this one document, and it can be found ten years later or something." That kind of discovery is what's fun about music.
From the outset, Pavement were unique in that you were openly upper-middle-class -- you had nice sweaters, good haircuts, you were probably the first band to use the word docent in lyrics…
Well, we went to college -- we weren't going to hide it. Mudhoney were deliberately anti-intellectual; Sonic Youth hid it in art damage.
Back in 1994, you had a brush with fame with "Cut Your Hair," a song that seemed to be about careerism.
Yeah, and it's too bad it wasn't quite the song that could've really pushed the band. For all the mistakes that were made marketing Pavement, it comes down to the song; and the song was pretty good, but it just wasn't the song of the time. The Offspring song ["Come Out and Play"], "Cannonball" by the Breeders -- those were bigger songs people could get behind. Being in a band at that time in New York, looking through the Village Voice with a gajillion bands playing every night, or knowing that the CMJ music conference was coming, it was about Pavement being bemused by -- or afraid of -- committing to wanting that.
Are you less ambivalent now about how your legacy is perceived?
I'm very lucky on that front. I'm basically proud of what we did and what we're doing, and that people are into it still. I don't know what more I could've expected from the humble beginnings -- not that we weren't confident that what we were doing was good, but that it could have that much of an impact that we could tour around and meet a lot of cool people and not have a regular job. Good bands and people have generally come out of the time that we came from—it's gone on longer than probably anyone thought it could.
Do you think that if Pavement were a bunch of 22- or 24-year-olds starting a band now, you'd be hit by blogger backlash?
I don't think so. If you click with people, it will ride through. The proof is in the pudding. I mean, people do still like music. They connect to it for whatever reason -- the song does rule, even if marketing and timing and luck and stuff are important.
Are you still in touch with the other members of Pavement?
Well, Scott's up in Seattle -- I saw him recently. Bob [Nastanovich] is in my fantasy basketball league, so I see him online. Whenever I get to New York, I always see Mark [Ibold]. And the drummer [Steve West] is sort of lost in childville in the middle of Virginia -- he's a little AWOL, but he's still my friend. We still all get on, but it's hard to imagine that band being a living entity again. If we ever got back together again, I'd like it to be later, when we're really paunchy and our fans are cashing in their IRAs.
You're one of the few major bands from that era that hasn't reunited.
I'll go see reunion bands; I have no problem with that. My Bloody Valentine? I'd like to see them. Van Halen and the Police -- I like both bands, but I probably wouldn't want to spend two hours at a mega-arena.
