Interview with Pavement
 
  

Matt: Hi, this is Matt Hall, and today our Doctor Martin’s interview is with Bob from Pavement. Thanks for coming on the show, Bob.

Bob: Pleasure.

Matt: Cool. The new album, Terror Twilight, produced by Nigel Godrich, who is known, for among others, has worked with Beck and Radiohead. This was the first time you guys had brought in an outside producer. Why Nigel, I guess, and how was it work with someone different?

Bob: Well, in the past we’ve had engineers, we had Mitch Easter engineer a record for us, Brighten the Corners, and with a fellow named Bryce Goggin, who worked with us on Crooked Ray and Brighten the Corners, and the difference being, between those guys who helped us make those records and Nigel, is Nigel played more of an active role in the music itself. We brought him in basically because we’d been working on the record for a while and we hadn’t made much progress and we felt like it was a good time for us to try some outside help, and specifically, we’re looking for somebody who had the reputation of being a workaholic who was very diligent, who got things accomplished and who could work fast. And we’re on a label in England called Domino Records, and Lawrence, who runs that label, had met Nigel and recommended him to us. And then Stephen Malkmus, our singer, and Nigel spoke on the phone a few times, and we decided we’d give it a go. He obviously is a very busy guy, he’s very much in high demand, so he scheduled as much time as he could for us both in New York, and on November of last year and then London in January. And the difference being is that he’s far more precise when it comes to recording music. He’s far more of a perfectionist, and he made us do things over and over. Usually, generally, Pavement’s fairly satisfied with a handful of takes. I mean, sometimes we do work harder on certain things that we just can’t get right, but usually we’ll back off when we feel like we have a good enough performance. He immediately wanted to trim ten songs, or ten ideas, that we had to be on the record off the record, and work with the 12 or 14 best songs and spend a lot of time working on them. And he obviously uses a lot of modern techniques and computer trickery to make records which we hadn’t used before, so it was not a massive difference from the attitude and spirit of the recording, but just the way in which he does things is clearly different than what we’d had before.

Matt: Was it tough to push egos aside or anything like that, just bringing someone in from outside?

Bob: No, it was more of just your basic teamwork sentiment, and it was more difficult for him because he’s walking into a situation with five strangers, and we’re just dealing with one. And he handled it particularly well, and again he’s an extremely diligent guy, and there was never any problems with egos, at least that I saw.

Matt: Cool. Along with your label Matador, you guys are celebrating a ten-year anniversary. Were you guys involved with a Matador anniversary and stuff like that, the concerts in New York and London?

Bob: Yeah, we just played the U.S. one in New York, the three-day one. We played on the middle day and I guess they assembled about 18 Matador bands for a three-day festival at Irving Plaza, and it was a good opportunity for the employees at Matador to loosen up and celebrate an occasion because most of them work pretty long weeks, and it’s always nice for them to stop and have a chance to celebrate and loosen up.

Matt: Good time, did you have a good time?

Bob: Yeah, it was fun. Yeah, it was fine. It was good, yeah. It was a tough social workout. You know, you talk 10 hours. I only went two nights, because we left the third night to start our tour, but heavy partying.

Matt: Yeah, actually it came right on the heels of CMJ also.

Bob: Right, yeah, so I don’t if any of them had recovered from that. But I know I was one of the talkaholics at the event.

Matt: The show deals primarily with Onsond and independent artists.

Bob: Right.

Matt: And you guys have been on an independent label for the length of your career as a band, right?

Bob: A few, yeah.

Matt: Do you have any kind of indy philosophy or anything like that? Is there a reason you’re on an indy versus a major?

Bob: I think that our main philosophy is to work with people that we feel like we can trust. We’ve been very fortunate to work with people that are in a similar age group with similar tastes in music, people that have grown at a similar rate, their companies started around the same time as our band, both booking agents and record labels, and you feel like there’s a common language, you feel like you call these people and you’re actually getting through and you can communicate with them. Financially, you also feel like you’re not going to get ripped off. So when you get a bunch of young people who have a band and their band basically has consisted of them jamming in their house and then going and doing shows, maybe putting on a seven inch themselves, when they’re approached by somebody who seems like they’re talking the same language, you have a lot more confidence in trusting your music to them. And basically you want to work with people who are doing things that you don’t want to do that they want to do, business aspects of music which most people in bands really don’t want to deal with. I think that we’ve always kind of wanted to keep things from getting way over our heads. And that’s basically it, really. Again, Matador, Drive City, Domino, Big Cat, the Billions Corporation, have all started about the same time as Pavement, and all of those companies have done well for themselves and have steadily grown and expanded their operations, so for us, we’ve had an unusually healthy business situation. Not to say that there hasn’t been some difficulties, ‘cause they’re all new companies being run by comparatively young people, but you’d rather deal with that than deal with a situation where you really feel like you’re just lost and that you’re dealing with a lot of people that have heard you’re cool but actually have no valid opinion of your genre. So it’s difficult, but I think that you just look for people that you have confidence in basically.

