Chasing Pavement

As befits his billing as the slacker’s slacker, Stephen Malkmus is merrily unperturbed this grainy winter morning. He recently released his best record in nearly 15 years, but the fact his solo career continues to be overshadowed by past achievements doesn’t seem to trouble him in the least. Malkmus understands people wish to focus on his previous incarnation as leader of bedraggled lo-fi institution Pavement. That’s perfectly alright – when it comes to his favourite artists, he feels exactly the same.

“Take someone like Neil Young. Sure, we like what he’s doing now. When we are honest with ourselves, it’s the older songs that we want. Generally it’s easier to stick with stuff you know rather than take a chance on something new. I get it.”
The record in question, Mirror Traffic, was recorded in late 2010 with Malkmus’ post-Pavement outfit The Jicks, and produced in LA by ‘90s polymath Beck. However, the drop date was set back 18 months so that Malkmus could spend a year traveling the world with a reformed Pavement. That reunion tour was judged a triumph – Irish hipsters practically weeping when the quintet played Tripod – but now it’s done Malkmus doesn’t plan on keeping the band going. The chances of new Pavement material are slim to none and a second tour appears unlikely.
“The Pavement reunion ended at the perfect time,” he reflects. “It was fantastic that a lot of people were able to come and see that band for the first time. It wasn’t such a novelty to me. I’d already spent years playing those songs. That said, it was an opportunity to celebrate the legacy of the group. And to enjoy a wonderful party.”
He’s known Beck since the ‘90s, watching in mild disbelief as the LA singer became a rock star with 1996’s Odelay. Still, they’d never discussed a collaboration and Malkmus was taken aback when the prospect was put to him. He isn’t one of those artists who feels compelled to always work with a producer – why pay someone to twiddle knobs when you could do as good a job yourself? He changed his mind after a guided tour of Beck’s state of the art studio.
“Instead of eating out in fancy restaurants he spent a lot of the money he made on equipment. He has all this really fantastic recording stuff – things that not everybody has. So it was great to go to him for that.”
The received wisdom on Pavement is that, the better they learned to play, the less interesting they were. They splash landed with 1992’s Slanted And Enchanted, a work of naïve, shambolic genius that, in its way, was as influential as Nirvana’s Nevermind (you can hear echoes of Pavement’s collapsing tunefulness in contemporary acts such as Yuck). Over time they become slicker and, by 1999’s Terror Twilight, were just another mildly bedraggled indie outfit. When they split up not long after it felt like an act of mercy. Far from a happy accident, Malkmus says those chaotic early records were a deliberate attempt to stand out.
“We were doing the trashy punk aesthetic on purpose,” he says. “We were consciously rejecting other sounds. I’d put together a band prior to Pavement. We’d done it in a proper studio. It sounded like Camper Van Beethoven. We sent the songs out and nobody took any interest. My response was, ‘Oh, people aren’t into that’. So we went back to that willfully trashy thing.”
The first many beyond the alternative scene heard of Pavement was when they dissed Smashing Pumpkins (and Spin Doctors) on their 1994 hit ‘Range Life’ (“Out on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins/Nature kids/They don’t have no function/I don’t understand what they mean/And I could really give a fuck…”) Bad mouthing other artists is standard procedure in hip-hop but unheard of in rock music and Smashing Pumpkins – never exactly masters of self-deprecation – were understood not to be amused.
“There were no lyrics at the end of the song so I started free-styling,” Malkmus recalls. “And that’s what I came up with. We thought it was very funny. The words had nothing to do with the rest of the song. We left it any anyway. Of course if someone had mentioned our band in a song it would have been like, ‘Fuck those guys! What do they know.’ I’m sure that’s how Smashing Pumpkins felt.”

Mirror Traffic is out now.