Alex Ross Perry on his Pavement documentary: ‘The concept was an absurd notion that this band would ever go gold or platinum'
Alex Ross Perry
can shake the most algorithm-trodden viewers out of their complacency. His unapologetically caustic, literary milieu, populated by spiky, self-absorbed humans, remains defiantly indie, made on modest budgets, with zero concessions towards 'relatable' entertainment norms.
In
Listen Up Philip
, from 2014, Jason Schwartzman plays a misanthropic novelist who alienates everyone around him. In Her Smell, playing Becky Something, Elisabeth Moss delivers a ferocious performance as a volatile, drug-addled punk rocker. In the earlier
Queen of Earth
, Moss excelled as a grieving woman descending into paranoia.
The film-maker's devoted following intersects with that of Paul Schrader, John Cassavetes and the American authors Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth.
Pavements, Perry's new hybrid documentary portrait of Pavement, indie rock's least-bothered legacy act, is a thrillingly maximalist curveball from an auteur with such a disciplined, character-driven oeuvre. It's a world away from those films that Perry's cinematographer, Sean Price Williams, has described as 'people talking in rooms'.
READ MORE
'You hope that everything you create will be a new process, no matter what,' says Perry. 'You're looking for that every time in some way or another. But, by definition, there are 40 primary characters in Pavements whom you're keeping track of. That is extremely rare and complicated – except for movies like Nashville [directed by Robert Altman, from 1975].
'The movie is actually really several smaller movies. The challenge was making little tiny movies that fit into a bigger movie. I wanted to make something complicated and unprecedented.'
Nearly 35 years after a band of self-styled slackers from Stockton, California, emerged with a batch of lo-fi, inscrutable songs, Pavement remain an outlier in American indie rock.
They were never meant for the mainstream. Formed in 1989 by
Stephen Malkmus
and Scott Kannberg (aka Spiral Stairs), Pavement began as a studio experiment of distorted guitars and nebulous mumbling. They sold self-distributed cassettes and secured some basement shows.
They scored an unexpected success with their much-loved album Slanted and Enchanted from 1992, but their jagged sound and nonsensical lyrics would never truly go mainstream.
'I always was hoping that it was music for the future. I mean, I think everyone who's not that successful in their time tries to think that,' says Malkmus early in Perry's film, a documentary that occasionally gives you the sense that you're watching the biggest act on the planet.
A lot is going on. An anchoring timeline chronicles the band's 2022 reunion tour – their first since 2010 – featuring rehearsals and performances from dates across North America and Europe. Off-Broadway, hopefuls audition for Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical. A pop-up Pavement museum, ostentatiously titled Pavements 1933–2022, features authentic artefacts and apparent fakes.
There's more chicanery in Range Life: A Pavement Story, fragments of a grandiloquent Hollywood biopic filmed within the film, starring Joe Keery as Malkmus, with Schwartzman as Chris Lombardi, founder of Matador Records, the band's long-time label. There is even a completely made-up awards-season denouement, featuring Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.
It's an epic sprawl that came together surprisingly quickly following an approach by Matador. Lombardi pitched the idea, with Malkmus giving a clear directive: they didn't want a typical documentary or a scripted screenplay. The frontman's only note was a request for something 'confusing and weird'.
'Within six weeks of being contacted to come up with some sort of radical or unusual idea that could be a suitably unique Pavement movie, all of those strands were there,' says Perry.
'When I look at my early documents, the only thing in my notes that is not in the movie is a fictionalised art-house film – I had the idea that, in addition to a very cliched, silly, bad Hollywood movie, there would be an art film like Edvard Munch by Peter Watkins. All of the ideas were there from the outset. My first thought was the movie ought to be a mosaic.'
