Travel Diaries #37 - Pavement
Don't Harness Your Hopes on just one song: old favourite bands, new favourite bands, the heartbreak of expectations and letting go of the crushing weight of nostalgia
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I went to Pavement in Dublin last weekend.
Pavement isn’t a place – it’s a band.
Ticket bought well over a year ago, I don’t know if I’ve ever waited so long for a gig. One of those ones you thought would never happen in your lifetime, I missed seeing them first time around, as they’d already broken up when I first discovered them at the age of 11, though I would come of age when the great bands of old started to reunite and tour again. Bands I’d no right to ever see alive and still breathing: Pixies, Rage Against the Machine, At the Drive-In, Blur, and more. All come back from the grave, the members never died but the bands they formed were ghosts for a while.
Pavement, the latest ones to tick off a dusty old list, and I’m sure you all know by now my feelings about living a life of ticking things off lists.
I first heard them over twenty years ago, on my grandparents’ MTV2 and my brother had a CD or two. Music videos for Cut Your Hair and Shady Lane. Got mad into them in college, they were my favourite band for a while.
They were never the most famous but were amongst the most critically acclaimed. They had some hits. You might have heard one or two of them, the ones that sound like they could be early Weezer. Most people who ask who I’m going to see reply with “never heard of them”, though the odd one has. I make the joke to someone that “In Ireland they’re called Footpath”, though just the once. They’re cult favourites, it’s safe to say – a hardcore fan base.
I try to resist the temptation to go looking up the setlists. There’s no point anyway. They could play anything, or nothing. They’re playing 50 songs on the tour, 25 or 26 in any given night. Some crowds disappointed with nailed-on hits dispensed with for deeper album cuts. The true fans would love them for it. They were always a band of whom I adored half they’re music, and much of the other bored me to tears. I’d skip them. Give me hooks and riffs over the more aimless atonal noodling any day. Maybe I do just prefer the hits.
I just need to know if there’s a chance they’ll play my song.
In the week leading up to the gig I start to prepare. Do my homework. Listen to their whole back catalogue. Forcing myself, at first, I’d been on a run of listening to some other artists and albums for a few weeks, the kind of rinsing that can only be earned through some deeper meaning to the music than just the notes and the chords, times the lyrics, though perhaps some deeper attachment than that.
A live video on Youtube of a set from earlier in the summer, I thought it’d give me a well-rounded flavour of what they’d play, though I didn’t really enjoy it. Give me the albums so. Though like writing a story or an article, once I’d sat down and stopped fighting my own nature I got into the flow of things it became quite effortless.
I even found myself sitting through the ones I used to skip through, the two-minute jams that used to bore me, the atonal warbling that made my younger, less wrinkly, skin crawl. So many great songs, it dawns on me as I’m listening to all five albums back-to-back on the Friday evening drive in the dark across the whole of Ireland that there’s barely a bad song in it. By the time I get to Dublin for the gig I think I’m ready to see them.
I might never listen to them again after this. A token show after, all these years, ticked off the list.
I’m tied to nostalgia and still resolute in my favourites. I try not to get too attached to a setlist, but just saying it to myself I know that I am. I’ve even written a list of the ones I want and it’s half a set. I try to tell myself they could play anything after all, or nothing. That it’ll be good just to see them.
I allow myself just one must-have, one song that they simply have to play for me: In the Mouth a Desert. I’ll let everything else go, detach from all other expectations even as to the quality of the music on the night, though if they don’t play that one (surely they will?!), I might kick up a fuss.
My friend and I grab one beer and head in to wait on the dancefloor. Vicar Street is smaller than I remember it, even though I’ve been here a dozen times or more. We meet another friend in the crowd. More appreciative than me, he’s just happy to be here.
Wait around for twenty minutes and the show begins.
All I want is In the Mouth a Desert. I don’t even care if they play Cut Your Hair or Shady Lane. Or even Gold Soundz at this stage. Be careful what you wish for, though In the Mouth a Desert is my most recent favourite Pavement song.