Matt: Ten years is a long time for a band to be able to continue to tour and release relevant records and to be successful and to continue to make new fans and keep old fans, especially right now with the major label thing. It’s very disposable, singles and stuff like that. How have you guys kept it together for 10 years against commercial odds, I’d guess you’d say.

Bob: Yeah, well, we basically have done things the way we’ve wanted to do them, and have taken substantial chunks of time off when we felt like we were kind of burned out on it and regenerated enthusiasm in the band when it was time to start again, and just kind of, again, worked with people that were patient and were content to let us do things our own way. So, really, the band changed significantly in 1992 when....flushing toilet....of course, we’re still hanging out in places like this.

Matt: When perpetual rain started to fall.

Bob: ‘89, ‘90, and ‘91, the band was substantially a hobby and everybody in the band had day jobs. In ‘90 we did like 10 shows. In ‘91, again, everybody decided to take their vacations from work at the same time and do another ten-day tour. ‘92 is really when the band started from the standpoint of not having to go home and work. So for that seven-year chunk, we’ve just made the five best records that we could make, and fortunately gradually build an enthusiast following. And that’s really it. If you don’t place too much emphasis on having to make it big and having to make a huge amount of money and having to have a successful video, and you’re content with being able to sell your records and go out on tour and make ends meet, so we’ve been fairly easily satisfied in this band. And have been well treated, so...

Matt: Well, enough about the band for a moment. Let’s talk about you, Bob. You’ve got a horse, Speedy Service.

Bob: Got three horses now, yeah. Speedy Service is probably our best. He’s a three-year-old, and he’s now just back in training. He won his first lifetime start, and I’ve had him since he was a baby. And now we have a two-year-old, who’s by Thunder Gulch, who’s unnamed and hasn’t raced yet, and he’s now been in training for a couple of months, and he’s doing very well. And then we have an older horse who’s five, named Emerald Forest, who’s racing currently. Won a race about six weeks ago, and has won a couple of races for us. So at this point, that’s about all I can afford.

Matt: When you say "us,"...

Bob: Oh, myself and my trainer, Pete.

Matt: Okay, so you got a crew kind of?

Bob: Who’s one of my best friends, and we co-own the horses together with the exception of Speedy Service, who Steven, our singer, owns 10% of, and I own 70, my parents own 5 each, and this fellow that runs a record store in Memphis called Shangri-la, owns 10%. It’s a very expensive...

Matt: You got any shares in this horse left?

Bob: He’s pretty much at a point...right now we’re just selling shares in the younger horse.

Matt: So you do sell shares. I was kind of joking, but that’s like the terminology in that?

Bob: Oh yeah, sure. Yeah, you defray expenses any way you can. In order to keep a horse in training, it usually costs $15-20,000 a year. That on top of vet bills, which it depends on the horse. It’s very expensive and it’s a high risk investment. I’m involved in it at this point just because I am a huge fan of the sport and have been a horse player since I was a teenager, and this is taking the next step, and it’s a bigger gamble. And I figure I should try it now because I don’t have a wife and I don’t have kids, and basically my money is my own, so I should take chances now. But I wouldn’t go beyond saying that I’m one of the poorest racehorse owners in Kentucky. You know, there’s a reasonable amount of pressure on us to succeed to make ends meet, but you have to be patient, and that’s the thing is that you can’t be greedy in horse racing. Things just won’t work. You know, you can’t press an animal that doesn’t want to participate. You gotta give them time and you gotta make sure that they’re mentally and physically ready to run.

Matt: So, can you draw some kind of weird celestial parallel between developing the horse and developing a band?

Bob: Not really. They’re two entirely different things. Like the band for me has always been, well, I guess they’re equivalent in that they’re both ideally incredibly enjoyable things. I feel like I’m kind of chasing a wild dream as a racehorse owner, whereas the band seems to be far more practical and makes far more sense to me.

Matt: So, does it have like one jockey?

