Out past the strip malls, donut shops, and Chinese fast-food joints that line Stockton’s Miracle Mile, along a narrow county road that cuts through a jigsaw puzzle of dusty, sun-scorched farmland, Pavement headquarters is tucked away in a quiet, residential enclave just east of the city limits. Band founders Scott Kannenberg and Steve Malkmus grew up here, in the neighborhood shaded by giant oak and eucalyptus trees, where kids leave their bikes unlocked in the driveways and American flags fly above manicured front lawns. Malkmus’ house burned down a few years ago and his parents moved to Idaho, but Mr. and Mrs. Kannenberg still live here, along with Scott’s younger sister, Kelly, who runs Pavement’s mail order business out of the back room, and Alabama, the family’s five-year-old golden retriever.
Rumbling at through the old neighborhood and Kannenberg’s blue 1982 Saab, Malkmus slouches low in the backseat and points out personal landmarks along the way. Over here is where he got arrested for walking across people’s roofs in the middle of the night. Over there is an irrigation ditch where you can catch the biggest crawdads in Stockton. Up the road a ways, the flat brown landscape is suddenly broken by whitewashed stucco walls separating the farmland from a sprawling new housing development. Both Kannenberg and Malkmus groan as we roll past row after role of identical pastel-colored ranch homes and giant multi-colored flags welcoming potential home buyers to “The California Dream…Made Affordable!” A little further ahead, Kannenberg slows down to admire a place where the subdivision ends and a creaky old green farmhouse stands alone, a solitary reminder of Stockton’s rural past.
“The people who live here have been fighting off these big developers for years,” Malkmus explains. “The developers tried to get the guy to sell, but he refused. So they just built up around him.
“I was so proud of them for not selling out,” he adds. “They’re like our very own Bikini Kill, or something…”
“Or, Fugazi,” Kannenberg cuts in.
“Yeah,” says Malkmus, grinning. “The Fugazi of Stockton Land development.”
Pavement looks at the world through an indie rock lens. From the intentionally lo-fi approach of its records to the tongue-in-cheek parallel Malkmus and Kannenberg draw between farmer’s stand against land developers and the struggle of independent-minded punk bands, the group’s identity is rooted in an oppositional sensibility, that arose among bands, fanzines, college radio, and small independent labels in the post-punk mid-’80s. Embracing low budgets, loud guitars, and an anti-corporate ethos which demanded that music be treated as something more than “product,” indie rockers transformed punk’s loose-knit DIY principles into a formalized subculture that often seemed to view signing a major label deal as the ultimate sell-out and obscurity, as an achievement in itself.
But at a time when the underground has become mired in an orthodoxy as rigid as the mainstream pop market, it defines itself against, Pavement makes indie rock fun again. Not simply because the band turn down major label deals to stick with feisty Matador (though that label is affiliated with Atlantic, Pavement’s latest album, Crooked, Rain, Crooked Rain, is not a joint-label release). And not just because guitarist Kannenberg has refused to appear in Rolling Stone, a magazine he reviles for “ignoring all the best music of my generation.” Rather, Pavement is fun because Payment is truly independent: Steve Malkmus and Scott Kannenberg don’t play by anyone’s rules but their own.
Often portrayed as smug, contemptuous slackers, hiding behind fake names and cryptic lyrics, slagging both Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots in the song “Range Life,” and greeting MTV VJ Lewis Largent with slack-jawed glares during an interview on 120 Minutes, the band has, in fact, stepped out of the murky in the underworld with rare poise and humor. Particularly on Crooked Rain, Pavement’s casual, brilliant guitar rock transcends indie convention and challenges notions of what (if anything) “alternative” really means, investing punk’s corporate-backed Second Coming with more guts and vision than any other American band.
It’s a warm, windless summer day in Stockton, and after lunch at a downtown Mexican diner, Malkmus and Kannenberg, accompanied by cannon Berg’s girlfriend Chrissy, shut off on a tour of the town. Although Pavement has never actually performed here, the bands to 28-year-old leaders have deep roots in this agricultural hub located at the tip of the Sacramento River Delta and California’s vast Central Valley. Malkmus and Kannenberg played on the Tokay High School soccer team together in nearby Lodi. They worked in local record stores and movie theaters, spent their free time smoking pot, collecting punk and new wave records and making up songs for the short-lived first band, Bag of Bones. These days, when Pavement isn’t touring, Malkmus splits this time between New York and Memphis, and Kannenberg lives with Chrissy, 100 miles from Stockton, in San Francisco. But Stockton remains Pavement’s homebase, the place it receives its fan mail and deposits its royalty checks, and the place for Malkmus and Kannenberg find their sense of perspective.
