Which was a good thing, because Spiderland was recorded and mixed in just four days.
River North
Corey Rusk paid for Slint to record Spiderland, but that didn’t mean that the recording budget was luxurious. The band still had to call in a few favors to make the album happen, and they had to be totally focused when it came time to work. They arranged to record at a studio in Chicago called River North, where McMahan had interned. “Brian somehow worked it out so we could record there, even though they didn’t do that kind of stuff,” Pajo said. “They didn’t do rock bands; they were a jingle studio. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of another band recording there.” Unable to afford the studio’s day rates, Slint were only permitted to record at night over two weekends in September. They recorded the basic tracks over the first weekend, then returned the following weekend to mix.
Behind the boards for the session was an engineer named Brian Paulson, a Minneapolis transplant who befriended McMahan and Walford through the Chicago music scene. Earlier that year he had recorded Bastro’s second and final full-length, Sing the Troubled Beast; he was also a friend of Steve Albini, who had turned Paulson onto Slint not long after Tweez was recorded — yet another instance of Albini proselytizing on Slint’s behalf.
Albini’s influence over whatever opportunities Slint had cannot be overstated. Going back to his first meeting McMahan in 1985, Albini was the one who first brought Squirrel Bait to Chicago and who put the bug in Gerard Cosloy’s ear at Homestead. When Squirrel Bait disbanded and McMahan joined Slint, Albini became even more of a booster. It seems like more people heard Slint not because they caught a live show but because Albini played them the then unreleased Tweez recording. Albini recorded the “Glenn”/“Rhoda” single for free. When McMahan and Walford moved to Chicago he introduced them to many of the major players in that city’s music scene. He arranged for Walford to record with the Breeders — in Scotland, no less! He was so close to Walford that he let him house-sit while Albini went on tour (the tale of which is recounted in the Jesus Lizard song “Mouth Breather”). Albini was Slint’s champion as well as their friend. And yet he did not record Spiderland.
Neither Pajo nor Brashear would answer why the band chose to go with Paulson over Albini, each claiming that it was a decision made by Walford and McMahan, both of whom declined to be interviewed for this book. It’s difficult to say whether they opted for a different engineer for aesthetic or personal reasons or simply due to a scheduling conflict — Albini was engineering the Jesus Lizard’s second album, Goat, at the exact same time, literally just a few blocks from River North. Pajo remembers Albini and the Jesus Lizard guys dropping in to the studio to see how the session was going. “I remember feeling like Steve was kind of bummed that we didn’t have him doing the record. He was the biggest Slint fan on the planet, and he did a lot for us. And then we went with somebody else.”
Not that Paulson was a slouch. In fact he was an extremely talented engineer in his own right, as the final product clearly attests. Albini himself acknowledged to Alternative Press that “they certainly made a better record without me.” And Slint’s friendship with Albini seems not to have suffered; he continued to champion the band, penning the Melody Maker review of Spiderland that is widely credited with launching Spiderland’s status as one of the most influential records of the decade.
* * *
Following the path set by “Glenn,” Slint had a clear idea of how they wanted their record to sound. Citing the band’s growing affinity for old folk and delta blues of the 1930s and 1940s, Pajo said the band wanted to capture a similarly unaffected sound. “We had a purist approach to [Spiderland]. We wanted it to be natural — the opposite of Tweez.” The blues songs the band had become so fond of were recorded simply — someone put a microphone up and the performer played live, then it was done. There were no multiple takes, no studio trickery, no reverb or compression, no click tracks or punch-ins. All the beauty of a recording came from the performance.
Approaching the Spiderland session, Slint had spent the summer putting their songs to tape in a similarly simplified manner. Using Walford’s jam box, they had recorded their practices so that Walford and McMahan could work on lyrics and vocals. They had been recording with the jam box for years, going as far back as the demo Maurice recorded for Glenn Danzig, and they had grown accustomed to the way they sounded via those recordings. Brashear went so far as to claim that there is a version of “Glenn” recorded on the jam box that he prefers to the Albini-produced version. “We were all really hot on how this jam box recorded stuff, so maybe that had something to do with keeping [Spiderland] pretty stripped down. We just liked that unadorned sound so much,” Brashear said.
