Gary Young, the original drummer of Pavement, dead at 70
Gary Young, the original drummer of the influential alternative rock band Pavement, has passed away aged 70.
The band’s founding member and frontman, Stephen Malkmus, confirmed the news of Young’s passing via a short statement on social media. “Gary Young passed on today,” he wrote. “Gary’s pavement drums were ‘one take and hit record’…. Nailed it so well.”
Earlier, the quintet followed up Malkmus’ original message with a lengthy tribute posted to Young on social media. The statement reads: “Garrit Allan Robertson Young put Pavement on the map. He recorded all of our records from the Slay Tracks 7″ through to the Watery, Domestic EP. He did it all in his garage, a studio called Louder Than You Think. Stephen and Spiral knew him from the Stockton punk rock scene and got his phone number from the yellow pages. He made all of their early songs happen as tried to grasp their youthful mayhem and make sense of it all. That, he did.”
Continuing the statement added: “He was made to play drums in rock and roll bands. He came from the ‘Keith Moon school of drummers’. It’s an unofficial school. But Gary graduated from it with honors. We’ve had the great pleasure of seeing insanely talented drummers. He drummed very hard from a different planet despite being born and raised in Mamaroneck, New York, on the easiest birthdate ever to remember (5/3/53). To us and all who knew him, he was a fearless fireball. His enthusiasm for playing live music was relentless and unrepentant. He was the best storyteller we’ve known and a unique judge of character. The things he experienced before we knew him blew our minds.”
“Gary loved tension. He wanted to make people excited and anxious. He accomplished both. We embraced him and he taught us myriads of things that we never thought about. He was an educator. In ways, we were his apprentices. Pavement has been an extremely fortunate endeavor from the start and, somehow, continues to be.”
“Without Gary, many people would not have noticed us. In all of the best ways, he was a freak show. He was magnetic. He was magical. He was dangerous. We could think of him as an uncle, an older brother that none of us had”.
Adding: “We all loved him, and it was life-changing to have a staggering weapon to play music with. Collectively, our hearts go out to Geri Bernstein, Gary’s wife, who was with him for nearly 50 years and kept him going and staying as vibrant as possible past the age of 70”.
Stephen Malkmus and guitarist Scott Kannberg formed Pavement in 1989 in their hometown of Stockton, California. They recorded their debut EP Slay Tracks: 1933–1969 later that year at a local studio, Louder Than You Think, which was owned by Young, who would become their drummer. He played with the band until 1993, playing on four EPs with them and their 1992 debut album Slanted and Enchanted.
The group recorded their first album in Young’s studio. “Gary deserves a lot of credit when it comes to that album,” member Bob Nastanovich, who joined Pavement during this time, told Rolling Stone in 2015. “The whole thing was really brought together by him. Pavement was really fortunate to stumble upon this guy.”
See the statements in full below.
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