“People always think there’s so much pressure on us now that we’re selling some records, and getting played on MTV and stuff, but we don’t really feel it,” says Kannenberg, browsing through a dusty row of guitar amps at a downtown pawn shop. “I guess if we had movie star girlfriends and hung around in Hollywood or something, maybe we would feel the pressure. But it’s not like that. I mean, we’re from Stockton, where there’s no scene, no bands—where there’s nothing. And I guess that’s part of the charm.”
While most aspiring rockers would kill for the kind of critical acclaim and commercial success that’s greeted Pavement, Malkmus and Kannenberg strategize ways to avoid entering the rock star realm. It’s not that they lack ambition, as has often been written, just that they view rock ‘n’ roll as more of an absurd aberration than a full-time job. “When we started, every record was like this little project we did on vacation,” says Kannenberg, “and that’s kind of how we want it to stay. Traveling around and playing is a lot of fun, and I’m glad we’re getting a chance to do it, but that’s not all there is. We don’t ever want to let this run our lives. “
Dressed in a blue T-shirt and jeans, Kannenberg is clean-shaven, square-shouldered, and solid, with an easygoing smile and a stoner’s laugh. Malkmus, the band’s singer, is ganglier and more ruffled, wearing an orange thrift store sweater and crooked baseball cap. Clutching a tape recorder in one hand and a can of Coke in the other, he delivers a rambling tour monologue that’s equal parts sarcasm and earnest nostalgia, unearthing memories around every corner and putting together pieces of the Pavement puzzle.
“I have a sad story to tell about the first punk rock show I ever wanted to go to,” he announces as we drive north from downtown into a battered industrial zone that was once home to several part-time punk clubs. “It was the Dead Kennedys, and I had just gotten my driver’s license the day before. I wanted to drive there really bad, but my parents said, ‘No, you can’t take the car. It’s in a bad area and it’s too late.’ I really wanted to go and I threw a temper tantrum. I got so angry that they wouldn’t even let me go with anyone else cause I was acting like such a brat.”
Malkmus got his punk rock initiation a year later, though, when his own band Straw Dog open for Black Flag at another local venue. “I was backstage before the show, and all those guys, they look so scary, I was afraid of them,” he says. “Like Greg Ginn was mixing up the stuff in a glass. It was probably just protein powder or some healthy drink, and I thought it was like heroin or something—some kind of drug. And before they played, Henry Rollins is back there with this pool ball, this white cue ball, just squeezing it to get pumped up for the show.” He pauses, looking out the car window at a graffiti-covered box car sitting on rusty train tracks.
“I mean, squeezing a cue ball!” he continues. “You’re not going to get anywhere! I guess that was his point. It’s like smashing your head against a brick wall. That’s what I thought punk was, you know. That’s when I knew that maybe I am just not punk enough.”
Beyond the junkyards and abandoned factories, around the corner from a massive gated compound that houses Stockton’s glimmering Christian life Center, Kannenberg pulls into a ’60s-era subdivision and parks across the street from a nondescript one-story house at 9318 Waco Way. This is the former home of local drummer Gary Young, who operated a small recording studio called Louder Than You Think out of his garage. This is also where one dull afternoon in the summer of 1988, Pavement cut its first record.
At the time, Malkmus was visiting his folks between semesters at the University of Virginia, from which he graduated with a B.A. in history in 1989. Kannenberg had moved back home after dropping out of Arizona State. They had remembered Young from his days with the Stockton hardcore band Fall of Christianity and decided to book some recording time.
“We were just hanging around, you know, getting stoned and watching TV at Steve’s parent’s house, and we’d started making up the songs,” Kannenberg says, standing in the driveway while Chrissy snaps photos. “Steve had just started being a DJ at UVA and I think he just got the idea that, well, there’s all these bands, we can do it too. It was a completely naïve thing.”
