Pavement’s all-rounder and de facto spokesperson talks Hayden Merrick through the songs that have defined his career as a performer and music fan.
Bob Nastanovich had no idea that Pavement were releasing a new greatest hits album.
“It wasn’t my idea, obviously. I didn’t know anything about it.” He’s unfazed by this breaking news, shrugging with the amiable charm that’s made him the band’s go-to press liaison and most approachable member ever since he joined as their understudy drummer in 1990.
The origin story in brief is that the Stockton, California band’s original time-keeper, headstander, and the man whose studio birthed Slanted and Enchanted was something of a wildcard. “When he was on, he was on,” Nastanovich says of the late, great Gary Young. “When he was too inebriated, there needed to be somebody there, just to keep 4/4 time.”
Enter: Bob Nastanovich, one of Stephen Malkmus’ best buds and fellow alum/college radio DJ at the University of Virginia. A few years on, once Steve West completed the lineup for Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain – a better drummer, Nastanovich will be the first to admit – the latter was reassigned to the multi-hyphenate role of percussionist/hype man/keys player/tour manager. How many bands can say they have a quadruple threat in their ranks?
Being out of the loop is a running theme with Pavement. After Stephen Malkmus and Scott ‘Spiral Stairs’ Kannberg recorded their first scratchy, staticky songs – those that would become Slay Tracks – Malkmus went backpacking around Europe, leaving his bandmate with, I’d argue, some pretty crucial tasks: naming their fledgling project, cultivating its art direction, and founding a label (the Treble Kicker imprint) in order to release physical pressings of the EP.
It’s wasn't until Malkmus got home months later that he realised he was in the band Pavement and it was doing quite well. Likewise, conversations around their 1999 breakup barely happened: Steve West learned his band had finished after the public announcement went live.
But Nastanovich has seen Alex Ross Perry’s ambitious and bewildering film, Pavements, which came out last year and has Nastanovich portrayed in biopic scenes by Fred Hechinger (you might have seen him in The White Lotus or Eighth Grade; “really sweet kid, about half my size”).
Nastanovich has actually seen the movie eight or more times. He watches it in prep for various Pavement events and socials. He just got back from one in Ísafjörður, Iceland. “They invited me over. I DJ’d and hosted an indie rock pub quiz and did the introduction [to Pavements] and the Q&A for about 60 people,” he says. “Lovely people in the coldest place in Iceland: a fantastic little village of about 2,600 people, where they have a wonderful industry called Kerecis, which is very cutting edge. They have figured out how to make human skin grafts for both humans and wildlife using cod skin.”
I’m not sure whether Nastanovich does this sort of Pavement outreach because he genuinely loves it – to be fair, I wouldn’t mind learning about the frontline of soft tissue rejuvenation – or because no one else in Pavement will. For the record, his being in the dark about band stuff is not because he’s only a ‘live guy’ or a peripheral member or anything like that. He’s played on most of the records, and he’s been compensated well enough when it comes to royalties, he tells me.
“People will contact me and be like, ‘Oh, I see you’re doing this,’ and it’ll be the first I’d heard of it,” he says. “It’s the way it goes. It’s fine with me.” Maybe there’s something kind of nice, freeing, about the surprise factor, like finding a £10 note between the couch cushions? “I appreciate my friends and people like yourself saying, ‘By the way, do you know that you’re doing this?’”
‘This’, to clarify, is a 12-song remastered primer titled Hecklers Choice: Big Gums and Heavy Lifters. There’s already a Pavement greatest hits – the meatier and more aptly named Quarantine the Past, which is double the length and at least gestures towards some of the band’s deeper cuts.
So why this new, truncated best-of? A sneaky cash-in on the hype swirling around the new-ish Pavements movie? A genuinely thoughtful way to help new fans from the I-found-them-through-that-one-song-on-Tik-Tok cohort get immersed in an unwieldy, red-herring-filled back catalogue? Maybe it’s a bit of both. But I’m asking the wrong person.
“I would have voted against it,” Nastanovich says. “I can understand why Quarantine the Past came out, because you didn’t want to force people that were new to the band to go back and have to purchase three, four, or five Pavement records.”
Quarantine coincided with Pavement’s first reunion, in 2009/2010, back when the vibes were still a little forced, before they’d put enough distance in front of their awkward turn-of-the-century dissolution, before they were having real fun off and on stage, and sounding tighter than ever.
“We already have a soundtrack record coming out, which I also view as somewhat unnecessary,” he continues, referring of course to Pavements (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack). “I can gather the uniqueness of such a result,” he says, conceding, “I mean, movie soundtracks are a thing, and this is the only opportunity to do a Pavement movie soundtrack.
“But this current thing [Hecklers Choice] seems unnecessary.” Nastanovich is not being curmudgeonly here – he’s speaking empathically, from the perspective of a music fan in the cost-of-living era. “I’m not comfortable with the idea of taking advantage of Pavement completists. I’m not telling people who have a lot of Pavement stuff not to buy it. It’s their choice. I can tell you that if I was a Pavement fan, I wouldn’t buy it.”
A reductive but admittedly hard-to-resist take here is that this kind of self-effacing shrug is deliciously on-brand for Pavement – the infamous though inadvertent ‘slacker’ progenitors who were seemingly unfussed by what people thought of them (but who were, in fact, always trying harder than anyone realised).
I feel like every Pavement fan loves the band madly but acts like they don’t, feigning casual interest, and that’s because it’s what Pavement taught us to do: be cool, man. Don’t have a cow. It’s 1994, your late night TV debut, and you get to play your would-be world-conquering pop hit to millions of viewers – what do you do? Squawk like a bird over the intro and shut your eyes or else look at your feet for the rest of the song. (Side note: all the comments on this legendary performance of “Cut Your Hair” are about how Nastanovich is “the most underrated tambourinist of all time.”)