In 1999, after a decade that had seen them have moderate hits with Cut Your Hair, Gold Soundz and Range Life, Pavement broke up with the same shrugs they brought to their live performances. They had sung and played off-key during shambolic television appearances. Their inclusion on the bill of the Lollapalooza festival in 1995 – an odd fit alongside Sonic Youth, Hole, Cypress Hill, Sinéad O'Connor, Beck and Coolio – almost started a riot.
Do Pavement fit Perry's description of his most acerbic creations as 'people who can't get out of their own way'?
'When I first heard Pavement as a young person, I had no understanding of the complexity of what an artist's goals are,' the film-maker says. 'You don't think about that stuff when you're 13. You're just hearing a good song and catching a concert. That level of insight is invisible to a lot of the public, and often only visible in hindsight.
'But it certainly became their story in the 20 years after they broke up. After the reunion it became the story of unfulfilled ambition and missed opportunities and untapped potential.
'During my research for the film, which was all done in 2020, deep into the pandemic, when nobody in the band had seen each other since the 2010 reunion tour, the narratives I was given by everyone involved with the band spoke to that disappointment.'
Then came a plot twist. Harness Your Hopes, an obscure track recorded in 1996, unexpectedly became one of the band's most popular songs. Despite never being released as a single or receiving significant radio play at the time, the track gained traction on Spotify in the 2010s – it now has more than 210 million streams – before igniting a dance craze on TikTok.
'At some point, making the movie, I looked at their Spotify page expecting to see Range Life or Cut Your Hair as their number-one songs. And suddenly I'm asking, 'Why does this song have tens of millions more views than everything else?'
'This song hasn't even been on my radar for narrative purposes. And then I googled it and discovered this crazy thing happened. By the time the band were rehearsing for the 2022 tour, this song had blown up and they were playing it as part of every show. I shot the video for it before we shot the movie.'
It is a delightful second act, not just for Pavement but for Pavements. Perry's grandiose, counterfactual account of the band now feels strangely prophetic.
'We made this movie over a five-year span,' he says. 'The concept was an absurd notion that this band would ever go gold or platinum. We weren't thinking, Oh, that'll be funny, because sooner or later they'll have gold records. It was, like, This is the most ridiculous thing imaginable, because they haven't been a band for 25 years. And now the movie is out and the success that had eluded them for forever has happened.'
Pavements is in cinemas from Friday, July 11th
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
21 hours ago
- Irish Times
Alex Ross Perry on his Pavement documentary: ‘The concept was an absurd notion that this band would ever go gold or platinum'
More than 16 years into his film-making career, Alex Ross Perry can shake the most algorithm-trodden viewers out of their complacency. His unapologetically caustic, literary milieu, populated by spiky, self-absorbed humans, remains defiantly indie, made on modest budgets, with zero concessions towards 'relatable' entertainment norms. In Listen Up Philip , from 2014, Jason Schwartzman plays a misanthropic novelist who alienates everyone around him. In Her Smell, playing Becky Something, Elisabeth Moss delivers a ferocious performance as a volatile, drug-addled punk rocker. In the earlier Queen of Earth , Moss excelled as a grieving woman descending into paranoia. The film-maker's devoted following intersects with that of Paul Schrader, John Cassavetes and the American authors Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth. Pavements, Perry's new hybrid documentary portrait of Pavement, indie rock's least-bothered legacy act, is a thrillingly maximalist curveball from an auteur with such a disciplined, character-driven oeuvre. It's a world away from those films that Perry's cinematographer, Sean Price Williams, has described as 'people talking in rooms'. READ MORE 'You hope that everything you create will be a new process, no matter what,' says Perry. 'You're looking for that every time in some way or another. But, by definition, there are 40 primary characters in Pavements whom you're keeping track of. That is extremely rare and complicated – except for movies like Nashville [directed by Robert Altman, from 1975]. 