The duo’s ragged, out-of-tune guitars and screeching vocals didn’t much impress Young, who spent most of his studio time recording demos for riff-heavy local metal clones. “The thing is,” Young remembers, speaking from his current home in nearby, Linden, “they didn’t know anything. When they walked in the door, they were two kids with two guitars. They had what I considered to be trash noise. I didn’t realize that there was a market for this at that point in time, so I just said this is noisy trash, what’s the deal?”
Young ended up drumming on some of the tracks Malkmus and Kannenberg laid down and thought he’d seen the last of Pavement. But while Malkmus ditched fall semester at UVA for a trip to Europe, Kannenberg pressed the record and sent it out to fanzines and record companies. By the time Malkmus came home, Pavement’s first 7-inch, Slay Tracks, had been released through Dutch East India and was getting write-ups in ’zines across the country. Returning to Young’s garage during the following Christmas and spring vacations, the duo tossed off two more mini-albums, Demolition Plot J-7 and Perfect Sound Forever, as well as assorted fanzine-distributed singles. (Drag City ultimately compiled all three albums, plus early singles, as the CD Westing by Musket And Sextant.) The music was still raw and unfocused, employing only two guitars and Young’s spare, rubbery drumming, there were also fragile melodies and crisp, inventive guitar lines reaching out of the harsh soundscape, signs of the band’s sonic vision evolving with each new song.
By the time its first full-length album, Slanted And Enchanted, finally came out in 1992, Pavement was riding a major buzz. Songs hinted at myriad influences—the Velvet Underground, the Fall, Wire, the Pixies, Sonic Youth—but also had an edgy, spacious sound all its own, full of clipped, ringing guitars, choppy rhythms, and melodies close to perfection but always on the brink of falling apart.
Live shows were similarly precarious. Up until Slanted, Pavement have never performed outside of the studio. In fact, bass guitar didn’t even become a regular part of the band lineup until Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. So to greet a sudden wealth of opportunities to play live, Malkmus and Kannenberg quickly pieced together a band—with Young on drums, Mark Ibold on bass, and percussionist/chanter Bob Nastanovich—and hit the road after only a half-dozen rehearsals.
Before the group’s sold-out San Francisco debut, Gary Young stood outside the Kennel Club greeting people with gregarious handshakes and requests that they buy him a beer. Onstage, he stumbled around and forgot the names of tune after tune, often forcing his bandmates to start and re-start songs until he finally got it right. Young’s drunken antics became legendary as the band crisscrossed the U.S. and Europe, but they also made for chronically unpredictable performances. Following a particularly grueling European tour last summer, the 42-year-old drummer was replaced by Steve West, a high school buddy of Nastanovic.
If West has provided a more stable if less entertaining presence, Pavement’s haphazard approach has remained much the same. With Kannenberg studying urban planning in Sacramento State, Malkmus and Ibold living in New York, and Nastanovich in Louisville, little rehearsal went into the making of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Recorded for $10,000 in a makeshift New York apartment-studio, the album contains the same tossed-off unvarnished feel as Slanted And Enchanted, but is sharper and more cohesive throughout. Breezing from jagged, sarcastic pop tunes, like the single “Cut Your Hair,” to a tinkly reworking of “Take Five” by Dave Brubeck (a fellow Stockton native), called “5-4=Unity,” and the earthy country jam “Range Life,” Crooked Rain is like a secret tour of rock ‘n’ roll, full of clever allusions, subtle references, and sonic juxtapositions that hint at influences ranging from Creedence Clearwater Revival to the Beatles, Husker Du and, again, VU and the Fall.
In his lyrics, written mostly in the studio, Malkmus drops the arty ambiguity of past efforts for songs that dig into the tension, ambivalence, and absurdity of making a career as a rock musician. “Songs mean a lot / When songs are bought / And so are you,” he deadpans in “Cut Your Hair,” and lines succinctly describe the challenge facing Pavement and other bands trying to hang on to their indie values in the mainstream rock marketplace.
By early fall, Crooked Rain had sold 150,00 copies, spawned a hit video on “Alternative Nation” with “Cut Your Hair,” and even earned Pavement a spot next to Drew Barrymore on Jay Leno last summer. But if the band is flirting with fame in the U.S. and abroad, in Stocktone they may as well not exist. While another native son, retro-crooner Chris Isaak, is widely regarded as a local treasure, no one around here seems to know who pavement is. When I mention the band’s name to the teenager working the counter at a Taco Bell, his only reaction is a dull shrug. Even at the record store where Kannenberg used to work, not a single Pavement album sits on the shelves. Maybe that’s why the guitarist is surprised to find several copies of Crooked Rain on display at the nearby Tower.
