{"id":163100,"date":"2023-01-26T13:57:58","date_gmt":"2023-01-26T18:57:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=163100"},"modified":"2023-01-30T10:44:56","modified_gmt":"2023-01-30T15:44:56","slug":"on-the-bus-with-pavement-tour-diary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/01\/26\/on-the-bus-with-pavement-tour-diary\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Bus with Pavement: Tour Diary"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Pavement. Photograph by Marcus Roth, Courtesy of Matador Records.<\/p><\/div>\n

One of the more remarkable things about being behind the wheel of a tour bus for Pavement is that you can easily kill Pavement if you want to. I bring this up with their driver, Jason, who responds only by smiling at me while driving at a professionally breakneck speed on the interstate somewhere between Saint Paul and Chicago at 4 A.M. as every one of the six members of the beloved nineties band lies asleep in their bunks in the cabin behind us. To my left, Jason\u2019s freshly filled coffee mug\u2014personalized to read LORDY LORDY, LOOK WHO\u2019S FORTY above a beaming middle school graduation photo\u2014jangles in its cup holder.<\/span><\/p>\n

A fizz of dispatch comes through the receiver from the other driver, Jeff, who drives an identical bus bearing a platoon of tech and crew members that\u2019s ripping down I-90 just ahead of us. Since we left Saint Paul, a relentless stream of consciousness has flowed from Jeff to Jason via CB radio, coursing through points of interest such as God and the best way to cook snake, to which Jason has responded only occasionally, if at all, with transmissions like \u201cThat\u2019s a negative,\u201d \u201cMmhmm,\u201d or \u201cLord, that is crazy.\u201d Jason has hardly taken a week off since his last nationwide tour (three months, Def Leppard) yet remains <\/span>magnanimous<\/span>, gallant, sweatless, surely underpaid. \u201cI think it\u2019s about time for a squirt in the dirt,\u201d goes Jeff\u2019s voice overhead.<\/span> \u201cAll due respect, sir,\u201d Jason says, seizing the mouthpiece, \u201cbut there is a woman in this vehicle. Please refrain from that sort of language. Over.\u201d We pull over onto a shoulder and wait as Jeff\u2019s crew bus deposits toilet runoff into scrubgrass with the push of a button. \u201cI make it a point to listen to the bands that I\u2019m moving around,\u201d Jason offers as we watch the spot of sewage bloom, \u201cand I think I get why people like these guys.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m accompanying the indie rock group Pavement for a thin slice of their hugely anticipated, nearly sold-out, four-month monster of a reunion tour. Founded in 1989 and nominally dead a decade later, Pavement <\/span>belonged to the category of unsuccessful and confounding superstars<\/span>\u2014<\/span>a band who was never really that famous, that scrutable, that glory-seeking or ambitious. <\/span>None of their albums or songs ever got anywhere close to gold or platinum in the US. But they were treated as life-affirmingly, almost irritatingly influential by their big- and small-time rock contemporaries, knighted as \u201cthe finest rock band of the nineties\u201d by Robert Christgau, and earned Pitchfork\u2019s number one song of the nineties, back when people relatively cared about the opinions held by either Christgau or Pitchfork. They summed the epoch\u2019s diffidence (its huge concern for \u201cauthenticity,\u201d its allergy toward the idea of \u201cselling-out,\u201d et al.), were blessed and cursed with the idea that they were the <\/span>vanguard<\/span> of a loosely defined genre called \u201cslacker rock,\u201d and, for some among a population that remembers using the word <\/span>hipster<\/span><\/i> regularly, they are\u2014as they were for the long-lionized English DJ John Peel\u2014\u201cone of the best bands in the world.\u201d This is also a band that hasn\u2019t written anything whatsoever together since their dissolution twenty-one years ago and whose last tour happened at the tail end of the aughts.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As with most artists now granted the vague honorific of \u201ccult band,\u201d the enthusiasm for their reunion borders on unreasonable. Resale tour tickets in some cities were going for a ludicrous $500. Serious devotees have documented and color-coded each stop with <\/span>spreadsheets<\/span><\/a> that sort out setlists by album and frequency of track repetition. By the end of their North American leg, there had been a fan-made musical and a museum erected in their honor. Now, a feature-length film is purportedly in the works\u2014one that (once again) imagines a universe in which Pavement is \u201cthe most important band in the world.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was pre-verbal during Pavement\u2019s heyday, so a cushion of generational remove mediates my fandom. It is unremarkable, pathological, entirely digitally-based. For those of us who grew up in a cul-de-sac with standard-speed internet\u2014barely sentient for the twilight of the millennium, just learning how to use words like <\/span>derivative <\/span><\/i>in the pejorative from blogs and message boards\u2014Pavement seemed like shorthand for a precious and preeminent disaffection that had phased out of vogue by the time that rock was no longer the biggest thing on the planet. Fans like me ached for what we imagine we missed out on, and could marvel, in a cool, touristic way, at an Arcadian<\/span> moment in time in which an artist\u2019s persona was de facto a little brambled and blurry. Now, as a fly-on-the-wall of their\u00a0<\/span>reunion tour\u2014a spectacle that brings together past and present by framing Pavement as whole, imperative, immortal\u2014two questions loom: Will it recreate the known or unknown universe as it once was? Or will it all just bum me out?\u00a0<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

