Slint's Spiderland

by Tennent, Scott

  “Let me in,” the voice cried softly from outside the wooden door. Scattered remnants of the ship could be seen in the distance. Blood stained the ice along the shore.

  Here McMahan pauses as the guitars come forward and the words are given a chance to sink in. These few lines are vivid and compelling scene setting — you’re on the bloody shore, outside the house with this unknown but sympathetic character. The guitars subside and McMahan continues:

  “I’m the only one left. The storm took them all,” he managed as he tried to stand. The tears ran down his face. “Please, it’s cold.”

  Through dialogue McMahan fleshes out the character — he’s injured, distraught, and fearful. (An interesting detail, by the way: McMahan’s voice is panned right in the mix whenever he speaks a line of dialogue.)

  Again the music takes over before we learn whether the captain’s plea is heard. With the move into the first extended instrumental passage, the band sets to work laying the foundation for the eventual payoff. They burst into a wordless blast of thick chords and distorted harmonics, the first of three instances in which the band will hit this particular crescendo. As with the increasingly emphatic rises of “Washer,” the band builds the dramatic effect of these sections gradually and with restraint. They play the riff for just four bars before taking an abrupt left turn into a second wordless passage in which Pajo and McMahan’s guitars dance around each other in playful yet strange off-harmonies.

  Returning to the next verse, the guitars again recede to let McMahan’s words move the plot forward.

  When he woke, there was no trace of the ship. Only the dawn was left behind by the storm. He felt the creaking of the stairs beneath him that rose from the sea to the door.

  There was a sound at the window then. The captain started, his breath was still. Slowly, he turned.

  It’s a cliffhanger of a last line, and the band revels in the opportunity to let it dangle as they shift again to an instrumental passage, this time inverting the structure of the previous section by playing first the off-harmonies, then the monster riffing. The upward climb toward a climax continues as they elongate the riff this time to twelve bars instead of four. In another instance of employing a structure similar to “Washer,” they follow this second, more dramatic rise with a sudden drop to the song’s quietest moment. McMahan softly plays a version of the two-chord verse riff, now in a descending pattern and a different key, as Pajo picks a single note in a sixteenth-note harmonic, slowly moving his finger down the neck of his guitar and changing the quality of the tone from a natural, ringing harmonic (on the seventh fret) to a flat, artificial harmonic (sixth fret), and back to another natural harmonic (fifth fret). Brashear and Walford re-enter with the verse rhythm to bring the story back on track. The second character, the boy, makes his appearance and, chillingly, recognizes the captain but does not let him into the house. Unlike the first two verses, the music is no longer trading off with the words. Midway through this last verse McMahan continues to speak where previously he had paused; beneath his words the guitars jump into their off-harmonies. The buoyant pace and new confluence of words and music signals that the denouement is nearing.

  Stranded on the doorstep, the dejected captain seems also to have recognized the boy, as he proclaims, “I’m trying to find my way home. I’m sorry, and I miss you” — at which point the band explodes for the third time into the wordless chorus, this time stretching it still more to sixteen bars. As the band churns on McMahan continues to speak, though most of what he says is obscured. He has overdubbed himself speaking different lines, making for a cacophony of thoughts and words mixed below the din of the music. As in “Washer,” the overdub has a ghostly effect. The multiple voices here — multiple versions of one man’s voice — are a blurring of the captain’s thoughts, words, reality. Here and there you can hear more regrets from the captain — “I’ll make it up to you. I swear, I’ll make it up to you.” As Walford’s drumming intensifies, lifting the music higher still toward the climax, the multitude of voices and throbbing music breaks just long enough for McMahan’s sudden scream — “I miss you!” — to ache with a heartrending clarity. These three words, this simple emotion, are the last we hear from the captain, the lost shadow looking for his way home but damned never to find it.

