Slint's Spiderland Read online

  SPIDERLAND

  Praise for the series:

  It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—The New York Times Book Review

  Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough—Rolling Stone

  One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut

  These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice

  A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love—NME (UK)

  Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon

  Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype

  [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK)

  We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books—Pitchfork

  For more information on the 33 1/3 series, visit 33third.blogspot.com

  For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

  Spiderland

  Scott Tennent

  2011

  The Continuum International Publishing Group

  80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

  The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  www.continuumbooks.com

  Copyright © 2011 by Scott Tennent

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tennent, Scott.

  Spiderland / Scott Tennent.

  p. cm. — (33 1/3)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Slint (Musical group)

  2. Slint (Musical group). Spiderland. 3. Rock

  musicians—Biography. I. Title. II. Series.

  ML421.S6132T46 2010

  782.42166092’2—dc22

  2010024900

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-8941-7

  Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand

  Printed in the United States of America by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Let Me In

  The Early Years

  Please Give Me Some New Headphones

  A New Sound

  River North

  Spiderland

  Brian Stepped Outside

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  I feel compelled to thank my hometown record store, circa 1994. It was a chain, a Tower, and countless hours of my youth were spent there. In my smallish town there was little else to do but while away the hours in its aisles. There I found, by a chain of events too mundane to detail here, a strange record filed in Miscellaneous S. I was a high school metalhead at the time — an era I like to call BS, Before Spiderland. I’ve been listening to the album regularly ever since. It changed the way I listened to music and set me on a path that I’m still traveling today.

  Which of course means I must thank Slint, both for making this record and for their help in my research for this book. In particular I am grateful to David Pajo and Todd Brashear for agreeing to be interviewed and for taking the time to check my facts. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Sean Garrison for inviting me to his home and filling me in on the details of Maurice and the early Louisville punk scene — a significant and underreported period in Slint’s history.

  Thanks are also due to my editor, David Barker, for reeling me in before I went too far off the deep end; to graphic designer Justin Goetz for making sense of my elaborately kooky Slint family tree; and to Sara-May Mallett for seeing this project through the design and production phase. I also appreciate the help of Richard Crary, Dan Sylvester, and Sam Yurick, each of whom gave me valuable advice at various stages of this project.

  There is a complete list of references at the back of this book, but I would be remiss not to acknowledge a few indispensable sources which I returned to over and over again in researching this book: the website louisvillehardcore.com has an encyclopedic archive of the local scene’s history; Rob Ortenzi’s and Jeff Guntzel’s 2005 articles on Slint in Alternative Press and Punk Planet, respectively, provided the springboard for some of my research; and the unknown writer behind the 1986 photocopied zine the Pope (which I discovered via the blog swanfungus.com) gave me a more detailed account of the history of Squirrel Bait than I could ever have hoped for.

  Finally, and foremost, I thank my wife Jill for ten years (and counting) of encouragement and love. I would not be the person I am today were it not for the support and courage she gives me every single day. I’m filled with joy to know that our new son Cooper will get the same.

  Let Me In

  To get to Utica Quarry you take Interstate 65 north out of Louisville, over the Ohio River and into Indiana. Not long after crossing the border you follow I-265 east until the freeway dwindles into a one-lane road that dead-ends at Utica Pike. The area is a surreal collection of steelworks set amidst cornfields.

  As you follow the pike east, you enter the small town of Utica, Indiana, founded 1794, population 591. You pass a small marina on the edge of the river, heading down a tree-lined two-lane road. In the fall the trees are rich reds, golds, browns. Rickety wooden posts punctuate both sides of the road, stringing sagging power lines overhead. The houses along Utica Pike are modest, most built in the last fifty years, though a small town hall from the nineteenth century is still in use.

  Make a right at Hillcrest Cemetery, founded 1817 — notably established a couple of decades after the town founders arrived. From here you can see the Ohio, a vast bloom of golden trees gathered on the Kentucky side obscuring the activity of the Louisvillians underneath the canopy.

  A passage appears in the massive hill rising on the other side of the road, and through it you can see water in the distance. In fact it’s no mere hill. It’s the quarry — a giant bowl of limestone holding a small lake, water from the river flowing in from an underground passage.

  Inside the quarry the rest of the world seems shut out. You are surrounded on all sides by towering limestone cliffs, the river out of view and the trees out of reach. The signs say “swim at your own risk,” though the water is still.