Next: you’re getting a lot of buzz from those Crooked Rain singles – the aforementioned plus “Gold Soundz” and particularly “Range Life” have got people talking, partly because you baited Billy Corgan and got thrown off the Lollapalooza lineup – so you should probably double down on that fun, bittersweet, lightly irreverent style of pop music and become bigger than Jesus, right?
Wrong: you make Wowee Zowee, an 18-song, hour-long, dope-fuelled rollercoaster to hell and back that is fucking genius and has so many blissful moments, but to the untrained eye looked as though it was deliberately turning off as many fairweather Weezer and Green Day fans as possible (it was 1994, remember). “Try harder!” Beavis and Butthead hollered at the album’s lead single, the lethargic “Rattled By the Rush”, which, incidentally, has the most underrated guitar solo of their catalogue.
But Nastanovich says we mistook Malkmus’ approach – and thus the band’s approach – to these high-stakes situations for aloofness or a lack of passion. “The best way for him to deal with it was to pretend he didn’t care, but he did,” Nastanovich says. “It was just his way, as a kid. He was a kid! And when everything happens pretty fast… obviously we’re more popular and well liked now than we’ve ever been, for some reason.”
The reason Pavement has invited so much critical analysis could be boiled down to the fascinating chasm between how innovative they were and how they acted like it was all too easy, like they’d rather be anywhere else. But Malkmus and Kannberg never stopped writing songs in the years following their split.
And while Nastanovich spends half his time breeding and racing “really slow, cute horses” and self-deprecates that he’s not a songwriter or even a musician, he has been DJing, podcasting, and discovering new music this whole time. Because here’s the thing: Pavement loves music – they love their favourite bands as much as we love ours. (They wrote a song about R.E.M., remember!)
Before and after Bob Nastanovich the hype man, the tambourinist, the only guy smiling in the Pavement press shot, there is Bob Nastanovich the music fan.
“I’ve got way too many pieces of vinyl, and I love so many of them, but they are – generally speaking – pretty obscure,” he says. “It amazes me that people your age and younger, when they do these things like Nine Songs, how much of the music is before they were born. But a lot of the people you speak to are musicians and songwriters. I’m neither, mate – I’m just a music fan who loves to go to gigs.”
As Bob Nastanovich guides me through his Nine Songs selections – deferentially, tangentially, and with warm, disarming humour – it feels like speaking with a music superfan I’ve known for years rather than a member of the band that did more to define American indie rock music (and my music taste) than few others in history.
And as for that new greatest hits record, “The art looks kind of cool, I guess,” Nastanovich muses, walking back into a thoroughly Pavement-ian conclusion: “I mean, who knows…?”
“Good Advices” by R.E.M.
BOB NASTANOVICH: A very important part of my youth. I saw them when I was 16. I was a fan from Chronic Town forward. Being raised in Richmond, Virginia – which was a place that they would frequently play because it’s about seven hours from Athens – they were the first band as a southern kid that made you feel cool about simply being in the South.
Their early records were very dear to me, and they also have this wonderful quality to introduce us to so many bands. In fact, I wouldn’t have heard Gang of Four and Wire, or even bands that I adored from the same era in Athens, Georgia – like Pylon. Everybody had heard of B-52s, but Pylon’s a band that I loved. I thought about putting one of their songs on the list, because I saw them play on New Year’s Eve and they were fantastic.
BEST FIT: The Pylon Reenactment Society, right?
Yes, it’s a great 40-minute live show. They don’t play very often. I think they play about four to six times a year, mostly in Georgia. It was really cool to meet them. I was nervous because, when you’re a huge fan of a band since you were 15 or 16 years old – just like R.E.M. – to you, they’re rock stars. Regardless of their success in the end, they were heroes as a kid, to me.
“Good Advices” is off Fables of the Reconstruction, which was a very important album. It was so anticipated after Chronic Town, Murmur, and Reckoning. I think it’s a song that you don’t see on that many R.E.M. top 10 or 20 lists. It’s a very, very simple song, and I’ve always really enjoyed the lyrics. It’s always made an impact on me to the point where if somebody offers me good advice and I feel the need to take it, I’ll usually text back, or say back, “Good advices.”
But it’s just a vibe, like just about every R.E.M. song from that era. Quite famously, “Time After Time” was one that none of us really liked.
It’s in Pavement’s R.E.M. tribute [“Unseen Power of the Picket Fence”]. Malkmus says, “‘Time After Time’ was my least favourite one.” For some reason that one wasn’t as good as all the other ones. But I DJ anywhere from three to 15 times a year, and usually I have a few R.E.M. songs on there. I have “Pretty Persuasion” and “Good Advices”, just because they aren’t the obvious ones.
Probably the cleanest, most straight-ahead pop song on your list. It’s a nice, accessible way to open it up before some more out-there stuff.
And early – a bit chronological there, although I think there’s a few that are much earlier.
“A Human Certainty” by Saccharine Trust
We’re in 1981 here, an SST band.
So one great thing about growing up in Richmond, where it is on the eastern seaboard, Richmond has a really good art school called VCU. SST bands – obviously Minutemen, perhaps my favourite band of all time – all those SST bands played Richmond, which was cool, and they played matinee shows.
As a teenager, I knew the promoter, and he let me into some adult-only shows. I remember he introduced me to the bartender and put two Xs on my hands and said, “If this kid comes anywhere near the bar, kick him out.” So I definitely didn’t come near the bar because I didn’t want to abuse that. It was a real privilege.
