Slint's Spiderland

by Tennent, Scott

  Solution Unknown played out frequently, unlike Maurice, and they quickly gained a reputation around town for their lively performances. Though Garrison was not in the band, the way audiences reacted to Solution Unknown threw into relief his own dissatisfaction with Maurice. “[Solution Unknown] was a side project for Dave, but not for Mike. For Mike it was his band. He wanted to do a band that would cause large crowds to go apeshit . . . And that’s not what Pajo and Britt had in their heads. They were not interested in causing a riot where 800 kids would wreck a joint. That’s just not what they wanted. They wanted to make fucked-up music.”

  Pajo and Walford were growing out of metal, and hence out of the sound of their own band. “Britt and I started writing these songs that had clean guitar sounds and were more like Minutemen and Meat Puppets–influenced, and Rat wasn’t sure how to sing over it. He was just like, ‘this is jazz or something.’ I think that’s when he quit the band. He just didn’t know what he could do for that.” Pajo had it about right. Garrison put it to me even more explicitly: “I mean, goddamn it, I don’t even like music, dude! I don’t even really like music that much, you know what I mean? To me, it’s like being on a Viking ship. I have come to fucking humiliate you with our band. We’re fucking shit up. And that’s just not what they were doing. They were into music, for real. And that was very huh? to me. I was like, ‘What? I didn’t know we were actually trying to be musicians, because I’m out! I can’t sing a lick!’”

  Things came to a head when Pajo and Walford had worked out a new song and brought it to practice in the summer of 1986. It was completely free of distortion; it wasn’t even particularly eerie or menacing. Pajo played a complicated arpeggiated riff as Walford drummed in a herky-jerky, Minutemen-like style. The song’s structure was linear, moving from Pajo’s arpeggio to a breezy, jazzy guitar solo to an angular motif in which the bass and guitar doubled up on a rolling, almost surf-guitar, vamp. Ambitiously, the song even contained a middle section which required bass and guitar to re-tune from drop-D to standard, then back down again for the conclusion. To Rat, it must have seemed baffling: there was absolutely no entry point for vocals. There was no clear verse or chorus section to hook into, and the relaxed, meandering pace and lack of distortion was diametrically opposed to his aggressive vocal style and stage persona. Bucayu and Garrison had finally had enough. They walked, and Maurice was no more.4

  Maurice was banished to local-legend status, without a single legit recording to document their celebrated run. Ironically, one song did eventually make its way to the masses — that last, cataclysmic track. Walford and Pajo eventually named the song “Pat”; it was the first song their new band would learn, and it appears on that band’s debut, Tweez.

  Please Give Me Some New Headphones

  Interviewer: What are the other guys doing now?

  Clark Johnson: Ben and Peter are in a band called Fancy Pants, kind of like Run-DMC with a little bit of Beastie Boys. They do a cover of “Play That Funky Music,” and I think they do the Fat Albert song. Their plan is that they’re going to record real soon, real major label shopping . . . Dave’s in a band that’s looking for a name; they’re working with the name Sweet Husk, but everyone says “Sweet Hüsker Dü,” so they’re not going to use that. Instead they’re going to call it Dulcino, which I think means “little boy” in Spanish or Italian . . . Brian is in a band called Bead in Louisville, with Britt and a guy who was in Maurice [who] can play circles around Eddie Van Halen. They’re really quiet and subtle, but other times they’re really angular, too, so it’s kind of cool.

  Bucayu and Garrison’s exit hardly seemed to have slowed Pajo and Walford’s new path. Their new sound was positively alien to where they were coming from — and alien to the rest of the Louisville scene, too. And that’s just what they were going for. “The thing that I always liked about Louisville,” Pajo told Punk Planet in 2005, “was that nobody wanted to sound like anybody else. If you came out and it was obvious that you were ripping off the Clash or Minor Threat, nobody paid any attention to you. The bands that had their own sound were the really respected ones.”

