Pavement – Crooked Rain Crooked Rain

(Editor’s Note:  The Vault is our occasionally updated storehouse of music from our pasts that is particularly awesome.  James has been hitting tracks pretty frequently, but it’s long been our intention to do full length reviews of old albums.  This week, given our various time constraints and/or trips to Guam, is the perfect time to dip into The Vault and pull out a gem.  We’ve got a ton of good new music that we’ll be dropping on you soon, but we’re a little too harried to digest it and spit out refined criticism of it just yet.  I’ve been thinking about the review I’d write of Crooked Rain Crooked Rain for twelve years, so, given my limited amount of thinking and writing time this week, this is an ideal Vault record to talk about.  New stuff is on the way!  Have no fear!  For today, though, pretend it’s 1994.  I did not write for a blog then.  If I did, I would have written this.)

I’ve written in the past about missing things the first time around.  I wasn’t cool enough (Neutral Milk Hotel) or old enough (The Minutemen, Fugazi) or smart enough (Slint, Nirvana (more on that in a minute)) to hear some bands when they first came out.  Pavement, on the other hand, was right in my wheelhouse.  I was sixteen when I saw the video for “Cut Your Hair” on the MTV and it was a fucking epiphany.  Full disclosure:  I bought Apocalypse ‘91: The Enemy Strikes Black on cassette tape instead of Nevermind.  (I will go to my grave arguing that “Shut ‘Em Down” was a better single than “Come as You Are,” but that is another story altogether.)  I caught on eventually, but I was behind the curve a bit on bands that broke before 1994 or so.  When I wrapped my brain around Nirvana, I was the dude who bought Bleach and acted like I’d gotten it before “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” (Don’t judge me.)  Pavement was different for me, however. Nobody in Willougby had heard Slanted & Enchanted. Shit.  Nobody in Willoughby had heard Crooked Rain Crooked Rain. As such, I felt like I caught Pavement on time.  It was the first time that I felt conscious of listening to something that was right on the front of the edge.  (I know that this is not de facto true.  But I was sixteen.  Pavement made me feel like an insider, even though I wasn’t.  This is a finely shaded distinction, so hopefully it comes across.)   All this to say that Crooked Rain Crooked Rain holds a special place in my heart.  It was the album the showed me that there was more music in the world than that which I heard on the radio or saw on the television.  (I never saw that “Cut You Hair” video again before the youtube.)  Beyond my personal associations with this album’s role in my growth from musical boy to man, it is absolutely amazing. Listen to it right now.  Take forty-five minutes or so and treat your ears to some of the sweetest sounds laid to tape in my lifetime.  Or, just read the rest of this thing, download the tracks and go back to work.  Your call.

My best memory is that the cassette tape of Crooked Rain Crooked Rain that I bought in 1994 had “Unfair” as the last track on side one.  (I might be wrong, but that cassette is long gone in the wilds of my ancestral home and I can’t do the fact check.  If I’m wrong, bitch slap me in the comments.)  Better news for me was that the single I’d dropped my hard earned $9.99 on was buried in the middle of side one.  You remember cassettes.  You were forced to listen to the tracks you didn’t know, as fast forwarding was a haphazard and time-consuming process; so you put it in and you hit play.  Today, I’d spend a buck on “Cut Your Hair,” play it a dozen times and be done with it.  1994 technology forced me to listen to the whole first side.  Lucky me.  “Silence Kit” completely blew my mind out of the water.  I was expecting the mild crunch and pop hookiness of the track I knew from the TV.  Instead, I get the freaky intro, the cowbell, the veiled masturbation references, slurred vocal delivery, operatic conclusion and overall coolness of that opening track.  Not to get all High Fidelity on you, but I’d go dollars for donuts against any other side one, track one in the history of music.  How good is that song?  It defines the ethos of the record perfectly.  It is catchy as hell.  “Silence kid, don’t listen to your Grandmother’s advice about us,” may well be my all time favorite lyric from any song ever.  The fact that the name of the song is recorded incorrectly because of sloppy handwriting is one of my favorite footnotes in rock.  I can’t say enough good things about “Silence Kit.”  Tell me you don’t like that track.  Then get in your car and drive to Cleveland Heights, because I want to fight you.

“Silence Kit” really just sets the table for a murder’s row of a side one.  Seriously. Malkmus tosses off lines like “because there’s forty different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack” (“Elevate Me Later”) and “write it on a postcard: Dad they broke me, Dad they broke me” (“Stop Breathin’”) like goddamn Sandy Koufax throwing curves.  Dude’s ability to right cutting, incisive, witty, difficult lyrics is nearly unparalleled in the indie rock canon, as far as I’m concerned.  Past the words, the songs are outstanding.  The emotional crescendos of the music mesh perfectly with the lyrics.  If it’s a baseball lineup, “Cut Your Hair” is batting cleanup, but the tracks around it are all-stars as well.  The laid-back, semi-lounge skank of “Newark Wilder” the near new-wave/half-punk California brilliance of “Unfair” and the rock chops of everything else on side one had me awestruck.  It still does.  This record could come out now and people would fawn over it; it has not aged a day.

Side two didn’t have as much appeal for me as a youth, but the benefit of time is that it’s now what I turn to when I need my Pavement fix.  “Range Life,” “Gold Soundz” and “Heaven is a Truck” are as good as it gets.  Time has helped me appreciate Malkmus’s big brass balls and perceptive genius on “Range Life,” the band’s sheer talent on “Gold Soundz” and the wistful, angst-ridden “Heaven is a Truck” far more than sixteen-year old Brian did.  Think about how big Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots were in 1994.  Then think about how hard Malkmus pisses on them in that track.  Sign me up.  Past that, think about what this means when you’re thirty: “Hey.  You’ve got to pay your dues before you pay the rent.”  Shit yeah.  You don’t get that in high school, but you sure do after you write you’re first resume.  We’re clocking in at near 1200 words already, so I’m not going to give you my full take on “Fillmore Jive.”  If I did, you’d have to take a day off to read the rest of the review.  Suffice to to say that, as a closer, it’s as good as “Silence Kit” is as an opener.  “I need to sleep.  Why won’t you let me?”  Indeed.

We do not do numbers here at Citizen Dick.  There’s some interesting research on the lack of any real reliability from “expert” ratings that is summarized nicely in The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow.  The upshot is that folks who are supposed to know stuff are usually incapable of producing the same results across multiple blind trials.  Essentially, wine experts will give the same wine somewhere between a three and a nine on subsequent blind trials.  We are not, as a species, any good at quantifying things that are essentially qualitative.  (This is why Pitchfork’s ranking system is absolute bullshit.  Tell me the difference between a 7.1 and a 7.2.  I dare you.)  All that said, this record is an unqualified 10.  This is partially because it has a lot of personal significance to me, but mostly because it is amazing.  Sonically, lyically and otherwise it is damn near unsurpassed in my lifetime.  If you don’t own it you should.  If you do, you don’t listen to it enough.  Guaranteed.

We’ve got some live tracks today that were originally posted by the inestimable Aquarium Drunkard sometime in 2008.  If you missed his post, these will keep you happy.

“Silence Kit” – Pavement – Live, 1994, Hollywood

“Stop Breathing” – Pavement – Live, 1994, Hollywood

“Range Life” – Pavement – Live, 1994, Hollywood

And, as an added bonus, enjoy that “Cut Your Hair” video that got me hooked.