Saccharine Trust, to me, are a band that – amongst the 12 or 15 really brilliant early SST bands – somewhat gets overlooked. Paganicons is just a brilliant and perfect EP. I know a lot of people like Watery Domestic by Pavement; my Watery Domestic is Paganicons. Just a perfect punk rock record, and I think that “A Human Certainty” really presents Joe Baiza’s guitar perfectly.
The guitars sound like they’re being played with razor blades. It’s amazing.
Yeah, I love that guitar sound. That’s why I loved Gang of Four as a teenager too. Entertainment! is a masterpiece in that regard.
I was actually going to put on a more obscure Saccharine Trust song, which is also great, called “Our Discovery”, off an album of theirs that didn’t sell well at all, called Surviving You, Always. They’re both long – really long by Saccharine Trust standards. But they have all the elements: Jack Brewer’s one of those poets. He’s a poet more than a singer. Obviously, a lot of people consider David Berman the same way.
It was a great thrill for me to have them invited in 2010 to the ATP [All Tomorrow’s Parties Festival] that we curated. I think the only original members were Jack and Joe, and they [played with] some 20-something kids that, under the circumstances, did a marvellous job.
They reunited for that, and I can’t remember the specifics, but they hadn’t played in years. Seeing them and the Raincoats in 2010, for that, really made my enjoyment of the weekend unusually cool. Saccharine Trust came a long way. They obviously put a lot of time into preparing. They played a fantastic setlist, and it was just amazing to see those dudes.
Were you mates with them by this point? Had you met?
That’s the only time I ever met them in my life. People that I admire in bands, I’m the kind of person that if I said anything to them, I would say, “Thanks so much for coming to our town” or one statement followed by “thanks a lot.” I always assume that you don’t know the person so maybe they don’t want to talk to you.
It’s kind of funny, in Pavement, I’ve always felt like the most easily approachable member, and there are certain occasions when I’m short on time or my mind’s elsewhere, where I wished I was that person that could somehow scare people off. But that’s also a huge part of my enjoyment of Pavement. Fans are great.
A band like Saccharine Trust, their brilliance would intimidate me. So just admiration and saying thank you, I’ve always felt, was all a band wants to hear. It takes less than 10 seconds.
That’s good advices, actually.
Some people are pushy, and they want to say, “Oh, I hung out with Jarvis Cocker.” At the end of the day, you probably annoyed him. But if you happen to be in his vicinity, and you said, “Man, that was awesome. Thanks for coming,” he probably thought, ‘That’s a cool person.’
In fact, I saw him the other day because one of our long-standing crew members is a part of his crew. Andy Dimmick is a brilliant roadie and a great friend from Hull. I saw him after the show. I went back to hang out with Andy, and I went up to [Cocker] and I shook his hand and said, “Thanks very much. That was awesome.” I didn’t feel the need to say, “I didn’t know any of your songs really. I only know the hits” – any of that shit. Like, who cares about me?
That was a mind-blowing performance. I realised watching him how worried I needed to be about how out of shape I am.
“Motorcycle Kondilies” by Xylouris White
The next one’s a different vibe, a very unique duo project: Jim White from Dirty Three and Hard Quartet. And of course the long-necked lute player, whose name is…
George Xylouris.
How did this one come on your radar? I suppose you know them through friends/Jim?
We toured a lot with Dirty Three. They just blew my mind. I have never seen such powerful live performances and such unique brilliance. I remember Mick [Turner] actually stayed in my house in Kentucky several years ago. And Jim is one of those people that, as far as I can tell, might be addicted to playing live shows, because he might have played at least 200 nights a year with several different acts.
It’s amazing to follow him on social media, because God knows where that guy is going to turn up – every obscure corner of the world. I think he really loves to play for people, which is amazing in its own right.
I always sort of judge bands from one simple standpoint: how far would I travel to see them? Xylouris White is a band that I’ve travelled several hours to see on many occasions. I just love the energy. I love the fact that, being a two piece, you can hear every single thing that the two of them are doing.
“Motorcycle Kondilies” is such a triumphant-sounding song to me, just a really great rave up. I don’t have much to compare it to from a knowledge standpoint, but I really like a lot of Mediterranean-type music, and I think that they do such a wonderful representation of it.
They’re both such great players. George – I like the way he sings. I like the way his voice sounds. And Jim – he can just play with anyone. There’s nothing else like him. He has his own style, but I really think that if he had to, he could drum on anything. I guess he sort of proved that, playing on a lot of pop records. But he’s amazing to watch.
It’s like a party song. It’s a great song to DJ, and you don’t need to be a good dancer to dance to it. You could dance like any old fool. It just really puts a smile on my face.
Did they play it when you travelled to see them?
I’ve seen them four or five times. They definitely played it three times. It’s long. There’s several songs on the setlist that have a bit of duration to them. And generally speaking, I’m kind of a three-minute-form guy. I guess when I make a list like this, if I put a song of great length on it, usually that would bother me, but I think when a song justifies a high level of duration, it’s because it’s so brilliant.
It’s just like movies. If Pavements was an hour and 40 long, it would be a hell of a lot more bearable. But it’s two hours and eight minutes long, and that’s usually the problem I have with most movies these days.
Then you hear a lot of great songs where the band will have a really, really great idea and a great vibe going, and it’s a song that would have been brilliant if it was three and a half minutes, but they fell in love with it so much while they were recording it, they made it five minutes and 20 seconds, and it loses some of its steam.
We live in a world where people drink THC drinks and take gummies and shit and I do think it’s kind of funny – people just fall in love with their groove, and they don’t realise that they’re costing their song. There are a few Pavement songs that are over five minutes, and we’d like to think that it justifies that extra time. But I feel like “Motorcycle Kondilies” could go on longer than that.
There are those songs, though, that can go on forever and you’ll happily get totally lost in them.