It was fortunate that the band preferred this aesthetic, because time was not on their side. Had their sound hinged on studio experimentation, the album likely wouldn’t have been completed. Not that they didn’t have ideas, Pajo recounted: “There was a piano in the room that we were thinking of micing up putting bricks on the pedals, then recording the strings that would resonate in response to the drums. We were still up for trying stuff like we were on Tweez, but there was a lack of time.”
The lack of time weighed on everyone, making for an incredibly tense session. Pajo claims that Spiderland is only a “snapshot” of where Slint was at that exact moment — that even by that point the band did not consider the songs totally finished. He emphasized that Slint thrived most not in the studio but in the practice space, crafting their songs’ finer points. Speaking to Alternative Press, McMahan also downplayed the act of recording in regard to Slint’s existence as a band: “We tended to refine stuff a lot, but I don’t think we ever thought, ‘Gosh! We’ve gotta unload this new batch of material so we can move on!’”
Yet it’s impossible to believe that finally putting these songs to tape — in such a compressed period of time — did not create massive anxiety among all four members. Whether the band considered the songs finished or not, this was going to be the permanent document. And it was going to be released internationally on a label that everyone in the underground knew and respected. The members of Slint had made life-altering choices because of these six songs. No more college. No safe career path. Forms filed at the passport office to enable them to tour their new album on the Continent. Here were four twenty-year-olds who had put the rest of their lives on hold so they could be Slint. So they could make Spiderland. And they had two weekends. No wonder rumors spread years later that members of Slint were committed to a mental institution following the recording of Spiderland.
Adding to the stress were the dueling factors of the band’s sense of perfectionism and their seemingly tenuous understanding of exactly how McMahan and Walford’s vocals would work. Since the band did not own a PA, they never rehearsed vocals; and the vocal parts they did have were too difficult for McMahan to sing while playing his often elaborate guitar parts during live shows. Going into the studio, neither Brashear nor Pajo had a firm idea of what McMahan and Walford had planned.
That’s not to say there weren’t plans, however. McMahan and Walford had a vision for how their words would sync up with the music. The two would privately rehearse using practice recordings and a four-track. Although they would share some of these demo recordings with Pajo and Brashear for their feedback, the lyrics and vocal performances were largely a private collaboration between the two, and were still a work in progress when they entered the studio.
In an environment where the band couldn’t afford to dwell for too long on any one song, this complicated matters, as Pajo described: “We were changing the songs even in the studio. I remember Brian kept changing the lyrics for ‘Good Morning, Captain,’ and the whole arrangement would have to shift in response to his lyrics. He would say a couple of lines and then we’d do a guitar break and then he’d say some more. So if he changed the words — or if he added or took away a verse — we’d have to change how many times we did a section.”
Other
frustrations arose, adding to the general sense of anxiety. Brashear, known among the band as a very business-minded, hyper-responsible guy, became agitated by the painstaking perfectionism of his friends. His eyes were constantly on the clock. “There was a lot of time spent tuning drums and tuning guitars . . . I remember Britt, right when we got there, decided he wanted to get all new cymbals. So on the studio time we had to go to some music store and wait for him. I’m like, ‘Corey’s paying this bill, and you’re down here picking up cymbals?!’ At the end of the day it turned out to be a good record, so who am I to say he shouldn’t have? [But] back then I thought, ‘God, I can’t believe he’s doing this.’”
