But it turned out that the time was just “all right” and the tunes were not that catchy. Gary was fed up with a lot of things. I mean, Stephen’s one of these guys, when he’s writing and teaching songs to everybody else and figuring out what he wants to do, I don’t think he really spends a lot of time thinking about what something might sell, what could be an appropriate song for the radio. is one of lo-fi indie rock's breakthrough albums, is an eclectic, sprawling, silly record in the vein of the Beatles'. I think everyone was in the band because of that reason because they understood what we were trying to accomplish. I remember listening to it on my Walkman headphones walking from my house to the office and being one of those kind of great New York days and sort of visualizing something — maybe what a video would be like or whatever — not that we did one for that song, but you know. Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was a landmark for the band and its genre.

I remember we woke up in Albuquerque at 5 a.m. and flew to LA and the two guys in the crew drove the vehicles in LA. Some songs, even in the future on Wowee Zowee, I would play drums on some of the faster ones and ones that were more punky. Anyway, the track was cool and summery so I thought I'd give the album a go. You could go in there any time and Mark would just wake up and say he could do it. It wasn’t really until Crooked that Matador began to get more involved in sort of bigger rock business machinations to kind of move that process along a little faster, and that stuff was not entirely successful. "All My Friends" is by far the best of these, and could fairly be called a Pavement classic (it would have fit quite nicely on the Watery, Domestic EP), and "Soiled Little Filly" is almost as good. Scott would come over and do his songs with me. They often looked decidedly preppy, eschewing the flannel and tangled hair of the era. “Some of the singing, there’s yelp-y singing at times,” he tells me. Albums you've known so well and for so long that you don't really know what to think of anymore, Try to predict the next 5 stars of the user above, Late night summer campfires soundtrack ("la ba la"). I remember some piano and we put some tambourines and percussion on other stuff. The extreme, thrifty manner that we toured at that time — one hotel room, all piling into a van, insane tour schedules — was fun. You don’t even know what it really means. Bob was funny drinking the blue shit.

We enjoyed having him be involved. The building was called Downtime. On Crooked Rain, Pavement became a band, opened up (as much as they ever could, anyway), and sounded like themselves: smart, funny, confident, West Coast, suburban. The band largely left behind the post-punk framework of Slanted in favor of an easygoing classic rock influence, establishing a template they’d work from for the rest of their storied career.

He was probably the most apprehensive because he didn’t know me as a person. We weren’t a big band.

MALKMUS: Slanted was sort of a one-off couple of weeks of really being into the Fall and coming over on Christmas vacation and making Slanted And Enchanted and not really expecting anything. We didn’t pay much attention to that. Matador was roughly a year into our deal with Atlantic and the guy who brought us into Atlantic — the president of the label, Danny Goldberg — left Atlantic to become president of Warner Bros., which left us in a weird situation because he was our guy. “And so that’s exactly what they did. Kannberg is the gorilla.
We were never—we never really said, ‘No, we don’t want to be famous’ or that whole thing.

An anti-fashion statement is still a fashion statement, but Pavement was on another trip. I understand it now — I don’t have health insurance from work now and I can understand why you’d want it now.

And it rhymes in a really ridiculous way, a double rhyme.

Nirvana — pass agg. And all of the sudden, we have this massive record, and Pavement were certainly part of the reason why Danny was interested in working with Matador in the first place. “Gold Soundz” is the seventh song—and thus the opening song on Side 2 of the cassette, crucially—on Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, which came out on February 14, 1994, though at the time I personally was nowhere near cool enough to have even heard of Pavement yet, and certainly didn’t know enough to be vexed by that ignorance.

Here we are.

He had ideas written down on a page but no clear map yet he was able to deliver an amazing thread off the top of his head. One day early last spring I was Googling for the best songs of the 1990s, and I found myself on the Pitchfork list. Elevate Me Later 3. It was a little weird because of the whole Gary thing, but once we started touring and made the record with Westy we all got over it pretty quick. Kind of like before you get on a rollercoaster or something like that. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain comes as close to a unified *composition* as any piece of classical music, while simultaneously holding its own as a collection of really likeable and thinkable tunes worthy of anyone in mainstream or classic rock, and to top it all off, proves once again that Pavement is the crown jewel of the indie rock movement. Usually people are asking you to play slower in the studio.
It is simply one of the best songs of its era from one of the best bands of its era, one that did succeed, despite appearances, in setting the world half-alight. The most anticipated tracks are the first eight, recorded in 1993 with Gary Young and never officially released in any form. WEST: I think it was a five-week tour within the U.S. and Canada. I think that as the band was growing, they needed to have some sort of stability in the operation, and he was just — I don’t know if they ever anticipated this growing as fast and as large as it did. But at the time we did that we were also in a joint-venture agreement with Atlantic Records. Pavement's Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe-- packed with top-quality extras at a low price-- was a near-perfect example of how to reissue an already beloved record.

