( The author with Alameda at Sin E, NYC 2003)You play an instrument and you're good enough so that you have felt that fleeting intoxication of performance. The real essence of that feeling is of course, the celebration of you by others, particularly those of the opposite sex (or not opposite as could be the case).
It's late at night and your at home with headphones on or in your car listening to some album, very loudly. Maybe you're at a bar with a friend, maybe it's your band mate. You listen to every song on that album, singing all the choruses, pantomiming all the guitar lines, walking the bass notes, and all the while thinking, "I can do this!" "I can write these songs." You collapse into the couch or park the car, close your eyes and it's you singing on stage enjoying the lights, the crowd, the crying, the empathy, the respect. It's 3am and you're a rock star, a folk hero. Not everyone can do it. But you can.
The following too many lines are for all those who have been taunted and rewarded by the art in their lives.
I listen to a lot of music, but I never have thought I could be John Coltrane, Otis Reading, or even Kurt Cobain. These icons were too tortured, too meta or just too plain brilliant. To me there is music that I listen to because I love it, but don't imagine myself on stage playing it, that being primarily jazz. Then there is music I listen to that I imagine myself flooring people with, that would be be rock.
I love the anatomy of a good rock song. Good rock to me has a strong hook, memorable, but not too infectious lyrics, possibly a guitar solo and well placed noise or discordance. But more so, a good rock song ushers a mood and takes you beyond yourself.
In the last twenty years two groundbreaking albums which perfected these elements, among a few, were Nirvana's "Nevermind", possibly a perfect pop album as well, and Radiohead's "OK Computer".
As much as I love these albums, I never thought I could write them. Cobain's radio ready, but devastating songs are sourced from a place of alienation. This is not me. His catchy, but impolite guitar lines, particularly the game changing opening power chord riff at the beginning of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" ruined it for all the other singles that year and immediately became the anthem for all kids, disaffected or not. It's biggest accomplishment however, is that it is one of the few songs to incite mosh pits at Bar Mitzvah parties.
Radiohead's "OK Computer" is a cerebral and complete masterpiece that upped the ante for rock. The album boasts richly layered melodies, cinematic narratives, and some of the most unique crushing guitar work to-date. Thom Yorke's pained and beautiful voice captures dark bedroom melancholy, but just irreverent enough to keep us from bolting the door.
I fell in love with this album while listening to it repeatedly while on a bus commuting between the cities of Turrialba and San Jose, Costa Rica. The album became the perfect soundtrack for that trip, speaking to the wonder, distance and loneliness that I felt during those heady rides at night when the oblivion off the highway gave way to the gleaming lights of the central valley two thousand feet down from us.
But the songs stood in contrast to the the surroundings. This album comes from a harder, more critical and sardonic world than the one around me, which oddly made me feel less homesick. It also provided that medium in which I could ponder the existential musings of somebody just out of college - an act less satisfying with my emerging Spanish.
"OK Computer's" perfectionist patina presents an achievement just out of reach and holds back safely any tides of my regret or misgivings for not being on stage.
But I am not that safe. All I need to do is go no further than two listings up the iTunes alphabet to find a band that seductively reminds me that rockdom can be within reach.
The band is Pavement and the albums are its first two: "Slanted and Enchanted" and "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain".
Pavement's sound and image are deceptively casual and without overarching ambition. Early photos of the band captured a motley bunch of non-threatening pranksters, that said to me, "Hey, that's me and my friends."
Their sound furthered that approachable illusion with its ironic and outsider attitude toward music and the business of rock. But these albums are not the product of stoner lightweights.
"Slanted " (1992) and "Crooked Rain" (1994) are powerful because they seem just thrown together, accidental, and tipsy, like live jam sessions familiar to me from college, but when listened to carefully, they reveal more and more purposeful and delicate arrangements. The band's sound is new, but quotes and comments on earlier music (The Fall, Joy Division, Pixies, Sonic Youth), a certain postmodern involvement with and distance from their work.
"Slanted and Enchanted" opens up with the single "Summer Babe (Winter Version)" introducing listeners to the band's low-fi but multi-layered fuzzy sound and the lead singer, Stephen Malkmus', off voice and funny Beat lyrics, "mixing cocktails with a plastic tip cigar".
The prettiest and most melodic song on the album is "Here", a down beat spare ballad that shows off Malkmus' two level range as he switches up an octave for the refrain.
"and all the Spanish candles have all gone to this and a 'run-on piece of mount on' trembles , shivers, run-on down the free way."
You kind of, but not really, know what he's talking about, but you love it anyway. So much of his lyrics fade between linear cogency and Dadist free form or referential story telling, like the song "Conduit for Sale".
When Malkmus "sings" as opposed to his flat talk-sing, it usually pairs with the catchy guitar hook that drops in among the almost chaotic busyness of their songs.
A great example of this is "Silent Kit" on "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain", a terrific warm weather driving opening, full of hope and expanse, which all collapses on itself for a broke down ending.
The next song, "Elevate Me Later" continues with the stops and start momentum building theme. Again great in a car with the windows down.
"Cause you sleep with electric guitars, range roving with the cinema stars, but you wouldn't want to shake their hands because there in such a high protein land."Or at least that's how I hear it. The line is playful and ironic, but smart- a combination that most middle class liberal arts college kids work on very hard. If their source material is not childhood pain but instead a healthy disdain for popularity, conventional success and all things banal, well then we're talking about Pavement.
I could run down the whole album, from the twisted Pixies-esque "Stop Breathing" to the the band's catchiest single, "Cut your Hair" or the lazy country anthem "Range Life", but this is not exactly an album review and here we are at the end of it.
This is all an attempt to explain why these two albums are dangerous for someone like me, when, as I said before, are played loudly late at night on an open road or in your headphones.
At first listen the members of Pavement do not sound like extraordinary musicians, and they weren't in comparison to their more polished peers. But the twisted beauty of these two albums and the band as a whole, is the nonchalant complexity. Simply put, they make it sound easy and immediate. At 3am the songs tell the musician fans "Right Now! You can do this!..... but most of you never will."
So what's the moral of the story come the next morning: more hard work and the struggle to channel that vision given to us by our late night heroes, be they sly slackers or clear perfectionists. That's what Malkmus and Yorke are doing, we hope.