Bob: We use a bunch of different jockeys. We try to find jockeys that actually suit the running style of our horses, and you want to hire people that are willing to take time in the morning to come out and ride your horse on certain occasions to give them a chance. We occasionally bet on our horses, so we’ll use jockeys that aren’t big name jockeys in Kentucky because people just will automatically bet on horses ridden by Pate or Jane Sellers. We use more obscure jockeys that we know can ride well, and there’s a lot of them. I mean, that state, that racing circuit right now is filled with talented jockeys, so it’s not hard finding one of those.

Matt: So do you get to track some stuff while you’re on the road. Is that a pastime?

Bob: As much as possible. Usually I will go out of my way in Europe, especially in England and Ireland, to go. This year, on a bus, you have far less flexibility because you don’t have a vehicle to sneak away in, you know? So usually when the bus arrives at 10:00 in the morning like it has in downtown Denver, you pretty much stay around the bus. That’s your hub. That’s where all your stuff is, so it’s one of the mild disadvantages of bus touring.

Matt: Speaking of touring, over the course of ten years, aging and stuff like that, how is the road treating you guys? I mean, do you do different things on the road now than you did back in the day, or...

Bob: Well, performance-wise, I would say that we’re the exact same band in that we’re fairly erratic and sometimes things just don’t work, and we’re not beyond disastrous performances. I think we’re a little bit harder on ourselves than we used to be. I mean, I think in the first few years of touring in this band, we’d be satisfied to pull it off. And now we actually want to be good. So there’s a lot of times that people think that it’s a good show when we don’t feel that great about it. I think that happens to every single band in the universe. I think that, fortunately, when the band started, it was just the five of us on the road and the first luxury that we were able to afford was a front of house sound man who’s been with us for seven years now, a Dutch fellow named Remco Shouton. And then we’ve been able to go beyond that to affording a tour manager outside the band, which was a real relief for me because that was part of my job for a while. And then you get up to further luxuries like a t-shirt person and somebody to tune guitars and set up the stage, then a lighting designer. So right now we’re up to a five-person crew, which is a lot for us. And then of course we have the bus driver as well. I think beyond that, you hire a monitor person next, somebody to do monitors, so there’s still further ways to expand. That’s why you see bands who have crews of 15 to 20 people. For us, it’s amazing to have five. And that’s been a major change, because you used just have to do completely everything and trust this van that you didn’t have complete confidence would make it through the tour and all that kind of stuff. So there’s a lot of things that have changed that way. At the same time, you still get burned out the same way and you still kind of feel the same way on tour, you know, that you’ve always felt, so I just feel like we’ve progressed in terms of being able to take care of our business better, but we’re the same dodgy act that we’ve always been.

Matt: So what can we expect tonight?

Bob: Well, I can tell you exactly what we’re going to do. We’re just going to put 18 songs on a piece of paper, probably eight from Terror Twilight, and we play about 30 old ones, so we’ll pick ten of those 30, and play for an hour and a half, hour and 15, hour and a half and try to pull off something good. Lately the last week, things have been really up and down. We’ve done some really, really good shows, particularly the second night in San Francisco was really good and played pretty well through Texas, but at the same time, there’s been some rather embarrassing performances I think that you mentioned. The Coach Hella Festival...that was a complete disaster. And our singer’s voice was messed up, but at the same time, it was just yet another lousy outdoor festival performance by Pavement, you know. Our strike rate at these outdoor festivals is about 6% in the last eight years. I don’t know why we keep signing up for the utter humiliation of embarrassing yourself in front of a large field of semi-interested people. It’s much easier for us at this point to play for 600 people that know the band and they can see when we’re not doing very well and try to bring us around because they don’t want to see a crappy show, so, as opposed to the antagonism that you deal with when you blow chunks in front of a bunch of Rage Against the Machine or Blur fans, you know.

Matt: Not the support network there that you’re looking for.

Bob: No, no, no. They’re anxious to trash the woosie rockers with smoke bombs and bottles.

Matt: Really.

Bob: Yeah, that’ll happen. In this day and age.

Matt: So you play percussion and keyboards.

Bob: Um-hm. Do a bit of background vocals. The easy stuff. Keep it easy.

Matt: Keep it easy, yeah. I’ve also seen you quoted as saying that your talents are not music-based at all.

