Slint's Spiderland

by Tennent, Scott

  “There was this little seedy pocket in Louisville then,” he told me. “The Beat Club was next to a really scary strip club — you couldn’t get seedier than this — called the Penguin. It was serious.” The Languid and Flaccid boys would get dropped off by their parents, who would help them load their equipment into the dank and dirty club populated by the intimidating punks who were part of the Louisville scene. “The guys that were in bands back then, some of them were really scary. Really scary. And some of them got scarier. But those kids could hang. It was very, very impressive, at least to me. It blew my mind.”

  * * *

  It was on the exact same day — Halloween 1982 — that Clark Johnson and his childhood friend David Grubbs kicked around the idea of starting their own band. The two sophomores were loafing around listening to records when Grubbs piped up out of nowhere, “Why don’t you play bass?” So Johnson picked it up. The two didn’t actually start practicing until December; they had to wait for their drummer, a friend named Rich Schuler, to come home from his first semester at the University of Cincinnati, and Johnson didn’t own his own equipment until the following year. It wasn’t serious anyway: they named the group Squirrelbait Youth, in simultaneous emulation and parody of the DC hardcore scene, not to mention the local bands who were aping the anti-authoritarian rage with all the suburban naïveté they could muster. “Our first song was ‘Tylenol Scare,’ right after the Tylenol thing. And ‘That Badge Means You Suck,’ things like that,” Johnson told the Pope. Most of the energy put into Squirrelbait Youth was in concept — it was more of an inside joke between Johnson and Grubbs, mocking the local punk scene. Besides, Grubbs was in a more serious band at the time, a new-wave group called the Happy Cadavers. They had just self-released their debut 7”, With Illustrations. “Grubbs was not taking [Squirrelbait Youth] seriously at all and not putting any time into it,” said Johnson. But the Happy Cadavers soon dissolved, and Johnson pressed Grubbs into putting more stock into their venture. “We dropped the ‘Youth,’ and I bought a bass.” It was impossible to be more serious, though, when their drummer could only practice on spring break and winter and summer vacation. They needed to find a replacement.

  * * *

  By late 1982 the Languid and Flaccid had already been around for more than a year, and Walford, McMahan, and Oldham were growing up and growing restless. They wanted to make music that was louder, faster, more aggressive. So they started a second band which they dubbed Maurice. Rat, who had become utterly enamored with the Languid and Flaccid, saw an opportunity to ingratiate himself into the new act. “I just kind of pushed my way in. They didn’t need [a frontman], I just insisted they did. I was like, ‘Man, I’m doing it.’”

  If their intent was to create a more aggressive band, then the addition of Rat was a coup. “My level of rage was so much higher than theirs, it must have seemed comical. Just like their lack of rage sometimes seemed comical to me,” Garrison recalled. “Back then I didn’t realize that the angst or the fury I had, it definitely wasn’t teen angst. I was way beyond that.”

  Indeed, Rat’s background could not have been more different from that of his bandmates. Walford, McMahan, and Oldham all grew up on Louisville’s East End, a middle-class and upper-middle-class part of town filled with tree-lined streets and well-kept lawns. As evidenced by the boys’ enrollment in the Brown School, their parents viewed their children’s potential as unlimited. They encouraged their kids to learn music, literature, and art. None of this described Rat’s childhood. Louisville’s South End was a more working-class, blue-collar part of town — and Rat lived south of there, in Pleasure Ridge Park, twenty miles beyond what was then the city limits. His father was an ex-marine who worked at the local ironworks. “I come from a family where if you didn’t have a dangerous job and you didn’t bust your ass, then you were a pussy.” The danger of daily life was no exaggeration — Garrison’s father, like his grandfather, died on the job. Garrison launched himself out of his home and out of his neighborhood like a juggernaut, plowing his way into the Louisville punk scene. He landed in Maurice, where his shrieking caterwaul both compelled and alienated audiences — and his bandmates. Oldham left the band soon after Rat joined. He was replaced on bass by a kid named Mike Bucayu.