DAY ONE: SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA<\/b><\/p>\n

I am walking briskly and alone along a highway bridge immediately in front of Saint Paul\u2019s Palace Theatre, with seven hours until showtime. Pavement\u2019s two buses stand out against the plain back entrance of the venue like two long, smooth, sleeping orcas.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most of the team is present on the band bus, either making cereal or padding around in search of the other half of a broken tambourine. There\u2019s percussionist Bob Nastanovich, bassist Mark Ibold, and lead Stephen Malkmus, all dressed like normal adult men, which is to say in jeans, ballcaps, and interesting sneakers. The bus\u2019s interior has a sort of upmarket beauty, with everything stained a uniform tone of peanut butter, cabinets made of a gleaming lacquered composite wood, and a hydraulic magic button in the main lounge that extends the room out four or so feet when the bus is parked. Under the glaze of the growing sun, we look like we could be on the bottom deck of a rental yacht.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Scott Kannberg, the second songwriter and guitarist, whom everyone refers to as \u201cSpiral,\u201d diminutive of \u201cSpiral Stairs,\u201d is notably absent, squeezing in a full eighteen holes of golf on a course somewhere in greater Minneapolis. (Steve West, their drummer, later tells me he wanted to caddy for him, \u201cbut Spiral wouldn\u2019t let me get away with it. He\u2019s got men all over this country willing to carry his golf clubs.\u201d) Rebecca Clay Cole\u2014the band\u2019s overqualified keyboardist, and the only other consistent female presence on the bus\u2014is already out too, roaming around Saint Paul in search of a museum. Bob is busily wrestling a jumbo drum of spring water onto the countertop. A pre-show morning is defined by its bumbling. \u201cWe\u2019re in need of a sanity-type situation,\u201d Ibold announces just as Bob leaves to hunt for a screwdriver to stab the jug with, so he and Malkmus and I hail a cab to the town\u2019s Little Mekong<\/span> district.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Tour is always part-ritual and part-obligation, but it\u2019s particularly taxing for men who\u2019ve all crossed the threshold of fifty and have been off the road for years. They\u2019ve had more than eighty songs to learn, some for the very first time; the venues are the largest and toniest they\u2019ve ever played; their label\u2019s fuss is greater; the audience is bigger by several orders of magnitude, and every member of the band can fill a notebook with fresh anecdotes on the newfound virtues of diet, hydration, and sleep. \u201cThis is definitely the most demanding tour I\u2019ve ever been on,\u201d says Ibold once we sit down at an empty Cambodian restaurant, eating a shrimp cake the size of a domino. \u201cNot just musically, but psychologically.\u201d Ibold\u2014who has a day job as a bartender in Williamsburg and was working a shift the day before he left\u2014is sixty. If history repeats itself, the next reunion tour will happen in 2034, when he\u2019s seventy-two. \u201cWe have no plans to tour like the Pixies,\u201d Malkmus says, even before I ask. This does seem like the last of things.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This time around, Pavement will move athletically across the United States, then to bits of Europe, with an average of thirty-three hours of rest in between each show. I would be surprised if nobody in the band reaches a point of crisis by the time they get to the Australian stretch in a few months. \u201cYou tell yourself it\u2019ll be more fun than doing the dishes at home,\u201d Malkmus says. \u201cBut I\u2019m just old, man.\u201d I have to ask\u2014what\u2019s the point of all this, then? A new car? Karmic debt? Not <\/span>nostalgia<\/span><\/i>?<\/span> \u201cSure, all of that,\u201d he says, \u201cbut there\u2019s something else in there.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Though this has been obsessively documented, I\u2019m still taken aback by the degree to which Malkmus is very clearly <\/span>the nucleus of Pavemen<\/span>t, the band and the idea. He is its principal singer-songwriter, a blindingly good guitarist, and now shaggier and more silvery than he was in 1994 when Courtney Love called him \u201cthe Grace Kelly of rock\u201d but retains a boyish, shitkicking quality about him. He can be remarkably feline, charmingly chilly, and has a voice that <\/span>permanently suggests that he is unspecifically but thoroughly over it. He is, in many senses, responsible for granting Pavement their near-universal designation as a \u201cslacker\u201d band, which accounts for the general slouch of the band\u2019s posture and reifies the archetypal Gen X attitude of rather dying than surrendering any emotional investment. <\/span>\u201cYou know why I\u2019m doing this,\u201d he says, suddenly. \u201cI\u2019m really playing for the fans that are like, <\/span>I just really fucking like these songs. And these guys were special to me\u2014they made me feel safe. I\u2019m safe here at this show.<\/span><\/i>\u201d He doesn\u2019t look at me while saying this. \u201cI know what you mean,\u201d I reply, soothingly. \u201cYou know what I mean,\u201d he sighs.<\/span><\/p>\n