  Pajo and Walford were certainly achieving that. Soon the duo expanded to a trio when Pajo’s friend Ethan Buckler came into the fold to take the bass. Buckler had already been playing in the local scene, but was growing frustrated with the copycat sounds of so many bands. Speaking to Alternative Press, Buckler said he’d “wanted to get away from stuff that sounded like Minor Threat or Dead Kennedys or Black Flag, which we had been playing for a long time, and steer towards more musical, delicate-sounding stuff, like Dinosaur, Sonic Youth, the Meat Puppets, Minutemen — music girls can listen to.” When Pajo heard Buckler voice these frustrations with the scene — identical to what he and Walford felt — he invited his friend to practice. They hit it off and the band that would be Slint was formed. They gave themselves the rather ungainly moniker Small Dirty Tight Tufts of Hair: BEADS. “We practiced a lot,” Buckler told Alternative Press. “We wanted to be the vanguard of some new kind of sound.” Paradoxically, though, Pajo was still moonlighting in a band that wanted nothing to do with the vanguard.

  * * *

  Despite Maurice’s dissolution, Bucayu and Pajo remained on the same page with Solution Unknown. Like Squirrel Bait a few years earlier, Solution Unknown was evolving from a joke to something more serious. Looking to fill out the band in order to sound fuller, tighter, and better, they chose to bring in a second guitarist — a Ballard High junior named Todd Brashear.

  Brashear was a relative newcomer to the scene. He too lived on the East End, not far from Pajo and Bucayu, but he didn’t start going to shows until he was old enough to drive himself. He was a fan of Maurice before he’d ever met anyone in the band; after seeing so many of their shows, he eventually befriended Bucayu and Pajo, which led to their choosing him for Solution Unknown.

  He was a welcome addition to the band. Throughout the fall of ’86 and winter of ’87 Solution Unknown played out near constantly, writing prolifically and becoming tighter and tighter. By February of ’87 they were ready to record a full-length. Bucayu knew people in the thriving Washington, DC, scene and wanted Solution Unknown to make a pilgrimage to that punk mecca to record their album. “We were trying to get Ian MacKaye to produce it, but it never happened,” recalled Brashear. “Mike Bucayu was in with all the Dischord people and he talked to Ian on the phone a lot, but it never panned out.” Instead, they went to Don Zientarra, the producer responsible for so many of their favorite records. That spring Brashear borrowed his uncle’s furniture delivery van and drove the band to DC — braving a freak blizzard to get there — and in the span of a few days they recorded thirteen songs. They named the finished product Karen, after a friend of theirs from the local scene — adopting a similar knack for titles as Pajo’s other band was displaying.

  It turned out to be their last hurrah. By the fall, Brashear was off to college and Solution Unknown fizzled out.

  * * *

  All the better for Pajo, whose band with Walford and Buckler was gelling like no other he’d been in. They were succeeding in creating music unlike anything else in town — so unlike anything else that their first show, on November 2, 1986, was not at a club or a house party but the Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Church. On a Sunday. During mass.

  Will Oldham and Brian McMahan were both present for the show — McMahan in the audience, Oldham onstage. The trio had flirted with the idea of having Oldham join the band as either the singer or second guitarist, though he didn’t know how to do either. Instead, he sat onstage in front of Walford’s kick drum, holding it in place. The set was short, just three songs — “Ron,” “Darlene,” and “Charlotte.” Pajo reminisced to me, “It was a weird show to begin with because it was actually part of the service. The theme was rock and roll music, [but] they didn’t realize what they were getting.”

  They’d gotten the gig through Buckler; he and his family were regular congregants. “They would have some kind of music
— usually classical — to open and close the service; so, one Sunday it ended up being [us],” Buckler explained to Alternative Press. “Some of [our music] was very quiet and introverted, so it turned out not to be totally inappropriate. Unitarians are open-minded.”

  Aside from their friends who showed up to see them, you could imagine the congregation’s reaction. Pajo described the set: “Our songs were primarily just feedback at that point. And Britt had his huge drums — they were like cannons.” At least one person in the audience liked what he heard; within two months McMahan had joined the band. Pajo did not expect McMahan to be so enthused. “I thought he would hate it because it was like an extension of Maurice. I was surprised that he liked it as much as he did; I was happy that he was even interested in joining the band.”

