Slint's Spiderland

by Tennent, Scott

  This gives some credence to Buckler’s complaint that Tweez did not come out right — it didn’t come out “like Slint.” Was Slint, all along, supposed to sound cool, unadorned, starkly produced? Should Tweez’s quiet moments have been allowed to be, simply, quiet? No voices, no crashing sounds, not even the minimal effects coloring Pajo and McMahan’s guitar tones? Was Tweez supposed to sound like “Glenn”?

  It’s difficult but not impossible to imagine. “Glenn” possesses at least a few ingredients that are absent from Tweez but would later appear in Spiderland. Most obviously it is a long song, given the time to unfold, and it is the band’s first instance of employing the loud/quiet dynamic in the space of one track. Yet there are also a couple of elements that resemble Tweez. Most obvious, the metal — that thick, palm-muted chord that crashes into the middle of the song. It begs you to curl your lip, raise your devil horns, and bang your head. It’s also a simple song, more or less built around one bassline and drum pattern. Like many of the songs on Tweez, “Glenn” follows a single pattern through an almost linear song structure until it’s worn itself out. The difference here is that the band displays the patience to allow that process to stretch out over six minutes instead of jumping in and out in two.

  This is how “Glenn” can be viewed as a bridge between Tweez and Spiderland. On Tweez most songs were over just after they’d begun, as if they were just exercises or experiments. Think of “Ron” — an intro, a verse, an outro. It’s a minimal form of songwriting (and the song certainly didn’t need more). With “Glenn,” Slint hit upon another, more effective, form of minimalism, which they’d employ to dramatic effect on Spiderland in songs like “Don, Aman” and “Washer.”

  Listen to “Glenn” with an ear to two elements: the relentless repetition of the rhythm section and the illusion of song structure created by McMahan and Pajo’s changing guitar parts. Start with Brashear’s bass: the song begins with his harmonic-laden intro, which then morphs into a slinky arpeggio which Brashear more or less repeats for the duration of the song, excepting a brief reprise of that harmonic riff in the middle and a final change at the end signaling the song’s conclusion. Next, isolate Walford’s drums: they’re like a locomotive that will not be stopped. Walford plays roughly the same insistent beat for the entire song, adding cymbal crashes during the heavier moments but otherwise keeping to the same pattern at all times.

  The guitar lines are another story. Here the song becomes much more complicated in its structure. It begins with a skeletal, fragile series of notes (which I’ll call the “A” riff), which later shifts to mimic Brashear’s bassline (“B”), upon which crushing palm-muted chords (“C”) then come in overtop. Now, note the order in which these parts are played: bass intro, A, B, C, bass intro reprise, C, B, A, B, B (with a textural lead), B (with bass outro). Walford and Brashear’s repetition create the tension of the song; McMahan and Pajo build a rising/falling pyramidal structure (ABC-CBA) before falling in line with the repetition for the final two minutes. The ultimate effect is one of the most ominous songs Slint ever put to tape.

  * * *

  Tweez was finally released in July 1989, almost two years after it was recorded. To celebrate, the band had an album release show in Chicago, at a Thai restaurant called Bangkok Bangkok. Opening the show was Walford’s friends’ new band, a trio of bass, guitar, drum machine, and maniacal frontman making their debut as the Jesus Lizard. The restaurant was strewn with banners that read CONGRATULATIONS GRADUATE; McMahan had booked the space by telling the owner that it was his graduation party.

  Two weeks later the band played a hometown show at Café Dog, supported by local acts Crain and King Kong, the latter the new project from Ethan Buckler. It was at these shows that audiences first got their taste of the direction in which the band was headed. In addition to playing much of Tweez, “Glenn,” and “Pam,” Slint also played a few of the songs that Walford and McMahan had been working out over the past year. This included “Nosferatu Man,” instrumental versions of “Good Morning, Captain” and “Breadcrumb Trail,” and a very rough sketch of what would eventually become “Washer.”

