Slint's Spiderland (14 page)

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 unconcerned 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.”

* * *

In the course of our conversation Brashear and I had gotten on to the subject of the Chicago scene circa 1988–89, when Walford and McMahan still lived there and Pajo and Brashear were living in Indiana. Steve Albini’s first post–Big Black band, the shortlived Rapeman, was playing a show in Clark Johnson’s basement in Evanston. All their friends were there, so Pajo and Brashear drove up for the party. But by the time they got there it was getting late and they were exhausted, so they opted to crash out rather than catch Rapeman. “We just went to sleep. We didn’t even care. But if you tell somebody that now, they’re like
no way!
, because now it has all this weight — to be part of this legendary thing.” I told Brashear that he could say as much for his own band. “Pretty much,” he said. “History adds weight to things.”

When
Spiderland
was released in March of 1990, it was noticed by almost no one. The music press wasn’t interested in writing articles about Slint; even a hundred words in a zine’s densely packed reviews section was hard to come by. One review did get noticed, however: Steve Albini, once again, raved about Slint, this time in the pages of the British magazine
Melody Maker
. Packing his review with 600 words of ebullient praise, he wrote,

In its best state, rock music invigorates me, changes my mood, triggers introspection or envelopes me with sheer sound.
Spiderland
does all those things, simultaneously and in turns, more than any records I can think of in five years.

Spiderland
is, unfortunately, Slint’s swansong [sic], the band having succumbed to the internal pressures which eventually punctuate all bands’ biographies. It’s an amazing record though, and no one still capable of being moved by rock music should miss it. In 10 years it will be a landmark and you’ll have to scramble to buy a copy then. Beat the rush.

In the face of Slint’s impending date with total obscurity, Albini’s review — as evidenced by the very book you’re reading — turned out to be prescient. Pajo recalled a conversation with Albini in 1989, when Slint
were playing many of the
Spiderland
songs live, where Albini presaged what he would later put in print. “I remember Steve saying he never thought we’d be a big band but we’d be a really influential band. He said we were the sound of the ’90s — which in 1989 seemed like some far-off, unknown future. [I was] like, ‘No way man.
What?
’ It seemed so different from whatever was popular. I didn’t expect it.”

Albini’s review didn’t start a revolution, but it did spark a kind of whisper campaign. In the pre-blog era of the early ’90s,
Spiderland
’s success was due to honest-to-God word of mouth. No one in the band realized that people were imbuing
Spiderland
with any real significance until a few years later, 1993 or ’94, when they noticed their royalty checks from Touch and Go were still coming in. They weren’t big checks, but they were checks.
Spiderland
hadn’t quite disappeared into the bargain bin. Slint started getting name-dropped by other bands in interviews. Critics started using terms like “post-rock,” “math rock,” and “slowcore,” citing
Spiderland
as an example in each case. More and more bands started cropping up who employed an unadorned, slow, quiet sound — maybe with spoken word over top — often juxtaposed against ripping chaos.

Though
Spiderland
had come out a few months ahead of
Nevermind
,
Ten
, and the grunge explosion, its impact didn’t surface until a few years later, when many formerly underground bands — Pavement,
Jawbox, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and more — were jumping into the mainstream. Where did that leave the underground? Coincidence or not, many young bands latched onto
Spiderland
at this time. In this sense perhaps “post-grunge,” rather than “post-rock,” is a more accurate descriptor for
Spiderland
’s influence in the ’90s. Nirvana brought the noisy crunch of the late-’80s underground to the mainstream. In an era when the schism between punk and popular was still deeply, proudly, self-consciously felt, many in the underground couldn’t reference the Stooges or the Clash without risking the appearance of being no more than Alterna-wannabes. The cold detachment of Slint’s clean guitars, their subverted vocals, their dramatic juxtapositions — more exaggerated than, say, a Pixies chorus — was like an avenue out of the sound being co-opted by the major labels. If the mainstream, through Nirvana and Green Day, was going to scavenge four-chord punk, feedback-laden noise-rock, and fuck-you slacker attitude, then the punkest thing to do was to turn off your distortion pedal, slow your tempo, and speak in paragraphs rather than shout in slogans. It was a total effacement of personality, statement of intent, and accessibility.

