Slint's Spiderland

by Tennent, Scott

  In fact it’s not that terrible a reason. (And in fairness to Buckler, he was also ultimately drawn to a completely different style of music, pursuing a more danceable, light-hearted muse with King Kong, who have numerous records out on the Drag City label.) Tweez is a very odd-sounding record that takes a lot of getting used to, and half the reason for that is Albini’s production. His influence on Tweez stretches beyond his abilities behind the boards, despite his claims elsewhere that the final version of the record is not far removed from the demo the band sent to him prior to their session. “We all looked up to Steve a lot,” Pajo told me. “We were huge Big Black fans. When we went up there we wanted to let Steve do whatever he wanted. We were open to experimenting and trying everything. . . . The songs became, for better or worse, almost a backdrop for some of the production effects we were doing for fun.” One such example is the way they recorded McMahan’s vocals on “Ron”: “We had two mics swinging back and forth — Brian would have to keep pushing them as he sang — so they were going in and out of phase. We were up for trying any weird recording technique. We wanted to collaborate with Steve on the songs, and it sounds like it.”

  Many of Tweez’s most memorable moments and defining characteristics happened spontaneously in the studio, and the only reason they’re on the record is because Albini thought to turn his microphones on. “We didn’t have any lyrics,” Buckler explained to Alternative Press, “so Steve recorded Brian jabbering on a scratch track and put it in the mix. He also would secretly record all of us chatting in the snack room. This was our first recording, and Steve Albini was a superstar. Steve saw us as this goofy math-metal band from Louisville who idolized him. He tried to capture our odd ways and put it on our recording. He was making fun of us, and it worked.”

  When Slint showed up to the studio, many of their songs were either unfinished or the band was open to manipulating them. They never rehearsed with vocals, so many of the vocal parts were written on the spot (perhaps explaining the line “I’ve got a Christmas tree inside my head”). Elsewhere Albini added incidental voices (as in “Nan Ding”) or noises (as in “Carol”) to give the songs more density.

  The first minute of “Ron,” the opening track, captures the whole aesthetic of Tweez. It begins with the band ill prepared — McMahan stammers “Oh, oh, all right,” as if caught off guard before the opening chord strikes. Even as the song gets going, McMahan is still not settled. “Steve, these headphones are fucked up. They’re only coming out of one side, like the . . . Should I just bear with it or what? Shit. They’re fucked.” The music keeps going and McMahan quiets down, as if considering whether or not to deal with his faulty headphones. Then: “Man, no, wait. Please give me some new headphones.”

  It’s probably the most classic moment on the album. No matter one’s opinion of the record — and there are a lot of Slint fans out there who hate Tweez — I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t at least crack a smile at this intro. That very act — smiling or laughing with Slint — might even be part of the reason why some don’t like Tweez. It’s not “Slint,” it’s not Spiderland. It’s not the anguish of “Washer” or the creepiness of “Nosferatu Man” or the anxiousness of “Don, Aman.” Spiderland, while not completely dark, is not a terribly funny album, nor is it boneheaded. Tweez is.

  All four guys in Slint were just finishing high school when they made Tweez. Speaking to Alternative Press, McMahan described himself and his bandmates as “very playful, with a boundless sense of optimism.” Albini, in the same article, put it this way: “They were about what you would expect from smart kids in a supportive peer group: prone to ass humor, practical jokes and absurdity on many levels.” “Ass humor” and absurdity are all over the record. Its very title is a reference to Walford’s odd collection of tweezers. A minute and a half into “Warren” the song ends abruptly and the listener is treated to thirty seconds of what sounds like someone jerking off (or, more accurately, indulging their tweezer fetish). The song is followed by “Pat,” which confirms the, uh, fixation of the jerker as an electronic Speak-and-Spell voice intones “canker loaf . . . snatch beast . . . tweezer fetish.” (How did Warren and Pat Buckler — good-hearted Unitarians, mind you — feel about being named for both of the “tweezer fetish” songs?)

