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Snarky indie kids had been dancing around it for years, but Space Ghost had the balls to say it.  When Pavement appeared on the cartoon show “Space Ghost Coast to Coast ” in 1997, the band was introduced as – and only referred to as – the Beatles . . .

Calling a moderately successful underground band on a minor label “the Beatles” was, of course, a joke.   But every joke has a grain of truth, and for much of the 1990s, Pavement seemed like they might actually save rock n’ roll.  Rolling Stone even called frontman Stephen Malkmus “rock & roll’s greatest expressionist.”

With their lo-fi sound, penchant for two-word rhyming album titles and tongue-in-cheek aura, Pavement became one of the first bands to achieve international success without major label money.  If they didn’t start the indie movement, they certainly made it seem more possible than ever.  When Pavement split in 1999, Malkmus carried his cult icon mantle into a new band:  the Jicks.

Thriller spoke to Malkmus after the release of his fourth solo album, Real Emotional Trash.  He is reportedly recording the followup now and preparing for the impending Pavement reunion/ greatest hits compilation.

It seems like since Pavement broke up, the band is getting bigger.  Like, every year since you split, more people catch on.  Do you see that as being the case?

*CLICK TO LISTEN* Well, yeah.  The ‘90s – we’re all looking for something out of that era, which initially seemed a lot better than the ‘80s, and it probably was.  But, what are we going to take from that time, like the meat of the ‘90s?  Pavement is hopefully going to be one of those things.  There’s at least four solid albums, four and a half, and extra stuff.  And it was exactly in that era, and it ended right before the next century, so it’s compact that way.

A lot of stuff can be popular in the moment, but the mark of something great is that it takes on new life after it ends.

I hope so.  It’s in the canon, that hasn’t ended, which is kind of like The Velvet Underground, to punk rock, to the song end of things.  It’s in the same place.

There seems to be an absurdist element to a lot of Pavement music.  Where did that come from?

*CLICK TO LISTEN* Probably just surprise of actually being in a band that people are listening to [laughs].  Because I played in some punk bands and stuff, in the ‘80s, and nobody listened to us.  And I was a fan of, whatever, Butthole Surfers and stuff like that seemed like the most massive band ever, and Mudhoney.  This was more when I was actually thinking of having a band, that was huge.  So I think when Pavement got to be even more accepted than those kinds of bands, judging by our sound and who we were, I think we were really just like, “Oh my God, this is really insane.”

So you weren’t expecting it?

No, not at all.  So I think we were kind of like, “Whoa, what are we going to do now?  This is pretty crazy and we’re going to have to be a little self-conscious and a little absurd about things.”  And beyond that, I’m sure there’s other reasons, just artistically, what bands we liked or what kind of lyrics I liked.

That’s interesting you mention lyrics, because the lyrics are really the most absurd parts.  So many of the lines are really funny, like “Watch out for the gypsy children in electric dresses, they’re insane / I hear they live in crematoriums and smoke your remains” (from the song “You are a Light” on Pavement’s final album, Terror Twilight).

That was from like, when I was just a backpacker, and I was a kid and they were like, “Watch out for the gypsies.  If you go to Rome, they’re going to come get you, they’re going to be nice, and then you’re going to be up a fountain.”  It was just like, you know, thinking, well, you know, they don’t only do that. They live out in the cemetery because they don’t have houses, and they’re really depraved, they smoke people’s remains to get high [laughs].  Like, they’re really bad – “watch out for those gypsy children” – they’re really, really bad.  They’re not only just going to pickpocket you, they’re beasts.

What about “I have all this Harvard LSD / Why won’t anybody fuck me?” I laughed for about five minutes after that one.

I agree; it’s funny.  Well, there’s like Owsley [Stanley], and I was imagining all these twenty-three-year-old hipsters, they probably just want chicks.  But they’re really just greasy hippie guys.  I’m sure Ken Kesey was getting a lot, but I’m sure there were a lot of other people that weren’t.  They thought they could be like Ken Kesey, but you’re late to the party and, “I’ve got drugs, why doesn’t anybody want me?”  You should have had coke or something, dude, that might have worked better.

When you were a college DJ at Virginia, what were your favorite albums to play?

*CLICK TO LISTEN* At that time, I was not the main DJ.  I would hang out with friends more.  But, the things I really got excited about then was that band Can that was from Germany.  That was something where I was like, “Wow, there’s a whole other world that I don’t know anything about,” because I knew about 13th Floor Elevators, and the Velvet Underground and Wire, and these bands I really liked.  But this was this band that was kind of mysterious, more than the sum of its parts.  The name was weird, and the whole idea of the band seemed extremely perverse to me.  I was a big fan of theirs, and I also liked this band Chrome from San Francisco, that was, again, a band that was completely baffling.   I think when I got into the Fall and Chrome, it was sort of after Joy Division and New Order, and New Order, although they were a pop band, they also kind of had this image that was very cryptic and indecipherable what they really meant.  That’s the kind of things I was into then – sort of like being into Jean Paul Sartre if you were a philosophy student.  Kind of geeky.  Besides that, I like the mainstream, like Dinosaur, I loved Dinosaur, and Butthole Surfers and Sonic Youth was also an amazing band, I thought.

