 |
| Maybe we can dance / Maybe we can dance / Maybe we can dance together? |
Hey so we saw
Pavement again on Saturday, Sept. 11. Last time was the
Pitchfork festival over the summer, this time was at the Uptown Theater in Kansas City, Mo., a 1,700-capacity theater built in the 1920s, with seats in the back half of the main floor and in the ample balcony. Josh and Jessie of another central Iowa-based blog,
Nothing Gets Crossed Out, kindly gave us a ride and booked the hotel rooms-- it's like a two-and-a-half or three-hour drive, but the traffic got really bad-- and
Chet Boom came along, too*. There's something about Pavement that Mark Richardson touched on nicely in his
three paragraphs hailing "Gold Soundz"-- sort of an underdog single, from the band's 1994 album
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, which also featured the more-often-shown-on-MTV "Cut Your Hair"
-- as No. 1 song of the 90s. "Pavement went around like regular schlubs and played messy shows with songs that took strange turns and didn't quite sound like guitar rock songs are supposed to sound," Mark writes. Their bemused, down-to-earth shrugginess was exceptional at the time, but it's not the type of thing that necessarily translates well to non-believers when set up on a reunion-gig pedestal at a festival of younger bands. I was trying my best not to look silly in front of a few other writers by singing along too much during the band's Pitchfork set, but next to the theatrics of Major Lazer or the fiery declamations of Titus Andronicus, I could understand if somebody unfamiliar might've been wondering to themselves: What's the big deal?
 |
| "Hey, you're not in Poison Control Center." |
Not so Saturday night. Dudes opened with "Gold Soundz", another shrug maybe, but one with a triumphant undertone: We do remember, in September, the August sun. As a group, we're not as empty as we (they) protest. And yeah, consider the past un-quarantined. There was sadly no "Summer Babe"-- as Kansas City Pitch
points out-- and no "Two States", but there were plenty of favorites, including songs from my own Pavement entry point, 1997's
Brighten the Corners (I found out about them by being a huge fan of Britpop group Blur, who were saying in interviews back then they were huge American indie rock fans): "Here", "Shady Lane", "Stereo", "Unfair", "Cut Your Hair", "Date With Ikea", "Rattled by the Rush", "Conduit for Sale", "Debris Slide". Sorry to name so many songs; these guys just play hit after hit. I never saw Pavement live before their latest tour, but what struck me most both times was not the frontman or the guitarist but
Bob Nastanovich-- a familiar smiling face around Des Moines (and supposedly the guy who inspired Blur's "Song 2")-- stalking the stage screaming gleefully like a teenager. Or banging on a tambourine. Or blowing into a harmonica, or some kind of pull-whistle, I didn't get a good look at either. Stephen Malkmus was decked out in a Kansas City Chiefs jersey, which he explained at one point, but I didn't quite hear. I guess this was Pavement's first non-Lollapalooza show in K.C., which is crazy. Anyway, I don't know if the band did much out of the ordinary, but it was the kind of crowd where you can just tell a lot of people actually know the songs and are super happy to be singing along with them or else just watching fondly. As someone who mostly grew up near Sacramento, it was fun to finally be able to shout along to lyrics arguing for the supremacy of Northern over Southern California. For "We Dance", Bob and his wife Whitney, another Des Moines fixture, well, danced. Devin Frank from Ames, Iowa-based opening band
the Poison Control Center-- more on them in a sec-- ended up onstage singing along for encore finale "Range Life", which segued into a goofy "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da". How'd he do that?
Posts
