Slint's Spiderland (9 page)

And the attention to detail, with Walford’s input, got still smaller — down to the way Pajo and McMahan’s picks hit their strings. One facet of
Spiderland
’s legacy is the legion of bands born in the mid 1990s who insisted on playing their clean-toned guitars with all downstrokes, influenced by the tension created by the guitar strums of “Don, Aman” and the hypnotic grace of “For Dinner . . .” All the more fascinating,
therefore, to learn that Slint carefully considered this level of minutia — and that they chose a more subtle tactic. “Britt liked to up-pick,” Pajo explained. “If you were playing a Ramones riff, for instance, most people would down-pick it. But Britt would always up-pick everything, which emphasized the higher strings.” Inspired by Walford’s manner, Pajo and McMahan would play the same guitar part but McMahan would up-pick while Pajo down-picked, making for a fuller sound.

How the guitar player literally
plays his guitar
is usually an individual, unspoken choice in rock bands, but in Slint this was the kind of decision made as a unified entity. Slint had enveloped themselves, utterly, in their process, savoring the many small pleasures of refining every element of each song. Often when preparing for the studio a band will write dozens of songs and then whittle them down to the ten or twelve best for a proper album. This was not the case for Slint. Aside from “Pam” (which they did record during the
Spiderland
sessions), Slint was not working on anything other than what wound up on the final product. When you consider that “Don, Aman” and “For Dinner . . .” were not written until just before they hit the studio, the painstaking intensity of Slint’s practices from May to September 1990 is all the more mind-boggling. For four months, five days a week, eight hours a day, Slint more or less worked on just four songs. Absolutely every facet of
Spiderland
— every off-note, every snare
hit, every whisper and shout, was deliberate. The band had become a machine.

Which was a good thing, because
Spiderland
was recorded and mixed in just four days.

Corey Rusk paid for Slint to record
Spiderland
, but that didn’t mean that the recording budget was luxurious. The band still had to call in a few favors to make the album happen, and they had to be totally focused when it came time to work. They arranged to record at a studio in Chicago called River North, where McMahan had interned. “Brian somehow worked it out so we could record there, even though they didn’t do that kind of stuff,” Pajo said. “They didn’t do rock bands; they were a jingle studio. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of another band recording there.” Unable to afford the studio’s day rates, Slint were only permitted to record at night over two weekends in September. They recorded the basic tracks over the first weekend, then returned the following weekend to mix.

Behind the boards for the session was an engineer named Brian Paulson, a Minneapolis transplant who befriended McMahan and Walford through the
Chicago music scene. Earlier that year he had recorded Bastro’s second and final full-length,
Sing the Troubled Beast
; he was also a friend of Steve Albini, who had turned Paulson onto Slint not long after
Tweez
was recorded — yet another instance of Albini proselytizing on Slint’s behalf.

Albini’s influence over whatever opportunities Slint had cannot be overstated. Going back to his first meeting McMahan in 1985, Albini was the one who first brought Squirrel Bait to Chicago and who put the bug in Gerard Cosloy’s ear at Homestead. When Squirrel Bait disbanded and McMahan joined Slint, Albini became even more of a booster. It seems like more people heard Slint not because they caught a live show but because Albini played them the then unreleased
Tweez
recording. Albini recorded the “Glenn”/“Rhoda” single for free. When McMahan and Walford moved to Chicago he introduced them to many of the major players in that city’s music scene. He arranged for Walford to record with the Breeders — in Scotland, no less! He was so close to Walford that he let him house-sit while Albini went on tour (the tale of which is recounted in the Jesus Lizard song “Mouth Breather”). Albini was Slint’s champion as well as their friend. And yet he did not record
Spiderland
.

