Slint's Spiderland (5 page)

It came as no surprise to McMahan, who’d seen the writing on the wall. But Daughtrey and Searcy were blindsided, according to Johnson. “Ben and Peter were like, ‘I can feel it. I can taste the top now. We’re going all the way. We’re going to get signed to a major
label really soon, it’s going to be great.’ It came as quite a shock to them.”

There was no final show.
Skag Heaven
, released on Homestead later that year, was dead on arrival.

* * *

It turned out to be a tough summer for the Louisville scene.

Walford and Pajo, firmly in control of Maurice’s musical direction, were moving down stranger and stranger avenues. As Pajo tells the story, “I started getting into this mindset that the weirder it was the better it was. We’d come up with a part that was in some totally bizarre time signature that was so difficult we couldn’t even play it. I think I probably should have started noticing [Rat and Mike’s displeasure], but we were so lost in our own world.” The farther down those avenues Walford and Pajo went, the less Rat’s rage-fueled, religious-themed lyrics — never mind his entire stage persona — seemed to fit. “Once Dave shows up, everything is different,” Garrison explained. “You could just see the lights in Britt’s head go off . . . They were so ahead of the pack that nobody even knew what it was. Some of the Maurice songs are very definitely Slint songs. They were so strange I couldn’t do anything with them.”

By the time of the Samhain shows, the distinction between Walford and Pajo and Bucayu and Garrison
was clear to anyone who saw the band play. “[On stage, Bucayu and I] are hoping something happens, that the place burns down, and [Walford and Pajo] are just weird, freaking out on their instruments. [Maurice was] two extroverted people who want to kick you in the balls and two guys who are like, ‘just leave me alone, I’m playing.’” Reaction from the audience and from other bands made it clear to Garrison that Walford and Pajo were onto something — and that he was not a good fit for it. “Nobody from that era who saw those two knew what to do. The guys from the Descendents were flabbergasted. Scratch Acid? Flabbergasted. Everybody from the generation before us who would see those guys play couldn’t believe it. Period. Shocked. Jaws open. Trust me. Like, ‘I’m not really into the other two guys, but my god,
you two
!’ It was hard to deal with, but what can you do?”

One thing you can do is start another band, which is exactly what Bucayu did. Though he didn’t quit Maurice, he did start a new group in which he was the primary songwriter. They were called Solution Unknown, and their ambition seemed to be the antithesis of Maurice — that is, they were purely focused on having fun and making the crowd go crazy. Perhaps as a sign that the split in Maurice was purely along musical lines and not based on a personal schism, Bucayu enlisted Pajo to play drums. The band was filled out with friends Kent Chapelle on bass and Eric Schmidt on vocals. It was a fairly straightforward hardcore
band, influenced by the likes of Minor Threat, the Faith, Black Flag, and the Circle Jerks.

The band formed in late February of 1986, largely on a dare. Before their first practice, they’d booked a show for March 15 at a local pizzeria, Charlie’s. They gave themselves two weeks to write a set’s worth of material. Like Squirrelbait Youth four years earlier, the band had begun as a lark, almost as a parody of punk. And like Squirrelbait Youth, things got serious quickly. Back from Maurice’s tour with Samhain, Pajo and Bucayu gave Solution Unknown its next challenge: make a recording. Maurice by now had been together for two years, with no recordings to show for it other than a demo recorded on Walford’s jam box. Yet within two months of existence, Solution Unknown were already in the studio. They self-released the eight-song
Taken for Granted
7” a few months later. The EP made the rounds in punk rock circles, garnering praise in
Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll
and airplay on John Peel’s radio show in the UK.

Solution Unknown played out frequently, unlike Maurice, and they quickly gained a reputation around town for their lively performances. Though Garrison was not in the band, the way audiences reacted to Solution Unknown threw into relief his own dissatisfaction with Maurice. “[Solution Unknown] was a side project for Dave, but not for Mike. For Mike it was his band. He wanted to do a band that would cause large crowds to go apeshit . . . And that’s not what Pajo
and Britt had in their heads. They were not interested in causing a riot where 800 kids would wreck a joint. That’s just not what they wanted. They wanted to make fucked-up music.”