  The following month Slint set out on tour, doing two back-to-back ten-day sojourns to the Midwest and East Coast. The first circuit took them back to Chicago, then Madison, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and St. Louis; after a short break in their hometown, they ventured east for shows in Philadelphia, New Brunswick, New York, and Boston.

  For all the sophistication the band were showing in their new songs, the tour proved that college hadn’t totally brainwashed the immature goofs who made Tweez. “It was a weird tour,” Pajo said. “It was a lot of fun. We were just kids who were able to get away from our parents and freak out.” They rode in a black Dodge van Walford had acquired. There were bullet holes on one side and the front end was badly dented — due, Walford swore, to the previous owner running someone over. Adding to the suspicious nature of their ride, the boys would make signs to hang in the back window, competing with each other to come up with the most offensive slogans. One day on tour, while fueling up, Walford ushered everyone into the van and drove off after realizing the clerk failed to charge him for the gas. Within minutes they were pulled over by a highway patrolman. The cop approached the dented, bullet-ridden van with a sign in the back window proclaiming JESUS CAME DOWN IN MARY’S ASS and found Walford in the driver’s seat. He ordered them to remove the sign and escorted them back to the gas station.

  It wasn’t the only memorable run-in the band had while on the road. Pajo recalled that, in the spirit of keeping things interesting, the band would pick up any hitchhiker they saw. “I remember picking up this really old man — he must have been eighty. When he got in the van there wasn’t any music playing and we all just talked to him. He was telling stories and he really liked us, and we liked him. Then Britt or Brian put on the first Suicide album at full volume, so loud you couldn’t even talk. The poor guy made it through ‘Frankie Teardrop’ but then he wanted out.”

  The boys had to amuse themselves somehow, because the shows were often depressing. Slint were virtually unknown outside of Louisville and Chicago; their album was not available in stores in advance of their shows, and they didn’t share the bill with any well-known bands at any point on their tour — a far cry from McMahan’s last outing with Squirrel Bait a few years earlier. “I remember Slint played in Madison, Wisconsin,” Pajo told me. “That’s the kind of show that I don’t think would ever be remembered. It was just a shitty bar and the marquee said ‘Flint.’ We drove a long way and didn’t get paid; it was just three old men at the bar with their backs to us the whole time.”

  Brashear recalled that the band would do their best to have fun during their sets, even if no one else in the club was. “We’d throw joke covers together. We used to open with ‘Rise Above’ by Black Flag, with no vocals. When we played in Boston we played this really bad, instrumental version of ‘Roadrunner’ by Jonathan Richman.” If people did show up to see them, it didn’t guarantee a positive reaction. “I remember some feedback from that tour; someone saw us and said we were ‘too young and too clean.’ People were like, ‘What’s up with these guys?’ We weren’t real angry. We were nineteen years old, we were all shy, and they didn’t like it. They didn’t like an indie rock band that was young and clean.”

  It’s worth remembering that in 1989 the trend in underground rock was heavily slanted toward the macho and the abrasive, especially in the so-called pigfuck scene populated by friends of Slint like the Jesus Lizard, Rapeman, and Killdozer. When the four Kentucky kids in Slint took the stage and, standing stock-still for their entire set, played mostly instrumental songs that shifted between technically difficult exercises and slow-building epics, it was totally removed from the sounds their peers and audiences were used to. “All of those bands were taking risks with their music; we were just doing it in a different way,” Pajo said. “It was risky to be a quiet band, especially in that scene. There was a macho element to [the scen
e]. If you were playing melodic, quieter stuff, you were kind of a pussy.”

  * * *

  With the tour completed, Slint again went on hiatus. Pajo and Brashear returned to their respective schools in Indiana. Walford and McMahan returned to Chicago, but not to Northwestern. That year they both dropped out and got jobs in the city while rededicating themselves to writing together and continuing to develop friendships with others in the Chicago scene.

  That winter Steve Albini’s affinity for Slint manifested itself again when he introduced Walford to Kim Deal of the Pixies, who with Tanya Donelly of Throwing Muses had put together a new band, the Breeders. They were scheduled to record their debut for 4AD but were in need of a drummer. Walford was game and was soon off to Scotland for two weeks of studio time with the band and Albini.