  * * *

  Of all the seminal albums to come out in 1991 — the year of Nevermind, Loveless, Ten, and Out of Time, among others — none were quieter, both in volume and influence, than Spiderland, and no band more mysterious than Slint. And while there are few single albums that can lay claim to sparking an entire genre, Spiderland — all six songs of it — arguably did just that. Within a few years of its release, a cornucopia of new bands arrived on the scene, playing a cold brand of calculated rock. The sound was so much the antithesis of the Rolling Stones, or T. Rex or the E Street Band or Black Flag or Dinosaur Jr. or the Jesus Lizard, that critics grouped it under a newish umbrella called “post-rock.” The term didn’t originate with Slint, but it nonetheless became synonymous with the sound of Spiderland. Bands everywhere, starting in the Midwest and percolating out to the rest of th
e country and eventually to other parts of the world, embraced the sound of spindly guitars, stark drumming, slow tempos, complicated rhythms, and carefully orchestrated rises and falls. The underground had taken a turn from a sloppy, anyone-can-do-it ethos toward something more grandiose, technical, and epic. Other subgenres developed during the decade — emo, post-hardcore, math rock, slowcore, space rock — and Spiderland was a touchstone for all of them.

  And yet, as if to lay the foundation for their own mythmaking, Slint evaporated before anyone even realized who they were. Those six songs, it turns out, were enough.

  * * *

  Spiderland sold only a few thousand copies in its first year of release, due to the fact that the largely unknown quartet from Louisville, Kentucky — Britt Walford, Brian McMahan, David Pajo, and Todd Brashear — had already called it quits. No one’s ears perked up until Steve Albini, a longtime booster for the band and the engineer who recorded Slint’s little-heard debut, Tweez, wrote a prophetic rave for Britain’s Melody Maker, rating it “ten fucking stars.”

  In the ensuing decade, Spiderland gained a mythic significance. As was famously said about the Velvet Underground, it seemed that whoever heard Spiderland started a band. Yet for so much influence, both the band and the album remain something of a puzzle that no one has truly attempted to solve. Since the band never did press at the time of Spiderland’s release, there is little record of their personal or aesthetic perspective at the time; most interviews and articles since have used Slint as a contextual preamble for the members’ current projects (such as McMahan’s run as the For Carnation, and Pajo’s many associations, including Papa M, Tortoise, and Zwan). Even when the group briefly reformed in 2005 to curate All Tomorrow’s Parties and do a short tour of the US and England (and another reunion tour in 2007), only a small handful of publications attempted to shine a light on the murky history of Slint. Spiderland is usually a gimme on any best-albums-of-the-’90s (or all time) list — it’s one of the 1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, and appears on best-of lists by the likes of Spin, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and others — but it typically only garners a shallow, misinformed, single-paragraph nod, usually not getting beyond the fact that Slint get quiet, then loud; that they had ties to another Louisville band, Squirrel Bait; that Will Oldham, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy, took the photograph on Spiderland’s cover; and that “Good Morning, Captain” is their most famous song thanks to its inclusion on the Kids soundtrack in 1995. That’s not much.

  Maybe the band was too mysterious for its own good. The packaging for Tweez and Spiderland revealed almost nothing: the covers were free of copy, the song titles were cryptic, and no lyric sheet, thank-you list, or substantive liner note was to be found. Spiderland included an appeal to “interested female singers,” indicating that the band didn’t even consider themselves fully formed by the time of their demise. The songs on either album featured vocals (often spoken) buried in the mix and contained few hummable riffs — fifteen songs largely free of hooks. There was little to hang your hat on, other than “songs” that might better be described as instrumentals paired with half-intelligible short stories.

  And what the fuck does “slint” mean, anyway?

  * * *

  Here is a typical way a new fan of Slint experiences the band. First you buy Spiderland, because that’s the album everyone talks about. And you are blown away by it and vow to purchase everything anyone associated with this band has ever done. So you naturally go to Tweez next. And you are hopelessly disappointed because you can barely find an inkling of Spiderland buried beneath the nine short jazz/metal/punk flurries. It’s not Slint — not your Slint. Stubbornly, you track down the two-song untitled single Touch and Go released in 1994, three years after Spiderland. The first, unnamed track (actually, it’s called “Glenn,” though you wouldn’t know it from owning the record), gets you excited again. There’s that eerie, ominous guitar! The snapping snare drum! The eventual crushing distortion! But it’s only one song. The other track is a Tweez retread. It’s not Slint.

  You buy the Breeders’ first album, Pod, because Slint’s drummer plays on the record under a pseudonym. It’s good, but it’s not Slint. Meanwhile you’ve picked up a For Carnation album (ex-Slint!), Tortoise’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die (ex-Slint!), and maybe one or two Papa M discs (ex-Slint!) — maybe you even tracked down that Evergreen album (ex-Slint!). On most, the Slint sound permeates, kind of, and you are pleased enough, though in truth they’re not Slint. Still hungry, you track down the two albums by Squirrel Bait, where it all started with McMahan, Walford, and David Grubbs, who was destined to start his own influential post-rock act, Gastr del Sol. All of them together? It’s like a primordial supergroup! But actually, it kinda sucks in a not Slint sort of way. You didn’t get into Slint just to trace it back to some crunchy thrash punk band. You get frustrated.