Neither Pajo nor Brashear would answer why the band chose to go with Paulson over Albini, each claiming that it was a decision made by Walford and McMahan, both of whom declined to be interviewed
for this book. It’s difficult to say whether they opted for a different engineer for aesthetic or personal reasons or simply due to a scheduling conflict — Albini was engineering the Jesus Lizard’s second album,
Goat
, at the exact same time, literally just a few blocks from River North. Pajo remembers Albini and the Jesus Lizard guys dropping in to the studio to see how the session was going. “I remember feeling like Steve was kind of bummed that we didn’t have him doing the record. He was the biggest Slint fan on the planet, and he did a lot for us. And then we went with somebody else.”

Not that Paulson was a slouch. In fact he was an extremely talented engineer in his own right, as the final product clearly attests. Albini himself acknowledged to
Alternative Press
that “they certainly made a better record without me.” And Slint’s friendship with Albini seems not to have suffered; he continued to champion the band, penning the
Melody Maker
review of
Spiderland
that is widely credited with launching
Spiderland
’s status as one of the most influential records of the decade.

* * *

Following the path set by “Glenn,” Slint had a clear idea of how they wanted their record to sound. Citing the band’s growing affinity for old folk and delta blues of the 1930s and 1940s, Pajo said the band wanted to capture a similarly unaffected sound. “We had a purist approach to [
Spiderland
]. We wanted it to be
natural — the opposite of
Tweez
.” The blues songs the band had become so fond of were recorded simply — someone put a microphone up and the performer played live, then it was done. There were no multiple takes, no studio trickery, no reverb or compression, no click tracks or punch-ins. All the beauty of a recording came from the performance.

Approaching the
Spiderland
session, Slint had spent the summer putting their songs to tape in a similarly simplified manner. Using Walford’s jam box, they had recorded their practices so that Walford and McMahan could work on lyrics and vocals. They had been recording with the jam box for years, going as far back as the demo Maurice recorded for Glenn Danzig, and they had grown accustomed to the way they sounded via those recordings. Brashear went so far as to claim that there is a version of “Glenn” recorded on the jam box that he prefers to the Albini-produced version. “We were all really hot on how this jam box recorded stuff, so maybe that had something to do with keeping [
Spiderland
] pretty stripped down. We just liked that unadorned sound so much,” Brashear said.

It was fortunate that the band preferred this aesthetic, because time was not on their side. Had their sound hinged on studio experimentation, the album likely wouldn’t have been completed. Not that they didn’t have ideas, Pajo recounted: “There was a piano in the room that we were thinking of micing up putting bricks on the pedals, then recording the strings that
would resonate in response to the drums. We were still up for trying stuff like we were on
Tweez
, but there was a lack of time.”

The lack of time weighed on everyone, making for an incredibly tense session. Pajo claims that
Spiderland
is only a “snapshot” of where Slint was at that exact moment — that even by that point the band did not consider the songs totally finished. He emphasized that Slint thrived most not in the studio but in the practice space, crafting their songs’ finer points. Speaking to
Alternative Press
, McMahan also downplayed the act of recording in regard to Slint’s existence as a band: “We tended to refine stuff a lot, but I don’t think we ever thought, ‘Gosh! We’ve gotta unload this new batch of material so we can move on!’”

Yet it’s impossible to believe that finally putting these songs to tape — in such a compressed period of time — did not create massive anxiety among all four members. Whether the band considered the songs finished or not, this was going to be the permanent document. And it was going to be released internationally on a label that everyone in the underground knew and respected. The members of Slint had made life-altering choices because of these six songs. No more college. No safe career path. Forms filed at the passport office to enable them to tour their new album on the Continent. Here were four twenty-year-olds who had put the rest of their lives on hold so they could be Slint. So they could make
Spiderland
. And they had
two weekends. No wonder rumors spread years later that members of Slint were committed to a mental institution following the recording of
Spiderland
.

Adding to the stress were the dueling factors of the band’s sense of perfectionism and their seemingly tenuous understanding of exactly how McMahan and Walford’s vocals would work. Since the band did not own a PA, they never rehearsed vocals; and the vocal parts they did have were too difficult for McMahan to sing while playing his often elaborate guitar parts during live shows. Going into the studio, neither Brashear nor Pajo had a firm idea of what McMahan and Walford had planned.

