Slint's Spiderland (2 page)

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 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.

“There was this little seedy pocket in Louisville then,” he told me. “The Beat Club was next to a really scary strip club — you couldn’t get seedier than this — called the Penguin. It was serious.” The Languid and Flaccid boys would get dropped off by their parents, who would help them load their equipment into the dank and dirty club populated by the intimidating punks who were part of the Louisville scene. “The guys that were in bands back then, some of them were really scary. Really scary. And some of them got
scarier
. But those kids could hang. It was very, very impressive, at least to me. It blew my mind.”

* * *

It was on the exact same day — Halloween 1982 — that Clark Johnson and his childhood friend David Grubbs kicked around the idea of starting their own band. The two sophomores were loafing around listening to records when Grubbs piped up out of nowhere, “Why don’t you play bass?” So Johnson picked it up. The two didn’t actually start practicing until December; they had to wait for their drummer, a friend named Rich Schuler, to come home from his first semester at the University of Cincinnati, and Johnson didn’t own his own equipment until the following year. It wasn’t serious anyway: they named the group Squirrelbait Youth, in simultaneous emulation and parody of the DC hardcore scene, not to mention the local bands who were aping the anti-authoritarian rage with all the suburban naïveté they could muster. “Our first song was ‘Tylenol Scare,’ right after the Tylenol thing. And ‘That Badge Means You Suck,’ things like that,” Johnson told the
Pope
. Most of the energy put into Squirrelbait Youth was in concept — it was more of an inside joke between Johnson and Grubbs, mocking the local punk scene. Besides, Grubbs was in a more serious band at the time, a new-wave group called the Happy Cadavers. They had just self-released their debut 7”,
With Illustrations
. “Grubbs was not taking [Squirrelbait Youth] seriously at all and not putting any time into it,” said Johnson. But the Happy Cadavers soon dissolved, and Johnson pressed Grubbs into putting more stock into their venture. “We dropped the ‘Youth,’ and I
bought a bass.” It was impossible to be more serious, though, when their drummer could only practice on spring break and winter and summer vacation. They needed to find a replacement.

* * *

By late 1982 the Languid and Flaccid had already been around for more than a year, and Walford, McMahan, and Oldham were growing up and growing restless. They wanted to make music that was louder, faster, more aggressive. So they started a second band which they dubbed Maurice. Rat, who had become utterly enamored with the Languid and Flaccid, saw an opportunity to ingratiate himself into the new act. “I just kind of pushed my way in. They didn’t
need
[a frontman], I just insisted they did. I was like, ‘Man, I’m doing it.’”

If their intent was to create a more aggressive band, then the addition of Rat was a coup. “My level of rage was so much higher than theirs, it must have seemed comical. Just like their lack of rage sometimes seemed comical to me,” Garrison recalled. “Back then I didn’t realize that the angst or the fury I had, it definitely wasn’t teen angst. I was way beyond that.”

Indeed, Rat’s background could not have been more different from that of his bandmates. Walford, McMahan, and Oldham all grew up on Louisville’s East End, a middle-class and upper-middle-class part
of town filled with tree-lined streets and well-kept lawns. As evidenced by the boys’ enrollment in the Brown School, their parents viewed their children’s potential as unlimited. They encouraged their kids to learn music, literature, and art. None of this described Rat’s childhood. Louisville’s South End was a more working-class, blue-collar part of town — and Rat lived south of
there
, in Pleasure Ridge Park, twenty miles beyond what was then the city limits. His father was an ex-marine who worked at the local ironworks. “I come from a family where if you didn’t have a dangerous job and you didn’t bust your ass, then you were a pussy.” The danger of daily life was no exaggeration — Garrison’s father, like his grandfather, died on the job. Garrison launched himself out of his home and out of his neighborhood like a juggernaut, plowing his way into the Louisville punk scene. He landed in Maurice, where his shrieking caterwaul both compelled and alienated audiences — and his bandmates. Oldham left the band soon after Rat joined. He was replaced on bass by a kid named Mike Bucayu.