Your last three solo albums have been a bit dark, especially compared to Stephen Malkmus, and Real Emotional Trash only really has one pop song – “Gardenia.”  Is there a reason for that?

I like tougher sounds or darker – that feeling is more what I get from music.  I like beautiful things too, but it’s basically against the system, or something.  It’s about that, the underside of feelings, sort of a release, a chance to just go and rip.  You’re allowed to do that there.  You’re not really allowed to do that so often.  But you can control it, obviously, into a form.  It’s not all release, but it shows man’s urge to make something that has craft, but just on the darker end of the street.

It’s interesting you say that you like beautiful things too, because I think Real Emotional Trash has some of your prettiest melodies – “Cold Son,” “Out of Reaches,” “We Can’t Help You,” – and also some really interesting melodies like on “Baltimore” and “Elmo Delmo.”  Is that something you were trying for on this album?

I like melody and harmonies.  We all do, and the Beatles are the best band ever for a reason.  For all this saying you like dark things, they’re the best band.  They cover so much ground, but they are grounded in the singing, and rock ‘n’ roll, no matter all this talk about jamming and pushing the edge, it does kind of live or die by the singer.  That’s like the thing that’s going to ruin it – I mean, you need a great drummer or it’s going to suck, and you need a good singer, basically.  All this talk about guitar – a good guitarist, not that I’m a great one, but a good guitarist helps and a great band is going to have one too.  But if you have a great singer and a great drummer, you can pretty much do anything.  So, I put a lot of effort into that part too.  You can have any kind of song, and if you have those two things, I think I’m going to like it.  I mean, maybe I won’t like it if it’s modern country, or something [laughs].

I noticed just from the opening of Real Emotional Trash, the distortion is a little warmer and fuzzier than what I’m used to hearing from you.  What kind of pedal are you using?

It’s a running low on batteries version of the Big Cheese.  I have the tone turned down all the way on it, and as little buzz, as little high end as possible, and the batteries are a little low, so there’s definitely a really compressed and warm fuzzy sound on there.

It reminds me of the exact tone of Hendrix at the Fillmore East.

Yeah, it’s rad.  It’s a rad pedal.  I mean, they don’t make them anymore now, but I highly recommend them.  You can do this compression thing that it just farts, like it won’t even come out, the sound.  The bass player of Radiohead uses one too, Collin.  Most of the record is that, and I use a little Fuzz Factory every now and then, because that’s kind of fun, in a recording thing, you can play with the knobs while you’re playing.  It would be hard to do live.  That’s pretty much all I used on this record.

Do you have a favorite guitar that you record with?

Well, yeah, lately I’ve been playing this Jazz Master that I’ve had forever.  It’s like a ‘60s one that’s had some modifications from Sonic Youth, when we were touring, some of their guitar techs did some modifications so it wouldn’t fall apart.  I’ve been playing that more lately.  I have a Les Paul too that I used to like, but I just didn’t get that tuned up for the recording, so I stuck with that more.  I used a bunch of guitars that were at the studio.  Whatever the guy had, I would occasionally try.  For most of the basics and the solos, I used the Jazz Master.

Where do you like to keep the toggle switch?

Live, often, I actually use the warmer, whatever sounds less tinny – except on maybe the song called “Cold Son.”  I actually use the old-fashioned ones on the top, for some reason when I use that and I do it to the, I don’t know which pickup setting it is, but the one that’s less bright sounding, it’s really, really muffled sounding.  Then again, if I don’t use that, after about four songs, your ears just gum up and block out everything because they’re hurting.  They say, “I don’t want to hear that anymore.”

Do you like to get into the gear and put special pickups in a guitar, or do you just leave it the way it is?

I just leave it the way it is.  Those are the stock ones that came with it, and all my guitars are that way.  My original guitar, the Strat that I had, had some pickups that someone put in there in the ‘80s and I just stuck with them.  I don’t really know what to use, what I like.  I feel like, of course if I play a guitar in a shop or someone’s guitar and I like how it is, I just stick with that.  Ninety per cent of it comes from the player. I mean, you could put twenty-five people in front of Angus Young’s guitar and amp, and it wouldn’t sound like Angus Young.  I tend to stick by that, like you can wrench a decent sound out of even the crappiest Mexican Fender, although obviously there are some guitars that will never sound good, no matter what you do.