  * * *

  If the primordial period of Slint’s history could be described as a game of musical chairs, Mike Bucayu might have unwittingly been the one controlling the music. In 1983 Bucayu was friends with Clark Johnson and David Grubbs, who were looking for a replacement for Rich Schuler. It was through Bucayu that they met Britt Walford.

  Right off the bat, Johnson was impressed with the eighth-grader’s all-around talent: “He was a classically trained piano player. He can play circles around just about anybody, including Marvin Hamlisch. As a musician, he can play any instrument perfectly.”

  It was around this time that Squirrel Bait brought in a fourth member, Peter Searcy, to take over vocal duties from Grubbs. By now the band had shed its impulse to parody hardcore, instead opting to simply be hardcore. Grubbs’s early songs were thrashy, shout-along rants with titles like “Insult to Injury” and “Rage for Life.” The addition of Searcy gave those songs a more melodic dimension. He sounded a lot like Paul Westerberg, too — not a bad thing.1 Squirrel Bait was developing a sound clearly influenced by Minneapolis bands like Hüsker Dü and the Replacements, with the lyrical directness of DC bands like Minor Threat.

  But they didn’t make it out of the garage much. In six months, Walford had only joined his new band onstage two or three times. Meanwhile, Bucayu and Garrison weren’t happy with Squirrel Bait’s infringement. It was impacting their ability to practice and play out, not to mention Walford was an essential part of Maurice — their sound was driven largely by his songwriting — and they didn’t want to share him. Too, Garrison and Grubbs were like oil and water, making it difficult for the two bands to develop much camaraderie. It was this social component that may have determined Walford’s choice to give up on Squirrel Bait. “I think he wanted to be in their band,” Garrison told me. “I think he didn’t quit Maurice out of loyalty to me.”

  But Walford’s near defection was not the only trouble Maurice faced. Despite his longtime friendship with Walford, McMahan had had enough of Bucayu and Garrison’s more extroverted, obnoxious behavior. He quit Maurice, according to Garrison, in hopes of following Walford to Squirrel Bait, but Walford chose to stick with Maurice instead. McMahan, for the moment, was left in the lurch. Things for Maurice, meanwhile, were about to transform.

  * * *

  When McMahan’s exit opened a vacancy in Maurice, Bucayu saw an opportunity that the band couldn’t pass up. “Bucayu tells us, ‘Look, I know a guy, and he can really play guitar, like, for real,’” Garrison recalled. Walford and Garrison were skeptical, but Bucayu promised it was the real thing. He brought the new guy in to practice with Walford — Garrison stayed away for the audition.

  The kid’s name was David Pajo. At the time he was in a Top 40 cover band called Prophet. His front four teeth had been knocked out of his mouth in the pit of an Iron Maiden show a year earlier — and he had an “adorable mullet,” according to Garrison. He loaded his gear into the practice space — a full stack, far more impressive than McMahan’s small amp — and told Walford how much he liked Maurice. He’d seen them play a show before Brian left the band. “I know your whole set,” he reportedly said. “Just click the sticks.”

  “Britt calls me and he’s laughing this hysterical, demented laugh,” Garrison said. “He says, ‘Listen to this shit. He already knows it!’ He sets the phone down and they do three songs right off the bat.”

  Pajo’s technical skill level, particularly for a fifteen-year-old, was off the charts. “I was a guitar geek,” he told me. “When I entered that scene I was a total shredder.” But to call Pajo a geek or a shredder is to grossly understate how seriously he took his instrument. At the time he joined Maurice, he had just dropped out of high school — because it was
interfering with his ability to play guitar. “I was complaining to my mom that I was only getting in six hours of practice every day. Only six hours was a bad day of practice.” His parents agreed to relieve him of the obligations of high school on the condition that he pass the GED (General Equivalency Diploma) and that he spend the summer really studying the guitar — at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

  If Walford was still considering Squirrel Bait, Pajo’s audition obliterated the option. “Pajo changed everything,” Garrison said. “He transformed the whole city.”