  Finding the roots of Spiderland can feel like a wild-goose chase. Part of what makes the album seem so singular is that so many listeners process all things Slint out of order. Of course, hearing Squirrel Bait before Slint, or Tweez before Spiderland, doesn’t magically transform them into what you want them to be. But they do give proper context — especially, as I’ve attempted to do in this book, when you start to fill in the gaps that exist in the Slint timeline.

  * * *

  Despite the stated purpose of the 33 1/3 series — to dedicate each book to a single album — I’ve chosen to tell, as best I can, the entire story of Slint’s existence, from the four members’ pre-Slint affiliations to Tweez to the “Glenn”/“Rhoda” single and, finally, to Spiderland. I’ve chosen this tack for a couple of reasons. First, despite their massive influence, the full story of Slint has never truly been told, and I felt it would be misguided to omit that story in the first large-scale examination of their work and impact. Second, and more important, I feel that telling that story goes a long way toward understanding just how brilliant a flash Spiderland was. At the time of its release, Spiderland was totally unique, seeming to come out of nowhere. Not only was it alien to the scene with which Slint was affiliated (i.e. running in the same circles as Chicago acts like Rapeman and the Jesus Lizard), but it was alien to Slint.

  There’s a disconnect. On the one hand, Spiderland was a singular achievement — almost a fluke — that no individual member truly recaptured on his own or with other groups. On the other, the mystery and the mythology around the record and its creators begs for telling and retelling, investigation and reinvestigation — a search for some explanation for Spiderland in the absence of more Spiderland. That is my goal with this book: to once and for all tell the story of where these four boys came from — and they were boys when they made this record, barely in their twenties — and in that telling show how the work Slint is most associated with is an almost ephemeral moment in their history. Slint’s legacy is Spiderland, but its history is Tweez. The Slint most prefer to remember and lionize happened quickly and lasted barely at all. But that’s just it: to tell the story of Slint is to italicize how much Spiderland was lightning caught in a bottle. How did they catch it?

  The Early Years

  The accepted story of Slint’s origin winds back to Squirrel Bait and usually ends there, as if the notion that Brian McMahan and Britt Walford shared the stage with fellow godfather of post-rock David Grubbs was too mythic to contest. But to trace a straight line from one band to the other is to overstate the significance of Squirrel Bait at the expense of the intertwining relationships and lesser-known bands shared by each of the young men who ultimately created Spiderland. Squirrel Bait is but one thread among many.

  It’s certainly not the first thread. To pick that up you’d need to travel back to J. Graham Brown School, Grade 6, 1981. Founded ten years earlier, the Brown School was (and is) notable for its open, unstructured learning environment. The arts were heavily emphasized and each student’s curriculum was individually molded based on their unique aptitude, interests, and self-discipline. “I think [
Brown] was pretty significant for all of us,” Brian McMahan told Alternative Press in 2005 — “all of us” being him and his classmates, Britt Walford and Will Oldham. “I don’t think I would’ve been so involved in music or writing if I hadn’t gone there,” he said. Just eleven and twelve, respectively, McMahan and Walford had already picked up instruments; Oldham was musically inept, but his older brother Ned, an eighth-grader, played bass. So Brian, Britt, and Ned, along with friends Stephanie Karta and Paul Catlett, started a band. They were called the Languid and Flaccid, and were an “art/noise band,” according to Clark Johnson, then a high school freshman who saw some of the band’s shows. “They were just little kids,” Johnson recalled in a 1986 interview in a small photocopied zine called the Pope. “They had songs like ‘White Castles’ and ‘Fire Engine,’ then they also had songs like ‘K Song,’ ‘L Song,’ ‘M Song,’ ‘N Song,’ etc. Their best song was called ‘Big Pussy,’ and it was so good. Brian sings on it way before his voice changes . . . Yeah, Languid and Flaccid were great.”

  Sean Garrison, a young Louisville punk, was also a fan. “Languid and Flaccid were a very garage-y band,” he told me. “Very clever . . . slightly smart-assed. It was just amazing hearing these guys. Man, they could play.”

  Most tween bands tend not to justify their place in the annals of indie rock history, if only because they seldom make it off of the playground and onto a bona fide stage. But the Languid and Flaccid played out, holding their own against the other, older bands in the scene like Your Food, Malignant Growth, and the Endtables. All-ages venues at the time were scarce, so the Languid and Flaccid would get on Sunday matinee bills at a dingy downtown dive called the Beat Club. Garrison, known around town as Rat, first caught them at a Beat matinee. He was fairly new to the scene; he’d gotten involved because his friend, Brett Ralph, had recently become the new singer for Malignant Growth, arguably the biggest punk band in town. Just fourteen himself, Garrison became immediately compelled to check out this band of twelve-year-olds who had a set’s worth of all original music. So he made his way to the Beat Club to see the Languid and Flaccid open for Your Food on Halloween 1982.