By the time we get back to the Palace Theatre, the stage is ready for our opening act. A blast of organic and inorganic smells fill the building: buttered popcorn from a choke point in the lobby, a damp pigeony scent from the door that opens out onto the alley where everyone smokes, and a strong mixed waft from the green room, where a routine order has been delivered. (Their rider: Gouda, tubs of chicken salad, whiskeys and hummuses, slabs of sourdough, diet root beers, regular beers.) Like the sound of a great, muffled gong, the doors open. Two hours to go.<\/span><\/p>\n

BEFORE THE SHOW:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014After checking in with their dog\u2019s caretaker, who was very sorry to let them know that their cardigan welsh corgi has been having diarrhea all day, Bob is rubbing his wife Whitney\u2019s shoulders backstage, watching the opener perform.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Rebecca is warming up her voice in a rear atrium of the basement by blowing loud raspberries.She\u2019s been brought on tour to make the music sound \u201cabout as close to the album as we can humanly get it,\u201d as West notes, adding that she\u2019s \u201cprobably the only member of the band that can actually read music.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve approached this about as devotedly as a person can,\u201d she tells me. \u201cEven before I was approached to tour with them, I\u2019d known that there were piano parts on, you know, a few songs, but all the old albums have these sneaky, crunchy keys and organs all over them. It\u2019s deceptively tough jinglejangle jazz.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Spiral has returned from tee time and is now on a long and desperate quest for antacids. After ten minutes, he secures half of a lucky old roll of Tums from our tour manager Mike\u2019s pocket. Later, he shows me a text from his wife, who\u2019s presently somewhere in California dining with their daughter. The photo shows off their spread (pasta, white wine) and her new haircut (blonde bob). \u201cHott,\u201d his text replies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When Pavement goes on, I wonder\u2014are all old bands haunted? <\/span>The show is a pilgrimage for men who look like they indulge in a good microbrew every once in a while. Those with pleading ankles and spongy knees sit; those still without stand at the front. Some audience members chuck beer cans, shriek, make out, weep. The reports that I\u2019d heard earlier\u2014that a couple was kicked out for having sex at a San Diego show<\/span> a few days prior\u2014seem totally conceivable, even if this was some of the least horny music on earth. \u201cIt\u2019s so funny to see them here,\u201d says a seated patron wearing a Guided By Voices shirt. \u201cThis is the nicest venue I\u2019ve ever been in, and it\u2019s like going to a cathedral and seeing a bunch of guys make a sandwich.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