  “Darlene,” while not absurd or dirty, also points to the band’s level of maturity. Musically the song is one of two on Tweez that hints at where Slint were headed — it’s the quietest song, driven by a slightly eerie guitar line of arpeggios wrapped around a tightly locked rhythm section, as McMahan leads the way (or tags along) with a monologue. Missing here is the literary aspiration found on Spiderland in songs like “Nosferatu Man” or “Good Morning, Captain.” Rather, McMahan talks of two platonic friends who become romantically involved. It’s the kind of topic a high school senior might have on his mind, as opposed to the content of Spiderland, which seems to come from the head of a college kid immersed in lit studies.

  “Darlene” ends with McMahan ominously repeating “We know what happened to them. We know what they did,” hinting at the creepy monotone that would permeate Spiderland. “Kent” is the other song on Tweez that foreshadows some of the ideas the band would explore in the next few years.2 At nearly six minutes, it is the longest track on the album. It’s also the only song that really shifts into more than one movement, compared with the other tracks which are mostly built on two riffs each. It begins (after the sound of someone sipping a refreshing beverage) with a cool, almost groovy, clean-tone vamp that Walford quickly cuts off with a snare hit, propelling the band into a jaunty, playful instrumental jam. At one point the band pauses, Walford hits the snare again, and they resume the romp. After a second pause, however, “Kent” moves into a whole other territory. Buckler hits a stray note on his bass which prompts him and Walford into a tense one-note build. One guitar drops in and out with moody volume swells while the other plays a minimal but discordant lead. Buckler’s voice comes in and cryptically says, “Don’t worry about me / I’ve got a bed / I’ve got a Christmas tree / Inside my head,” sending the song back to that original intro groove, now in full swing as Walford pounds his kick and snare to slowly but forcefully drive the rhythm. McMahan’s guitar enters, doubling the main groove higher up on the neck before moving into a solo that is alternately menacing and disjointed. McMahan’s lead (written by Buckler), all mood and texture, is a contrast to Pajo’s flashier, harmonic-heavy leads on the rest of Tweez. In its length, texture, composition, and mood, “Kent” seems to point the way forward for the band.

  A New Sound

  Slint returned to Louisville in the fall of 1987 with a finished album, but the recording experience created a fissure within the band. Buckler left the Tweez sessions incredibly deflated by its outcome. “[Albini] had a kind of sonic ideology he applied to all the groups he produced, which I don’t think was meant for Slint,” he told Alternative Press. “He would produce bands to sound raw and abrasive; I wanted Slint to sound warm and delicate.” Pajo noted to me that, though all four bandmates went into the studio eager to work with Albini, Buckler grew more and more frustrated as the session progressed. “All [the studio experimentation] was done after the basic tracks were recorded, so Ethan didn’t envision the record sounding like that. He wasn’t into the end product at all . . . We wanted the record to sound like you’d hit the loudness button on your stereo, which scoops out all the mids — all low end and high end, no midrange — and he was really mad about that. He thought it sounded really false . . . He thought it made a joke or a novelty of the songs; he liked the songs the way they were.” Angered by Tweez’s outcome, Buckler left the group.

  The band found Buckler’s replacement in the summer of the following year, when Todd Brashear returned home from Indiana University in nearby Bloomington. Still good friends following Solution Unknown’s breakup, Pajo had given Brashear a copy of Tweez soon after it was recorded. Unlike Buckler, Brashear was instantly on the same page as Pajo and the rest of Slint. “I li
ked it; I thought it sounded unique . . . The Albini influence was pretty obvious, [but] there was still a lot of cool musical stuff going on. That’s what drew me to it.”

  Brashear soon developed stronger musical and personal relationships with all three guys. His friendship with McMahan and Walford grew as they visited him at his job at a local video store, hanging out for hours watching and talking movies.