  As with most of the other songs on Spiderland, “Good Morning, Captain” concludes on an inconsolable note. It is a stunning and affecting conclusion to an epic song. Even more profound is how it functions as a conclusion to Spiderland as a whole. The final minute of “Good Morning, Captain” chugs away like a classic thrasher, McMahan shouting those three words over and over. Unlike nearly every other moment on the record, you can picture yourself in the audience for this moment, holding your fists aloft and screaming right along with McMahan. I miss you! It’s not the rousing middle section of “Breadcrumb Trail” or the shouts of “Nosferatu Man,” neither of which ever repeat a line; the shouts in those songs serve the same end as the spoken lyrics — to move the plot forward. “Nosferatu Man” flirts with a little fist-pumping repetition — “She set a fire burning / And I railed on through. the. night.” — but McMahan subverts such pleasures by speaking the lines rather than shouting. Then there’s “Washer,” a song every bit as anguished as “Good Morning, Captain” but whose climax is, aside from being instrumental, all too brief. Every song on Spiderland — every song — foils all standard rock expectations. There are no classic choruses, no real hooks, hardly anything to sing along to, nothing to dance to. Most of the lyrics are written as paragraphs. The rhythms, the resolutions, the arrangements — all are miles off from typical rock ’n’ roll tropes. Spiderland is a cold, haunting album made by a bunch of punk rock and metal dudes who had zero interest in embracing the machismo or bravado of those forms. So, when, in the thirty-ninth minute of this thirty-nine-minute album, the band finally locks into a fucking rock rhythm and the fucking singer screams his fucking head off and repeats the same fucking three words over and fucking over . . . fuck, man. I MISS YOU!

  Brian Stepped Outside

  More bad news on the band front.

  Slint, a band originally scheduled to perform on the Cool Christmas show, had a falling out and split up as of last Monday. Slint is signed to the Touch and Go label and was on the eve of a European tour. We’re losing a band per week around here, so you might want to check out any remaining favorites before they check out.

  — Jeffrey Lee Puckett, “Night Life,” Louisville

  Courier-Journal, December 15, 1990

  Spiderland was finished by the end of September. The band returned to Louisville and their daily lives as they prepared for the album release in the spring, to coincide with their first European tour, organized with Touch and Go’s help. This wasn’t a ten-day road trip on summer break: Slint were about to take the leap into being a truly serious band.

  In the meantime they finalized the artwork for Spiderland. For the album cover the four boys and their longtime friend Will Oldham traveled across the Ohio River into Utica, Indiana, to a hidden quarry they knew and liked to swim in. All five got into the water as Oldham held his camera aloft, snapping the band’s picture with only their heads visible above the water. The sky and water were vivid blue, the towering quarry cliff a golden brown, lined with a crown of golden trees across its top. But Oldham’s black-and-white shot drained all the color out of the day.

  The rest of the album’s design, or lack thereof, came courtesy of Brashear. He wanted the cover to be totally free of copy — no band name, no album title — an idea he lifted from the original British issue of the Rolling Stones’ debut album. In a nod to one of his all-time favorite records, the Flamin’ Groovies’ Teenage Head, he suggested that they add a letterbox effect to the top and bottom of Oldham’s photo.

  The absence of information, the letterbox, the colorless photo — all add up to capture the mood of Spiderland. In retrospect the cover also encapsulates the story of Slint. In the photo the young men are smiling �
�� the swim in the quarry is youthful and fun. Their grins hint at their juvenile past; these are the guys who overwhelmed a church congregation in their first show, who goofed about tweezer fetishes on record, who picked up hitchhikers while on tour only to blast them with Suicide. But the carefree nature of the moment is made overcast by the absence of color. The sky is a blank white, the trees a dark mass atop the cliff, itself an imposing gray that matches the gray of the band members’ faces. The black bars framing the photograph make the image feel more like a document of a past moment, not a composed album cover (compared with, say, the frowning heads of Meet the Beatles! or the faces and bodies emerging from the black of The Doors). The setting is placeless and timeless, saying neither Louisville nor 1990. Likewise the disembodied heads obscure just who these four people are — they are nothing more than four anonymous swimmers in an anonymous lake in an anonymous era. The image feels both nostalgic and foreboding — a frozen past and an unknowable future.

