Slint's Spiderland (7 page)

Slint returned to Louisville in the fall of 1987 with a finished album, but the recording experience created a fissure within the band. Buckler left the
Tweez
sessions incredibly deflated by its outcome. “[Albini] had a kind of sonic ideology he applied to all the groups he produced, which I don’t think was meant for Slint,” he told
Alternative Press
. “He would produce bands to sound raw and abrasive; I wanted Slint to sound warm and delicate.” Pajo noted to me that, though all four bandmates went into the studio eager to work with Albini, Buckler grew more and more frustrated as the session progressed. “All [the studio experimentation] was done after the basic tracks were recorded, so Ethan didn’t envision the record sounding like that. He wasn’t into the end product at all . . . We wanted the record to sound like you’d hit the loudness button on your stereo, which scoops out all the mids — all low end and high end, no midrange — and he was really mad
about that. He thought it sounded really false . . . He thought it made a joke or a novelty of the songs; he liked the songs the way they were.” Angered by
Tweez
’s outcome, Buckler left the group.

The band found Buckler’s replacement in the summer of the following year, when Todd Brashear returned home from Indiana University in nearby Bloomington. Still good friends following Solution Unknown’s breakup, Pajo had given Brashear a copy of
Tweez
soon after it was recorded. Unlike Buckler, Brashear was instantly on the same page as Pajo and the rest of Slint. “I liked it; I thought it sounded unique . . . The Albini influence was pretty obvious, [but] there was still a lot of cool musical stuff going on. That’s what drew me to it.”

Brashear soon developed stronger musical and personal relationships with all three guys. His friendship with McMahan and Walford grew as they visited him at his job at a local video store, hanging out for hours watching and talking movies.

Slint spent the summer getting comfortable with Brashear, teaching him the
Tweez
material as well as a couple of new songs, which they named for Brashear’s parents, Pam and Glenn. “I remember the first show I played with the band,” Brashear told me. “My manager from the video store came. I remember warning him, ‘this is going to be short.’ I don’t remember who decided, maybe Britt, that we only knew two songs really well. So we got on stage, played those two songs,
then walked off the stage. The people who booked the show were really upset with us.”

It was an indicator of an evolving sense of perfectionism within the band. By the fall of 1988, as all four members set off for college, Slint had entered a new era. The dynamic of the group was about to change.

* * *

When McMahan joined Slint a year earlier, the band’s sound was driven by the songwriting partnership of Pajo and Walford, who by that point had been playing together for three years. Pajo, Walford, and Buckler had been writing songs for a good six months before McMahan entered the equation in the winter of ’86–’87, and they were in the studio within six months of him joining. Vocals aside, a number of the songs on
Tweez
were more or less written before McMahan had a chance to exert much of his own influence.

By the fall of 1988 Slint’s makeup was totally different. As college beckoned, the quartet was ostensibly reduced to a duo. Brashear returned to Bloomington for his sophomore year; Pajo, who had gotten his GED, also moved to Indiana to attend the University of Evansville. That left childhood friends Walford and McMahan, who together moved to Evanston, just outside of Chicago, where they enrolled at Northwestern University. Sharing a dorm room, the two began sketching out the songs that would make up most of
Spiderland
.

Living on their own, away from hometown distractions and surrounded by academia, McMahan and Walford’s sensibility began to evolve away from tweezer fetishes, toward something more highfalutin. “We were just getting out in the world — and we all went to relatively stodgy, conservative colleges,” McMahan told
Alternative Press
. “It was this whole rude awakening period that gave rise to
Spiderland
. We were becoming adults; we were geeking out on mythology and the idea of archetypes.”

For the fall of ’88 and spring of ’89, McMahan and Walford (by now an accomplished guitarist as well as drummer) hashed out the skeletons of songs that would appear on
Spiderland
. These new songs were longer and more complex than before. The instrumentation was also more skeletal, perhaps due to the lack of other players piling on their own ideas. McMahan had come a long way since Squirrel Bait’s “Hammering So Hard.” He was a fan of players like Neil Young and Leonard Cohen — songwriters whose music managed to exude emotion without very many chords or notes. It was a totally different approach compared with Pajo and Walford’s process in Maurice, which was technically difficult and densely packed. Pajo described the partnership that bloomed between McMahan and Walford: “Both Britt and Brian had such strong opinions and ideas about music. Brian was very detail-oriented; a very critical listener. Britt and I thought more alike. If Britt or I had an idea, we usually settled on that idea. Brian took more
convincing. He and Britt would trade ideas back and forth before finally coming up with a solution.”