Louisville’s Rodan was probably the first and most obvious descendant of Slint. Their epic “Everyday World of Bodies,” from 1994’s
Rusty
, is like a catalogue of every technique Slint employed on
Spiderland
— dynamics, harmonics, story-lyrics, all the way down
to the cathartic scream at the end, “I will be there!” rather than “I miss you!” Washington band Codeine traveled to Louisville to record their final album,
The White Birch
, released in 1994. Other bands gravitated toward the sound as the 1990s progressed: Seattle’s Engine Kid, Austin’s Bedhead, San Francisco’s A Minor Forest, North Carolina’s Seam, Duluth’s Low, San Diego’s Tristeza. Louisville, in the interim, flirted briefly with being a “Next Seattle” thanks to a
New York Times
profile on the local scene, as more and more bands cropped up from under Slint’s growing shadow: June of 44, the Sonora Pine, Rachel’s, and Palace, along with McMahan’s the For Carnation and Pajo’s Papa M. Now living in Chicago, Pajo hooked up with Tortoise — a band that was a cottage industry for the second half of the ’90s, spawning more side projects than was possible to keep up with.
²
Labels like Drag City, Quarterstick, Thrill Jockey, and Touch and Go were largely sustained by a collective of bands with connections to the Chicago–Louisville axis that could be traced back to Slint, if not to Squirrel Bait.
Spiderland
’s DNA coursed through a huge swathe of the underground. The formula made its way out of
the US, showing up in British bands like Hood and Scottish acts like Arab Strap and Mogwai. Mogwai’s 1997 album
Young Team
made its Slint-like dynamics ever more pronounced, a trend taken even further with Canadian collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s 1998 debut
F#A#
∞ and still further on their 1999 EP
Slow Riot for a New Zerø Kanada
. Dramatic dynamic shifts had, by the end of the decade, become
de rigueur
for so many indie rock bands, finally taken to ethereal heights by Iceland’s Sigur Rós on their 1999 album
Ágætis Byrjun
.

By the twenty-first century, the post-rock trend in indie rock had become less overtly popular. Mogwai and Sigur Rós had mostly abandoned their peaks and valleys, while many of the other most obvious Slint imitators had disbanded and faded from memory. Writing for the
New Yorker
in 2005, Sasha Frere-Jones keyed in on why, to Slint’s credit, the genre spawned by
Spiderland
did not take hold:

[
Spiderland
] was partly responsible for the enervation and increasing insularity of independent rock music during the nineties, a decade in which hip-hop, teen pop, and dance-hall, by contrast, became ever more formally omnivorous and pleasurable. The problem was that Slint did not create a simple, easily imitated beat like Bo Diddley, or an elemental song like the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.,” which anyone could
learn to play. Slint — or “Spiderland,” because the two had become interchangeable — was like that grilled-cheese sandwich bearing the face of the Virgin Mary: an unlikely and irreproducible marvel.

Yet in some ways some of the ingredients to
Spiderland
— the unadorned sound, the complicated rhythms, the moody atmospheres, and yes, the dynamics — have become so ingrained in the way so many bands make their music, it’s impossible to really identify whether
Spiderland
, specifically, still resonates today, or if contemporary bands are reaching toward Slint’s own antecedents or descendants.

In the end it doesn’t matter. All the better if the clutch of bands trading in Slintisms in the ’90s have since disbanded, and that bands of the twenty-first century have filtered
Spiderland
’s best traits through a prism of other influences. Meanwhile
Spiderland
remains, two decades later, singular and utterly affecting. Nothing sounded quite like
Spiderland
when Slint created it in 1990. Nothing sounds quite like it today.

* * *

When I visited Louisville in the fall of 2009 I took a drive out to Utica Quarry. As I followed the road into town, my eyes caught small signs posted at every intersection pointing the way to “Quarry Bluff.” Driving
along the Ohio, the signs led me up an inclined road culminating at an imposing brick wall embedded into a hill, “Quarry Bluff Estates” emblazoned in gold letters across an ebony backing. The road curved past the sign and from my window I could see the lake come into view below. I was on the cliffs which rise behind the four heads on the album cover I’d known for roughly half my life. Ringing the top of the quarry were a smattering of ornate McMansions dotted with empty lots still for sale. The neighborhood landscaping was in progress, the streets and cul-de-sacs still half-formed. From my vantage point I had dramatic views of the quarry lake to one side, the Ohio River to the other, where the auburn treetops of Louisville lined the opposite bank.