  * * *

  Slint stayed busy for the latter half of 1990 as they waited for Spiderland’s release. They played a few shows in Louisville and continued with their constant practice schedule. Signs seem to indicate that the band was almost immediately ready to push into totally new musical territories, far beyond the songs they’d spent the last two years refining. McMahan, always uncomfortable with his vocals, wanted to seek out a new singer for the band, so they put an advertisement in Spiderland’s liner notes for “interested female singers.”1 They also began laying the groundwork for a new musical direction. With Pajo and Brashear back in Louisville full-time since they’d both committed to taking a year off from college, Slint were not slowing down. They continued their intensive practice schedule. Speaking to Punk Planet in 2005, Pajo admitted his memory of the band’s post-Spiderland material was foggy, though McMahan had reminded him: “[Brian] asked me if I remembered any of those songs . . . he said ‘[they were] as different from Spiderland as Spiderland was from Tweez.’”

  And then suddenly it was over.

  * * *

  Though they didn’t know it at the time, Slint’s last show was a house party in Evanston on November 27, 1990 — almost exactly four years after Small Dirty Tight Tufts of Hair: BEADS blew the doors off of Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Church. Two weeks later they would be no more. As was routine the band had gathered at Walford’s parents’ house to practice. But when McMahan arrived he launched into a long, meandering monologue about the future and his changing priorities. “It was so convoluted,” Pajo told me. “We weren’t sure what he was talking about.” Brashear shared the same memory: “He talked to us for thirty minutes, and then he left. I remember Britt and Dave being like, ‘What was that all about?’ And I was like, ‘Man, he just quit.’”

  One can only imagine what McMahan’s exact reasons were for leaving the band at such a pivotal point. The artwork for Spiderland had been finalized and was printing; the European tour was booked. All four guys had put their lives on hold so they could make Slint their number one priority. It was a huge leap.

  Maybe that was just it. McMahan wasn’t just taking a break from college like Pajo and Brashear were. He had dropped out completely. He was also the only one in the band for whom releasing an album on a legit, nationally distributed label and touring with a modicum of label support was not a new experience. What did it mean to dedicate oneself entirely to the band? Brashear may have inadvertently justified McMahan’s reasoning when he expressed his own disappointment to me. “I was truly into [Slint] because I liked the music. I don’t mean this from a money point of view, but I was ready to conquer the world. I was like, ‘Man, this band is awesome’ . . . I was ready to go all the way. Then again, what was ‘all the way’ before Nirvana? ‘All the way’ didn’t mean much of anything.”

  Nevermind was still almost a year away from dropping into the pop music landscape like an H-bomb. In 1990 the major labels were not yet looking under every rock in any old local scene they could scour, searching for the Next Seattle. Nor had indie labels yet grasped their full potential, first displayed when Epitaph sent the Offspring’s Smash to #4 on the Billboard charts in 1994. The idea of success for Slint as of December 1990 was, frankly, not that far removed from failure. Pajo felt that this was precisely McMahan’s concern — Slint’s prospects were not especially bright, even if they could foresee that Spiderland would be well received. “[The day McMahan quit the band], he said all this stuff about how he was worried about his future. He was thinking about the future and we weren’t at all. I remember that being a bizarre concept because we were all still pretty young.” They truly were: McMahan and Walford, the youngest of the bunch, were barely able to buy beer. “We were like, ‘God, you’re worried about your family and how to make money?’ We were still trying to get through college.”

  It’s not accurate to say McMahan desired sellout-level success, but rather that he wanted, simply, an income. Slint had become, as of the previous seven months, a full-time, totally unpaid job. The band had rehearsed five or six days a week, six to eight hours a day, roughly from May to December of that year; and if Slint was only to become a bigger priority for all involved, then that schedule was not going to change. That’s a lot of time to spend in one room with the same three guys every day — time that could be spent making an actual living. Tension had naturally been rising within the band. It should have hit its zenith during the two pressure-filled weekends spent recording Spiderland, but the band instead kept up their full-time schedule, not giving themselves a break. Now they had real goals — a record, a tour, possibly a real career as a band.