DAY TWO: CHICAGO<\/b><\/p>\n

\u201cShit,\u201d says a voice beyond my bunk\u2019s curtain. Then comes the clang of a dropped tambourine. Since clambering into my top bunk around 6 A.M., sticking a socked foot onto Malkmus\u2019s pillow to hoist myself up, I\u2019d slept like a rock until 11.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After seeing the sunrise with drivers Jason and Jeff\u2014barreling southeastward, fighting highway rumble strips\u2014we\u2019d all arrived and parked in front of the handsome Chicago Theatre, where the band was gearing up for two back-to-back sold-out nights. The interior of the Chicago Theatre earlyish on a Thursday looks like your usual swank venue: high-ceilinged interiors with good acoustics, baroque festoonery along the walls, and a tangle of pedals and cables littering the stage like noodles. Dozens of men and women unload the two trailers, rhythmically decanting small plastic tubs from larger plastic tubs, proving David Thomas of Pere Ubu\u2019s claim that touring \u201c<\/span>is mostly about moving big black boxes from one side of town to the other.\u201d<\/span> I watch as one tech lugs the giant, silent, theater-screen-sized video rig that the band plays in front of throughout each show, which is both a showcase for some surprisingly good juvenilia from Malkmus\u2019s old lyric notebooks and, according to crew members, a huge logistical pain in the ass. The stage clears for soundcheck, and, now seated as the only audience member up on the prow of the balcony, I had time to study the band at their rawest.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve ever listened passively to a single Pavement song, you\u2019ll catch shambly, wooly guitarwork and <\/span>jammy bass and drum patterns<\/span>; <\/span>if you listen closely, you\u2019ll notice that any given Pavement song is filled with total nonsense. In 1995, <\/span>the <\/span>New York Times<\/span><\/i> made sense of this by calling the band among \u201crock\u2019s most notorious nihilists: disaffected, disenchanted, and distanced<\/span>.\u201d An especially haunting indictment <\/span>came in an episode of <\/span>Beavis and Butt-head<\/span><\/i> from that same year, where the two cartoon morons groan at a music video for a track titled \u201cRattled by the Rush.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s like they\u2019re not even trying,\u201d says Beavis.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But if Beavis were to see \u201cRattled\u201d as I see it practiced here before me\u2014Ibold elated, Spiral hardly paying attention, Malkmus shredding while staring at the ceiling\u2014he might notice that it\u2019s not just a performance of ennui: the laziness is also creatively contrived, built into the music. Their tracks are crammed with <\/span>odd voicings, alternate tunings, a constant sense of tonal ambiguity, slightly uncomfortable intervals. <\/span>There\u2019s <\/span>hardly an ordinary sentence or ungenerative thought across their whole catalog. <\/span>There are few vaguely placeable themes in their lyrics, and the vulnerability behind them\u2014if you can find it at all\u2014always seems like it comes at the end of a bong rip. (Verse 2 of \u201cRattled\u201d goes: \u201cPants I wear so well, cross your <\/span>t<\/span><\/i>\u2019s\u2014shirt smells \/ Worse than your lying, caught my dad crying.) It <\/span>sounds<\/span><\/i> like rock, but rock rejiggered by modest, unshowy surrealists\u2014always seemingly noncommittal but irrationally graceful in the end.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After any obligatory soundchecking or set-erecting, the band and crew basically tool around for indeterminate stretches of time. I find our stalwart tour techs asleep in folding chairs\u2014seated upright, snoring, mouths agape\u2014just off the side of the stage not thirty minutes after soundcheck was over. West has his head down on a desk in the basement. Our tour manager Mike is on an errand: Bob has asked him to buy ping pong balls from Walgreens so that he can chuck signed ones into the audience while he plays. (Ideas for other projectiles\u2014eggs, tennis balls, shot glasses\u2014were dismissed.) Showtime takes forever to come until it suddenly doesn\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERHEARD FROM CREW MEMBERS WHO WERE OUT OF EYESHOT:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Voice 1: \u201cWe\u2019re gonna need some tea for the team before they go on. Herbal tea is heated between 180 and 200 degrees. Black teas, you\u2019re gonna want them between 200 and 220 degrees.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Voice 2: \u201cNo problem. But I really don\u2019t think you know what the fuck you\u2019re talking about.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Finally, lights go on, and the show is a goofy revelation. Spiral is tonight\u2019s quiet hero. They play a fizzy, relatively deep cut called<\/span> \u201cDate w\/Ikea,\u201d<\/span> where he takes lead\u2014legs akimbo as in a yoga stretch\u2014and then later leaves the stage, mid-song, mid-set. (\u201cI had to piss,\u201d he explains after the show.) The audience loses their mind. Fans and friends throw trucker hats emblazoned with his name onstage like bouquets.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tonight\u2019s encore is also uncommonly touching<\/span> because it includes a marriage proposal. The band jogs out after the compulsory caesura\u2014the audience roars like white noise when they return\u2014and Malkmus nearly ruins the whole thing by telling the crowd that \u201cwe\u2019ve got some folks who are about to get married.\u201d But the pageant goes smoothly: Chris, the groom-to-be, ushers his girlfriend Ramona onstage (they are thirty-four and thirty years old, respectively) and twirl around to a sweetish, woozy number called \u201cWe Dance.\u201d At the end of the song, Chris gets down on one knee. They are, and it is, a perfectly Pavementian affair: fumbly, lightly lackadaisical, flannel-clad. She says yes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Rapt in the tender human awkwardness of it all, we migrate to a totally characterless bar across the street from the hotel where the band and the crew will stay the night. I find our drummer, Steve West, reclining with a Guinness. Bargoers flock to shake his hand, making him sit down and stand up, stand up and sit down. \u201cI\u2019m the most off-the-grid guy here for sure,\u201d he says, swishing the beer around in his mouth like mouthwash. West is now a stonemason in West Virginia with the granite disposition to match. \u201cWhen this thing started, all of a sudden there were a bunch of dudes from the label emailing me while I\u2019d be out behind my house digging holes. I\u2019m about as good at this band to-do as a head of wilted lettuce.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