  Pod was released six months later, in May 1990. Walford was hardly more than a session player — he appears in the liner notes under a pseudonym, Shannon Doughton — but his stamp is all over the album. Albini recorded the drums with the same open, roomy sound of “Glenn,” and Walford’s drumming remains stark, disciplined, and minimal — a far cry from the bounce of the Pixies’ David Lovering and a continued maturation from Walford’s busier, jazzier drumming on Tweez.

  In the six months between recording Pod and its release, Walford’s dedication to Slint only grew, as it did with the other three members. Though Slint did not play out or practice much between September 1989 and May 1990, wheels turned nonetheless. Walford and McMahan’s friend Corey Rusk agreed to release Slint’s next album. He also promised to arrange a more substantial tour, including Europe, in support of the new record. Suddenly Slint had become a serious enterprise.

  Perhaps recalling the frustrations of Squirrel Bait’s experience while on Homestead, McMahan quickly surmised that the model Slint had worked under for the past two years, functioning only during school breaks, was untenable. “Brian and Britt kept pushing things along and making us a productive band,” Pajo said. “We suddenly had a deadline. It was a Touch and Go record, and we all loved Touch and Go records. We understood that it was a big deal.”

  As Pajo and Brashear’s school year ended, all four members returned to Louisville to prepare for their next album, which they planned to record in the fall for a release after the new year, to coincide with a European tour. Pajo and Brashear both agreed to take a full year off of school in order to focus completely on Slint. “That was the big Spiderland year,” Brashear said. “I was in an audio engineering program [at Indiana University], and the program was pretty hard to get into. I had to convince my professor that this had a lot to do with what I was studying.”

  They spent the summer practicing intensively, five days a week in six- or eight-hour stretches. Brashear remembered the exhausting schedule: “I had this job at a wood wall-covering plant in Indiana [just across the river from Louisville]. I’d work from 7:30 to 3:30, then I would go home, take a nap, eat dinner, and go to practice. It was grueling.” It was rigorous, but to hear the band members talk about it, the practice space is where they thrived. Given their small discography and rare live appearances — Pajo estimated to Punk Planet that Slint probably played just thirty shows in four years — most of the bandmates’ memories are wrapped up in their practices. “It was almost like the practices were more important than the final product,” Pajo told me, echoing a sentiment voiced by McMahan and Walford to Alternative Press in 2005.

  The band immersed themselves in the songwriting process. A year earlier Slint was already playing four of the songs that would appear on Spiderland. In the summer of 1990, however, the band revisited each song with new vigor, analyzing every note and transition. Pajo told me that “it was all about practicing and working out those details. You can see how we could spend a couple of years trying to get all the details right. It seemed like even if the most logical answer was the one we began with, we still had to try every option to go full circle, on every decision . . . We could spend three days of practicing trying to find this micro-second between two basslines. It would be a really small detail but it would be important enough to us to spend that much time on it.” That level of attention was not natural to Pajo, who told me that he’s never been in another band situation, from the Palace Brothers to Tortoise to Zwan to his own solo material, that examined every nuance of its songs to the degree that Slint did. “I think a lot of that is partly because Brian was so detail-oriented. He brought out the OCD in Britt and I as well.”

  McMahan was extremely critical of both his own ideas and those of his bandmates. His constant examination of every note, chord, and transition, according to Pajo, forced everyone to raise their game. “That was the fun part. I had to come up with better stuff because I knew it was going to be put under the McMahan Microscope . . . It definitely brought things up to another level, where we couldn’t just settle on the first thing we came up with.”

  Part of McMahan’s skill was in taking parts written by his bandmates and developing those segments into a cohesive whole. “Brian was really good at arranging,” Pajo said. “I remember coming in with some ideas — three or four parts that fit together into a song. The way I would have arranged it would have been really basic, but he hammered it into a really dramatic, epic song, using all the same riffs that I came up with.” Brashear had the same experience with his sole songwriting contribution to Spiderland. Though his basslines were typically written by Walford, Brashear brought the basic guitar parts for “Breadcrumb Trail” to the band. McMahan and Walford then took those riffs and structured them into the final version. “I’m kind of amazed that I even had it in me to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this song,’ and that it’s actually on the record,” Brashear confessed.