Pajo and Walford were growing out of metal, and hence out of the sound of their own band. “Britt and I started writing these songs that had clean guitar sounds and were more like Minutemen and Meat Puppets–influenced, and Rat wasn’t sure how to sing over it. He was just like, ‘this is jazz or something.’ I think that’s when he quit the band. He just didn’t know what he could do for that.” Pajo had it about right. Garrison put it to me even more explicitly: “I mean, goddamn it,
I don’t even like music
, dude! I don’t even really like music that much, you know what I mean? To me, it’s like being on a Viking ship. I have come to fucking humiliate you with our band. We’re fucking shit up. And that’s just not what they were doing. They were into music, for real. And that was very
huh?
to me. I was like, ‘What? I didn’t know we were actually trying to be
musicians
, because I’m out! I can’t sing a lick!’”

Things came to a head when Pajo and Walford had worked out a new song and brought it to practice in the summer of 1986. It was completely free of distortion; it wasn’t even particularly eerie or menacing. Pajo played a complicated arpeggiated riff as Walford drummed in a herky-jerky, Minutemen-like style. The song’s structure was linear, moving from Pajo’s arpeggio to a breezy, jazzy guitar solo to an angular motif in
which the bass and guitar doubled up on a rolling, almost surf-guitar, vamp. Ambitiously, the song even contained a middle section which required bass and guitar to re-tune from drop-D to standard, then back down again for the conclusion. To Rat, it must have seemed baffling: there was absolutely no entry point for vocals. There was no clear verse or chorus section to hook into, and the relaxed, meandering pace and lack of distortion was diametrically opposed to his aggressive vocal style and stage persona. Bucayu and Garrison had finally had enough. They walked, and Maurice was no more.
⁴

Maurice was banished to local-legend status, without a single legit recording to document their celebrated run. Ironically, one song
did
eventually make its way to the masses — that last, cataclysmic track. Walford and Pajo eventually named the song “Pat”; it was the first song their new band would learn, and it appears on that band’s debut,
Tweez
.

Interviewer:
What are the other guys doing now?

Clark Johnson:
Ben and Peter are in a band called Fancy Pants, kind of like Run-DMC with a little bit of Beastie Boys. They do a cover of “Play That Funky Music,” and I think they do the Fat Albert song. Their plan is that they’re going to record real soon, real major label shopping . . . Dave’s in a band that’s looking for a name; they’re working with the name Sweet Husk, but everyone says “Sweet Hüsker Dü,” so they’re not going to use that. Instead they’re going to call it Dulcino, which I think means “little boy” in Spanish or Italian . . . Brian is in a band called Bead in Louisville, with Britt and a guy who was in Maurice [who] can play circles around Eddie Van Halen. They’re really quiet and subtle, but other times they’re really angular, too, so it’s kind of cool.

Bucayu and Garrison’s exit hardly seemed to have slowed Pajo and Walford’s new path. Their new sound was positively alien to where they were coming from — and alien to the rest of the Louisville scene, too. And that’s just what they were going for. “The thing that I always liked about Louisville,” Pajo told
Punk Planet
in 2005, “was that nobody wanted to sound like anybody else. If you came out and it was obvious that you were ripping off the Clash or Minor Threat, nobody paid any attention to you. The bands that had their own sound were the really respected ones.”

Pajo and Walford were certainly achieving that. Soon the duo expanded to a trio when Pajo’s friend Ethan Buckler came into the fold to take the bass. Buckler had already been playing in the local scene, but was growing frustrated with the copycat sounds of so many bands. Speaking to
Alternative Press
, Buckler said he’d “wanted to get away from stuff that sounded like Minor Threat or Dead Kennedys or Black Flag, which we had been playing for a long time, and steer towards more musical, delicate-sounding stuff, like Dinosaur, Sonic Youth, the Meat Puppets, Minutemen — music girls can listen to.” When Pajo heard Buckler voice these frustrations with the scene — identical to what he and Walford felt — he invited his friend to practice. They hit it off and the band that would be Slint was formed. They gave themselves the rather ungainly moniker Small Dirty Tight Tufts of Hair: BEADS. “We practiced a lot,” Buckler told
Alternative Press
.
“We wanted to be the vanguard of some new kind of sound.” Paradoxically, though, Pajo was still moonlighting in a band that wanted nothing to do with the vanguard.