'The movie is actually really several smaller movies. The challenge was making little tiny movies that fit into a bigger movie. I wanted to make something complicated and unprecedented.' Nearly 35 years after a band of self-styled slackers from Stockton, California, emerged with a batch of lo-fi, inscrutable songs, Pavement remain an outlier in American indie rock. They were never meant for the mainstream. Formed in 1989 by Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg (aka Spiral Stairs), Pavement began as a studio experiment of distorted guitars and nebulous mumbling. They sold self-distributed cassettes and secured some basement shows. They scored an unexpected success with their much-loved album Slanted and Enchanted from 1992, but their jagged sound and nonsensical lyrics would never truly go mainstream. 'I always was hoping that it was music for the future. I mean, I think everyone who's not that successful in their time tries to think that,' says Malkmus early in Perry's film, a documentary that occasionally gives you the sense that you're watching the biggest act on the planet. A lot is going on. An anchoring timeline chronicles the band's 2022 reunion tour – their first since 2010 – featuring rehearsals and performances from dates across North America and Europe. Off-Broadway, hopefuls audition for Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical. A pop-up Pavement museum, ostentatiously titled Pavements 1933–2022, features authentic artefacts and apparent fakes. There's more chicanery in Range Life: A Pavement Story, fragments of a grandiloquent Hollywood biopic filmed within the film, starring Joe Keery as Malkmus, with Schwartzman as Chris Lombardi, founder of Matador Records, the band's long-time label. There is even a completely made-up awards-season denouement, featuring Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. It's an epic sprawl that came together surprisingly quickly following an approach by Matador. Lombardi pitched the idea, with Malkmus giving a clear directive: they didn't want a typical documentary or a scripted screenplay. The frontman's only note was a request for something 'confusing and weird'. 'Within six weeks of being contacted to come up with some sort of radical or unusual idea that could be a suitably unique Pavement movie, all of those strands were there,' says Perry. 'When I look at my early documents, the only thing in my notes that is not in the movie is a fictionalised art-house film – I had the idea that, in addition to a very cliched, silly, bad Hollywood movie, there would be an art film like Edvard Munch by Peter Watkins. All of the ideas were there from the outset. My first thought was the movie ought to be a mosaic.' In 1999, after a decade that had seen them have moderate hits with Cut Your Hair, Gold Soundz and Range Life, Pavement broke up with the same shrugs they brought to their live performances. They had sung and played off-key during shambolic television appearances. Their inclusion on the bill of the Lollapalooza festival in 1995 – an odd fit alongside Sonic Youth, Hole, Cypress Hill, Sinéad O'Connor, Beck and Coolio – almost started a riot. Do Pavement fit Perry's description of his most acerbic creations as 'people who can't get out of their own way'? 'When I first heard Pavement as a young person, I had no understanding of the complexity of what an artist's goals are,' the film-maker says. 'You don't think about that stuff when you're 13. You're just hearing a good song and catching a concert. That level of insight is invisible to a lot of the public, and often only visible in hindsight. 'But it certainly became their story in the 20 years after they broke up. After the reunion it became the story of unfulfilled ambition and missed opportunities and untapped potential. 'During my research for the film, which was all done in 2020, deep into the pandemic, when nobody in the band had seen each other since the 2010 reunion tour, the narratives I was given by everyone involved with the band spoke to that disappointment.' Then came a plot twist. Harness Your Hopes, an obscure track recorded in 1996, unexpectedly became one of the band's most popular songs. Despite never being released as a single or receiving significant radio play at the time, the track gained traction on Spotify in the 2010s – it now has more than 210 million streams – before igniting a dance craze on TikTok. 'At some point, making the movie, I looked at their Spotify page expecting to see Range Life or Cut Your Hair as their number-one songs. And suddenly I'm asking, 'Why does this song have tens of millions more views than everything else?' 