by Christopher J. Lee (@joonhai)
Pavement have been on a tear. After the murmurings of a reunion tour in 2019 and then two delays due to the pandemic, the boys plus Rebecca Cole (Wild Flag, the Minders) finally hit the road with their first stop being a warm-up appearance in Los Angeles followed by Primavera Sound 2022. They’ve been on the road ever since, westing by musket and sextant, through Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, and South America with the momentum they have established. I concede I am among the devoted Nicene Creeders. Having failed to see them during their last reunion tour circa 2010, I made a concerted effort this time, seeing them twice in Brooklyn and then, like a diseased Barbra Streisand fan, venturing to Tokyo and Osaka for two additional shows. I had seen them three times during the 1990s, each of which were memorable, including a ramshackle assignment at Liberty Lunch in Austin with $7 tickets and, at the very end, a grim 1999 performance at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, when the chilliness between Stephen Malkmus and Spiral Stairs (Scott Kannberg), the band’s two principals, was enough to ice your six pack.
It didn’t start that way, of course, and Pavement ultimately had an amazing run. Their new limited-edition box set, Cautionary Tales: Jukebox Classiques, is a testament to this fact, consisting of their complete catalog of 7” singles from 1989 to 1999 plus various B-sides, covers, demos, and live material. In total, there are 56 songs running to almost three hours. Ever ironic, most of these singles are not cautionary tales – except for one. These are the decade-long, zig zag moves to cultish success, or as Malkmus liked to pronounce on occasion while singing “Here” from Slanted and Enchanted, “Suck-sess!” The result is something like an audio index for Pavement’s career, with these singles providing entry points for the band’s different chapters and albums, whether early recordings like “Box Elder” or later pop confections like the Beatle-esque “Spit on a Stranger.” Pavement were always edgelords when it came to mainstream fame, and this box set charts how they surfed that shifting barrel between indie rock cred and some version of widespread popularity.
This is also to say that Cautionary Tales itself feels like a cash grab (sorry, guys). Having successfully navigated the polarities of the 1990s, Pavement today seem content to monetize their back catalog in this ongoing moment of nostalgia and secondary fame (or is it tertiary?) through Spotify hits like “Harness Your Hopes.” Most long-term fans, for whom this project seems mostly designed, have heard this material before. Pavement were smart about maintaining their archives – I chalk this up to Kannberg, though I have no evidence – and Matador has re-issued their studio LPs over the past two decades with ample supplementary material. An additional series of rarity-filled “shadow albums” was also planned, starting with the release of The Secret History, Vol. 1 in 2015, though this scheme was aborted at some point. Cautionary Tales comes across as another attempt at slicing and dicing and repackaging their material.
Listening to these tracks straight through, it is interesting to think about what songs didn’t make it as singles and have since become canonical. A quick list of alternatives might include “Debris Slide” from their Perfect Sound Forever EP, recorded in 1989 and released in 1991 when critical attention had gathered. Or “Here,” “Zurich is Stained,” “Loretta’s Scars,” or “In the Mouth a Desert” from Slanted and Enchanted, an album rich with competing pitches, tones, structures, and rhythms beyond the singles “Summer Babe” and “Trigger Cut,” as unimpeachable as those fan-fav tracks are. Kannberg’s “Kennel District” from 1995’s Wowee Zowee is equally absent, even though it may be the best song he has written. It has become a routine part of Pavement’s live set, as has Malkmus’s limpid “Grounded” from the same LP. One could go on rearranging the deck chairs and imagining alternative histories, but the point is that these singles are not necessarily representative, not even by a long shot. This may inform one meaning of the implied signaling in the title Cautionary Tales.
Another angle to approach this retrospective is how it affords a panoramic view of the split screen personality of Malkmus, who could be warm and prickly, enthusiastic and remote, an esteemed band leader and a bookish introvert, depending on the situation. A lacrosse-playing hardcore bassist for a high school band with the name Straw Dogs (who opened for Black Flag), a Scrabble devotee, and once referred to as “the Grace Kelly of rock” by Courtney Love, Malkmus has cut different figures at different times, which has been further mirrored in his music. From the art punk, Fall-influenced Slanted, to the sun-drenched, California-saturated Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, to the late, golden hour bid for a popular breakthrough that lit up Terror Twilight, Malkmus took his bandmates through a series of paradigmatic leaps that remain astonishing for their instinct and ambition – a hot-hand streak that appeared unmatched at the time. Cautionary Tales maps this story of acceleration and discontent.
Malkmus could also be his own worst enemy. The one single that is, in fact, a cautionary tale is “Carrot Rope” from Terror Twilight, which amounts to being the “Shiny, Happy People” in Pavement’s oeuvre. Dreadful at the time and still ghastly when set against the backdrop of songcraft on their first album, it endures as a breach of trust, even a death wail, for a certain league of Pavement listeners. (As an aside, Malkmus must know this; I’m unsure if it has ever been performed live since 1999.) Unfortunately, “Carrot Rope” also portended of Jicks’ tracks like “Tigers” from Mirror Traffic or “Bike Lane” off Sparkle Hard. Taking cues ranging from the Groundhogs to krautrock, Malkmus’s post-Pavement recordings have been mixed with highs like Real Emotional Trash and Can’s Ege Bamyasi (with Von Spar) along with the aforementioned lows: undoubtedly a reflection of his own musical interests and journey but, for that very reason, at times leaning into an exploratory vanity that can be hard to reconcile with his past brilliance. Cautionary tales indeed.
Unsurprisingly, the fun parts of Cautionary Tales are the covers of R.E.M., the Fall, and Echo & the Bunnymen; the Kannberg material like “Coolin’ by Sound” and “Mussle Rock (Is a Horse in Transition)”; and the skewed Malkmus digressions like “Haunt You Down,” “Gangsters & Pranksters,” and “Birds in the Majic Industry – B-side.” In short, the secret knowledge of backroads as Malkmus once put it. This box set ultimately won’t move the needle, but it provides another chronology and skeletal narrative for a band that, despite its relative brevity and self-contained body of work, established a sound and attitude that still remain inexhaustible.