  Now a quartet, the band settled on a new, far more succinct, name: Slint. In an interview with FILTER in 2005, Walford explained that it was the name of a pet fish. “I made it up . . . There were a couple of other fish I recommended, but the guys liked Slint. They were just names I came up with depending on what kind of fish it was and what it looked like.” It was a strange name; fitting for a strange band.1

  One unique thing McMahan brought to the table were connections from his days in Squirrel Bait — specifically, connections to Steve Albini. So when Big Black came down to Louisville for a show in May of ’87, Slint opened. Speaking to Alternative Press, Albini recalled their sound at the time: “During their formative period, they had almost this heavy metal undertone. I thought it was interesting, but it also seemed unformed; it seemed incomplete.” In a way, it was. Though their set was comprised of many songs destined for Tweez, Pajo recalls that McMahan played an acoustic guitar for the whole show. “Steve hated it. He thought we were a prog rock band. I think it was Brian’s acoustic that threw him off.

  Not everyone hated it. Brashear was in the audience and was already a convert. He knew what to expect because he’d just seen them a month earlier opening for Killdozer at Tewligan’s Tavern, a legendary Louisville punk venue. Also in the audience at the Killdozer show was Pajo and Walford’s old bandmate, Rat. It was the one and only time he saw Slint play. “They sounded like Maurice without me yelling,” he told me. A homegrown, mostly hand-written, zine called Conqueror Worm published a review of the same show, also remarking that the band sounded like “a jazzy Maurice.” The same zine also contained reviews of the Big Black show and a battle of the bands show at St. Francis High School. For the latter it noted that it was the first time the band opted not to do “a Maurice opening for the first song,” indicating once more that Slint, at this early stage, was clearly an outgrowth from Walford and Pajo’s original band. Garrison, however, appreciated the differences. “It was better, because I wasn’t interfering with it. I wasn’t trying to caterwaul above it about whatever crazy Jesus/Satan shit I was thinking about — my urge to drown in a sea of my enemies’ blood or whatever. It was nice to have me removed from the equation, but at the same time I was like, ‘these poor fuckers, Jesus. This is not going to fly.’ It was like looking at the most beautiful ship you ever saw in your life, and knowing it was going to sink.”

  Brashear, on the other hand, saw a band he wanted to follow. When he went to the Big Black show he came armed with a four-track to record Slint’s set. A few months later, McMahan called him for a copy; he needed to use it as a demo over which he could practice vocals. Slint had set a date to go into Albini’s studio.

  * * *

  Thinking of Slint’s Tweez-era material as metal — perhaps more aptly un-metal or anti-metal — goes a long way toward making sense of their early sound. Recorded in the fall of 1987 by Steve Albini and released in 1989 on Jennifer Hartman Records and Tapes, Tweez has always sounded like an alien in the musical landscape. Even more than twenty years later it’s hard to find another album since that could be perceived as having a direct link to Tweez. Quite simply, it’s a fucking weird record. It’s even stranger when trying to connect its sound to Spiderland, released four years after the first album was finished — a lifetime for teenagers. There is a hint of things to come in songs like “Kent” or “Darlene” (each song is named for the four boys’ parents — and Walford’s dog, Rhoda), but in the context of the rest of Tweez that path is difficult to foretell.

  So what is the proper context in which to understand Tweez? There are a few key ingredients — not least was Albini’s presence behind the boards and the young band’s general adoration of Big Black — but first and foremost Tweez is a record made by metalheads. Recovering metalheads, perhaps, but metalheads nonetheless. Were you to re-sequence its nine songs so that the first half ran “Ron,” “Carol,” “Charlotte,” and “Warren,” the metal-ness of Slint would be more clearly telegraphed. Pajo’s virtuosic playing permeates the record, and especially these songs, as he hurls a torrent of pick-harmonics like a champion dart-thrower. “Ron” opens the record with a crushing riff built around a drop-D chord and a run of artificial harmonics. As Pajo’s guitar drifts into a sustained chord that melts into textural feedback, his hands move to the whammy bar for a little flare as the note fades out. During the verse Pajo shifts into a jazzy, note-filled riff punctuated with more pick-induced screams.