Bob: I mean, I think I’ve gotten better just because of experience, but I’ve never done a lot of things that I should have done. Like I should have taken piano lessons. I should have learned to play a kick drum. When I go home from these tours, I separate myself from music. It takes me a while to even turn on my stereo. I don’t want to see any live bands. Just the loud noise aspect of rock, you just want to get away from. I’m not the kind of person that’s ever really thoroughly enjoyed playing music. And like, you’ll be on tour with a couple of bands, so combined with your band, there’ll be 18 musicians back there, and the people that you can properly call musicians, people that have played for a while or if they haven’t, they’re playing a lot now and they love making music. I’ve never been that way. I just have had friends, good friends, that that’s what they like to do, and so I keep making sure that I do really easy things, don’t want to try something I can’t pull off, you know. But I mean I’m always amazed by people that backstage before a concert are totally relaxed and completely confident, ‘cause the last thing that they’re worried about is going out there and executing their parts in these songs. Because for me, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know whether I’m going to get confused and lost or not. I just can’t imagine that feeling that playing was the easiest part of your job. To me, it’s one of the harder parts.

Matt: So what’s the easiest part then?

Bob: The easiest part is I certainly don’t mind talking to you guys. Talking comes a lot more naturally to me than music. The traveling’s no big deal either. I guess the worst part of the whole deal is the stress and your lack of health does catch up to you, and your mood swings become a factor in your enjoyment of a tour. But yeah, just about everything’s pretty easy. Days off are pure joy.

Matt: So it sounds like you got it pretty good. You’re enjoying the...

Bob: No, I’d never complain about this, you know. I mean, if I look at this as a replacement for a job...at some point I’m going to have to go back and find a job, whether that’s next year or three years down the road. Before this I was driving a bus in New York City. After this, I don’t know what I’m going to do, but making a living this way compared to a lot of other things I could consider is really a cushy ride, so I wouldn’t complain about too many aspects of it. You complain about your band mates when they’re drips on occasion, but that’s just you trying to improve your band, but to anybody from the outside, like if somebody asked me what’s it like being in a band, I sure as hell wouldn’t sit there and bitch about it. It amazes me how many millionaires we have in this industry that bitch about some of the easy, little things that they have to do, but quite frankly I guess they’re rather spoiled.

Matt: What are you listening to lately?

Bob: I’ve been listening to a lot of Scottish bands. There’s a band called The Delgados I like a lot and Mogwae, we’re pretty good friends with. The High Llamas have a new album coming out that’s really good. I’ve been listening to that. There’s this old Louisville punk rock band called Fading Out that I’ve been listening to their CD over and over again.

Matt: Are those guys playing right now?

Bob: That was in ‘85, like hard core bands. There’s a few bands from Louisville that are just starting out that are really good. This band called Speed to Roam. I put out a seven inch of theirs on my label a few months ago. Just a little limited edition of 500 seven inch, and they’re touring around the Midwest. There’s another really good band in Louisville called Party Girls. It’s a bunch of guys, and they have a really good demo tape. People also are making the complaint now that there’s nothing good going on new in underground and rock or in electronic...things are really dry or something, and it just means that people aren’t digging hard enough into it. It just means that possibly like the top tiers of the industry have really dried out. Whenever that happens, with as many kids now like between 10 and 20 playing guitars and keyboards and drums, that I’m sure that there’s good music being made right now after school in somebody’s basement that’s right around the corner from being in front of people like us and small rock clubs that we go to, so I think that there’s no reason to doubt or no reason to feel like, oh, music blows these days, what do you like? I mean, I only have the capacity to like about 10 things at once. If I was doing a college radio show like I did, at this point, almost 10 to 15 years ago, and I worked in a record store as well, I’m sure I’d be pouring myself into trying to find 50 things a week which are fresh that I could play on my show. At this point, I’m just trying to find a few a month, you know, ‘cause I’m probably not as rabid as I once was, but I think there’s definitely a lot of really cool things going on out there. You just have to pay attention.

Matt: In regards to college radio, we spoke with DJ Spooky a few weeks ago, who had a very eclectic show at school while he was there, and I guess you did some college radio yourself.

Bob: Yeah, I actually did some in high school at University of Richmond, and then 3-1/2 years at Virginian was the station manager the last year.

Matt: So how do you feel like college radio, what kind of role has college radio played in the development of Pavement?