  Slint spent the summer getting comfortable with Brashear, teaching him the Tweez material as well as a couple of new songs, which they named for Brashear’s parents, Pam and Glenn. “I remember the first show I played with the band,” Brashear told me. “My manager from the video store came. I remember warning him, ‘this is going to be short.’ I don’t remember who decided, maybe Britt, that we only knew two songs really well. So we got on stage, played those two songs, then walked off the stage. The people who booked the show were really upset with us.”

  It was an indicator of an evolving sense of perfectionism within the band. By the fall of 1988, as all four members set off for college, Slint had entered a new era. The dynamic of the group was about to change.

  * * *

  When McMahan joined Slint a year earlier, the band’s sound was driven by the songwriting partnership of Pajo and Walford, who by that point had been playing together for three years. Pajo, Walford, and Buckler had been writing songs for a good six months before McMahan entered the equation in the winter of ’86–’87, and they were in the studio within six months of him joining. Vocals aside, a number of the songs on Tweez were more or less written before McMahan had a chance to exert much of his own influence.

  By the fall of 1988 Slint’s makeup was totally different. As college beckoned, the quartet was ostensibly reduced to a duo. Brashear returned to Bloomington for his sophomore year; Pajo, who had gotten his GED, also moved to Indiana to attend the University of Evansville. That left childhood friends Walford and McMahan, who together moved to Evanston, just outside of Chicago, where they enrolled at Northwestern University. Sharing a dorm room, the two began sketching out the songs that would make up most of Spiderland.

  Living on their own, away from hometown distractions and surrounded by academia, McMahan and Walford’s sensibility began to evolve away from tweezer fetishes, toward something more highfalutin. “We were just getting out in the world — and we all went to relatively stodgy, conservative colleges,” McMahan told Alternative Press. “It was this whole rude awakening period that gave rise to Spiderland. We were becoming adults; we were geeking out on mythology and the idea of archetypes.”

  For the fall of ’88 and spring of ’89, McMahan and Walford (by now an accomplished guitarist as well as drummer) hashed out the skeletons of songs that would appear on Spiderland. These new songs were longer and more complex than before. The instrumentation was also more skeletal, perhaps due to the lack of other players piling on their own ideas. McMahan had come a long way since Squirrel Bait’s “Hammering So Hard.” He was a fan of players like Neil Young and Leonard Cohen — songwriters whose music managed to exude emotion without very many chords or notes. It was a totally different approach compared with Pajo and Walford’s process in Maurice, which was technically difficult and densely packed. Pajo described the partnership that bloomed between McMahan and Walford: “Both Britt and Brian had such strong opinions and ideas about music. Brian was very detail-oriented; a very critical listener. Britt and I thought more alike. If Britt or I had an idea, we usually settled on that idea. Brian took more convincing. He and Britt would trade ideas back and forth before finally coming up with a solution.”

  * * *

  That year the band would get together only sporadically, usually during winter or spring breaks. During that time they squeezed in a couple of shows — one in Bloomington, arranged by Brashear, and another in Chicago in the spring of 1989. The latter was organized by McMahan and Walford, who were folding themselves into the Chicago scene during their time at Northwestern. Their old friends Clark Johnson and David Grubbs were fellow students (Grubbs had transferred there for grad school); the two had reunited in a new band, Bastro, along with a drummer named John McEntire. Also in Walford and McMahan’s circle of friends was Steve Albini, Nathan Kaatrud and Eddie Roeser of Urge Overkill, recent Austin transplant David Yow — late of Scratch Acid, now forming a new band called the Jesus Lizard — and Touch and Go label head Corey Rusk.

  All of these friends were boosters for Slint. Albini would play Tweez for anyone who’d listen, and Bastro and Urge Overkill often shared bills with the band. Perhaps no one showed more tangible support for the band at the time than another friend of McMahan and Walford’s named Jennifer Hartman. After Tweez languished unreleased for more than a year, she fronted the money for the band to press 500 copies of the album on vinyl. With an official release finally in the pipeline, the band planned its first and only real tour, to coincide with their upcoming summer break.