The one that stands out the most to me is “You Doo Right” by CAN. I think that’s over 20 minutes. There was a wonderful band from California called Thin White Rope that used to, as their second encore, come out and cover it. They did a really good, straightforward version of it, and their version had to have lasted 12 to 15 minutes. But if it’s got that really hypnotic vibe, which I think “Motorcycle Kondilies” attains… you’ve got to be kind of a special band.
A lot of these jam bands that are successful today, I can watch two or three songs, then I’m fine, ready to go do something else. I would never play guitar, but I know the difference between good guitar playing and wanking. Some very talented people cross that line a lot.
“Washer” by Slint
Spiderland, like a lot of people who’ve heard it, is one of my favourite records of all time.
And fellow Louisville guys, right?
Yeah, I became friends with all of them. But at the time when I bought my copy, I was living in Hoboken, New Jersey, and driving a bus in New York City. In Hoboken, we had Maxwell’s – that wonderful rock club that’s now gone – but we also had arguably the best record store in the New York City metropolitan area, a place called Pier Platters. You could access, without leaving your little town, amazing music in an old-school record store.
I remember buying Spiderland. I was 24 and I was driving a split shift, which means you have to drive both rush hours. You drive in the morning, you get a few hours off, then you drive the afternoon rush hour. I would walk about a mile and a half to work at five in the morning, and Spiderland kind of set the tone for my day.
I like all the songs on it, but “Washer”, to me, for a band that’s not really renowned for love songs, is a love song. It’s an outpouring of emotions from the heart.
Soon after that, unbeknownst to either of us, Mark Ibold and myself became aware that Pod – the great Breeders album – was being recorded in New York, and that Britt Walford, the drummer for Slint, was the drummer. Even though I believe on the record he’s officially known as Mike Hunt, which is a nice look into his sense of humour.
Mark and I befriended him – fast friends – and then when Pavement started touring a lot, in ‘93, I realised that I wasn’t going to be in the New York City area enough to justify rent, so I was looking for somewhere to move. As a horse-racing person, the obvious choice was to move to Louisville, which is a great horse-racing town. Before I was able to buy a house across the street from the racetrack, I lived with Britt. Will Oldham lived there for a while.
Will Oldham who shot the Spiderland cover photo…
Yes, he did, actually, and those kids were mates since they were under 10. The first incarnation of Palace Brothers – that pink record, which is great [There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You] – as they were preparing for tour, they practiced in our little rental house. I felt like I was watching the best band in the world, four nights a week. It was Slint and Will.
Unfortunately, they got into some sort of disagreement and cancelled the tour the night before it was supposed to start, which was kind of sad, because I thought that it would be wonderful for the guys in Slint.
Louisville was one of those places where people thought I’d moved to town because I was going to try to steal ideas, and then within the course of several months, they realised that I’m not capable of stealing musical ideas.
Lance Bangs, who made the Slow Century documentary for us, he made their documentary, Breadcrumb Trail, which is just a fantastic, really full and complete story of Slint. I think Breadcrumb Trail accomplishes what perhaps Slow Century set out to do. I don’t think Slow Century is bad. I just thought that the Slint story was far less known.
They always had an air of mystery about them. But I don’t think a song or an album portrays the personality, attitude, emotion of a band more than Spiderland, and having the pleasure to get to know those unique individuals and their easy and brilliant sides and their struggles…
I never expected to meet them or even see them. The word on the streets was that they were pretty much done, but the gift they left behind was that record. Obviously, it’s not party rock, it’s not DJ rock. It’s a sit-quietly-and-listen record. It will always command every drop of my attention.
“Washer” is just a gorgeous song about a kid suffering. There’s thousands of songs with the same subject, but I really like Slint’s version of it – I think it’s a bit out of character, because people don’t think that was a band that writes love songs.
Very well said, and thanks for sharing. I think it sounds perfect for the 5am walk to work as well, and in the dark especially.
In like an ugly industrial area with puddles and under bridges and stuff. It was kind of gnarly, and it would set the tone and help me focus, on definitely not enough sleep. It’s kind of like music to replace Xanax, in a way.
And the album’s obviously stuck with you. Is it something you revisit a couple times a year, or how often?
Whenever anybody wants to put it on. It’s on a lot of my song lists, various songs. I’ve always found Spiderland to be a very – like a small handful of records – good driving record. In America – of course, as you know – an eight-hour drive is not an unusual thing. And if you can kill entire hours going 78 miles an hour, zoned out on a record, then you appreciate the fact that you didn’t think about every mile you drove for an hour.
Another one that pops in the head – completely different genre, completely different vibe, and a completely under-celebrated album that’s a great driving record – is Bad Brains’ I Against I. It’s like Bad Brains was trying to expand their audience. They could play, obviously, and they were trying to be more metal, more heavy metal.
I think it was a fail for them, but what came out of it was a great driving record. Spiderland’s a different vibe, but also a great driving record.
“Eaux Sombres” by Emily Loizeau
She would fall into the category of musicians that I probably would never heard of if I hadn’t done the 3 Songs Podcast. She’s a discovery for me from the last five or six years.
Did you ever see that movie Winged Migration? It’s a wonderful French documentary about the migration of birds. It’s very innovative, the way it was filmed, the techniques. It’s actually something that you should go out of your way to see. I don’t know whether or not she’s on the soundtrack. I think she might be, but a lot of the soundtrack is kind of atmospheric.
When I heard Emily Loizeau – and I don’t even know how I stumbled upon her, one of my playlists ends and I was like, ‘What’s this?’ – I took a two-or-three-day dive into her music, and it reminded me of how much I love the soundtrack on Winged Migration, how it fits the film.