They open with one I don’t care for. Grave Architecture. It always annoyed me, just one of those downbeat aimless deliveries that made me want to skip it. But it sounds alright. I’m just happy to be here.
I confess, I looked at more than one setlist. If they don’t play it in the first five or six songs they probably won’t play it. They’d better play it. They played it last night.
Stereo next – a hit. It sounds good. With a band like this, everyone has their personal favourites but the hits always go down well, maybe best even. The band are tight. And the crowd are predictably singing every word. I stand with my arms folded and let it all wash over me.
I don’t sing too loudly and refrain from exclaiming the name of any song, as I know I’d get them wrong. I knew all the songs but not the names, and some of the songs I didn’t know. There’s nothing worse than when they waste a setlist spot with one you don’t know. Even worse when everyone else loves it.
Forced to enjoy the music in real time as the songs slip away. Although they wrote some of the best pop-rock songs of the 90’s, their music is chaotic, broken down into individual notes and sequences, so indie that the parts of the song are independent of each other.
It's not even halfway through and it begins to hit me like a slow breakup:
They’re not going to play it.
Embrace the lack of order that I’ve no control over. Watching the band is a treat. They introduce themselves as being from Kentucky, California, these kinds of places, though they could be from anywhere in any town. A humble vibe of Americana filters through in their look, their vibe, in traces of their sound.
Heaven is a place on earth, though it’s probably also a time on earth, specifically America’s west coast in the early 90’s. They’re not exactly part of some surfer or punk rock or grunge scene, though watching now I see clearly the beauty of small-town America, the spaces between the places you’ve heard of. Kind of like their music. Away from the hooks and the riffs and the choruses and the songs you know and love and the words that half the crowd know inside out there’s a joyous chaos, even – or especially – in the atonal noodling I used to skip when I was younger, when they were my so-called favourite band.
They’re not going to play it.
The slow-burning realisation of crushed expectations.
And the music so much clearer for it. Like the shattering disappointment that a loved one deals you every now and then, the sort of reckoning with reality that ultimately makes you see things more clearly for the rest of your days, and you come to be grateful for it. Just not yet.
I know the songs but not the lyrics I’ve sung a million times before, and pick up ones I never knew, even though I later find out he’s shouting ‘Debris Slide’ and not ‘Green Car’. I choose the safer option and stick to the intermittent ‘Ba ba-bada-ba’, burying in to hide in the safety of the crowd roaring it all back.
I wonder how much I should even care about gigs anymore, and the trip to the big city that has to be made to see bands I loved once upon a time.
It dawns on me the thought that had bubbled up as I ploughed my way through repeated listens of every album over the last week, enjoying them all and even finding new gems and old classics revisited, new appreciation for songs I didn’t know or like, new perspectives of things I thought I knew inside out, the awareness of what was missing:
Nostalgia
No nostalgia, no sentiment. I love these songs for their music as much as ever though there’s no memories attached. I have one brief visual flash of sitting for long periods at my bedroom desk in third year of college in the winter darkness, Pavement on repeat, certain favourite songs. A single conversation with a dear old friend, I forgot to check if he’d be here tonight, I haven’t heard from him in years.
Though little else from that time that’s connected to the music. Even Gold Soundz, a song of bottled nostalgia, for so long ‘my favourite song’ (I was even going to call my indie night at a pub in Hanoi ‘Gold Soundz’ but changed it last minute to something more transient and trendier, a decision I instantly regretted when I saw the poster) – I don’t remember why. All I remember are the song titles scrolling in grey pixels on a Tetris background on my old iPod.
I don’t care as much as everyone else here. I can’t even muster up the enthusiasm to shout a cheeky request in between songs. For my song. They wouldn’t listen anyway. They’re not going to play it. Though I start to wonder why it was even my favourite song anyway. It’s just a song, at the end of the day. I listened to it on repeat while I travelled for three months around Japan depressed out of my mind a few years ago. Something that drew me into its gravitational pull. Lyrics about arrested communication and the end of a relationship.
It’s never just the music.
I’m forced to watch and listen.