  * * *

  Prior to the tour Slint had a sudden opportunity to enter the studio once more — the result of a quickly assembled session organized by Albini. According to Brashear, Albini had studio time left over from a completed session, so he invited Slint up to keep the paid-for studio from going to waste. The band had a dearth of new, finished material at that point, so they opted to record a reworked, longer version of Tweez closer “Rhoda” and one of their two new songs, “Glenn.”

  Clearly the band had some affinity for “Rhoda,” feeling it worthy of a second recording. In the scope of their discography the song stands apart as a unique entity — not as heavy or as juvenile as the other Tweez material, not as brooding or epic as anything on Spiderland. Knowing that it was the last song they’d written before recording Tweez, “Rhoda” feels in a way like the path not taken. Slint had one other song written at this time, “Pam,” which is sonically similar to “Rhoda.” For whatever reason, they opted to record “Glenn” instead, and the result is a bolder statement of intent for the direction the band was taking. Although the single wasn’t released until 1994, well after Slint was no more, it’s important to understand “Glenn” in context of the trajectory Slint were on in 1988–89. “Glenn” was not a posthumous afterthought — it was the creative breakthrough.

  From the first notes softly bubbling out of Brashear’s bass, “Glenn” quietly announces itself as a distinct animal from Tweez. For the first time Slint display a kind of confidence — a patience — in their playing. Brashear’s bass plays unaccompanied for the first twenty-five seconds of the six-minute mini-epic — no other instruments, no incidental voices or clearing of throats, no sound effects, no nervous energy whatsoever. When Walford’s drums come in — one of the best-sounding drums Albini has ever recorded, by the way — one senses a level of discipline among the quartet that is totally absent from their debut.

  In other words, it is immediately clear that Slint, one year later, had become more sophisticated players. But it wasn’t just them: Albini, too, seems to have gained confidence in the studio. By now he’d done a few more albums by bands other than his own — Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, Urge Overkill’s Jesus Urge Superstar, and Pussy Galore’s Dial M for Motherfucker, among others. He had likely gained the experience of working with other bands who may or may not have had their own strong opinions on their own aesthetics. In Fool the World: An Oral History of a Band called Pixies, Albini talks in retrospect about his attitude toward recording Surfer Rosa, an album which features some of the same studio tricks used on Tweez, recorded just a couple months prior, such as break-room banter recorded on the sly. Albini felt that he “indulged in a selfish part of [his] personality” in the recording of Surfer Rosa and that he “warped” the Pixies’ songs in a misguided attempt to suit his own tastes rather than the band’s.1 The statement could possibly apply to his other work from this period, including Tweez, and if so would certainly lend credence to Buckler’s criticisms of the experience.

  All signs indicate that, for Tweez, Slint did not have strong opinions about how thei
r record should ultimately sound. Their guitars took on a tone that could be dropped directly into a Big Black or Rapeman album. They wanted vocals on their tracks but didn’t write lyrics until just before they were in the studio. Albini recorded crashing utensils and stray conversations to add density to many of the songs and convinced the band to go along with it. Whether it was a willing collaboration or a scam — it doesn’t matter which — Albini may as well have been the fifth member of Slint for their first record. Not so for “Glenn.”

  Did Albini grow as a recording engineer? Did Slint develop a more firm idea of their own sonic aesthetic? Likely the answer is yes to both questions. Whatever the case, Albini seems to have gotten totally out of the way of the song itself, concerning himself more so with making each component sound perfect. He succeeds, utterly.

  How much of “Glenn”’s dramatic progression away from the sound of Tweez was due to Slint’s progression as songwriters, now with greater influence from McMahan, and how much was due to the production? You could ask this question not just of “Glenn” but of Spiderland as well. Clearly there is a progression in the nature of the songs the band wrote; but it’s an interesting exercise to listen to bootlegs from this era, where the band shifts from Tweez material to “Glenn” and early versions of Spiderland tracks and back again. The new songs are longer and more dynamic, but they aren’t so starkly distinct. Listening to Slint move from “Ron” to “Nosferatu Man” in the live setting feels natural — not at all the harsh juxtaposition that would come from playing the album versions in succession.