* * *

That year the band would get together only sporadically, usually during winter or spring breaks. During that time they squeezed in a couple of shows — one in Bloomington, arranged by Brashear, and another in Chicago in the spring of 1989. The latter was organized by McMahan and Walford, who were folding themselves into the Chicago scene during their time at Northwestern. Their old friends Clark Johnson and David Grubbs were fellow students (Grubbs had transferred there for grad school); the two had reunited in a new band, Bastro, along with a drummer named John McEntire. Also in Walford and McMahan’s circle of friends was Steve Albini, Nathan Kaatrud and Eddie Roeser of Urge Overkill, recent Austin transplant David Yow — late of Scratch Acid, now forming a new band called the Jesus Lizard — and Touch and Go label head Corey Rusk.

All of these friends were boosters for Slint. Albini would play
Tweez
for anyone who’d listen, and Bastro and Urge Overkill often shared bills with the band. Perhaps no one showed more tangible support for the band at the time than another friend of McMahan and Walford’s named Jennifer Hartman. After
Tweez
languished unreleased for more than a year, she fronted
the money for the band to press 500 copies of the album on vinyl. With an official release finally in the pipeline, the band planned its first and only real tour, to coincide with their upcoming summer break.

* * *

Prior to the tour Slint had a sudden opportunity to enter the studio once more — the result of a quickly assembled session organized by Albini. According to Brashear, Albini had studio time left over from a completed session, so he invited Slint up to keep the paid-for studio from going to waste. The band had a dearth of new, finished material at that point, so they opted to record a reworked, longer version of
Tweez
closer “Rhoda” and one of their two new songs, “Glenn.”

Clearly the band had some affinity for “Rhoda,” feeling it worthy of a second recording. In the scope of their discography the song stands apart as a unique entity — not as heavy or as juvenile as the other
Tweez
material, not as brooding or epic as anything on
Spiderland
. Knowing that it was the last song they’d written before recording
Tweez
, “Rhoda” feels in a way like the path not taken. Slint had one other song written at this time, “Pam,” which is sonically similar to “Rhoda.” For whatever reason, they opted to record “Glenn” instead, and the result is a bolder statement of intent for the direction the band was taking. Although
the single wasn’t released until 1994, well after Slint was no more, it’s important to understand “Glenn” in context of the trajectory Slint were on in 1988–89. “Glenn” was not a posthumous afterthought — it was the creative breakthrough.

From the first notes softly bubbling out of Brashear’s bass, “Glenn” quietly announces itself as a distinct animal from
Tweez
. For the first time Slint display a kind of confidence — a
patience
— in their playing. Brashear’s bass plays unaccompanied for the first twenty-five seconds of the six-minute mini-epic — no other instruments, no incidental voices or clearing of throats, no sound effects, no nervous energy whatsoever. When Walford’s drums come in — one of the best-sounding drums Albini has ever recorded, by the way — one senses a level of discipline among the quartet that is totally absent from their debut.

In other words, it is immediately clear that Slint, one year later, had become more sophisticated players. But it wasn’t just them: Albini, too, seems to have gained confidence in the studio. By now he’d done a few more albums by bands other than his own — Pixies’
Surfer Rosa
, Urge Overkill’s
Jesus Urge Superstar
, and Pussy Galore’s
Dial M for Motherfucker
, among others. He had likely gained the experience of working with other bands who may or may not have had their own strong opinions on their own aesthetics. In
Fool the World: An Oral History of a Band called Pixies
, Albini talks in retrospect about his attitude toward recording
Surfer
Rosa
, an album which features some of the same studio tricks used on
Tweez
, recorded just a couple months prior, such as break-room banter recorded on the sly. Albini felt that he “indulged in a selfish part of [his] personality” in the recording of
Surfer Rosa
and that he “warped” the Pixies’ songs in a misguided attempt to suit his own tastes rather than the band’s.
¹
The statement could possibly apply to his other work from this period, including
Tweez
, and if so would certainly lend credence to Buckler’s criticisms of the experience.

