Earlier this year we posted Will Eno’s feature story on Pavement’s return to the stage.

Today, with Pavement in the midst of a four show run in New York City’s Central Park, we look back to June 2003 and our feature story on Steve Malkmus.

Photo by Laura Crosta

It’s a typical day in New York City, and just blocks away from Ground Zero the streets are alive with the sounds of the city. Inside the offices of Matador Records, Stephen Malkmus glances idly around the lobby and makes sarcastic comments about his records label’s staff before we head on out for an afternoon drink. I want beer. Malkmus wants tea. He wins. We venture outside onto the crowded sidewalk and head towards the Mercer Kitchen on Prince Street. On the way, we talk about Phish, of all things, and I find this to be infinitely ironic. The first time I heard of Pavement was when Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio named Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain one of his favorite albums of the year. The first Pavement article I read in a magazine began by mentioning Anastasio’s admiration. And here I am, more than half a decade later, fielding questions from Malkmus about what Phish is up to these days. I suggest that with Round Room Phish finally made the Pavement album they’ve always dreamed of. It’s got that “unfinished but charming” feel. Malkmus laughs and leads the way into the Mercer Kitchen. “I have a tiny connection with them,” he admits, “through their recording engineer Bryce Goggin.” It is generally assumed Phish hired Goggin after hearing his work on Pavement albums. Malkmus nods: “That’s what people have said.”

The Mercer Kitchen is known for celebrity sightings. Forgetting I’m with Stephen Malkmus ( “of Pavement fame” ), I wonder for a moment if we’ll see any celebrities. Malkmus meanwhile makes himself comfortable on one of the couches. His eyelids seem heavy, his mind light. As we wait for tea, he alternates between witty commentary and nearly falling asleep. He also laughs a lot, mostly at his own expense. When I tell him that nobody will ever sound quite like Pavement, he says, “Well that’s true – it’s be hard to sing that bad.” He doesn’t even try for a punch-line delivery; he cracks mid-sentence. But it is a tired laugh. It’s as though he’s trying lazily to amuse himself just enough to stay awake. Today is his fourth straight day of interviews and he doesn’t pretend to like doing them. In fact, earlier this morning someone at the label warned me that he wasn’t in the greatest mood. “But,” they said, “he promised to be nice to the Relix guy.”

As the leader of Pavement, Malkmus launched an accidental revolution and redefined indie rock during the same period that Phish redefined jam rock. Leaders of the so-called lo-fi movement, Pavement recorded homecooked albums with a backyard aesthetic and a shoebox ideal. Sure, many punk rock and garage bands recorded shitty sounding albums before, but Pavement’s not only sounded bad – they also sounded great.

“It was pretty necessary,” maintains Malkmus, who explains that budget restraints prevented the band from spending enough time in the studio to polish all the tracks. "Although, there was a time when there was this bombastic ‘80s guitar and drum sound that was pretty disgusting. You’ll see it popping up on most major label recordings from that time, the Dead included. There was reverb on the snare, and echo… all these weird things. So it was like ‘Lets try to get this stripped down and sounding completely raw.’ I think we were kind of going for that, but on the other hand we didn’t really have a choice. It was making a virtue out of necessity.

It worked. Pavement’s 1992 debut, Slanted and Enchanted, was one of the more important albums of the decade. Pavement made it cool to miss notes. They apparently didn’t care. Had Pavement tried, they might have become rock stars. Instead, they became rock legends. They made it hip to struggle to get through songs in front of a paying audience, who loved to watch the struggle.

Listen: Pavement was a slacker band. They didn’t rehearse. They were sloppy. They were lo-fi, low-tech, nil-maintenance, nix-glitz. The band members lived in different parts of the country and learned songs by mail. They didn’t pull punches; they lazily rolled with them. Professionalism was too much of a bother. “We didn’t get a manager or go on a major label and we made life a little hard for us that way,” says Malkmus. “But we were trying to live like an indie band.”

Watching a Pavement show was like sitting in on a band rehearsal. Malkmus would insist on restarting songs, after first pointing out who made what mistake. He would sneer, leer, shrug and ultimately laugh as the band nearly fell apart in front of all those people. And Pavement attained a decent level of success with this act; except that it wasn’t an act. Nor was it even what they themselves wanted, necessarily.

“We were getting a little dragged down by living in different places, and the sort of complacency of our roles and all the touring. There were some things that were causing it to not feel fresh, but there was a lot of fresh stuff about it too,” says Malkmus. “Of course I was feeling like…yeah, I thought I could do something new, with new people. I was really excited to do that. I was ready.”

When Malkmus disbanded Pavement in 2000, he made no fanfare of it. It was just time to move on, that’s all. I probe further into Pavement’s breakup. Surprisingly, Malkmus doesn’t mind. Did he feel like he was dragging the weight of others?

“Not so much,” he says sincerely. “It was pretty similar all the way through. In fact there was more contribution towards the end actually, but there was never the full classic R.E.M., U2, everyone sharing style. It was the pretty classic having a singer/songwriter guy with everyone adding their parts. Probably not too different from Phish in that way.”