  Hearing Pajo and Brashear talk about Slint’s songwriting process and what each member brought to the table — especially Walford and McMahan — illuminates what makes the songs on Spiderland feel so transcendent compared with other bands who mined a similar sound in that era, like Bitch Magnet or Codeine, as well as compared with much of the work that members of Slint would later create on their own. Both Pajo and Walford were so technically skilled that they approached their instruments with a level of complexity that escaped the average punk. McMahan, on the other hand, had an intuitive understanding of the nuances of songwriting, of how to wring the most drama out of the smallest detail. The combination of Walford and Pajo’s technical skill coupled with McMahan’s refusal to be satisfied by their ideas pushed all three to examine and reexamine everything they did. No detail was too small.

  It’s easiest to see the effects of this laborious collaboration in the evolution of Pajo’s playing from Tweez to Spiderland. His ostentatious style defined the sound of Slint’s first album, but Walford and McMahan refused to repeat themselves. “I don’t know if they were very impressed with any of that flashy stuff. They’d just look at me, like, ‘You’re a fucking idiot. Any [guitar store] guy can do that.’ It was an ’80s thing, that sort of playing. Seeing things from their perspective made me want to do stuff that was cool but not flashy. It took a while for me to dampen that part of me, to refocus it.” You can hear the result of that refocusing on Spiderland, as Pajo’s leads are more sporadic, shorter, and more nuanced. The simple recurring note-bending lead riff on “Nosferatu Man,” for instance, contributes greatly to the song’s overall eeriness; and the gloriously screaming lead at the climax of “Washer” takes that song to its gut-wrenching height. Pajo’s style of playing, once overwhelming, had become a carefully curated selection of perfectly placed harmonics and off-notes.

  Pajo’s guitar work was enhanced by McMahan’s, who had a very different approach. “I’m a really mechanical player,” Pajo said. “I like emotionless, machinelike playing. But Brian brought more of a human feel to it.” That juxtaposition was exemplified not only in how they played, but how their guitars sounded — another detail the whole band labored over. Pajo played through a solid-state amplifier, which had the effect of making his guitar tone colder,
while McMahan honed a warmer, more natural sound from his equipment.

  And the attention to detail, with Walford’s input, got still smaller — down to the way Pajo and McMahan’s picks hit their strings. One facet of Spiderland’s legacy is the legion of bands born in the mid 1990s who insisted on playing their clean-toned guitars with all downstrokes, influenced by the tension created by the guitar strums of “Don, Aman” and the hypnotic grace of “For Dinner . . .” All the more fascinating, therefore, to learn that Slint carefully considered this level of minutia — and that they chose a more subtle tactic. “Britt liked to up-pick,” Pajo explained. “If you were playing a Ramones riff, for instance, most people would down-pick it. But Britt would always up-pick everything, which emphasized the higher strings.” Inspired by Walford’s manner, Pajo and McMahan would play the same guitar part but McMahan would up-pick while Pajo down-picked, making for a fuller sound.

  How the guitar player literally plays his guitar is usually an individual, unspoken choice in rock bands, but in Slint this was the kind of decision made as a unified entity. Slint had enveloped themselves, utterly, in their process, savoring the many small pleasures of refining every element of each song. Often when preparing for the studio a band will write dozens of songs and then whittle them down to the ten or twelve best for a proper album. This was not the case for Slint. Aside from “Pam” (which they did record during the Spiderland sessions), Slint was not working on anything other than what wound up on the final product. When you consider that “Don, Aman” and “For Dinner . . .” were not written until just before they hit the studio, the painstaking intensity of Slint’s practices from May to September 1990 is all the more mind-boggling. For four months, five days a week, eight hours a day, Slint more or less worked on just four songs. Absolutely every facet of Spiderland — every off-note, every snare hit, every whisper and shout, was deliberate. The band had become a machine.