crooked rain, crooked rain

Pavement cemented their place in the indie scene and ushered in a brand new era with the cryptic irony of this underground classic.  The band had won universal acclaim with their debut 'Slanted and Enchanted' and were primed for a breakthrough on the followup.   Stephen Malkmus looks back:  "I think we were confident. At that time, it didn’t seem like there was much going on. I think we were just sort of young and invincible-feeling. You don’t even know what it really means. No one was around telling us that much stuff, so we were just on our own. It felt like we had our own niche and our own take on things ... 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. When we signed to Matador, we got really positive feedback and were in Spin magazine with a review. It was really well-received. In England, the label Big Cat did a really good job of pushing us into the fray. We were bigger and had more attention than we thought we would. I didn’t want to do that again. I couldn’t do it, anyway, because it was based around Gary [Young, Pavement's original drummer]’s studio and the stuff that he had in the first place. Slanted And Enchanted was made with specific amps, and I couldn’t get back to that. "


Scott Kannberg says:    "It’s less of an English post-punk kind of sound, more of a classic-rock California sound, I think. Even though recorded in New York, I think the vibe of the record is a little more California. I mean obviously the lyrics and stuff have to do with California still. But then with New York as well. There’s definitely a change in songwriting... I moved out to New York for about a month. Malkmus lived over in Brooklyn, Mark was in Manhattan at the time, and Bob came to town. So everybody was in different areas. We would just kind of get together every day for a few weeks and meet around noon then record into the wee hours of the night. The mood was really good because we were a touring band and we were young, we were pretty into the whole experience. It was still very new to us, we were still learning how to play our instruments, learning how to record… The mood was cool. Everybody was happy and excited. 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."

Mark Ibold considers:    " I think the overall take on ['Crooked Rain'] by the music press was [that it was our] most accessible record because the songs sounded poppier or whatever. But I don’t think things changed that much. I think the songs came across as sounding poppier or more polished and different from the first album mostly because it was a totally different recording experience. Having a different drummer changed things, but to me the songwriting changed from record to record throughout the whole Pavement lifespan. That’s because Stephen really didn’t want to repeat himself. I know that was something we were always very aware of. We never wanted to make another record that just sounded like the previous record. I think that he was pretty good about that. 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."

The original trio had expanded after the departure of drummer Gary Young.  Bob Nastanovich recalls:   "Gary quit. Gary was fed up with a lot of things. He was paranoid that he wasn’t getting paid fairly, and he was touring, which is stressful and arduous anyway. The extreme, thrifty manner that we toured at that time — one hotel room, all piling into a van, insane tour schedules — was fun. But we were in our mid-20s and Gary was 40-something and didn’t take good care of himself, so Gary wanted health insurance, which was a preposterous idea... In a lot of ways, it was like a totally different band aside from Stephen’s songwriting and his vocals and his lyrics. Because Gary recorded pretty much everything we’d recorded up until then so not only did we lose our drummer and a huge personality and an amazing live performer, but we also lost our studio engineer and our studio. I kind of thought that, in that intervening year between 'Slanted' and 'Crooked Rain' when we were pretty busy, I wondered if Pavement would carry on. Fortunately, Stephen and Steve West were becoming really good friends. I don’t know how much of that actually had to do with the fact that Steve West was eventually going to join Pavement. They lived in the same neighborhood and Steve West had grown up with me and we were all mutual friends. Over time, Stephen started fleshing out stuff with Steve West, and he became sort of an obvious choice to be in the band. It felt completely different. It was really difficult for me because I didn’t really see why I should even be in the band without Gary."



Steve West says:   "[Malkmus'] girlfriend and mine — we all hung out together. Gary was having problems, and it was an unwritten thing that if Gary quit or something happened, I would be eligible. I remember [Malkmus] telling me a couple of times to put my drumsticks in the oven to keep them warm, because there was such a give-and-take with Gary. [Malkmus] tried to record 'Crooked Rain' with Gary, and Gary just couldn’t get it together enough. Then they went on tour and Gary quit. Then that eventually ended with me joining the group."

The band produced the album at Mark Venezia's Random Falls Studios in New York, New York.  The sessions featured Stephen Malkmus on vocals and guitar; Scott Kannberg on guitar and backing vocals; Mark Ibold on bass; Steve West on drums and percussion and Bob Nastanovich on percussion;   with Bryce Goggin on engineering, mixing, and piano; and Mark Venezia on engineering.   Kannberg reveals:   "It wasn’t really a studio, it was just kind of a guy’s apartment. He had set it up as a little studio, he had a tape machine and a little booth we could put the drums in. And basically we could play the drums [along with] a guy on guitar and just play the songs that way, and then overdubbed everything. Which was different than with Slanted, because with Slanted we played as a three-piece, and it kind of has more of a band feel. Crooked Rain is basically all overdubs... It was just our inner circle. I think we did it without anybody really knowing we were doing it. We had a chance to record, we had a chance to do it when we did it. And luckily all the parts kind of came together and Matador really dug it and it was at a time in music when you could put a record out like that.

Malkmus remembers:   "You could go in there any time and Mark would just wake up and say he could do it. We’d run the machine ourselves sometimes, but he definitely made the drum sound. He was in charge of the drums because I didn’t really know how to record drums. We really didn’t know whether it had sounded good or not. We had track sheets that were not … we sometimes didn’t even have track sheets. It was totally primitive. We were just running on our confidence of 'Slanted And Enchanted' thinking, 'This is easy, you just do it yourself and record and it’s going to be great because it’s lo-fi rock.' There were different influences of course coming, some classic rock influences. And Steve West himself was a slower — he’s groovy. He has an internal groove, but he wasn’t quite as wild as Gary, and there wasn’t as much kinetic, weird energy from him. So that affected the sound... I was thinking some kind of classic rock, like the Eagles, and riffs that were — I mean, Dinosaur had some of that in it, but I really wanted to put it more in people’s faces that the soft rock ’70s sound could be mined and played off. Also, some of the lyrics were commentary about music about music and that kind of music — that classic-rock Doobie Brothers rich guy archetype myths. I would play around with those when I was doing that kind of music. That was maybe a safety route for us as we were getting more attention, to kind of deflate it or play off it with a knowingness. [I was] kind of feeling a little absurd that we got that much attention. Or just fear — fear of success. Or just fear. But, at the same time, having faith in our chops, and my chops as a songwriter."

'Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain' charted at one hundred and twenty-one on the US Billboard 200, seventy-seven in Germany, forty-one in New Zealand, fifteen in the UK, and number two on the US Heatseekers chart.  





http://crookedrain.com/








"Cut Your Hair" went to number ten on the US indie chart.  



"Gold Soundz" 



"Range Life" 









'Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain' 
full album:






All songs written by Stephen Malkmus unless otherwise noted.

"Silence Kid" – 3:01
"Elevate Me Later" – 2:51
"Stop Breathin'" – 4:28
"Cut Your Hair" – 3:07
"Newark Wilder" – 3:53
"Unfair" – 2:33
"Gold Soundz" – 2:41
"5-4=Unity" – 2:09
"Range Life" – 4:54
"Heaven Is a Truck" – 2:30
"Hit the Plane Down" (Scott Kannberg) – 3:36
"Fillmore Jive" – 6:38