I read a quote where you said after making Face the Truth, “I don’t know if I can record at home again.  I need some variables — a different studio, different instruments — to get me inspired. I have to get new toys, new effects pedals, to make it sound different.”  What new toys did you use on Real Emotional Trash?

I used some different tape delays – Fulltone I guess makes it.  It’s kind of a slightly more rockabilly sounding Echoplex.  You know, in the end, it wasn’t that much.  I ended up using my wah-wah.  There weren’t so many outboard effects at the studio.  Come to think of it, though, when we recorded at Wilco’s, their studio is a shrine to excess with pedals and guitars.  I think, every year with Jeff Tweedy, for Christmas everyone knows don’t try to get him a shirt or something, just get him a weird pedal and he’ll be happy.  I played a ton of theirs and I can’t even remember what they are.  There was this purple one, Foxx.  I used their space echo.  A lot of their pedals, it was just kind of like plug it in, see how it works.  And their guitars – Jeff’s got an amazing collection of guitars, lines of guitars.  I’ve always wanted to play a Telecaster that sounded good, and I used his and some of his amps on the song “Real Emotional Trash.”  It’s with this kind of dark old Supro amp that’s not really my sound, but we were just like, “Let’s try that.”

How much planning do you put into your solos?  The impression I got from listening to the albums was that they were kind of off-the-cuff, just turn on the tape and play, but a few years back, I was watching the Slow Century DVD, and you were reproducing almost every part on the albums.  Do you actually write them out?

No, maybe there’s a starting point on some of them, but most of those are just improvised things that I’ve learned.  Or improvised and then I lost it half way through and then I replayed it, starting with that, and made a part out of it.  But they’re almost all just going for it, you know, just in that moment, and trying to lead the drummer and the band, to be like, this is the rocking part so you should rock too.  And if nothing is good there, I’ll just rewrite it or do a couple of passes, or if it’s really good I’ll double it, just make it sound fatter.

The press release for Real Emotional Trash said that it is a departure for you.  But I feel like songs like, “Speak, See, Remember,” or “No More Shoes” from the last album, if you listen to those songs, this shouldn’t be surprising or a departure.  Do you feel it is a departure?

Not really, I don’t see it that way.  I mean, it’s all a direction we’ve been going which is progressing on more musical passages and singing, and the beat and the band is what’s there, and the singer, he’s important, but things aren’t as compact, I guess.  It’s a product of probably becoming more of a live band, and also the reality of being a band that’s not going to be a singles band, anyway.  It used to be you toured to support the album, and now the album supports the tour from the economic standpoint of a band.  People do buy CDs and I wish they would buy our CDs because we need to pay back what it cost to record it, but we’re kind of a live entity now.  That’s where we thrive.  We don’t want to be as bad as The Grateful Dead on an album – although they have made good albums, their first three and American Beauty definitely have some cool parts.  But the records now, are just kind of let it all hang out, kind of shaggier affairs.  *CLICK TO LISTEN* I think also, just how we play and where we are as musicians, we’re not a real high-tempo group.  So, when you’re in the more mid tempo – we play the aggressive edge of the mid tempo – but  that leaves room for, like, where are you going to rock within that?  Because we want to rock, basically.  We’re into rock ‘n’ roll.  We want to be offensive, a little bit.  That’s how we do it.  We’re not here just to please you, this is rock n’ roll.  It should be a barrage, a little bit.

Do you think songwriting is like any other job, where you get better at it the more you do it, or can ideas run out?

I think people can just get sort of burned out.  You can also get misguided, especially if you’re a big pop star and people are talking in your ear about what you should be doing, and mixing things a certain way, or trying to make songs for radio.  You can get really screwed.  In the end, you’re going to have to make some value judgments about what was a better song or worse album that was done.  There’s a lot of variables, for me, in the end.  Maybe the songs weren’t as good, there might have been less time, or bad performances, or just there was no vibe.  In the end, sometimes there’s a vibe that’s going on through the whole event that makes it a little more special or something.  You wouldn’t really know while you’re doing it, because you think it’s good always.

Do you feel like you’ve gotten better at the craft?

Not necessarily, because you lose other things on the wayside and not wanting to do stuff that’s already been done, certain chord changes and the way it sounds, just deliberately shy way from that.  So the first things you do are some of the most natural, best things.  And then things maybe get too rock or you can go places you really shouldn’t go.  Sometimes, some hero or some song I like, I’m like “I want to take a stab at that,” and it’s close, but it’s really not that good.  It’s not like trying to rap or something, but just like, “I want to try to do this song.  I can rock like the Faces.”  But maybe you can’t, only the Faces can rock like the Faces because they’re the Faces.

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Buy these albums now: Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain | Brighten the Corners | Terror Twilight | Wowee Zowee | Stephen Malkmus | Face the Truth

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