'This song hasn't even been on my radar for narrative purposes. And then I googled it and discovered this crazy thing happened. By the time the band were rehearsing for the 2022 tour, this song had blown up and they were playing it as part of every show. I shot the video for it before we shot the movie.' It is a delightful second act, not just for Pavement but for Pavements. Perry's grandiose, counterfactual account of the band now feels strangely prophetic. 'We made this movie over a five-year span,' he says. 'The concept was an absurd notion that this band would ever go gold or platinum. We weren't thinking, Oh, that'll be funny, because sooner or later they'll have gold records. It was, like, This is the most ridiculous thing imaginable, because they haven't been a band for 25 years. And now the movie is out and the success that had eluded them for forever has happened.' Pavements is in cinemas from Friday, July 11th
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Irish Times
Maureen Dowd: talking past our Foundering Father
I called my brother, Kevin, to ask if he would spend Independence Day with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and me . Monticello has a new tour focusing on the fond and fractious relationship of Jefferson and Adams, which culminated in an exchange of 158 letters in their last 14 years of life. Historian David McCullough deemed this attempt of the fiery Bostonian and reticent Virginian to overcome their political feuds and understand each other 'one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history'. My favourite anecdote about Adams and Jefferson, who loved Shakespeare and used the Bard's psychological insights as inspiration when they conjured the country, concerned their visit to Shakespeare's house in Stratford-upon-Avon. As Abigail Adams recalled, her husband cut a relic from Shakespeare's chair, while Jefferson 'fell upon the ground and kissed it'. READ MORE [ Musk announces forming of 'America Party' in further break from Trump Opens in new window ] Our family trip to Monticello on Wednesday was suggested by Jane Kamensky, a very cool historian of the American Revolution and the president and chief executive of Monticello and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. She thought that my Trump-supporting brother and I might appreciate the new tour, 'Founding Friends, Founding Foes,' as inspiration for 'a thoughtful dialogue across the divide'. Kevin laughed when I told him about the invitation. 'I'm amused,' he said, 'that we are the example of modern-day comity and civility.' Americans are at one another's throats, living in a world of insults, coarseness and cruelty – a world where Donald Trump and JD Vance excel. At Monticello, we talked to Ken Burns, who was giving a preview of his upcoming PBS documentary on the American Revolution. He is finishing it in the nick of time, given Trump's attempts to slash PBS' federal funding. 'The Revolution – no pictures, no newsreels, and more violent than we could possibly imagine,' the film-maker told us. 'The Revolution was not just a quarrel between Englishmen over Indian land and taxes and representation, but a bloody struggle that would involve more than two dozen nations, Europeans as well as Native Americans, that also somehow came to be about the noblest aspirations of humankind.' A year from now is the 250th birthday party for the country. In retrospect, the odds seem impossible. When the patriot militias engaged at sunrise at Lexington Green in April 1775, Burns noted, 'the chances of the success of the operation were zero.' Then, somehow, eight years later, 'we created something new in the world. We were the original anti-colonial movement. We turned the world upside down'. Adams and Jefferson constantly talked about virtue and what virtues would help mold our antimonarchical society. Trump, who plays at being a king, is not interested in virtue; only in humiliation, conflict, enrichment and revenge. (The popular president of the University of Virginia, the school here founded by Jefferson, just announced that he would resign because of Trump's anti-diversity, equity and inclusion pressure campaign.) As Trump rammed through his horrible bill, a humongous wealth transfer, he scoffed at those who suggested there was no virtue in hurting the most vulnerable to make the obscenely rich richer. He keeps insisting that no one will lose Medicaid benefits, but Republicans are cutting more than $1 trillion from the programme, so a lot of people are going to suffer. The Declaration of Independence aspired to equality, while Trump's bill deepens our inequality. He wanted it rushed through for a flashy July 4th ceremony so he could sign this dreckitude on the same day that our soaring origin statement was adopted. He timed it for maximum drama at 5pm, with military planes flying over the White House. I asked Burns if it was possible now to persuade anyone across the aisle of anything, or is everyone just howling into the storm? 