  * * *

  Walford’s rejection was a blow to Squirrel Bait, who more than a year after forming had yet to have its shit together. What’s more, Walford’s skill made the band realize their songs were good. What began as a joke was becoming more serious in their mind. Adding to their sense of mission, a tiny label called Upstart Records offered to release Squirrel Bait’s debut. With dreams of the studio in mind, the band auditioned one or two replacements for Walford, but none could match what they’d become accustomed to. Desperate, they asked Walford to sit in to record their debut. He agreed, and in the fall of 1984 Squirrel Bait entered the studio to record the nine-song, fifteen-minute Nearest Door EP. The album never saw the light of day: catastrophically, Upstart Records went bankrupt before it ever started up. Once again Squirrel Bait was at an impasse. Walford was gone again.

  It was not until October of 1984 that the band was finally up and running — and they were about to run like never before. They found their permanent drummer in the form of Ben Daughtrey. He wasn’t a perfect fit at first — he was more of a Talking Heads fan than a hardcore kid, and his simple, pounding style was a far cry from Walford’s blasts. But soon enough they found their groove, and for the first time ever the band felt like a fully formed unit. Daughtrey was the force — both in percussion and in personality — that pushed Squirrel Bait onto the stage, onto the road, and back into the studio.

  Daughtrey’s first priority was getting the band to play out — to generate a following. Despite technically being together since the winter of ’82–’83, Squirrel Bait rarely performed live. The original trio of Grubbs, Johnson, and Schuler only played house parties when Schuler was down on breaks from college. Even with the addition of Searcy and Walford, they hardly did shows. When Daughtrey joined, that all changed. They debuted their new lineup in January 1985 in Cincinnati, opening for Articles of Faith. It was the first show of a busy year: the next two months were filled with as many local gigs as they could get, then back to Cincinnati in March to open for Chicago punks Naked Raygun. Their transformation from basement band to a serious touring and recording act happened almost overnight. Their sound was gelling like never before; looking to fill it out even more, they added Brian McMahan as second guitarist.

  McMahan hit the ground running. Though Grubbs was still the band’s primary songwriter (both music and lyrics), McMahan showed up to their early practices with a song he’d written called “Hammering So Hard,” a two-chord thrasher that also contained one of the group’s catchiest shout-along choruses. Within a month of McMahan’s joining the group, Squirrel Bait were back in the studio, recording “Hammering So Hard” and five other tracks.

  The band was running full throttle. They’d hit it off with Naked Raygun at the Cincinnati show, and the Raygun guys recommended Squirrel Bait to their friend (and, for Santiago Durango, Big Black bandmate) Steve Albini. Albini was given a copy of the Nearest Door demo, which he liked, so he invited Squirrel Bait up to Chicago to open for Big Black and Minneapolis act Rifle Sport.

  Albini quickly became a booster for Squirrel Bait and encouraged them to get in touch with a guy named Gerard Cosloy, the brains behind a new label out of New York called Homestead Records. Talking to the Pope in 1986, Johnson recalled the night: “Even though they hadn’t put out a lot of records, everyone was saying this was going to be the hot label, because Raygun had signed, Big Black had signed, and Albini was like ‘Go to Homestead. These guys are the best, and Gerard is the greatest.’” Members of Big Black, Naked Raygun, and Breaking Circus (another Chicago-based act on Homestead) each started putting Squirrel Bait in Cosloy’s ear.

  It wasn’t that simple though. Bob Mould almost fucked it all up for them.

  It was May of ’85, a month since Squirrel Bait’s show in Chicago. Though the band had sent their recent recordings off to the Homestead office in New York, and they felt encouraged by Albini and their other friends who were on the label, they’d yet to have much, if any, direct contact with Cosloy himself. They’d found themselves back in Cincinnati once more, the third time in five months, this time opening for Hüsker Dü, who were on tour for New Day Rising. Fresh off their six-song session, they handed Bob Mould a copy of their recording. Impressed, Mould offered to sign the band to his own label, Reflex Records. Still feeling the buzz around Homestead, however — despite having little to no contact with anyone actually at the label — the guys turned Mould down, explaining that they were looking seriously at Cosloy’s label and needed to see how it would play out.