Bob: I think it’s been 95+% of any radio air play that we’ve had in the United States has been college radio. I think that we’re blessed being one of the most successful college radio bands of the last ten years. Our band would never have even, the ball never would have gotten rolling without college radio DJ’s playing the first seven inch, and that’s kind of how the buzz started, that a bunch of those were sent out to college radio stations and people were like these kids from Stockton, California made this cool little seven inch, and it starting getting added to college radio play lists, so obviously is the most adventurous form of radio in rock music where the DJ’s have the most freedom to do whatever they want. I realize that some stations are quite a bit different from others. Some stations you become a DJ and you get your time slot and you have free reign as long as you don’t swear constantly on the air and have a keg party in the station, then you can do whatever you want, whereas some other stations have like, okay, you gotta play one of these 40 CD’s. Still, regardless, compared to big time alternative rock radio or something like that, there’s just more artistic freedom for the DJ, him, his or herself, so obviously for Pavement who has virtually no success in getting our music on bigger radio, and, again, a lot of it’s not really that radio friendly. It wouldn’t even make sense. It would stick out like a sore thumb with a lot of these other artists that are on these stations, so we’re completely dependent on college radio air play and always have been.

Brian: If you could talk about your own label a little bit. Why you started that and...

Bob: Okay. Yeah, I started it just because I was playing with a couple of friends of mine in Louisville in this band called Pale Horse Riders, and we made four songs on four track, and we just thought we’d get a kick out of putting them out, so basically I’m friends with Dan Karetski at Drag City and I called him up and I said we’re just going to put out this little record and we want to do it this way, and he gave me a couple of phone numbers, and we just sent the DAT off. I think that record cost about $900 and we got blank sleeves that we decorated ourselves and kind of just did it just to document the fact that we made four songs. I realized once I had these 500 records in my house that I certainly didn’t ever want to go beyond this level, the absolute smallest dust speck level of running a record label. So I intend to put out, the label’s called Broker’s Tip Records, and we definitely proudly consider ourselves one of the world’s smallest labels. We put out two records in six years at this point and we’ll probably put out another one in three years, but I don’t ever want to put out more than one record a year, and just do it when a bunch of your friends make a handful of songs or a single or something like that that they want to put out, and if ever a situation arises where we were to put out a seven inch by a band that then went on to be on a label like Drag City or the next level up, that would be exciting, you know, that, oh, you know, we definitely wouldn’t have to worry about selling out of our 500 records, so I definitely don’t want to put out anything more than a thousand ever, just because there will never be an office. Just right now the records are just stacked in my roommates bedroom, so a very, very tiny thing.

Matt: Pavement recently launched a website. It’s pavementtherockband.com.

Bob: Yeah.

Matt: Obviously, you know, utilizing the Internet is another vehicle to stay in touch with fans and things like that, on even the smaller level like what we’re talking about with your own label. Are you doing anything Internet-wise?

Bob: No, but our drummer is. His band, Marble Valley, he’s just got his own website up for that, and I think it is marblevalley.com as far as I know. He’s got his second album coming out and he’s very into it. I personally don’t own a computer. I’ve perused the Pavement website once. I support us doing such things, ‘cause I’ve realized that a huge majority of our fans are not only computer owners but they’re computer socialites. It’s very clear to me when I talk to people that come to our shows that computer-oriented things are about 70% of the conversation, and they always snicker at me when I tell them that I just don’t have any involvement in it. I just haven’t gotten around to it and don’t know if I ever will, at least in my little house. I just don’t know. I play Sega PGA Tour 2 Golf enough in my life, not to mention the soccer and a few other cartridges and watch a lot of cable TV and watch a lot of horse racing on cable, and I just feel like that’s enough time in front of screens at this point at least for me. I’m not doing any business on a computer either, and I’ve never been educated by a computer as well. I guess being 32, I’m right on the cutoff along those lines. Yeah, it’s not even a factor. I’ve started, like people have shown me, I guess I was afraid of mice for a long time and somebody showed me how to do that, but I feel like my dad when the subject is computers, like I’m that clueless.

Matt: Is that a call for you, Bob?

Bob: I don’t know. I hope not.

Matt: Sound technician has just disconnected the phone permanently.

Bob: Outstanding.

Matt: Let me grab a station i.d. from you before I forget...Bri, you have anything else? Okay. Do you have anything else that you'd like to say?

Bob: No, I’m fine.

Matt: Okay. Bob, it has been a pleasure having you on the show today. Thanks for coming.

Bob: Thank you very much, Matt. Thanks Brian.

Matt: Looking forward to checking out the show.

Bob: Hope it’s good. A hit or miss deal.

Matt: We will see and we’ll report back to you.

Bob: Judge for yourselves.

Matt: Yes. Thanks a lot.