IBOLD: In America, the music press meant little to us at the time because we never really relied on it for anything. I didn’t know what a compressor was. We weren’t as interested as he was in greed. So that was a rough thing. We even did this show where we played in Australia and we flew from Australia back to L.A., L.A. to London, London to Copenhagen, got in a van and drove for about eight hours to the middle of nowhere in Sweden to play this festival where we played at like 2 in the morning and it was sunny out. It was catchy and the time was right. And I can get it.” It was totally basic. I think we were mixing about three songs a day. He lived in New York, and that was Steve West. I think Steve (Malkmus) was a little bit nervous about working out of a big studio with an engineer. It was the studio where Teenage Fanclub recorded Bandwagonesque with Don Fleming. The punch line—if you happened to be a big Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots fan for whom Pavement would be, in retrospect, by far the coolest thing you listened to in high school—was that Crooked Rain very famously throws hands at those two bands very specifically. But what made that time so memorable was their willingness to push back. MALKMUS: It’s always an existential question for Bob, being in a band, and he [feels like], “I’m not a musician, and I never planned on doing this.” But he is a musician. I was really into the Stranglers records and early DEVO records, and I wanted to make a song that kind of captured that sort of post-punk with synthesizers in it. I don’t think we would have gone on that long without him. I can just remember them calling around, like, “We’re having a Scrabble tournament! And that felt kind of… it felt out of place! I would have much rather had it this way than be Hootie And The Blowfish or something that just had a massive hit but doesn’t have as much trickle-down interest as we have had.

BOB NASTANOVICH, AUXILIARY PERCUSSION: Gary quit. It was kind of humorous and lo-fi and worked for us because it was kind of tongue-in-cheek. LOMBARDI: I think at the time Bryce was supposed to be — he was scheduled to work with Chavez, and I believe he was working on the Chavez record when he got the call to work on the Pavement record. It reflected a bit of what he was listening to at the time, so that might be one of the reasons the album came out sounding differently. There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. So he was pretty adamant that we didn’t mix the drums too loud and stuff. View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 1994 Vinyl release of Crooked Rain Crooked Rain on Discogs. ... Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: LA’s Desert Origins.

It was definitely a huge change. Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2010. Gold Soundz 8. Some of these items ship sooner than the others. He had a crash-pad/waterbed thing. It was one of those things where you get that almost physical feeling — that excitement that runs through you, and that knowledge that you really are going to be part of something exciting you know? “But the fact of the matter is,” he adds, “we were fronting, and acting cooler than we were like everyone else, and afraid, and nervous about whether what we’re doing is good or not. Elliott Sharp would work there.

We did a song for No Alternative, which was a compilation benefit for HIV, and we had some extra time, and we did that song there and added it to the album. That’s all I really remember. Then I was like, “Well, Steve can give it a go.” So I started jamming with Steve, and he had a loft on South 5th Street in Brooklyn, and he could play drums in there at the right time of day. I can’t remember which track I mixed first, but I guess things went pretty smoothly because he was pretty into it. The bands that are on a major label, there’s that whole apparatus. Whatever indie rock means anymore — which, I’m not sure it ever really meant anything; it has fractured and splintered in so many ways.

Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was a landmark for the band and its genre. "Like, Greg Ginn was mixing up this stuff in a glass. They didn't go for the pink noise effect or try to change the world with their "omniscient" observations, but preferred the less groundbreaking method--and it worked. He had set it up as a little studio, he had a tape machine and a little booth we could put the drums in. It’s never fun.

We were very cheap back in those days. There was that possibility and that kind of excitement. KANNBERG: [We toured] a year, more than a year off and on. The record is coming out through WEA but it’s not on Atlantic and it’s not on Warner Bros. He put a speaker underneath and rerecorded it that way. But from the first Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain single ("Cut Your Hair") forward, Pavement, on the verge of the big time, opted out. He was in charge of the drums because I didn’t really know how to record drums.

This is a suburban California album, and since suburbs are exactly the same from Sacto to Levittown, it's an album to which all suburban kids can relate. I certainly felt like I brought form and clarity to the songs by featuring the vocals a little bit more and featuring the hooks more clearly. We definitely hadn’t, and I remember going out to Los Angeles and having our rental car, and — hell, it might’ve even been a convertible — and hearing the song.

My alt-rock-loving high school friends hated Pavement; enough people came to love “Gold Soundz” that it topped Pitchfork’s Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s list. Of course it’s not insanely commercial. Just a tape machine — a good Studer tape machine — and a dummy board where the mics were practically plugged directly into the machine practically. Hearing “Cut Your Hair” was intense. Amazon's Choice recommends highly rated and well-priced products.