FEATURED INTERVIEWS

Sonic Youth, 2009

Grizzly Bear, 2009

Yo La Tengo, 2009

Michael Stipe, 2008

Stephen Malkmus, 2008

Conor Oberst, 2007

The Long Blondes, 2006



FEATURED REVIEWS

Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, 2008

Beach House, 2008

The Clientele, 2007

Frida Hyvönen, 2006

Ladybug Transistor, 2006

Hidden Cameras, 2006

Malkmus broke up Pavement unceremoniously in 1999 and didn’t miss a beat in releasing a trio of fine solo records throughout this decade, the latter two augmented by his ad hoc band The Jicks. His newest album with the Jicks, Real Emotional Trash, is superb, perhaps his most satisfying post-Pavement work to date. A Fairport Convention homespun influence guides much of it; see the serpentine folk of “Wicked Wanda,” and the fuzzed-out psychedelic wash of “Elmo Delmo.” First single “Baltimore” dazzles with nifty quicksilver guitar lines, before it abruptly veers out of waltz time into an expansive molten jam coda. And “Out of Reaches” is perhaps the prettiest thing here, a scarred ballad with a rapturous, treble charged chorus that recalls the abject ache of “Here” and “Fillmore Jive,” two songs pivotal to Pavement’s legend.

We caught up with Stephen via phone at the early hour of 9am from his home in Portland, OR, sleep deprived from tending to his two young flu ridden daughters, eager to discuss formative influences like R.E.M. and The Fall, his championship winning softball team, and the state of Jam Nation in 2008.

Thanks to Nils Bernstein at Matador for setting up the interview.

JE: I always thought it was kind of funny that a lot of Phish and Grateful Dead fans I knew in college gravitated towards Pavement. But I think this record, and most of your solo stuff actually, could really appeal to those groups.
STEPHEN: Yeah, well it depends on the state of Jam Nation. I don’t know where they stand. If Ween counts, then we can, you know? And, I don’t turn away anybody. Almost anyone, except for date rapists and stuff, they aren’t allowed, and Jam Band fans aren’t generally like that. I don’t know. That’s a Matador question. We’ll see. That’ll happen when we go out on the road.

JE: I was thinking that these songs would sound good in amphitheatres. They’re very epic sounding.
STEPHEN: Me too. I’ve got no problems with that. I like the daytime shows now and then, just for a breakup. In an amphitheatre it’d be on at 5:30 and the place would be half empty when we got a chance to play them, but I’d be up for it.

JE: I saw you back in 2003 opening for Radiohead in an amphitheatre in Seattle and you seemed to go over pretty well. Later on that same tour Low opened at Madison Square Garden, and they didn’t go over nearly as well.
STEPHEN: Low is a tough sell. They’re quiet, even when they were louder on their last record. We’re gonna be loud. We probably sounded like Damaged-era Black Flag to those people, if they knew what that was, comparatively, because Radiohead is so beautiful sounding.

JE: Has the addition of Janet Weiss (Sleater-Kinney, Quasi) changed the dynamic of the band?
STEPHEN: Well John Moen, our ex-drummer, is one of my best friends.  He’s unbelievable to play with. But Janet, too. There’s something in the water here (Portland, OR), there’s good people here right now.  She’s a force of nature and she’s also mentally sharp too, so I think the sky’s the limit sort of, whatever we want to do we can do. But it does push it in a different direction with her. More rockist, I guess.

JE: “Real Emotional Trash” is a song on the new record I really like. It reminds me a lot of “Type Slowly,” and I never really cared for that song.
STEPHEN: Yeah, It has some of those same moves. It’s maybe more realized than Type Slowly, which had kind of a British folk progression on guitar, and I thought I was singing like Robin Williamson (Incredible String Band) or something, but I wasn’t hitting that many notes I don’t think. I thought I was really bringing it, you know? (laughs)

JE: It also reminded me a bit of “Transport is Arranged” in the louder parts.
STEPHEN: Yeah, it builds. The end is something I haven’t really done, a standard Status Quo boogie rock part that ends up sounding a little more like a watered down, ninth generation San Francisco sound…(laughs) And people try to mention the The Allman Brothers, but just because you do a couple harmonized guitars, it’s not really The Allman Brothers.

JE: I remember seeing a best of list you compiled back when you were with Pavement and I was surprised to see The Groundhogs on it. I can hear that influence a lot more here.
STEPHEN: Yeah, I hadn’t heard them in college but this label executive from Big Cat, our record label over in the UK at the time, he was a big fan of British music from the 70s. He was also into Virgin Records things like Gilgamesh, things I didn’t really know about or graft onto. But when he played me that it was like the pied piper. It was the real thing, one of the most interesting progressive blues rock bands ever made. They always err on the right side of the progressive side. It’s not Yes, it’s just exploratory, but it’s really about the power of the jam.