West has belonged to legions of bands prior to this one, but it was his work with the Silver Jews that ushered him Pavementward. The Silver Jews are something of a cousin band to Pavement\u2014West and Malkmus played on some of their albums, Malkmus passed along the Jews\u2019s debut to their first label, and where Pavement stands firmly on the soil of \u201cindie rock,\u201d the Jews err more toward country-flecked, plainspoken poetry\u2014but their legacies have been entwined and underscored since the suicide of David Berman, the Jews\u2019s frontman, in 2019. His life is a subject of delicate love and introspection. \u201cDave told Malkmus,\u201d goes West, \u201c\u2018A drummer\u2019s replaceable\u2014we\u2019re all replaceable\u2014but it\u2019s the personalities that you can\u2019t replace.\u2019 So when Pavement needed a new drummer, he offered me up.\u201d He is reverential about David, as all who knew him and didn\u2019t know him seem to be, but his vantage is especially matchless.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cArtists have always gotten used up and spat out,\u201d West says, leaning back on his stool. \u201cIt\u2019s just the way that all of this works. I just hope that everyone remembers how talented he was. I don\u2019t know what took him away from us\u2014I just know that he understood something big about this world. I\u2019m just lucky to have known him at all.\u201d There is a long, terrible grip of silence, then a mangled sound in his voice as he looks away from me. \u201cI loved him,\u201d he says, awfully. \u201cHe was my best friend.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