* * *

Despite Maurice’s dissolution, Bucayu and Pajo remained on the same page with Solution Unknown. Like Squirrel Bait a few years earlier, Solution Unknown was evolving from a joke to something more serious. Looking to fill out the band in order to sound fuller, tighter, and better, they chose to bring in a second guitarist — a Ballard High junior named Todd Brashear.

Brashear was a relative newcomer to the scene. He too lived on the East End, not far from Pajo and Bucayu, but he didn’t start going to shows until he was old enough to drive himself. He was a fan of Maurice before he’d ever met anyone in the band; after seeing so many of their shows, he eventually befriended Bucayu and Pajo, which led to their choosing him for Solution Unknown.

He was a welcome addition to the band. Throughout the fall of ’86 and winter of ’87 Solution Unknown played out near constantly, writing prolifically and becoming tighter and tighter. By February of ’87 they were ready to record a full-length. Bucayu knew people in the thriving Washington, DC, scene and wanted Solution Unknown to make a pilgrimage to that punk
mecca to record their album. “We were trying to get Ian MacKaye to produce it, but it never happened,” recalled Brashear. “Mike Bucayu was in with all the Dischord people and he talked to Ian on the phone a lot, but it never panned out.” Instead, they went to Don Zientarra, the producer responsible for so many of their favorite records. That spring Brashear borrowed his uncle’s furniture delivery van and drove the band to DC — braving a freak blizzard to get there — and in the span of a few days they recorded thirteen songs. They named the finished product
Karen
, after a friend of theirs from the local scene — adopting a similar knack for titles as Pajo’s other band was displaying.

It turned out to be their last hurrah. By the fall, Brashear was off to college and Solution Unknown fizzled out.

* * *

All the better for Pajo, whose band with Walford and Buckler was gelling like no other he’d been in. They were succeeding in creating music unlike anything else in town — so unlike anything else that their first show, on November 2, 1986, was not at a club or a house party but the Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Church. On a Sunday. During mass.

Will Oldham and Brian McMahan were both present for the show — McMahan in the audience, Oldham onstage. The trio had flirted with the idea of
having Oldham join the band as either the singer or second guitarist, though he didn’t know how to do either. Instead, he sat onstage in front of Walford’s kick drum, holding it in place. The set was short, just three songs — “Ron,” “Darlene,” and “Charlotte.” Pajo reminisced to me, “It was a weird show to begin with because it was actually part of the service. The theme was rock and roll music, [but] they didn’t realize what they were getting.”

They’d gotten the gig through Buckler; he and his family were regular congregants. “They would have some kind of music — usually classical — to open and close the service; so, one Sunday it ended up being [us],” Buckler explained to
Alternative Press
. “Some of [our music] was very quiet and introverted, so it turned out not to be totally inappropriate. Unitarians are open-minded.”

Aside from their friends who showed up to see them, you could imagine the congregation’s reaction. Pajo described the set: “Our songs were primarily just feedback at that point. And Britt had his huge drums — they were like cannons.” At least one person in the audience liked what he heard; within two months McMahan had joined the band. Pajo did not expect McMahan to be so enthused. “I thought he would hate it because it was like an extension of Maurice. I was surprised that he liked it as much as he did; I was happy that he was even interested in joining the band.”

Now a quartet, the band settled on a new, far more succinct, name: Slint. In an interview with
FILTER
in 2005, Walford explained that it was the name of a pet fish. “I made it up . . . There were a couple of other fish I recommended, but the guys liked Slint. They were just names I came up with depending on what kind of fish it was and what it looked like.” It was a strange name; fitting for a strange band.
¹

One unique thing McMahan brought to the table were connections from his days in Squirrel Bait — specifically, connections to Steve Albini. So when Big Black came down to Louisville for a show in May of ’87, Slint opened. Speaking to
Alternative Press
, Albini recalled their sound at the time: “During their formative period, they had almost this heavy metal undertone. I thought it was interesting, but it also seemed unformed; it seemed incomplete.” In a way, it was. Though their set was comprised of many songs destined for
Tweez
, Pajo recalls that McMahan played an acoustic guitar for the whole show. “Steve hated it. He thought we were a prog rock band. I think it was Brian’s acoustic that threw him off.