  “Carol”’s opening riff is a revision of “Ron”’s — slower, more drawn out, but the same chord-plus-harmonic-run, set in a minor key. Albini does his best to distract from the metal sound by adding sounds of crashing noises and an exceptionally Big Black–like bass sound, but by the two-minute mark Pajo and Walford reassert themselves with a sinister circular rhythm played in half time. “Rhoda,” the last song on Tweez and also the last song the band wrote before hitting the studio, is the only track on the album that succeeds at being aggressive without being heavy. The song sees Pajo’s predilection toward artificial harmonics taken to the extreme, turning the technique into a series of riffs without ever descending to chunkier low-end chords as he does on the rest of the album. The sound of the instrumental clearly appealed to the band as an avenue worth pursuing post-Tweez, as they re-recorded an extended version of the song two years later.

  Also distracting from the at times brutal sounds of songs like “Carol” or “Charlotte” are McMahan’s lead vocals. Far more ingratiated in punk, McMahan didn’t sing with a hint of metal trappings. One could imagine Rat singing over “Charlotte”’s sludgy and dense percussive verse riffs, all shrieks and moans and howls, but McMahan had no interest in such theatrics. His vocal delivery throughout Tweez hews much closer to a hardcore bark.

  That is, when he sings at all. Slint seemed clearly more interested in being an instrumental band from the start. McMahan only performs the duties of a frontman — singing lyrics that seem intentionally written and intended to be up in the mix — on three tracks (“Ron,” “Carol,” and “Charlotte”). The rest are either instrumental or feature spoken monologues or incidental voices recorded by Albini when the band wasn’t looking. Elsewhere McMahan steps aside, letting Buckler take the vocals on “Kent” and Edgar Blossom, of the band Flour, speak over on “Warren” (not that you could tell: Blossom’s voice is pitched down to half speed, rendering his lyrics almost unintelligible).

  It’s decisions like these that keep Tweez from ever feeling too metal. Tweez is a fun, often surprising, record thanks to the band’s (and Albini’s) efforts to sidestep all the genre tropes that Maurice (metal) or Squirrel Bait (punk) traded in. Part of how they accomplished this is that they didn’t sequence the record so that the heavier songs ran in succession. Instead, each is paired with a track comprised of all clean-tone guitars. Not necessarily “quiet” tracks, but more whimsical. Nowhere on Tweez do Slint employ the clear-cut dynamic juxtaposition of loud and quiet the way they would on much of Spiderland — most of the songs on Tweez are just a couple minutes long, getting across a single idea in one or two riffs and then done (“Ron,” for instance, is an intro, a verse, and an outro) — but you do begin to see the experiments in juxtaposition in the way the record is se
quenced, and how that affects its overall pace and vibe. There is a fairly consistent ebb and flow to the album, from the aggressive to the ponderous and back again.

  Tweez is a record made by young kids who seem to be simultaneously running toward and away from the sounds of their record collections. McMahan and Pajo were both using EMG pickups in their guitars — a standard feature for guitarists in bands like Megadeth, Anthrax, and other metal gods of the ’80s, but not so in vogue among the Gibson- or Fender-wielding punks and indie pioneers. Walford meanwhile played Samhain’s Initium for Albini as an example of the drum sound he was going for. (Albini declined to accommodate the request.) At the same time, the band lionized bands like the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, and especially Big Black; and they made a concerted effort, regardless of their equipment, to try and find a sound that nodded in that direction.

  In making Tweez, they managed to accomplish this in a couple ways — the first and most obvious being the choice of Steve Albini as producer. Most of Albini’s seminal production jobs — roughly everything that wasn’t his own band’s output — were still ahead of him at this point, though his reputation as an engineer still preceded him even in 1987. (For context, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa was recorded a few months after Tweez.) As Ethan Buckler would later put it, “Slint went to Chicago [and] got Albini-ized.” That is: a razor-sharp guitar sound — less heavy metal than crackling aluminum — a well-defined but dirty bass sound, beautifully rendered drums, and vocals mixed in at equal (or lower) volume in relation to the music. While the phrase “Albini-ized” has a tacit meaning to anyone who listened to indie rock in the ’90s and beyond, it couldn’t have necessarily loomed as an expectation in 1987. Still, by the time he was done with Slint there were plenty of sonic similarities to Big Black or Albini’s new band, Rapeman. Much of Albini’s early work can sound tinny and cold; it’s an aesthetic choice, not a flaw — unless you’re Ethan Buckler and you feel a record without mid-range is excuse enough for quitting a band.