I was in France in the last few years, and she was playing somewhere in Paris. For whatever reason, I couldn’t get to it, and I was gutted. There’s another French band I really dig, called Mansfield.TYA, which is two women, but Emily Loizeau, her story is an interesting one. This song in particular – I don’t speak much French…
Nor me.
But this song means ‘murky waters’. Titles to songs are important, and to me, the sound and prettiness of the song, the depth of the song, really fits the title.
If you’re listening to music in a foreign language, and you listen to it a lot, you have certain passages where you sing under your breath lyrics in English that probably have nothing to do with the song, but it’s just the way you entertain yourself. I can’t really think of the things I say during certain parts of the songs, but it’s a wonderful song to have in a DJ set, because it adds a lot of dynamic. It’s gorgeous.
I think she seems, as far as I can tell, like a really cool and uniquely talented person with a beautiful voice. I’m kind of a high-strung, anxious person, so to me, it’s very, very soothing and very emotional. I’m not sure if that was even its intent, but that’s its effect on me.
I like how there’s that one line she sings in English. I wrote it down: “Love will take us away, someday.”
I love that. You should go out of your way to watch Winged Migration when you have plenty of time on a Sunday or something. It’s a very, very good feeling. It’s an absolutely gorgeous film.
I looked her up on Spotify: she’s got one artist playlist, and it’s just 24 Bob Dylan songs.
Oh, funny. Maybe somebody should tell her that Shawn Marshall has already done that.
“The Murder of Liddle Towers” by Angelic Upstarts
I was looking into Liddle Towers – a really upsetting, horrible story. Did you know about that when you found the song? Did you choose it for the lyrics? This is the guy who was beaten up by police in his cell and then died, in the UK in the 1970s.
Yeah, he was murdered in 1976, and the song came out in 1978. And [Thomas ‘Mensi’ Mensforth], the singer from Angelic Upstarts, died from COVID-related illness a few years ago, protesting in Northumberland at a protect-immigrants-type event.
So he’s been at it this whole time, years.
Yeah. I never heard the song until a week after Mensi died. I remember seeing, in my town, tough kids would have amongst the 25 hardcore bands on their leather jackets or shirts, Angelic Upstarts. That was really all I knew about Angelic Upstarts.
I wasn’t the kind of punk that was into The Exploited or U.K. Subs or anything like that. I was more of an SST guy, like a Replacements guy. The English punk rock I liked was more of the mutant pop variety.
A lot of it came from Yorkshire. As a kid, I really liked bands like Echo & the Bunnymen and New Order, and it’s funny – Joy Division was one of those bands that you’d see on the kids’ jackets that would have U.K. Subs and Angelic Upstarts. Crass would be another one. Even in Richmond, there were some kids that completely identified with ‘70s English hardcore.
My best friend, who lives in Margate, is a guy named John MacArthur, and he’s a few years older than me. We’ve been to all 60 British racecourses together, which is quite an odyssey. It took us 25 years, because I’m an as-frequent-as-possible visitor to the UK. We met at The Leadmill in Sheffield after a Pavement show and just became fast friends. He’s from Cleethorpes, outside of Grimsby. It’s pretty obscure.
Very friendly people.
Yes! So John and I often exchange stories of our teenage years and listen to the music. I’ve turned him onto a lot of bands that he never would have heard from the early ‘80s in the US. He would have seen things like Angelic Upstarts like eight times, being from Lincolnshire and willing to travel around the northern part of the country.
After Mensi died, and I heard that whole story, we stayed up really, really late that night, and he told me all of his Angelic Upstarts stories and played me a lot of their music. He’s a fantastic storyteller. You can almost feel what it was like to be 17. I’m not going to go so far to say he was a glue-sniffer, but that kind of low-rent abuse that kids did then.
But this song, obviously, is wildly intense. While he’s telling me stories, I’m reading the Wikipedia page. Police brutality is a part of all of our lives. And this was, as far as I know, a very early and highly publicised case. This band perfectly – in every way, shape, and form, in a very powerful manner – made one of the best songs against wildly unnecessary cop brutality that I’ve ever heard.
Over here, I believe they use ACAB, which means ‘all cops are bastards’. I don’t believe that. I’ve worked a lot of jobs, and I’ve worked in a lot of different areas of my life, and I’ve worked with a lot of assholes who are useless at their jobs. Very rarely – in this country, at least – have I ever had a good experience with a police officer. I sort of look at police – since I was a teenager – as really only being able to cause me trouble, whether it be in the form of traffic enforcement.
Your [UK] rules have always been incredibly strict against driving intoxicated, but then your options are a lot better with public transportation in general, no matter where you are in Britain, so they can make those rules against driving while intoxicated really, really strict, which is good for everyone.
In this country, to a fault, we push the envelope a lot more, and we’re lucky to make it from point A to point B. I don’t do it anymore, but I certainly have put in a lot of drunk driving miles and emerged unscathed, which is just down to pure fortune.
So I’m not going to sit here and say that I’m some sort of saint, which I’m certainly not, but I think the way that some people just aren’t cut out for [the police], and they end up doing it because it’s the best job they can get. I do believe there must be good police officers out there, but we all know that there’s a hell of a lot of bad ones that abuse the opportunity.
I don’t know if they use the same language here, but in the US they use ‘to protect and serve’. A lot of people would say ‘to fuck with and destroy’ would be more accurate. I’m not a hater of cops, but one interesting about Little Towers was he was undiagnosed crazy. I’m sure he was heavily intoxicated, but we’ve all been around people like that, and I don’t know about you but in a handful of instances, we’ve seen them get arrested. And if they’re really bad, we’ve seen them go off to jail.