All signs indicate that, for
Tweez
, Slint did not have strong opinions about how their record should ultimately sound. Their guitars took on a tone that could be dropped directly into a Big Black or Rapeman album. They wanted vocals on their tracks but didn’t write lyrics until just before they were in the studio. Albini recorded crashing utensils and stray conversations to
add density to many of the songs and convinced the band to go along with it. Whether it was a willing collaboration or a scam — it doesn’t matter which — Albini may as well have been the fifth member of Slint for their first record. Not so for “Glenn.”

Did Albini grow as a recording engineer? Did Slint develop a more firm idea of their own sonic aesthetic? Likely the answer is yes to both questions. Whatever the case, Albini seems to have gotten totally out of the way of the song itself, concerning himself more so with making each component sound perfect. He succeeds, utterly.

How much of “Glenn”’s dramatic progression away from the sound of
Tweez
was due to Slint’s progression as songwriters, now with greater influence from McMahan, and how much was due to the production? You could ask this question not just of “Glenn” but of
Spiderland
as well. Clearly there
is
a progression in the nature of the songs the band wrote; but it’s an interesting exercise to listen to bootlegs from this era, where the band shifts from
Tweez
material to “Glenn” and early versions of
Spiderland
tracks and back again. The new songs are longer and more dynamic, but they aren’t so starkly distinct. Listening to Slint move from “Ron” to “Nosferatu Man” in the live setting feels natural — not at all the harsh juxtaposition that would come from playing the album versions in succession.

This gives some credence to Buckler’s complaint that
Tweez
did not come out right — it didn’t come
out “like Slint.” Was Slint, all along, supposed to sound cool, unadorned, starkly produced? Should
Tweez
’s quiet moments have been allowed to be, simply, quiet? No voices, no crashing sounds, not even the minimal effects coloring Pajo and McMahan’s guitar tones? Was
Tweez
supposed to sound like “Glenn”?

It’s difficult but not impossible to imagine. “Glenn” possesses at least a few ingredients that are absent from
Tweez
but would later appear in
Spiderland
. Most obviously it is a long song, given the time to unfold, and it is the band’s first instance of employing the loud/quiet dynamic in the space of one track. Yet there are also a couple of elements that resemble
Tweez
. Most obvious, the metal — that thick, palm-muted chord that crashes into the middle of the song. It begs you to curl your lip, raise your devil horns, and bang your head. It’s also a simple song, more or less built around one bassline and drum pattern. Like many of the songs on
Tweez
, “Glenn” follows a single pattern through an almost linear song structure until it’s worn itself out. The difference here is that the band displays the patience to allow that process to stretch out over six minutes instead of jumping in and out in two.

This is how “Glenn” can be viewed as a bridge between
Tweez
and
Spiderland
. On
Tweez
most songs were over just after they’d begun, as if they were just exercises or experiments. Think of “Ron” — an intro, a verse, an outro. It’s a minimal form of songwriting (and the song certainly didn’t need more). With “Glenn,”
Slint hit upon another, more effective, form of minimal
ism
, which they’d employ to dramatic effect on
Spiderland
in songs like “Don, Aman” and “Washer.”

Listen to “Glenn” with an ear to two elements: the relentless repetition of the rhythm section and the illusion of song structure created by McMahan and Pajo’s changing guitar parts. Start with Brashear’s bass: the song begins with his harmonic-laden intro, which then morphs into a slinky arpeggio which Brashear more or less repeats for the duration of the song, excepting a brief reprise of that harmonic riff in the middle and a final change at the end signaling the song’s conclusion. Next, isolate Walford’s drums: they’re like a locomotive that will not be stopped. Walford plays roughly the same insistent beat for the
entire
song, adding cymbal crashes during the heavier moments but otherwise keeping to the same pattern at all times.