Whatever time was eaten up by prepping and tuning and massaging the vocals was made up for by the band’s sheer musical prowess. The months of constant practice had turned Slint into a machine. They recorded everything live — Pajo says he may have done one overdub on the whole record — and in very few takes. “I’m sure some of the stuff on the album is the first take,” Brashear told me. Pajo agreed, citing again the “documentarian approach” of the old blues records the band were into at the time. “If it sounded right enough, if there wasn’t a major mistake, we moved on to the next song.”
Once again the disconnect between how Slint functioned leading up to the session and how they functioned in the studio makes itself apparent. After spending months laboring over the most minute details, the brevity of the session seemed to transform their mindset. How a band could go from spending an entire practice day thinking about how their guitarists pick their strings to accepting a take that is “right enough” seems mystifying. When I phrased this schism to Pajo during our interview, he laughed as if he’d never considered it this way before, offering only that “we weren’t thinking straight.” Given the time constraints, thinking straight was likely not an option.
Further discombobulation came in the form of two new songs Walford and McMahan unveiled at the last minute — a serene instrumental called “For Dinner . . .” and a drumless story-song written by Walford called “Don, Aman.” They’d practiced the former at least a few times prior to entering the studio, but Pajo learned “Don” literally right before they recorded. It was Walford’s brainchild: he wrote the lyrics and music and spoke the lead vocal part. Brashear recalls that “Don” was the most time-consuming of the songs they laid down that weekend, especially because of a small detail at the end, where Walford wanted a distorted guitar to briefly fade back in after the song was over.
Over the course of my interviews with them, both Pajo and Brashear took pains to emphasize that McMahan and Walford were responsible for the lion’s share of the material on Spiderland — drums, bass, guitars, lyrics, and vocals. Pajo even went so far as to say that McMahan and Walford “are Slint.” It’s not unusual for one or two band members to guide the sound and direction of a band, but hearing stories of Slint’s time in the studio brings to light how much of a grasp McMahan and Walford had on the big picture, above and beyond Pajo and Brashear’s understanding. Slint practices so intensely for months, shaping all four members into a unified entity with a finger on every nuance, entering the studio only to have Walford pull out a totally new song that seemed to spring whole cloth from his mind; to have McMahan experiment with the arrangement of “Good Morning, Captain” to suit lyrics he had barely shared prior to recording; and, in the case of “Washer,” to have McMahan introduce a totally new element that had never been done in a Slint song before — singing. McMahan and Walford seemed to possess an ambition for the album that their bandmates had only glimpsed prior to entering the studio.
McMahan’s performance on “Washer” is the surest indication of this ambition. Though considered the band’s “singer,” McMahan had never actually sung before. Everything on Tweez, and the Spiderland songs they’d demoed, featured McMahan speaking or screaming (aside from Walford’s spoken contributions to “Nosferatu Man”). McMahan was not comfortable doing lead vocals of any kind, especially considering he’d only practiced in privacy, performing for no one except perhaps Walford. It only added to the level of stress in the studio. “I’d never heard any of those lyrics until we got in the studio,” Brashear said. “I’m sure he was stressed out about recording vocals because that’s not something he was ever comfortable with. It even said on the record, “Interested female singers . . .” Even after the record was out, he was still [trying to find someone else to do the job].”
“Washer” had to have been the most nerve-wracking for McMahan. His performance is incredibly naked, its awkwardness only enhancing its honesty. Yet Pajo says the performance is a quintessential example of McMahan’s exacting nature. Though no one in the band had heard him sing the song before, that didn’t mean he hadn’t rehearsed obsessively. “He was actually really deliberate about the way he phrased everything [on “Washer”], even which verses to pull back on. That’s where he’s a genius. He knows how to get a lot of drama out of a performance. He wrote these amazing lyrics and then he was able to present them in a way that got the most emotion out of it.”
For anyone who knew Slint already, “Washer” was shocking. Quiet, dramatic, sensitive, gut-wrenching — none of these adjectives described the Slint that had existed from 1986 to mid 1990. The song is the most explicit distillation of what Slint had become. Spiderland was an album to be reckoned with. In its preparation, composition, production, and performance, Spiderland was an astonishing departure from Tweez — not to mention a departure from the sound any of Slint’s peers were making at the time. In two weekends, Slint had unknowingly made a record whose reverberations are still being felt today.