But there was no need to beat this man senseless and eventually kill him. There’s many opportunities to draw the line, and they decided this was an opportunity to remove somebody that they didn’t want to have to keep dealing with from their lives. They probably were quite confident they’d get away with it, and that’s sickening, and Angelic Upstarts found it sickening. It’s just a very powerful anti-police-brutality anthem.
It’s kind of interesting to love a song from 1978 and know a band’s name and find out everything you know about them from a friend who loved them as a teenager, during a four-hour period.
In recent years.
I think that that’s a very powerful and intense late ‘70s sentiment from what obviously is a rough part of Northumberland, a highly populated part. So I thought it was a really powerful presentation of a horrible act.
It’s a really good choice. I don’t think I have anything intellectual enough to add to that. But I think the cops did get away with it.
I can’t recall if any of them were suspended or anything like that, but certainly none of them were jailed or punished. These days, as you know, whenever you see a police incident, everything’s on camera. Well, this was word of mouth. There’s nothing on camera from this thing. You and your mates can decide what you think, looking at the video. It wasn’t like that in 1976. I don’t think it was like that in 1986, perhaps even ‘96.
“Fantasize The Scene” by Circuit des Yeux
Changing pace – did this come on your radar via Matador?
No, she’s a hero of mine. I bought her first seven inch, which is like a limited edition of 300.
There’s a woman called Thalia Zedek, who was in Live Skull, and she still plays solo, and she was also in a band on Matador called Come. She’s just a great Boston punk rocker with exceptional taste. Thalia, back then, recommended this band that I’d never heard of before. I quickly bought the first seven inch, and I couldn’t tell whether to play it at 33 or 45.
I’ve been there.
I found it really, really intriguing, so I bought all her records. It’s due to her magical voice and the power of it, and she’s a brilliant musician – but after 60 years of rock and roll music, it’s nearly impossible (and it was certainly impossible for Pavement) to be completely original.
Of artists today, Haley Fohr – who’s a young woman from Fort Wayne, Indiana – somehow achieves that. She tackles a lot of different styles and genres. And I love all of her records. I’m a huge fan. She’s my favourite current artist, and has been for the last decade, plus.
This is one of her more well-known and well-liked songs. Obviously, I was thrilled when she signed to Matador. It’s tough being on Matador if you don’t have a pretty commercial sound. She can do that. She can do just about anything she wants. Her most recent record is pretty weird and pretty dark.
Halo On the Inside. It came out this year.
We had her play with us, two or three shows, when we went on tour in 2022. She’s just such a joy. She’s such a down-to-earth person. If you listen to her music, you might think that she’d be a bit odd, but she’s just a really cool person.
David Berman, before he died, the last time I saw him, he was living at the Drag City offices. He was living upstairs. There’s a couple of offices – the size of a very small hotel room – and then across the hall there’s like an apartment, and he was living there. It’s like three floors in Chicago.
The person who would hang out there the most who was living in Chicago in the same neighbourhood was Haley. So they became friends, and she would be the last person that I met through David. But David really didn’t know how great she was.
I was visiting him, and he died in August, and it was January, because I went there for his birthday, which was January 4th. I was just like, “Haley Fohr is one of my heroes.” And so we listened to her music outside on their picnic table. I think she actually sings on one of the songs on the Purple Mountains record, his last record.
We were leaving there to go to a bar to celebrate David’s birthday, and there were two cars going, and she gave me a ride. She had this totally normal ten to fifteen year-old little tiny car where the back seat was just all trash, just like a lot of kids’ cars, that she had moved that out of the way.
She was so down to earth and cool that you can’t believe that somebody makes this really, really intense music. But I easily could have picked any. I would say there’s about 40 songs of hers that I love. I just think it’s a really good introduction. She’s potentially overlooked, and I don’t like that, because, of people from her generation, in my opinion, she’s doing the most valuable and interesting work.
I think that’s pretty admirable as well, to pick a song that you think is going to appeal to the largest number of people, rather than just being your favourite.
If you’re ever given the opportunity to see her play live, she’s an outstanding performer who engages the crowd in a really interesting way. She’s an intense performer, and her voice, which I think sometimes she feels has held her back because it’s so untraditional – it’s so powerful.
She’s going to be on tour in Europe and the UK this fall. If you’re not doing anything that night, I would highly recommend going to see her play.
I also noticed that all of her albums have nine songs, curiously enough.
Oh, is that true? That’s something I didn’t know. Some of them are long. I mean, they’re full-length records.
I really liked that song and will be listening to more of her stuff. How did you find meeting her and having to say more than your usual, “That was awesome; thanks so much”?
Pretty cool. But to me, she’s like a rock star, and to her, I’m just some friendly old dude. I had to interview her for Matador. That’s always a little awkward. I think it was a way to promote whatever album she was having on Matador, like an hour and a half before she played with us. But I don’t like to watch bands play before Pavement plays, because, funnily enough, I’m damaged from seeing Dirty Three, watching them play and then 20 minutes after that ended, having to play.
Keep in mind, we toured with Stereolab at the absolute peak of their powers, when they were just such a well-oiled machine. So I would watch bands like that and then go up on stage 20 minutes later and be like, “Ladies Gentlemen, the song’s called ‘Trigger Cut.’” Even if we were good, it just didn’t have the power or intensity of those bands.
But I made myself watch Circuit des Yeux. Two shows in Chicago, and then she played Detroit, opening for us. I made myself watch her because I realised, these could be rare opportunities, because she kind of plays less in America than other parts of the world. She’s the kind of person that could show up in, like, Aarhus instead of playing in LA.
We have a lot of those smaller, experimental festivals, like Le Guess Who?, and I feel like she would fit in well at something like that.