“It’s here,” Kannenberg announces, holding a copy. Then he notices the price tag. “$15.98,” he says. “What a rip-off.”
If Malkmus is Pavement’s eccentric spirit, Kannenberg is its indie conscious. He’s the one who seems most uneasy with the band’s escalating commercial success, and the one most inflexible in his indie ideology. Kannenberg is also the one who refused to be interviewed or photographed for a July 14 Rolling Stone piece on the band. The rest of the group went along with the story, but as Malkmus explains in his own roundabout way, the episode highlights tough issues facing Pavement.
“I have a problem with appearing in that magazine, too,” Malkmus says. “They really gave a skewed, unfair history of rock ‘n’ roll in the ’80s. But to me it was more of a slippery slope kind of thing. I mean, what’s the difference between saying no to Rolling Stone but still appeared on MTV? MTV makes you bend down more—it’s like, ‘Make us a video, make sure it’s hot, spend a lot of money on it, and maybe we’ll play it. And then we’ll take the credit for it and we’ll play it as much as we want whenever we want.”
“To me, MTV is way worse,” he continues. “Even to sit down and talk with an MTV VJ, it’s so insidious. They’ll lead you on, just like that Lewis Largent tried to do with me, asking those dumb questions. So what do you do? When you’re on there you can protest it by just ignoring him and trying to be civil. Or you can just be rude for no reason—spit on Lewis Largent or something. A lot of kids’ll think that’s real cool—‘You spit on Lewis Largent. Oh, that’s real punk.’ But there’s no point to that. Besides, you might give him a disease.”
Late afternoon sunshine beats through the car windows as we drive past the vineyards and apricot orchards that line Highway 99 on the way to Tokay High. Pulling into the school’s parking lot, past a group of Asian teens sitting on the hood of a car, Malkmus points to a grassy area across the street where he says kids used to spoke pot between classes. “They hired a narc because so many kids were showing up stoned,” he says. “But it turned out the narc was also the dealer. So it worked out pretty good.”
Wandering through the empty halls of their alma mater, the two peak into the gym and point out a squat stucco building called the Newcomb Media Center where, Malkmus says sarcastically, “we spent many hours plotting, reading the magazines, and dreaming that one day we’d be as big as Toto.” They show me the assembly hall where Gary Young’s band, the Fall of Christianity, was set to play during lunch once time. The show was broken up because a bunch of kids blocked the entrance in protest and began chanting “Jesus lives! Jesus lives!”
“Everything was always in very black-and-white terms here. It was like, rednecks versus punks,” says Malkmus. “In fact, that’s kind of how our song ‘Fillmore Jew’ was inspired: by this high school where everything was just so easily separated.”
As athletes, stoners, and part-time punks, Malkmus and Kannenberg say that they didn’t fit into any of the neatly defined Tokay cliques. “We kind of hung out with this group of punkers from another high school,” says Kannenberg, “but we didn’t dress the part or anything. We were just kind of normal, I guess. But we were still outcasts.”
“It’s funny,” he continues, stopping to sit on a bench in the quad. “Today, the people who listen to alternative music are the people who were like the rednecks then, the people who would tease us and stuff. The people who listen to Pavement are those people. It’s kind of weird.”
Note: This story is republished here with author Jason Fine’s permission. It originally appeared in the September 1994 issue of the acclaimed independent music magazine Option. Published by Scott Becker, this print music magazine ran from 1985 to 1998 and was edited by a series of folks, including Richie Unterberger, Mark Kemp, Jason Fine, Steve Appleford, Erik Pedersen, Barbara Jordan, and Scott Becker. Kristin Bell was Option’s art director. This is this story’s first appearance online. To read more of Option’s back catalogue, buy the anthology We Rock So You Don’t Have To: The Option Reader #1, edited by Becker. Jason Fine went on to become Rolling Stone’s Editor in Chief, and later their first Senior Vice President of Films.
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So cool to see this story after all these years. That Kennel Club show was amazing. And getting to know Gary Young was such a joy and a wild ride...
Great piece to start my weekend off. Thanks for posting!