Slint's Spiderland

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

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.

Acknowledgments

Let Me In

The Early Years

Please Give Me Some New Headphones

A New Sound

River North

Spiderland

Brian Stepped Outside

Sources

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.

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 the 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.”