And let’s face it, the UK and Europe’s just way cooler. It is. Less corporate nonsense. Believe me, there’s plenty of corporate nonsense. I know, okay, but you do have smaller, cool things with less corporate nonsense – when you pay your £30 for the weekend, £27 of it is going to the artists. Just about everything over here is bullshit. I mean, paying $85 to see a Pavement concert – what a joke.
LOL! No!
The thing is, $50 of that is fees. Everybody does everything they can to not screw their fans over, but there’s no way around it. It’s scandalous. If you and I went and saw an NFL football game this weekend – which I don’t recommend – we’d pay for bad seats, like $175 for a team that’s not popular. But it’s been going on forever, so it’s old hat and boring for me to complain about.
“Who's Gonna Take The Weight?” by Gang Starr
First of all, I’m no expert on hip-hop. I probably have 25 to 30 hip-hop records, and probably none of them are from this millennium.
Gang Starr played before us at one of the Reading festivals. I think it might have been the first one in ‘92, which was the day of the famous Nirvana show.
Yes, my dad was at that.
I know Melvins played. I know that Björn Again, the famous ABBA cover band, played after us. But I watched Gang Starr, who I’d never heard of. The opportunity to see live hip-hop, those opportunities were few and far between. I had seen Public Enemy. I found them rather disappointing. Cypress Hill was on the same Lollapalooza as us in ‘95.
The best two live performances from this genre I’ve ever seen were KRS-One – I saw him in Tampa in the mid ‘90s – and Gang Starr were mind-blowing. So it would have been the fact that they were so good live that attracted me to the record.
One of our dear friends and employees in the ‘90s was our merch guy, Maurice Menares, and he knew a lot about hip-hop.
He was an expert, and he really, really dug Gang Starr. But I found that out after I saw this show. I watched this show, and I was like, ‘Oh, people can really pull this off on a big stage at festivals, this can be awesome.’ Even though at the time I knew none of the music, I was kind of amazed, because I’d seen six, eight shows, and they were all nowhere near as good as the recordings. As it turns out, these guys were as good or better live.
Just the two of them up there.
They might have had a real drummer, which also is a bonus. If I could choose to play two instruments well, I would choose vibraphone or marimbas, xylophone. It’d be really, really cool to be able to play that really well. I sure as shit can’t do it. And I think it’d be really fun and super cool to be able to know how to scratch.
This guy, DJ Premier, was over-the-top good. It was like crazy hand athleticism, absolute style. I was just mesmerised the entire show, like, ‘How in the hell do you do that?’ And so “Who’s Gonna Take the Weight”, especially his solo towards the end, is just as good as it gets.
The aforementioned Maurice: on Pavement tours, the band would travel in a van. Maurice and I – I was a tour manager, and we needed to get there first, so we had a separate car, so we didn’t have to wait on them wasting time all day.
We needed to get there, get the merch set up, get everything ready, and then when the gear came, put that on the stage. I just let Maurice play the music. Maurice would listen to a lot of music like Gang Starr, and he would scratch on the dashboard, and he just loved this guy so much.
After I saw the [Reading] show, I bought a few records, including Step in the Arena, which is, to me, their best record, but just out of complete admiration for an untraditional instrument that’s kind of considered, in most circles, a novelty. I was able to see something transcendent in that regard.
The Beastie Boys, we played with them a lot, and they have a guy that’s good at it. I think his name is Hurricane. He’s revered as being really good at it. He’s no DJ Premier. I think the guy might be dead. I mean, I probably shouldn’t say that, because I’ve gotten that wrong before.
No, he’s alive. In fact, he’s just a little bit older than me. [Reading Wikipedia] “Christopher Edward Martin, known professionally as DJ Premier, also known as Preemo” – that’s good to know. So if we want to even sound cooler, we can say ‘also known as P, R, E, E, M, O.’ That’s got to be primo as opposed to pre-emo. That’s kind of funny.
I love that song, because when it comes to hip-hop and stuff, I defer to people with more knowledge. I don’t understand how people do this. I don’t understand how people listen to people rap and then, within two or three listens, can rap back the whole thing. I know a handful of people like that. To me, there’s no way in hell – people that karaoke hip-hop songs but don’t need to look at the screen.
I really like the being-on-tour anecdote, because I totally had a picture in my mind of you in New York in the ‘90s, New York state of mind, listening to stuff like this, wandering the streets. But it’s cool that, of all places, it was Reading Festival.
Let me load up that while we’re on the subject. Public Enemy headlined the second night, and I didn’t go.
You were already turned off them?
And also, I went to University of Virginia, and there was a famous US football player named John Harkes that played for Sheffield United – no, Sheffield Wednesday, my bad – and they were playing in London at Highbury against Arsenal. I’d never been to a British football match before. The hotel we were staying in was half a mile away, so I blew it off. I figured I needed a break from Reading.
The previous day, I remember seeing Dry-era PJ Harvey, and that was fantastic. That day when we played, it was Melvins, Screaming Trees, Pavement, L7, Teenage Fanclub, Mudhoney, Nick Cave, and Nirvana.
That’s bananas.
We had no business being on that bill. I could tell you that much. But we only had to play for half an hour, so we didn’t suck too badly.
Reading ‘94, from the top down: Cypress Hill, Lemonheads, Frank Black, Pavement, Hole, Gang Starr, Transglobal Underground, Verve, and Flaming Lips. What a weird year. Primal Scream headlined the second night with Ice Cube playing before them. Radiohead were halfway down the bill, and Pulp played before them. Flaming Lips started it.
And then Sunday, from the top down, it was Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Soundgarden, Therapy?, Rollins Band, Senser, Afghan Whigs, Stabbing Westward, and Cop Shoot Cop. So it was kind of what I call crotch rock on Sunday, where you watch the bands and you feel like you can smell a bad locker room.
Is that different to cock rock, crotch rock?