That’s not to say there
weren’t
plans, however. McMahan and Walford had a vision for how their words would sync up with the music. The two would privately rehearse using practice recordings and a four-track. Although they would share some of these demo recordings with Pajo and Brashear for their feedback, the lyrics and vocal performances were largely a private collaboration between the two, and were still a work in progress when they entered the studio.

In an environment where the band couldn’t afford to dwell for too long on any one song, this complicated matters, as Pajo described: “We were changing the songs even in the studio. I remember Brian kept changing the lyrics for ‘Good Morning, Captain,’ and the whole arrangement would have to shift in response to his lyrics. He would say a couple of lines and then we’d do a guitar
break and then he’d say some more. So if he changed the words — or if he added or took away a verse — we’d have to change how many times we did a section.”

Other frustrations arose, adding to the general sense of anxiety. Brashear, known among the band as a very business-minded, hyper-responsible guy, became agitated by the painstaking perfectionism of his friends. His eyes were constantly on the clock. “There was a lot of time spent tuning drums and tuning guitars . . . I remember Britt, right when we got there, decided he wanted to get all new cymbals. So on the studio time we had to go to some music store and wait for him. I’m like, ‘Corey’s paying this bill, and you’re down here picking up cymbals?!’ At the end of the day it turned out to be a good record, so who am I to say he shouldn’t have? [But] back then I thought, ‘God, I can’t believe he’s doing this.’”

Whatever time was eaten up by prepping and tuning and massaging the vocals was made up for by the band’s sheer musical prowess. The months of constant practice had turned Slint into a machine. They recorded everything live — Pajo says he may have done one overdub on the whole record — and in very few takes. “I’m sure some of the stuff on the album is the first take,” Brashear told me. Pajo agreed, citing again the “documentarian approach” of the old blues records the band were into at the time. “If it sounded right enough, if there wasn’t a major mistake, we moved on to the next song.”

Once again the disconnect between how Slint functioned leading up to the session and how they functioned in the studio makes itself apparent. After spending months laboring over the most minute details, the brevity of the session seemed to transform their mindset. How a band could go from spending an entire practice day thinking about how their guitarists pick their strings to accepting a take that is “right enough” seems mystifying. When I phrased this schism to Pajo during our interview, he laughed as if he’d never considered it this way before, offering only that “we weren’t thinking straight.” Given the time constraints, thinking straight was likely not an option.

Further discombobulation came in the form of two new songs Walford and McMahan unveiled at the last minute — a serene instrumental called “For Dinner . . .” and a drumless story-song written by Walford called “Don, Aman.” They’d practiced the former at least a few times prior to entering the studio, but Pajo learned “Don” literally right before they recorded. It was Walford’s brainchild: he wrote the lyrics and music and spoke the lead vocal part. Brashear recalls that “Don” was the most time-consuming of the songs they laid down that weekend, especially because of a small detail at the end, where Walford wanted a distorted guitar to briefly fade back in after the song was over.

Over the course of my interviews with them, both Pajo and Brashear took pains to emphasize that McMahan and Walford were responsible for the lion’s
share of the material on
Spiderland
— drums, bass, guitars, lyrics, and vocals. Pajo even went so far as to say that McMahan and Walford “
are
Slint.” It’s not unusual for one or two band members to guide the sound and direction of a band, but hearing stories of Slint’s time in the studio brings to light how much of a grasp McMahan and Walford had on the big picture, above and beyond Pajo and Brashear’s understanding. Slint practices so intensely for months, shaping all four members into a unified entity with a finger on every nuance, entering the studio only to have Walford pull out a totally new song that seemed to spring whole cloth from his mind; to have McMahan experiment with the arrangement of “Good Morning, Captain” to suit lyrics he had barely shared prior to recording; and, in the case of “Washer,” to have McMahan introduce a totally new element that had never been done in a Slint song before — singing. McMahan and Walford seemed to possess an ambition for the album that their bandmates had only glimpsed prior to entering the studio.