  These goals might have meant the most to McMahan. During our conversation Pajo had described the personalities of the four members of Slint. McMahan was the most difficult to please, but he was also the one who cracked the whip on the rest of the band. “[Brian] was always the one who kept pushing things along and making us a productive band. Otherwise it would have been Britt and I just practicing and never getting out of the basement.” It’s telling, in retrospect, to look back on the boys’ pre-Slint bands. McMahan was part of a hardworking band that toured, signed to Homestead, recorded two albums — all by the time he was seventeen. In the same span of time, Pajo and Walford played their share of local shows with Maurice but never recorded anything, managed just a week of out-of-town shows with Samhain, and eventually alienated their bandmates by devoting themselves to songwriting and practicing rather than performing or otherwise engaging whatsoever with an audience. Slint’s dysfunction was written into their DNA.

  Even with McMahan pushing the band forward, they still remained in their rehearsal space with an almost agoraphobic mania. Between May and December of 1990, the period in which all four members of Slint lived in the same town, they played just four or five shows — one with Urge Overkill in Chicago and the rest in Louisville. The Chicago show was the best-paying show the band had ever played — they took home a whopping $250. Split four ways. On top of that the band seemed to be losing focus in the practice space once Spiderland was finished, according to an interview McMahan gave to Alternative Press. Pajo relayed to me an anecdote McMahan had told him a few years after Slint’s breakup: “Brian came to practice once — this is just a sign of how idiotic we still were — and Todd and Britt and I started playing the Batman TV theme. We thought it was so funny; we were jumping into different intervals and making these stupid harmonies. He said we were doing it for so long and just laughing our heads off that he got frustrated. So he went upstairs and put on some headphones and listened to both sides of Neil Young’s On the Beach, and when he came downstairs we were still playing the Batman theme. And it was at that point he decided he had to leave the band.”

  Pajo told the story with a laugh and reiterated that McMahan had reminisced about that day in jest, and that he didn’t know how much stock to put in its veracity. Still, the story seems to illustrate perfectly the personality of the band. Obsessive yet juvenile; intent on the detail of making music yet un
concerned with real productivity. If McMahan was the one in the band who was the most concerned with getting results, it wouldn’t be surprising to find that it was his back broken by the last straw. Though the timing couldn’t be worse — cold feet, now that something was finally going to happen? — perhaps McMahan saw the writing on the wall. These were four good friends whose personalities were never going to mesh into a properly functioning band.

  To the rest of the band, McMahan’s exit seemed in and of itself not surprising; it was the timing that was the most upsetting thing. “I could have been really resentful,” Brashear said. “I’d taken a year off from school and we had a European tour getting ready. I remember we had to fill out all these forms — I had a passport and everything. I could have been pretty bitter about that. [But] if you practice every day, it’s not an easy experience . . . I wouldn’t have been surprised if anybody had quit. Bands are hard to keep together.” Though twenty years of hindsight were evident in Brashear’s explanation, there was still a trace of regret. “I was convinced we were really doing something. I really believed in us, I guess you could say. Back then it was a punk rock thing. Nobody made money off that stuff. I was just excited to go Europe. I’ve still never been.”

  Pajo too was sad to see Slint’s time cut short, but like Brashear he didn’t have any inkling of Spiderland’s potential impact beyond it being “a punk rock thing” — he and his hometown friends making music together. Shortly after the breakup Pajo went to England for a semester, then returned to Louisville to once again play with his hometown friends. “[When I came back], the Palace Brothers were starting and King Kong was starting,” he told me, referring to Will Oldham and Ethan Buckler’s bands, respectively, both of which featured some combination of Slint members backing them on their early singles and albums. Things felt, in some ways, the same as they’d ever been. “Slint was just another blip.”