JE: On the other end of the spectrum on the record there are really good pop songs like “Out of Reaches,” which reminds me of an R.E.M. or Built to Spill song.
STEPHEN: Yeah, there’s a balance. Those come out naturally and either they’re ear breaks or they’re great pop songs, you know? It depends on what side you stand on with the band. Janet calls them ear breaks. She likes them too though.

JE: I just saw a Take Away Show you did online.
STEPHEN: The half R.E.M. stuff? (an acoustic medley of “Don’t Go Back To Rockville,” “Good Advices,” “7 Chinese Brothers,” and Driver 8”)

JE: Yeah, I really dug it.
STEPHEN: Me too, it’s all I wanted to do. The guys who did it, when I went on my promo tour of France, they were like, (affects French Accent) “you have to do another one, you did not do your own songs.” And I was like, “I don’t want to. I thought that was quite nice. That was enough.” (laughs)  We gave a lot there. I thought it was fun that we were just sort of messing around. R.E.M. has a record coming out and my friends who are big fans are calling it a return to form, and maybe their fifth best record.

JE: We just interviewed Michael Stipe for this issue. The record’s really good. Harkens back a bit to Document and Life’s Rich Pageant.
STEPHEN: I’m really looking forward to hearing it. The title Accelerate turned me off a little bit, like 15%.  It kind of reminded me of Monster.  It’s like, we don’t need the nudie suits, you’re not rockers, although you might rock. You’re R.E.M., and we just want you to bring your R.E.M-ness to us again.

JE: There was a hidden feature on the Pavement Slow Century DVD of you covering “Camera” with in Athens back in 1994. You were a pretty big R.E.M. fan back in the day.
STEPHEN: I don’t know if I’ve actually watched that, but I was a big fan of R.E.M. for sure. In the mid-80s they were a revelation to me to get away from American hardcore, being into Black Flag and the Circle Jerks. Echo and the Bunnymen were there, but R.E.M. was off on their own, kind at the top of the class. They were similar to some of the paisley groups like Rain Parade and Green on Red, but they seemed to be kind of self-contained. They didn’t really need to reference anything else. They just were. And I saw a lot of their shows too when I was in college in Virginia, and they were really great.

JE: I never got to see them until the Monster tour in 1995, which was probably quite a lot different than the shows you saw.
STEPHEN: Yeah, I saw them on the Monster tour too. That’s when I met Michael Stipe. I met him in a giant mega-dome in Kentucky backstage in a basketball locker room putting on his make up, so it was like, you know, times have changed. (laughs) Peter Buck actually lives up in Seattle, and he’s just a music geek. He’s got just a great record collection, and he’s a big fan of music. He’s probably the one I related to most as a young fan or something.

JE: I actually thought about you when we interviewed Michael Stipe for this issue. Apparently Iggy Pop’s never been all that nice to Stipe, as he doesn’t really care for R.E.M.  It reminded me of your history with Mark E. Smith (The Fall), and how he’s never had very nice things to say about Pavement despite being an acknowledged influence on the band. Have you ever met him?
STEPHEN: I’ve been within five feet of him. He’s a tough nut to crack I’d imagine.  Wouldn’t know what to say really. I have some friends in Elastica, and they did some stuff with him, and he was just like a total gentleman to them, you know. They just met him at a café, some greasy spoon, and he’s just like, (affects cockneyed British accent)“I love the lot of ya. All right love.” (laughs) I think they were giving him publishing for songs they had taken from him, so he was pretty gracious.

JE: He probably wanted publishing from you, too.
STEPHEN: (laughs) He probably wouldn’t mind. He could’ve had a claim if there was enough money to be worth getting out of us, which there wasn’t. When we were making Slanted and Enchanted, Grotesque was my favorite. I’d just gotten into them, and it was the perfect record for me, just the cover, everything about it.

JE: Well, you certainly turned a lot of people on to him. I got into The Fall because of Pavement.
STEPHEN: Yeah, somewhere, someplace, you’re gonna get there eventually, if you’re into a certain kind of music. It’s just a matter of when. I wasn’t ready when I was in my teens. I heard him and I just was like, what’s this tuneless dirge? It takes a little more conceptualizing, and you get it, and once you get it, it really hits you.

JE: Did you ever see them live?
STEPHEN:  I saw them at 9:30 Club in DC, probably for Frenz Experiment. And I saw them later, but I almost don’t consider it seeing The Fall when they were on Matador, this era when it was kind of depressing. Just one light on and this ghost up there. I tend to just think of the Frenz time as when I really saw them.

JE: I saw them in London right after the Coney Island High show in NYC in ‘98 when he allegedly beat up his girlfriend after the show.  Probably the dark era you were talking about.
STEPHEN:  Yeah, he’s got a shaky history with girlfriends and band members in general, sacking people and treating them poorly, treating them like he’s James Brown or something but without the guarantee that James Brown gets. (laughs) That builds a legend but it’s hard to do that, to be a dictator like that, you’re going out on a ledge if you aren’t a big seller. It might just be just you and yourself in the mirror.