Spiderland
Spiderland’s legacy will forever be linked to its dynamics. Although the shift from quiet to loud passages can be traced back to rock’s earliest days (never mind classical, opera, gospel, Broadway, and blues), Slint may have been the first to make the tactic explicit — to play really quiet, then really loud — and to make it doubly pronounced by using the same exaggerated juxtapositions on almost every song in the course of one album. Rock bands of every era utilized dynamic changes: the Beatles dropped “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” into the middle of Abbey Road; the Velvet Underground closed out Loaded with the slow-building “O! Sweet Nuthin’”; psychedelic acts like Pink Floyd and the 13th Floor Elevators bounded from simmering looniness to balls-out crazy; Joy Division, Wire, and the Fall all employed dramatic breakdowns against their usual post-punk paces; Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, released in 1988 and considered another early landmark of the post-rock genre, resembles Spiderland in some ways thanks to its atmospherics, slow builds, and occasional bursts into high volume. Even contemporaries of Slint, like Bitch Magnet or Codeine or Galaxie 500, experimented with turning the volume way down in the context of punk rock.1 Yet Spiderland somehow makes its use of dynamics feel new, making it a kind of calling card for the band. Twenty years later, any band that makes a pronounced shift from spare to discordant passages in the space of one track runs the risk of being dubbed “Slinty.”
To describe Spiderland in such terms, however, risks the implication that the album is formulaic, which it certainly isn’t. Sloughing off Slint as a band that gets “quiet, then loud” paves over the sophistication of their arrangements. The band employed a number of subtle tools and tricks on each of Spiderland’s six songs, all of which enhanced the large-scale drama and small-scale nuances. “Quiet, then loud” could not be more limiting in its description. Spiderland is (roughly in order) innocent, soaring, creepy, disorienting, tense, maddening, lush, harrowing, somber, ominous, surging, and desperate. In other words, for all the manner in which Slint travel from quiet to loud and back again, they never really do it the same way twice. A closer look at how Slint treated their dynamics gives some insight into why Spiderland has endured as an influential album while so many Slint-like also-rans, many of whom simply played “quiet, then loud,” have faded away.
No song on the album illustrates Slint’s dynamic leg
acy more literally than the opening track, “Breadcrumb Trail.” In the song McMahan narrates, in first person, the story of a visit to a carnival full of rides, games, and professional parlor tricksters. When the song’s protagonist enters the tent of a fortune-teller, he impulsively asks her if she’d like to ride a roller coaster instead. She agrees, and they share the thrill of the ride, clutching hands and screaming to each other as the car rockets up and down. When it’s over, they part ways.
The plot of “Breadcrumb Trail” follows a bell-like arc: peaceful and unassuming at the beginning and end (meeting and saying goodbye to the fortune-teller); charged and electric in the middle (riding the roller coaster together). Musically, the song’s structure mirrors the rising and falling action. It opens with a warm, almost nursery-rhyme-like riff while the protagonist walks the midway, then explodes into a swinging middle section while the couple takes the thrill ride. Swooping in waltz time from a low D chord to a high-pitched zing a few octaves up, the guitars here literally take on the action of a roller coaster, crashing down and whisking up over and over. Punctuating the roller coaster ride is the song’s subplot — yes, it has a subplot — signaled by the music’s shift into a jagged stop-start riff in 5/4 that moves the action from the peak of the roller coaster to the ground, where a ticket-taker observes the other fairgoers as he exerts his control over the ride. The character adds a more menacing element to the story — he teases a sickened girl and tells her she must stay on the ride — though his presence ultimately amounts to nothing. When the couple exits the ride and returns to the ground, so too does the music return to its original innocent riff.
Slint's Spiderland Page 7