'The best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view,' he said. 'The only thing that can do that is a good story. Good stories are a kind of benevolent Trojan horse. You let them in, and they add complication, allowing you to understand that sometimes a thing and its opposite are true at the same time.' Reading the Adams-Jefferson letters, I felt that these founders were able to resurrect their relationship the same way I'm able to preserve mine with my siblings. We approach politics carefully, without venom or overblown expectations of changing one another's minds. We look for slivers of common ground: None of us thought Joe Biden should cling to office when he was clearly declining, and none of us like it when Trump belittles people or cashes in with cheesy products like his new $249 perfume, 'Victory 45-47'. We talk about other things, movies and sports, just as Jefferson and Adams discussed wine, books and ancient Greek philosophers, with Jefferson sometimes throwing in Greek phrases. 'Lord! Lord!' Adams exclaimed with exasperation. 'What can I do, with So much Greek?' Burns said that his half-century of making documentaries about America's wars and pastimes has taught him to embrace contradictions. 'The binaries that we set up are the biggest trap, whether they come from the left or the right,' he said. 'When you see somebody making a 'them,' you have to be careful. That's antithetical to what the Declaration is saying. I hope that what we do on the Fourth of July is try to put the 'us' into the US.' – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Irish Times
Debbie Harry turns 80: what next for Blondie?
Why is Debbie Harry in the headlines? The pop icon and Blondie singer has just turned 80. She is now the same age as Rod Stewart, 12 months behind Mick Jagger and just ahead of Dolly Parton, Bette Middler and Neil Young. How does she feel about reaching that milestone? Conflicted, judging by a recent interview in Vanity Fair. Harry said she had been affected by the death of Blondie drummer Clem Burke in April. 'What is this space I live in now? I'm curing – I'm doing a cure,' she said, meaning that she was taking stock and working out what she wants at this stage in life. 'And part of that is decluttering up my space, which is crowded with that life. I need to get some breath, get some air in there.' So that's the end of Blondie? Not quite: the band have a new album on the way – though, following Burke's death, it is unclear if they will tour again. The record is to be produced by John Congleton, a well-known figure in alternative music who has worked with St Vincent and Mogwai. [ Rock of ages: The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Debbie Harry and 12 other classic acts still going strong Opens in new window ] Any idea what we can expect? With no new music released, it's still a guessing game. However, their last LP, 2017's Pollinator , featured contributions from Joan Jett, Johnny Marr of The Smiths and a pre-Brat Charli XCX. So fans can look forward to something exciting and boundary-breaking – elevated, as ever, by Harry's hard-as-diamond, soft-as-featherdown vocals. READ MORE Debbie Harry and Blondie perform on stage during Day 5 of Glastonbury Festival 2023 (Photo by) Why are Blondie so important anyway? In the 1970s and early 1980s they broke boundaries in numerous ways. The group emerged from the downtown New York punk movement, yet hits such as Sunday Girl, Hanging on the Telephone, and Atomic had a pop sheen. They also helped put a spotlight on the rap scene bubbling up in Harlem by incorporating elements of hip-hop into their 1980 song Rapture. Punk roots: Debbie Harry with Blondie in Amsterdam, November 1977. Photograph: Gie Knaeps/Getty What happened then? By 1981, they had been on the road quite a while and tensions were rising. Their sixth album, The Hunter, was regarded as a disappointment. Plus, because they weren't selling all that many records, they were under financial strain. More seriously, guitarist Chris Stein – Harry's then romantic partner – had developed a rare autoimmune condition. He had to take time away to recuperate, and Harry put her career on hold to care for him. However, with Stein having recovered, they reformed in 1997 and achieved success with their comeback single, Maria, which peaked at number three in Ireland in 1999. Why is Harry considered such an important pop star? She was one of the great front people of the 1970s – a fashion icon as well as an influential singer. At a time when the music industry was still weighted against female performers, her take-no-prisoners outlook made her an important role model.