JE: You’ve spoken about how you weren’t a huge Bob Dylan fan. I was curious as to why you did so many songs on the soundtrack to the Todd Haynes film I’m Not There if you aren’t.
STEPHEN: I’ve grown into being more of one in the past couple years. It just wasn’t anything I focused on as a youth. I was always into bands. At that time, when you first hear that stuff, well The Who, The Stones, and Credence and The Doors even, even though Jim Morrison was like a force unto himself in the Doors. I always liked seeing four people, and I guess I related to that more to that from a punk standpoint too. And I just thought, this old, well he wasn’t old then, it was kind of country-ish or folk-ish, and I had no time for that, and I wanted a backbeat, real hard, and of course he has songs like that in his early times, like “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” I thought he was all right, but he’s for the baby boomers. And I went to this show of his, it was around when Biograph came out, it was with The Grateful Dead. A really burned out concert, and I hated The Grateful Dead too, so I just sort of associated him with being burned out.

JE: Why did you go to the show then?
STEPHEN:  A friend got me tickets for free, and it was in Concord, at an amphitheater, and maybe my girlfriend used to wear a gypsy skirt. (laughs) I have a lot of friends that would go to Dead shows at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, maybe to take drugs, almost to hang out more, just to be a part of this event which The Dead sort of became more of, the band itself was just a part of it. This wasn’t like that at all though. It was more like an adult show.  But I would never doubt Dylan’s amazing lyrics and the things he’s done. Certain songs just go straight to the heart, real great, so I do like him, but he’s not like a signpost for me. It’s not a guy I want to play at my funeral or something.

JE: Did you like the film?
STEPHEN:  I did. I like Todd Haynes, his vision, how personal it is, with all the details. It’s slightly impenetrable at first, but you just give in to it. You trust him, and then you’re with him, you’re with Todd.

JE: There seems to be a great music and film scene in Portland these days.
STEPHEN: Music more. There’s a film world, there’s Todd and I guess Gus Van Sant would be the father figure sort of. But beneath that there’s a Super 8 DIY,
This whole other world of people making weird little movies at a festival called Peripheral Produce, it’s pretty cool. But music’s the thing right now. There are just so many good groups; freak folk like Jackie O Motherfucker, rock stuff like The Thremals, more mainstream stuff like Spoon and Modest Mouse and The Shins. A lot of punk, basement punk type stuff, like playing North Dakota type squat punk bands. The music side’s big these days.

JE: It’s all kind of happened in the past five years.
STEPHEN: Yeah, when I moved here there was Elliott Smith and Rebecca Gates and some Sub Pop bands, Sprinkler and Pond and Hazel. And Team Dresch. I guess Team Dresch filtered back to The Gossip and Sleater-Kinney. The Olympia stuff comes down here. The political, the body politics type Kill Rock Stars world is here too. So it’s good, you know? It’s great.

JE: I heard you’re in a softball league during the summer. A friend of mine plays in the league too.
STEPHEN: Yep, I am in a softball league. We won the whole thing. That was one of the crowning moments of the summer for me, taking the title. I never win anything in sports normally. We beat this paper called The Portland Mercury for the title. It’s sort of like the Voice, although it’s for 17 year olds instead of the Voice being for 24 year olds. (laughs) But we beat them.

JE: He mentioned that The Shins’ drummer (Jesse Sandoval) is on your team too.
STEPHEN: Jesse the Shins’ drummer was on my team. He was in left field, but was AWOL a lot because the band was busy. The Joggers, a really good band from Portland, were kind of the spine of the team as far as I was concerned.

JE: Any more of the Pavement deluxe reissues planned as of now?
STEPHEN: Matador’s trying to sell more CDs while they’re still sellable, so yeah, I think they’ll do Brighten the Corners. There was a lot of extra stuff for that one, we were doing like a million songs, not focusing, just kind of hoping something good would come out of it, so I think it’ll happen. I don’t know if they’ll do one for the last one. (Terror Twilight) They were getting lower in quality by that point, more like just computer ones or self-demos.

JE: Jack Rabid, the editor of this magazine wanted me to ask you about Mark Ibold.  He used to work with him at Freebeing Records on St. Marks back in 1984.
SM: Jack Rabid from Springhouse? Yeah, I’d see Jack at See/Hear, the old zine store in the East Village, walking around periodically in the early 90s. Mark is still around New York all the time. He works at Great Jones sometimes. He used to hang out at Shrine a lot, this cool record store, but it closed. Freebeing, I know about that place. Mark talked about that place a lot. He finally had to leave the East Village, as his complex was bought, but he’s living out in Sunnyside, Queens now. He’s liking it. He’s playing bass in Sonic Youth still, too.

JE: I know you get a lot of questions about Pavement reuniting, but I’d love to see you reunite jointly with Sleater-Kinney, especially since Janet’s playing with you in the Jicks now.
STEPHEN:  That’s a good idea. That would be a great double bill. A unique meeting of fans. It’s all part of, I can’t believe I’m saying this, alternative nation. (laughs) But it’s all part of the nineties. All post Homestead and Sub Pop.