Pavement: The Secret History, Vol. 1 

The strangest thing about Pavement? Not that there were ever many non-strange things about Pavement? Even tthough they made their era’s finest rock albums, the albums only told half their story. Pavement also made some of the Nineties’ best albums that *never* happened. Until now.

Every proper Pavement album, from the out-of-nowhere debut Slanted and Enchanted to the summer-upper Terror Twilight, was accompanied by a flurry of slay tracks and stray slack—songs that got scattered on B-sides, EPs, compilations, radio sessions. Any other band could have hopped on a lost nugget like “Circa 1762” or “Sensitive Euro Man” and milked it into a legend, or at least a check from an imminently sadder-but-wiser major label. But Pavement were too busy writing and recording great songs to worry about where to stash them, and they moved too fast to leave a tidy trail. So they left these songs off their albums. Some never got released at all.

Pavement made five proper album-as-albums: Slanted and Enchanted (1992), Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994), Wowee Zowee (1995), Brighten The Corners (1997) and Terror Twilight(1999). Each has its own sound. Each has its own legend. But each of their official albums has a shadow album—and it’s usually as strong as the album that actually *did* come out. It’s time for the world to hear the albums Pavement could have made, if they’d been a little less ambitious about music and a little more ambitious about the music business. If they’d been the kind of band to sweat the legacy. But if they were that kind of band, would they have written so many great songs? Much less *these* great songs? No.

Matador is finally releasing a series of these shadow albums. The first, naturally, is The Secret History, Vol. 1, collecting the songs that got away during the era of Slanted and Enchanted, which Stephen Malkmus, Scott Kannberg and Gary Young recorded on the cheaper-than-cheap in January 1991. The Secret History, Vol. 1 collects gems from Peel Sessions (“Kentucky Cocktail,” “Circa 1762”) and seven-inches (“Baptist Blacktick”) as well as live slop from the first European tours, with Mark Ibold and Bob Nastanovich in the fold. Some are outtakes from Slanted—imagine leaving these tunes off your first album, when as far as you know or imagine, it’s your *only* album. These tracks (some of which had never been rumored among Pavement freaks) came out on the 2002 Slanted and Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxedouble CD reissue. But they’ve never been separately available as an album in their own right, and many of them have never been on vinyl before.

The rarities collected here could have been—or maybe even should have been—cobbled together into a quickie stopgap album, a Slanted sequel. (It’s easy to forget now, but Crooked Rain didn’t come out till nearly two years after Slanted—three years after the tape started making the rounds.) The world (or at least a few undermedicated corners of it) was impatient for more Pavement product—a summer ’93 throwaway sandwiched somewhere between Robot World and Admonishing the Bishops, or between Exile in Guyville and Painful? But Pavement were too busy tinkering with their next ideas to bother packaging their last ideas. And so they moved on and left these songs to make their own haphazard way through the world.

At the time, fans chased down these songs, any time we caught a whiff of a ghost of a rumor that they might exist. It’s hard to overstate how tricky it was to find them; it’s also hard to overstate the excitement of suspecting there were always more Pavement tunes out there in the ether yet to be heard. You could spend literally years searching for just one listen. “Greenlander,” one of their best ballads, which would have been the fifth or sixth best song on Slanted—how did Pavement release that gem? They gave it to a pro-choice benefit comp Born to Choose (the kind of political statement people tended to overlook, since it didn’t fit their simplified image of what Pavement was).

Pavement really could have cranked out twice as many albums, without diluting their quality-control level at all. Even the hardest-core fans were often unaware of how many top-shelf songs were getting left off the albums. All through their career, the non-album tunes ranked with their absolute best: “Strings of Nashville,” “Easily Fooled,” “Raft,” “No Tan Lines,” “Nail Clinic,” “Give It A Day.” At the time, these songs circulated via mix tapes and underground radio and bootlegs and some girl you knew who had a third-gen dub of the I Shot Andy Warhol soundtrack advance.

(Sometimes you shelled out full retail for something like the “Schoolhouse Rock” Rocks!comp. You did what you had to do.)

But that was part of the romance of being a Pavement fan—the lads loved the album format, without feeling restricted to it. So you knew the albums were just the tip of the iceberg. They never made the same record twice, even when we all basically wanted them to. Each album came as a surprise. Each sounded little like the last one and less like the next one, until there weren’t any next ones. Each one started massive arguments about whether this year’s Pavement was too drastically different from last year’s. Including, incredibly, their *first* album, which followed three rapturously received EPs but flippantly refused to sound like them. 

And each one baffled fans who thought they knew exactly what Pavement would do next, because the band was too restless/bratty/stubborn/maddening to do the obvious next move. As Malkmus sang in “The Secret Knowledge of Backroads,” circa 1992, right after Slantedcame out: “Hunter called, said to me/ It’s not as good as the first EP.” (Everyone in Charlottesville knew Hunter, just as every town had a Hunter or two. He was cool. ) 

Well, whatever else they are, Pavement have always been surefire argument-starters. And for some reason, Pavement attract the kind of listeners who love to argue heatedly over the core canon: if you’re ever trapped in a bar during a Wowee vs. Brighten debate, you might want to consider starting a fire, a less painful way to go than getting riddled with secondhand “‘Fin’: ‘Grounded’ = ‘Starlings in the Slipstream’: ‘Blackout’” shrapnel. Now that the shadow Pavement albums are getting an official release, those arguments are just going to get louder.

But Pavement never wasted time defining their turf—geographically, they were scattered between the East Coast (Greenpoint, back before the glass houses and spritzers on ice) and the West (L.A.’s range rovers and cinema stars) and around the South. And in the same way, they were too slippery to get trapped in their corner of history. That’s why Pavement stand outside the fashions of their time, even the fashions they helped create. That’s also part of why the music continues to inspire new bands who hear it as a challenge to make up their own rules. Somewhere in your town, a band is trying to live up to these songs—not trying to copy them or rewrite them (although that’s been tried and often works out fine), just to partake of the same spirit. “Circa 1762,” from this album—play it back to back with Parquet Courts’ “Picture of Health” to get a sense of how two brilliant bands shoot their ideas back and forth across the decades. (Parquet Courts don’t sound like that anymore, of course—just like Pavement didn’t sound like “Circa 1762” a year later.)

Pavement always refused to be cowed by history, by the Fillmore jive of those who claimed the tricks had all been done and used up, the last-time-was-the-best-time nostalgia pimps. As Pavement proclaim in one of these songs, “We light the burnt match / And stick a flag on it.” So none of these songs sound dated, even though they’re all decades old. 

And now that they can stand alone as an official Pavement album, all these great songs on The Secret History, Vol. 1 just keep on moving through time. The unquarantinable past. The randomly spent present. The underground, out-of-sight future.

Rob Sheffield, May 2015