  Mould was happy for them. So happy, in fact, that when Cosloy caught up with Hüsker Dü at their New York show, Mould congratulated him on his new signing. This was news to Cosloy; to make matters worse, just days later he came across a copy of a zine out of Ohio called Offense Newsletter that included an article about Squirrel Bait which noted that they’d signed to Homestead. Johnson recalled, “Gerard read this and was like, ‘Fuck, who are these guys?’”

  Ultimately it all worked out; perhaps due to so many people talking Squirrel Bait up, perhaps due to the strength of their demo (probably both), Cosloy signed the band on Monday, May 20, 1985. Johnson remembered the date clearly because he and Grubbs graduated from high school the day before.

  It was the cap of an incredibly productive six months. They solidified their lineup, wrote an album’s worth of material, played a dozen shows in and out of town, made connections with some of the biggest indie bands of the day, recorded their debut, and signed to Homestead. The momentum didn’t last.

  * * *

  Though Maurice’s star did not rise to the same heights as Squirrel Bait, Pajo’s addition to the band gave them a boost in a different way: he became a collaborator and able conduit for Walford’s songwriting. Walford, though technically the drummer, had become Maurice’s primary songwriter. He was an accomplished pianist already. Garrison has memories of waiting in Walford’s backyard while the young wunderkind finished practicing his Rachmaninov. During Maurice’s formative period, when Oldham and McMahan were still in the band, their sound was straightforward, Circle Jerks–like hardcore. But soon Walford began teaching himself to play guitar. “I could see it when Britt started playing guitar on his own, just goofing around, his approach to the guitar was unlike anything I had ever seen before,” Garrison told me. “I guess he was approaching it like it was a piano or something, I don’t really know. I just know he was starting to mess around with types of sounds that were completely different than anything I was interested in.”

  By the time Bucayu was in the band, Walford had grown more assured on the guitar, and Maurice’s sound was becoming more and more adventurous. The music got faster and incorporated more stops and starts — similar, Garrison told me, to groups like Die Kruezen or Void. The Void similarities extended to Garrison’s vocals, too. “John Weiffenbach [Void’s singer] was my hero. I loved that superhuman caterwauling. Not just shouting but . . . outright screaming.” It was Peter Searcy who taught Garrison to widen his arsenal by actually singing. “[Peter] was incredible. People don’t even know. That guy doesn’t get his due.” According to Garrison, Searcy was the reason to catch a Squirrel Bait show. “They were boring, except for the singer . . . Peter was always just over the top — one of the best live singers I ever saw in my life . . . You should have been standing in front of the stage when those guys would play. Your eyebrows would hurt from the force of his voice.” One day after seeing Maurice play, Searcy advised G
arrison to “stop screeching and see what happens if you sing.” Garrison took the advice and quickly transformed into an even more dynamic front-man, shifting between a lower-register, Danzig-like moan to the pained shrieks he had already perfected.

  Still, with McMahan and Bucayu on guitar and bass, Maurice’s sound was sloppier and rougher than Walford desired. Pajo, on the other hand, was a trained musician. It was rare for a player in the Louisville punk scene to be classically trained on any instrument, and now two of Maurice’s four members shared that in common. The music immediately got tighter, cleaner, and more electrifying.

  Pajo came from a metal background, more so than the hardcore punk the others had been weaned on. Thus he brought hyperspeed guitar solos unlike anything else the scene was used to. Coupled with Garrison’s melodramatic, religion-obsessed lyrics, Maurice took on a much more menacing heavy metal sheen. They recorded a demo in Walford’s basement, dubbed The First Shall Be Last, in 1985 — about a year after Pajo joined the band. Songs like “Imitate Christ,” “Confession,” and “No Exit” demonstrate the brutality of the early Walford–Pajo collaborations. The songs shift from lightning-fast riffs to doomy sludge, Pajo punctuating all of it with piercing harmonics and dazzling leads.

  Maurice was a powerful, formidable band. It made for a live show not to be fucked with. “It was thunderous. We were the first band to have giant amps,” Garrison told me. Maurice gained a small but dedicated following. “We were [popular] with a certain group of people. But most of the kids were really alienated by what we were doing. They wanted the Dead Kennedys.”