DAY THREE: CHICAGO<\/b><\/p>\n

I wake up to a group text among Ibold, West, and their soundman, Remko Schouten. \u201cDown for Italian beef excursion? Be in front of the hotel by 11:15.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The sandwiches from a place called Johnnie\u2019s are pulpy potpourris of 80\/20 ground beef and bell pepper and come prepared in \u2018\u2018half-dip,”full-dip,\u201d or austere \u201cno dip\u201d levels of oily jus. Digesting the whole affair alfresco, I get to know Remko, a wizardly Dutchman who\u2019s been Pavement\u2019s sound engineer since 1992, and is the sort of guy who\u2019ll be working the board and time his edibles to kick in halfway through an hours-long set just to make things more interesting for himself. (This is exactly what happens later that night.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The conversation makes its way through reminiscences (\u201cIbold once had to fish out his shit from the tour bus toilet in 1992\u201d) and re-evaluations (\u201cTheir first drummer, Gary\u2014he would throw garbage into the crowd while we played, which ultimately became a problem\u201d), but it becomes apparent how valuable his constancy is for a band always in flux\u2014through the coming and going of members, shifting affiliations with record labels, spats and tiffs and breakups.<\/span> \u201cWe run on an absurd machine,\u201d Remko says, which is a nice pr\u00e9cis of thirty collected years of writing on the band<\/span>.<\/b> \u201cTake Bob, for instance,\u201d he suggests wisely. \u201cThe fact that he\u2019s here should tell you a lot about this whole thing.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Bob is a selcouth blend of audience motivator and whatever\u2019s-in-the-percussion-room player who feels like the id of the group built on a <\/span>shambolic<\/span> sort of peculiarity. Most videos of the band online have at least one top-rated comment that reads something to the extent of \u201cWhat is Bob\u2019s purpose?\u201d The night before, the newly-engaged Chris had offered an answer to the unspoken question outside of the bar. \u201cBob,\u201d Chris declared, like he was sharing a commandment, \u201cis the secret glue that keeps everything in place.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know about that,\u201d Bob says to me as he unloads his laundry back in the basement of the Chicago Theatre upon our return. \u201cI really don’t have the skills to play music, I\u2019ll be the first to tell you that. But having Rebecca here really shows you how much more vital we can be when we can actually play the songs. God knows I can\u2019t sing. It’s really fucking embarrassing. I\u2019ve done it for years, and I\u2019ve seen my band wince. Even people in the crowd have covered their ears.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Not the case on our last night in Chicago. It is not the most flawless show, but the most rabid\u2014everywhere the eye lands seems to be a fan shouting every non sequitur lyric. Like all good concerts, it\u2019s convivial and conspiratorial, but there is an urgency in the audience tonight, a sort of disorienting attentiveness bordering on the religious. It seems everyone knows this will likely be the last time they\u2019ll see Pavement together ever again. \u201cListening to this band makes me feel like the guy I was in college,\u201d says a patron next to me, arms draped like a shawl around a woman beside him<\/span>.<\/b> \u201cSometime between then and now I became an old man, and I\u2019m not sure how that happened.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