I think that you guys probably call it cock rock. I guess if we were 19 then, we’d have packed our tent on Sunday morning and got the hell out of there.
Do you think you take any cues from ‘90s hip-hop for your stage presence?
First of all, I’m nowhere near that cool or could even pretend to be. And I think it’s kind of funny because I’ve been referred to before as a hype man. To actually know what that is, I looked up the definition of it. It also led to a Wikipedia page in which they listed, I believe, 40 prominent hype men. I think two of us were white. One of them is Bez. Let me see.
I’m by far the least favourite person on this list. Definitely the poorest. The funny thing is, I told somebody about this. Kind of embarrassingly, they looked it up and were like, “You’re not on there.” And I was like, “Okay, I’m pretty sure I was at one point." I was like, "I wonder if somebody complained, like who is this indie rock honky on this list?".
Then it says, “Occasionally, pop or rock groups include a member upfront alongside the lead singer, who may perform backup vocals or percussion, but largely functions to excite the audience through dancing and/or stage patter. Examples include Bob Nastanovich for Pavement, Bez of the Happy Mondays, Beau Butler of AVAIL, and Guy Picciotto in Fugazi’s earliest incarnation.”
So they took me off the list of notable hype men, but then I’m in that paragraph.
You’re first, though – first in the list. You beat Bez.
I’ve finally surpassed Bez. Guy Picciotto – I never really thought of him as a hype man. He’s a lovely man, by the way. He’s very, very nice. He’d be a good guy to have on this [Nine Songs]. I can’t say whether he’d do it or not, but I’m good friends with his wife, Kathleen, who’s in Bikini Kill. I tour-managed her in 1993 when she was in a band called The Frumpies. And I was the tour manager for the short-lived British band, Huggy Bear.
They’re from my hometown, Brighton. I know Huggy Bear.
I think one of them went on to marry Graham Coxon from Blur.
No way. It’s all so connected.
I could be wrong there, but I had a brief relationship with one of them and when I say brief, like brief. She quickly moved on, mate – she quickly moved on.
I’m sure you’re the one who got away.
Never have been. Never will be.
“The History of Utah” by Camper Van Beethoven
“The History of Utah” is our final song, by Camper Van Beethoven, who you said you saw recently at their reunion or anniversary show?
They don’t play often. It wasn’t even a tour. They put out three records in less than two years, starting in 1985. They put out their first album called Telephone Free Landslide Victory that had an underground cult classic hit on it called “Take the Skinheads Bowling”. They got some notoriety for that.
It’s like the way Pavement is now, with “Harness Your Hopes”, except we didn’t put that out first. So just about everybody’s heard of “Take the Skinheads Bowling”, but really, in the overall scheme of things, it’s a run-of-the-mill Camper Van Beethoven song.
The show I saw was for the 40th anniversary of their first record, and they played the entire album. It was fantastic. And this is a very versatile band with an accordion player – or squeeze box, whatever you want to call it – a fantastic violinist, couple of great guitar players, brilliant keyboards.
I saw them about seven times between ‘85 and ‘90. Their second album, which interestingly from a sound aesthetic sounds like it would have preceded their first record, is a record called II & III, and it’s more low fidelity. It’s a gorgeous record.
This song came out in 1986 on their self-titled record. I was a college radio DJ, and I listened to Camp – they were heavy rotation for me in the ‘80s, and I still listen to them. The singer, David Lowery, he went on to be in a more famous band called Cracker, and he’s a very clever wordsmith and smart-arse and so a lot of the songs are funny, but then a lot of the songs are sort of world music-sounding instrumentals. They can do whatever.
I was always particularly amused by “The History of Utah”, which is one of their less-celebrated songs. But I was amazed when I saw this concert. They played all the first album, and they played about 12 more songs of variety from their later records, and I was so thrilled that they played “The History of Utah”.
The strange thing was, it was the first time in my life where I’ve ever been in the position of being out in the audience and somehow recalling every single song and knowing all the words. It’s the first time I ever spent close to two hours singing every word to the song. And I can understand why people do that now. It’s really, really fun.
And the people I was were with only really knew “Take the Skinheads Bowling”. They’re with this old guy who’s singing every word, and I think it made them get a kick out of it, enjoying it more, you know.
I think that “The History of Utah” is great political satire. It’s just a smart-arse, tongue-in-cheek type song, but they’re a band that’s generally considered – for whatever reason, and it could have been their own fault – the most underrated band of the late ‘80s underground in this country. And deservedly so.
I think they’re from California. They’re from Davis or somewhere like that, kind of like a Stockton-like place. So when Pavement first got going, we felt like if we were anywhere near as successful as Camper Van Beethoven was, it would be hitting it out of the park. It would be fantastic.
A couple of them came up to me after the show, and I had great conversations with all of them. The main guy, David Lowery, who’s the most famous one – I guess their Michael Stipe, let’s say. In fact, they used to open for R.E.M. back in the day. The first time I saw R.E.M., the Dream Syndicate opened for them, and then the second time the Rain Parade did – this really good psychedelic punk band from San Francisco.
There’s dozens of great songs, but that song is really, really cool, and it kind of sums up their whole way of being and their sense of humour. And they were great players.
They’re good at structuring a song as well, because that first section is more staccato and tense. But then I really like the outro section, where it releases into the 6/8 and goes into the major key.
I don’t know their backgrounds, but they’re obviously the kind of kids that, unlike Pavement, they practised. They enjoyed practising, which is a novel idea. Pavement practices now more than ever, because there’s more people out there to potentially humiliate yourself in front of.
Hecklers Choice is out digitally now, and is available on CD and LP on 14 November. PAVEMENTS (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is released on the same day, and available to pre-order now.
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