They are phenomenal. It’s almost surreal. Something so casual and beautiful about it all coming together. Humble American bar band energy, playing some of the most iconic and influential music of the 90’s. Some memories do float to the surface, not personal ones, just the air and atmosphere and the sunshine of that decade, before I ever knew them.
So many songs I think I don’t like until I hear it live. It changes and it changes me. The Hexx is worth the slow dirge build-up for the outrageous peak experience of that solo, the rest of the song before it instantly illuminated into a more holy thing altogether. Date with Ikea might be the most Pavement song ever even though it’s the one that sounds least like them. Unfair goes down a treat, I might listen to it when I get home. The deadpan jazzy bop of Grave Architetcure is actually pretty cool – maybe they’ll play it again.
Ah! – I get why everyone loves Range Life now.
I learn things I never knew about the band from just watching them. Things I couldn’t have gleaned from fact-hunting interviews back in the day. The infectious goofball energy of backup vocalist and percussionist Bob Nastanovich, for one. The way the band move and sway with this beautiful humble but earnest energy.
Things I’d no preconceptions of.
The band embody flux. They’re impossible to pin down, even for the hardcore fans singing every word. They could be greatest band ever. They could play anything. Tonight, or in each song, any note could come out. You listen to their first album of noisy rock and wonder why they didn’t just keep doing that, they could have made a brilliant career out of that sound alone. They took the haunting and tightly controlled ferocity of Pixies and Sonic Youth and blew it open with a touch of endearing humour. And then just went ahead and made different music, defied all expectations of what they should be or should play.
A new way of listening to music. Imagine. Not burdened by the weight of past loves or expectations of the future. No skipping to the next track. Every note heard, for better or worse. And as I watch I become certain that no band encapsulates that attitude better than Pavement. Every day, and every set, free to be whatever they want.
Another confession: I only listened to Wowee Zowee in full for the first time last week. I used to skip over the boring bits. They played a lot of those songs tonight. You get not what want but what you deserve. I quite like it now – it could be my new favourite album.
I’m counting down the songs they’ve left – they do a five song encore. We get Cut Your Hair. No longer a radio-friendly hit, just a great song. We get Gold Soundz. No longer an obsessive favourite. Just a great song. They are beautiful, in real time, no memories or attachments or expectations.
A bitter pill to swallow as it dawns on me during the gig that they’re not playing it.
But maybe a harder pill to swallow when you transcend an old love you thought you could never do without: the slow realisation before acceptance that you don’t even care that you don’t care.
They didn’t play my song. And I don’t care anymore. I listen to In the Mouth a Desert in the car driving to work on a sunny day this week and it hits me that, like the others, I can’t force it to take me back to the time when it was so meaningful to me, because the memories that once existed, every bit as much a burden as the weight of expectations that they’ll play it when you go to see them, that it’ll blow your mind and you’ll reach some state of peak ecstasy that’ll alchemise your college years into the greatest experience of your life right here and now – they don’t exist any more.
Maybe they never did.
It’s no longer my favourite Pavement song. The me who loved it and rinsed it so hard is gone, unrecognisable, and is never coming back. It’s no Trigger Cut. They played that one on the night, as if just for me. New memories formed. All ancient conceptions of the song as an angry punk rocker are difficult for me to dig up from my college days. As I blast it out on that sunny drive to work all I see now is the breezy float of their cute sunglasses-wearing keyboard player in sunglasses joyously singing the refrain of the chorus.
It’s a fun pop tune now.
It’s a song I actually saw them play.
I thought I’d listened to enough of them last week, though I can’t help queuing up the songs this week in between other favourites. Except now I listen to all the ones I never paid attention to before. Now I skip the old favourites – I’ve heard them all before.
Instead I listen to the ones I heard and saw last weekend, they’re filled with something new, not the weight of being forced to love them. Free to hear them for what they are, all the music in between the memories, the spaces between the places.
The latest revelation of many: Pavement are not my old favourite band anymore – they’re my new favourite band.
I’m glad they didn’t play it.
The past is a foreign country, a dead animal; the future no better.
And the world is a clearer place when you let them go.
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