E2 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022
Music
PHOTOS BY CARLOS CANARIOBY PAUL THOMPSON“I
call them the Pavement
anxiety dreams.”
Scott Kannberg, better
known as Spiral Stairs to fans of
that totemic 1990s band he co-
founded, is explaining what’s been
happening to him in the middle of
the night lately. As he prepares for
a slate of reunion shows later this
year, the 55-year-old guitarist has
no nerves about getting onstage
with his former bandmates — at
least during the daytime. “I wake
up in a sweat,” he says. “Everybody
else is playing a song, and I look
down, and I’ve got no cords
plugged in.”
Kannberg laughs, though long-
time followers of Pavement might
be tempted to read a little more
into the dream. The band has not
released any new music since
1999, when it capped its catalogue
with “Terror Twilight,” a gorgeousbut slightly discordant album that
made a fugue of Pavement’s
charmed slacker ethos and sly
commercial aspirations, all with
something slightly darker run-
ning underneath.
The album — reissued this
month by Matador Records as
“Terror Twilight: Farewell Hori-
zontal,” a 45-song package that
includes demos, outtakes, a rear-
ranged sequence, and a 30-page
book of liner notes and interviews
— was recorded as the band was
splintering. Its members had scat-
tered across the country, and cre-
ative control had largely been con-
solidated in its frontman, Stephen
Malkmus. Tension mounted dur-
ing the tour that followed, and by
the summer of 2000, Pavement
had formally but unceremonious-
ly dissolved. While Malkmus is
famously circumspect about the
meaning behind his lyrics, the
opening lines of “Ann Don’t Cry” —“The damage has been done/I am
not having fun anymore” — are not
exactly cryptic.
Outwardly, things were good
when the Twilight sessions got
underway. By 1998, Pavement had
become one of the most critically
beloved bands of its era, if a slight-
ly prismatic one: The most inter-
esting parsings of their work grap-
ple with the question of whether
the apparent disinterest in, well,
everything was a sincere world-
view or a pose that was meant to be
read as such. They’d released their
sprawling, idiosyncratic opus
(1995’s “Wowee Zowee”) and fol-
lowed it two years later with
“Brighten the Corners,” which was
tight and polished by comparison,
though not so tight or polished as
to alienate the counterculture.
But they were not exactly hud-
dling in a bunker somewhere to
plot their next move. Kannberg
got married and moved to Berke-
ley, Calif. Drummer Steve West
was living in New York and bassist
Mark Ibold in Virginia; Bob Nas-
tanovich, the band’s multi-instru-
mentalist and resident horse-rac-
ing fanatic, bought what he de-
scribes as “an 800-foot shotgun
shack” across the street from
Churchill Downs in Louisville. In
fact, not all the members were
even sure if they’d attempt to fol-
low “Corners.” “You made an al-
bum, you toured, you disbanded,”
West says of the band’s normal
rhythm, “and you were pleasantly
surprised if you got a call” to start a
round of sessions for the next one.
That call did eventually come.
In July of ‘98, Malkmus sum-
moned his bandmates to Portland,
Ore., where he now lived. Despite
the professional uncertainty West
and other members describe, each
Pavement record grew, at least on
a creative level, out of the tour that
preceded it. Each record, that is,
until “Terror Twilight.” This was
the first time the band had none of
what Nastanovich calls “larval-
stage” songs, skeletons that were
kicked around during rehearsals
and sound checks until they were
ready for flesh and blood and mas-
tering. Instead, Kannberg, West,
Ibold and Nastanovich tried to get
up to speed as quickly as possible
on songs that Malkmus had
demoed alone, some of which he’d
debuted at acoustic shows in Port-
land earlier that year.
The stint in Portland was neces-
sary to get the members back in
sync. “It was probably the closest
time that Pavement ever had to
what most bands have,” Nas-
tanovich says, “in that all of its
members were residing in the
same place and practicing on a
regular schedule.” But the sessions
themselves were a disappoint-
ment. “The songs weren’t as
straightforward,” West remem-
bers. “They had lots of different
rhythms going on, different
styles.” After a couple of weeks, the
members determined together
that things weren’t sounding
right, and dispersed for a few
months to regroup.
“I had lots of musical ideas,”
Malkmus says of this period, but
not as much lyrical inspiration as
he’d had for the previous Pave-
ment records. “It wasn’t feeling
effortless like the albums before
it.” So he decided to try something
the band had never considered:
hiring a professional producer to
guide the sessions. Malkmus
reached out to the British pro-
ducer Nigel Godrich on the recom-
mendation of Domino Records
founder Laurence Bell and fellow
’90s hero Beck, who had enlisted
him for 1998’s “Mutations.” Go-
drich was best known at the time
for his work on Radiohead’s “OKComputer,” which saw the band
emerge from the Brit rock pack to
become one of the world’s most
revered bands. Godrich was al-
ready a fan of Pavement — espe-
cially the audacious “Wowee
Zowee” — and agreed to bypass his
usual upfront salary in exchange
for a simple percentage of the al-
bum’s profit, and even sleep on his
American friends’ floors to keep
the budget in check.
This new round of Godrich-di-
rected sessions began in October
of ‘98 at Echo Canyon, the studio
that was normally used as a re-
hearsal space by Sonic Youth. This
proved to be yet another false start
— after only a couple days of re-
cording, Godrich determined that
the bare-bones space would not be
conducive to the kind of takes he
wanted to capture — but after a
move to a more conventional (and
slightly more expensive) studio,
the work on “Terror Twilight” be-
gan again in earnest. “We definite-
ly needed someone to light a fire
under us to get this thing done,”
West says. Godrich “was not only
doing that, but he was going to
make it a different record, so we
didn’t repeat ourselves.”