When Pavement did officially breakup, there was no official press release, no notice, nothing. In the tradition of the band, it happened almost without comment. Malkmus claims responsibility: “You’ll have to ask the other guys, but I’m not sure they would’ve [disbanded]. That being said, obviously they wouldn’t have wanted to keep doing it if I didn’t want to do it anymore. Or, if one of them didn’t want to do it, we probably wouldn’t have done it under the name of Pavement either. Maybe I was just the first one to crack.”

For Malkmus, cracking mean doing what he always did, sans Pavement. He put some songs together, bought some studio time in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, and invited some local musician friends to join him. No pressure. No commitment. Just jamming and playing music. The musicians he recruited were bassist Joanna Bolme, drummer Jon Moen and keyboardist/guitarist Mike Clark. All three were in other bands “that they got less interested in once we did this,” says Malkmus. “And that’s good – for me.”

The first album with this line-up was released in 2001 as his eponymous solo debut. No Jicks. At the time, Malkmus says, “that was a fair assessment of what was going on, on that record. They were people I hired to play on the record, with no strings attached… and then it started sounding good, and then we had a band.”

Pig Lib, released this past March, belongs as much to The Jicks as it does to Stephen Malkmus. While the songs sound like earlier work with Pavement, The Jicks have adopted these tunes. They own them. The band slinks through the changes, the jams, and the structures with ease. They’re mobile. They’re free to roam, without constantly having to take a head count.

“It’s Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks. We’ve got our Neil Young and Crazy Horse line-up,” quips Malkmus, “and I think that’s also true and a good reflection of what you’ll hear on [ Pig Lib ]. Me and them.”

His new band, like his old band, is a jamband, although no one has ever dared called them that. His awareness of the scene is shaky at best, and he’s unclear as to whether “Bonnaroo” is a person or a band. He asks what Gov’t Mule sounds like, before concluding that Lynyrd Skynyrd is probably better anyway. But when I slip him a Disco Biscuits show, he seems enthused.

“When I was in college in the ‘80s, there was a jamband world and a bunch of bands who thrived – and I would almost say preyed – on college students that were Dead fans. New Potato Caboose. Many of them are named after Dead songs. There’s this band Calobo, and there are the lighter ones like String Cheese [Incident] and Leftover [Salmon] – the bands that are named after foods. I don’t really go to see many of those groups, but my appreciation of ‘jamband’ might be a little more on the wilder side, like the improv side of the Dead. The Dead I really liked are the first three albums, and up to ‘72 of the live tapes that I heard. Those are my favorite Dead moments… I would go see them in the ‘80s and have a good time, but to me those don’t hold up as much musically… but I still like the space moments. I like the pretty songs. I also like some of the later albums like American Beauty, some of the more refined albums,” he says, then pauses, and adds, “We’re a little darker, a little harder than maybe what has carried jambands into the money. We’re on a little more of the dangerous level. But we definitely have that – there are moments when you can smoke a bowl or whatever, for want of a better term, and go ‘Yeah! It gets trippy.”

No doubt, The Jicks have all the best qualities of a true jamband. They jam out on “four or five songs” per set, and they feel free to take risks, to switch up things on a nightly basis. They even allow audience taping, although Malkmus cops that this is more a result of his slacker politic than company policy.

“They ask me and I’m always like ‘Go ahead and do what you will.’ We do have different concerts every night. Most band would say that, but maybe it would be the between song banter more than the actual shows.”

Playing live, The Jicks balance between the rehearsed professionalism that Malkmus has longed for and the spontaneous, laid-back attitude that made Pavement gigs work, despite their imprecision. Covers, both obscure and well-known, are thrown down last minute, just for fun. “Although, we never really rehearse [covers],” admits Malkmus “We’re probably a little more on the ragged edge in terms of our covers – on the ‘new Phish’ versus the ‘old Phish’ edge. Not so tight,” he laughs.

Before my meeting with Malkmus, I listened to Pig Lib nonstop for a week. I confess to him that I wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I do – as it turns out, I love it. It’s everything a Pavement album was, and then some. Malkmus is grateful and concurs: “I think it’s up there too.”

But will hardcore Pavement fans hold a grudge? “Probably,” he says seriously, “but we can’t concern ourselves with that too much. I’m happy that people are still interested [in Pavement], and I want them to be. If they weren’t, I probably wouldn’t be getting as much attention for this other band. While the jams and the music itself might be just as strong, people wouldn’t be hearing about it.”

He muses some more about whether or not some Pavement fans will give The Jicks a fair shake, and then he shrugs it off with his ever-present sleepy grin. “What can you do, you know? Just be happy about what you did and if your interior life is good, all this will just wash off you anyway.”

And on this note, we finish our tea at the Mercer. As we get up to leave, our bill is paid for by someone from Matador Records, who has been sitting all this time in a far-off corner. Malkmus shoots him a knowing glance, but then indulges the photographer who insists on shooting a few more rolls. Malkmus hates it, I’m sure, but he smiles obligingly. After all, he promised to be nice to the Relix guy.