After the encore, Ibold and Malkmus dawdle for a few perfunctory hi-byes before swiftly exiting out the back door for a bar called the Empty Bottle, where a band called Wand is playing. Wand is signed to Drag City, the Chicago-based indie label responsible for springboarding Pavement to fame. Drag City\u2019s founder, Dan Koretzky, whom Malkmus has excitedly been calling \u201cPapa\u201d all evening, greets them, beaming to see friends inside the humid dive. \u201cDidn\u2019t think you\u2019d make it,\u201d he says. Ibold, gazing into the audience\u2014which seems to gaze back at him\u2014adjusts his glasses. \u201cWouldn\u2019t miss it for anything,\u201d he responds.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On our way in, Ibold and Malkmus are honked, gawked, shouted at. (There\u2019s a <\/span>Great show, guys!<\/span><\/i> and an <\/span>I love you! <\/span><\/i>and then a<\/span> Marry me!<\/span><\/i>) When we get inside, they part the sea. Two men individually buy me a shot of Fernet when they see me passing lagers to their indie rock saints. Standing there\u2014as a band sort of in apex and sort of in twilight, alongside a younger band who are perhaps on the road to their own sort of apex\u2014I can only imagine that all of this is striking a note that they could\u2019ve only dreamed of striking years ago.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

NEW YORK CITY: THE END<\/b><\/p>\n

My version of tour ends not on the midwestern road but back in New York, at the Pavement Museum, a four-day pop-up event in SoHo billed as a course through the band\u2019s \u201creal and imagined history.\u201d It turns out the room is a shrine to Pavement in a way that feels half like an exhibition, half like pornography for ultrafans. Contemporary acts\u2014<\/span>Snail Mail<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Soccer Mommy<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Bully<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>Sad13<\/span><\/a>\u2014performed Pavement\u2019s splashier hits on a makeshift stage. Old music videos play on loop on tube TVs with built-in VCRs; lyric sheets are strewn around and encased like curios; there are communiques with record labels, lyrics on napkins, old show programs, the suit that Malkmus wore when he worked as a security guard at the Whitney Museum. I see Spiral there and ask him if it all feels a little like a mausoleum. \u201cThat\u2019s really nice of you to say,\u201d he replies.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to note that a significant amount of the ephemera inside the room is totally fabricated. There are tour posters for lineups and dates that never existed; there are T-shirts for real past tours that were created (and knifed to look roughed-up) precisely for the museum; immortalized in a box, there is a pair of handcuffs that Malkmus brandished during a 1999 show, announcing to the audience that they symbolized \u201cwhat it\u2019s like being in a band.\u201d The placard next to it reads \u201cThese are the original handcuffs.\u201d They are not. They were purchased from a sex shop a few days prior. Same goes for another shadow box, encasing a lone brown toenail that allegedly once belonged to their original drummer, Gary Young (again, no: it was clipped off of the foot of the set\u2019s art director), and for a poster of Malkmus starring in an Apple \u201cThink Different\u201d ad \u201cfrom 1996\u201d that he absolutely wasn\u2019t a part of. \u201cI have no say in this whatsoever,\u201d said Malkmus earlier that week, of both the museum and the upcoming film. \u201cWe\u2019ve all sent them some stuff, but I really don\u2019t even pay attention to what these guys are doing. None of us do.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

All the ersatz stuff is not subterfuge or sinisterism or deepfakery; this is\u2013to explain the joke\u2013a joke, in keeping with the arch \u201cwho-gives-a-shit\u201d quality at the core of the band\u2019s brio. A keen-to-rabid fan could plausibly discern between most bits of artifact and artifice but a casual one (which, more often than not, means a younger one) might accept them all, reasonably, as patent bits of reality. One had to admire it. All this puckish stuff made clear how little it matters what\u2019s real: it\u2019s Pavement not only for a generation already seduced by its apocrypha, but also for the present one, familiar with reenactments and revivals, and possessed of its own breed of absurdity. There\u2019s probably also something to be said about how my own relationship to Pavement\u2014private, greedy, and up until recently, comfortably unilateral \u2014might have made the whole hall-of-mirrors scenario unfolding before me feel a little stupid and perverse. It did, but fandom demands a certain level of delusion. It <\/span>is dumb and blind to real or invented ironies. <\/span>To press a band into legacy and lucite before they\u2019re gone is a pure and selfish impulse\u2013and it makes it so they can\u2019t ever die.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mina Tavakoli is a writer from Virginia. She has written for<\/em> Bookforum, The Nation, The Washington Post, and<\/em> NPR, among others.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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