Godrich
and Malkmus
developed
quick chemis-
try. “He’s very
project-orient-
ed,” Malkmus
says of the pro-
ducer, “and by
that I mean
the music
comes out and
he tries to reify
it or make it
into the thing
[he wants]
with his tricks
and his ability.
If it’s not there, he’s old-school.
He’s like, ‘Do it again.’ ” Godrich
pushed Malkmus to more robustly
hit notes that the singer would
have once let waver at their end, or
that he might have cut from songs
entirely after a couple of mediocre
passes. This helped turn those
Portland demos into more intrigu-
ingly realized songs; it also took
some pressure off the artist. “I was
ready for a little ... I wouldn’t say a
break,” Malkmus recalls, “but just
[to] do my thing and not have to
worry about everything or make
sonic decisions. Sometimes it’s all
just flowing out of you, and some-
times it’s like, ‘I’m tired.’ ”
Comfortable as this new setup
may have been for Malkmus, it cut
the other members of Pavement
out of the process, to varying de-
grees and at various points. “ There
was a bit of friction” in the band,
Nastanovich says, though he
found the producer’s perspective
understandable. “Nigel had very
much made Malkmus the focal
point — which I think was a fair
way to approach Pavement at that
time. I very well may have done the
same thing if I were him.” (In Rob
Jovanovic’s 2004 book on the
band, Nastanovich recounted a
moment early in the sessions
when it seemed Godrich didn’t
know his name; today he is mag-
nanimous, saying that trying to
augment songs in a separate stu-
dio room was his preferred meth-
od of working.) West, who saw
some of his drum tracks rerecord-
ed when the rest of the band left to
mix the album in London, is today
similarly Zen about his role in the
process.
The most notable absence from
“Terror Twilight” is Kannberg’s
writing. After contributing several
songs to each of Pavement’s prior
albums, none of his compositions
appear here. Kannberg mostlychalks this up to logistics, though
there is a lingering hint of frustra-
tion. “The way that we used to
record, I just kind of left my songs
until the end and then we would
work on them,” he says. But “by the
time Nigel got involved, we just
wanted to make the record. We all
kind of knew it was the end then.
Maybe we just wanted to get it
over with.”
Kannberg did win one signifi-
cant battle — the album’s tracklist-
ing. Godrich wanted to open “Ter-
ror Twilight” with “Platform
Blues,” a somewhat downbeat
song that unfurls in several, most-
ly unexpected directions, and to
follow it with the foreboding “The
Hexx.” Kannberg preferred the
cleaner, brighter suite of “Spit on a
Stranger” and “Folk Jam.” The re-
issue restores Godrich’s sequence
— which Kannberg, ironically, has
come to prefer. (It also adds “Shag-
bag,” a 70-second instrumental in-
terlude that was excised from the
original pressing.) Malkmus, who
was the arbiter in this dispute, is at
first self-effacing when asked
about how he arrived at his deci-
sion. “It was a little bit boomerish,
to me, to be too worried about” the
tracklisting,
he says with a
laugh. “People
are gonna like,
like, five of the
songs a lot, the
rest of them
less. There are
a few classic
albums of the
Pink Floyd,
Radiohead va-
riety that are a
total journey;
I wasn’t sure if
we made it
there anyway.”
Ultimately,
though, he says he had to side with
his longtime collaborator.
Ambivalent as Malkmus may be
on the issue, the reshuffling
changes the album significantly.
Where the 1999 version of “Twi-
light” captures an oddly earnest
yearning for something bright
and beautiful that is plagued by a
gnawing unease, Godrich’s ver-
sion hears the former emerge
from the latter. In both cases, the
listener is taught to be distrustful
of the mood each song creates, as it
is liable to be punctured by the
next one or undercut by a lyric that
seems to contradict its melody.
Even Malkmus, who has in the
past been somewhat dismissive of
the album, concedes that “there’s
this sonic fingerprint or some-
thing on there that’s addictive.”
Whatever bad blood ran
through the “Terror Twilight” ses-
sions seems to have evaporated.
All of Pavement’s members speak
eagerly about the reunion tour,
twice delayed by the pandemic,
that will begin this June in Spain.
And that downtime has allowed
for a strange kind of symmetry:
Each of the band’s five studio al-
bums has received a supersize re-
issue. Yet its founders are appro-
priately indifferent toward the
mythmaking process required to
maintain many acts’ legacies. “We
were kind of a weird band,” Kann-
berg says. “We just got together
when we got together and we kind
of all got along. Every Pavement
was always going to be the last one
— I remember after [the group’s
1992 debut album] “Slanted and
Enchanted,” saying, ‘Okay, that
was fun. I might see you again.’” If
the band’s growing pains and
eventual breakup were inevitable,
so too, perhaps, is this cycle of new
interest and renewed camarade-
rie. After all, Malkmus says, “we all
are slightly predictable.”Decades later, a new dawn for Pavement’s ‘Terror Twilight’
MATADOR RECORDSFrom left, Stephen
Malkmus, Scott
Kannberg and Bob
Nastanovich of
Pavement perform at
Metro in Chicago in
June 1999.“ HIGHLY recommended!Catch it, now!”— The ZebraORDER TODAY!
20 2-488-33 00ARENASTAGE.ORGHIGH-FLYING MUSICAL ROLLER COASTERCATCH MEIF YOU CANBASED ON THE DREAMWORKS M OTION PICTUREBOOK BY TERRENCE MCNALLYMUSIC BY MARC SHAIMANLYRICS BY SCOTT WITTMAN A ND MARC SHAIMANDIRECTED BY MOLLY SMITHNOW PLAYING!The cast of Catch Me If You Can by Margot Schulman.