MOG

This is part two of the Slint piece I wrote for Punk Planet Magazine in 2005 (issue #66). I'll be posting the entire piece and a few extras here. Enjoy!

"IT SEEMED INCOMPLETE"

When Slint formed in 1985, they weren't called Slint. They played their first show during a service at a Unitarian church as "Small Tight Dirty Tufts of Hair; BEADS."

At the time it was just Walford, Pajo, and Buckler (whose dad belonged to the church). Walford was 15; Pajo and Buckler were 17. They had all played together before, in different combinations. Most notably, Walford, Buckler, and McMahan - who was the last addition to the band - were in the seminal Louisville punk band, Squirrel Bait.

Steve Albini first heard the band - they still weren't Slint yet - not long after their Unitarian debut when they opened for Big Black in Louisville.

"During their formative period," Albini remembers, "they had almost this heavy metal undertone. I thought it was interesting, but it also seemed unformed; it seemed incomplete."

The next time Albini heard Slint was on cassette.

When Brian joined the band and it became Slint proper, Britt made some cassettes in the basement they practiced in. The recording, Albini remembers, was "almost exactly like Tweez came out, I mean, the album sounded like a slightly gussied up version."

How the album, recorded in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, "came out" was a matter of contention within the band. Buckler hated it - "Slint went to Chicago, got Albini-ized and fell down a black hole," he told the band at the time.

"He would call me at my dorm," Pajo recalls, "and talk for hours about the lack of mid-range in the recording; about how wrong it is to make a record without middle."

Eventually, Buckler quit.

Almost two decades later, Albini has mixed feelings about Tweez.

"Oddly enough, I think the last time I heard the whole record I was in England making a record with a band called Bush. The band was sitting around talking about the record that we were making and Tweez in its entirety played while we were having that meeting.

"I thought it sounded all right," he remembers. "My reservations about it have to do with the production decisions at the time. But, you know, there is a lot of amazing guitar playing on that record and there's some really good drumming on that record. It's a formative record; it's a record from a period where the band hadn't really crystallized its identity and I kind of wish now that it had been allowed to be a little bit more nude. I mean, at the time, they were trying to make a record that they would be engaged by and I understand that and I don't think that I had an undue influence on it, at least I hope not. But they certainly made a much better record without me."

He's talking about Spiderland. "That's the great record," Albini says. "I think on Tweez they were still ambitious but - and I feel uncomfortable saying this - I don't think they had that much confidence in their ability at that point."

It's a quirky record, to be sure. The first you hear from McMahan is a plea to Albini from the microphone while the band worms its way into "Ron," Tweez's first song: "Steve, these headphones are fucked up. It's only coming out of one side...like the...should I just bear with it or what? Shit. They're fucked." Then a pause. "Man, no, wait, please give me some new headphones." Seconds later he's screaming the words to the song.

The next song, "Nan Ding" - every song on the album is named after Slint's parents and pets - features a barely audible conversation that begins: "Hey, about that money thing...forget it," followed by laughter and more talk.

"Pat" breaks down with what sounds like a Speak & Spell enunciating "TWEEZER FETISH" and "SNATCH BEAST."

The music is a strange confluence of Big Black's razor sharp guitar, ever-so-slight hints of an intimacy with heavy metal, and the "simplicity and quiet grace" that would haunt Spiderland, earning the band posthumous success and leaving its mark on countless recordings by numerous bands in the decade to come and beyond.

But in the early days the band affected only a tiny - if influential - community.

"BUT AS WE STARTED ROLLING THE TAPE . . ."

Bob Weston, at the time the bass player for the Volcano Suns - now Albini's bandmate in Shellac - saw Slint only once at a show in Cambridge, one of the band's rare ventures outside the confines of the Midwest.

"There weren't very many people at the show," Weston recalls, "I remember being completely stunned, confused, and mesmerized during it. In the middle of one song, Britt seemed to pass out and sort of fall onto his drums for a few seconds. Then he 'woke up' and picked up playing the song. It was pretty weird. I had never heard anything like it and it was beautiful."

Brian Paulson first heard Tweez "driving around in a Subaru with Steve [Albini] shortly after he had recorded it. I was into it. He thought it sounded too much like King Crimson. I saw them once in Minneapolis with four other people - two of the others being Nate and Ed from Urge Overkill. It was shortly after Tweez came out.

It was Paulson who would record Spiderland. The album, Paulson remembers, "was recorded over the course of two weekends with very little sleep involved - not exactly luxurious.

"The Jesus Lizard and Steve [Albini] were recording Goat just a couple of blocks away," he says. "We would bounce back and forth to see how the other team was progressing."

The sessions, Paulson says, were "a little tense. There was very little time to document what they had spent the better part of a year rehearsing."

The timeframe may have been short and the quarters cramped, but the experience was one Paulson will never forget.

"As we started rolling tape," he says, "hearing 'Nosferatu Man' and 'Good Morning Captain' spilling out of the speakers for the first time, I had an experience which has never since been duplicated: it was a distinct feeling of 'What is this? I'd never heard anything like it before.'"

Paulson was not particularly surprised at Spiderland's posthumous success. "Not considering the huge impact it had on the few who heard it initially," he says.

Albini's initial response to the album was less decisive. "It was one of my favorite bands making a record. Listening to it, I enjoyed it, but it probably took me half a dozen listens before I got over the things about it that were initially off-putting.

McMahan's vulnerability on "Washer" was one of those things. In contrast to the obscured vocals on Tweez, McMahan's voice-and his words-were totally naked against a backdrop of achingly beautiful music: "I know its dark outside / Don't be afraid / Every time I ever cried for fear, it's just a mistake that I made."

"Bear in mind," Albini says, "that there was nothing like that at the time, so the first time I heard it, I was a little embarrassed for Brian. The way the vocals were presented it seemed like he was playing up the pathetic element a little bit. But listening to it a couple of times, that kind of becomes a persona in the song rather than this guy Brian that I know. And then listening to it a little bit more you realize how well integrated it is into the mood of the music."

Fourteen years ago, in his Melody Maker review, Albini was even more forthcoming: "the story made me sad," he wrote, "nearly to tears. Genius."

Spiderland's influence, Paulson says, "immediately rubbed off on the approach of many of their peers-you could hear it seeping into people's records the following year."

Stay tuned for Invisible Histories: Slint (Part 3). Part 1 can be found here.

Posted on 10/25/2006

Tags: Steve Albini, Bob Weston, Big Black, The Jesus Lizard, Brian Paulson