The comical reason why Pavement’s ‘Wowee Zowee’ is a walking pace record
As grunge finally broke the Seattle dam in the early 1990s and ushered a whole wave of American alternative that dominated the decade, Californian indie-slackers Pavement doggedly remained in the ‘cult’ camp. They garnered a dedicated fan base and critical acclaim but never reached the top-tier echelons of their lo-fi peers, such as Beck or Sebadoh.
And they certainly weren’t interested in indulging in plain ol’ rock ‘n roll like MTV sweethearts Smashing Pumpkins, with rumours abound that Pavement were kicked off 1994’s Lollapalooza Festival due to an alleged dig at Billy Corgan on the single ‘Range Life’.
Winning praise for their 1992 noise pop debut Slanted and Enchanted, frontman Stephen Malkmus’ deceptively emotional lyrics cut an acerbic counter to grunge’s earnest, introspective wallow. Maintaining their barbed humour but pursuing a polished, ‘classic rock’ approach for sophomore effort Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain won them universal critical acclaim yet still didn’t thrust Pavement into the pantheon of big names, not that they wanted it.
Jumping back into their cluttered experimental discoveries for 1995’s Wowee Zowee, Pavement released their longest LP yet that adopts a more scatter-gun approach to its disjointed rock across the record’s 18 cuts.
“It was still the same working style that we’ve always done, in that we don’t have any idea of what we’re going to do when we get into the studio,” Malkmus told the University of Washington’s student paper in 1996. “So in that case, it really hasn’t ever been different, even with Crooked Rain... It was just taking different influences, I suppose, more of a classic rock sound. We were in New York, and maybe we were just longing for our California sound. So I tried to get this Valiumed-out, California, burned-out sound – the ’70s without sounding retro. Then on Wowee Zowee, there really was no plan, it was just sprawl, just do whatever you want, and don’t worry about it fitting together. The less it fits together, the better.”
Embracing a creative angle of smashing the wrong jigsaw into the wrong shape and basking in its prickly results is a sure way to arrive at something. Luckily for Pavement, it worked despite the initial critical confusion.
Catching up with Mojo in 1995, Malkmus shed light on Wowee Zowee‘s sedate skulk: “We ate like pigs in Memphis… The reason the record is so slow sometimes is because we were so full of fried chicken and okra…” With guitarist Scott Kannberg chipping in with “and pork shoulder”, Pavement offered a comical and deprecating insight into their essential irrelevance.
Wowee Zowee does indeed lurch along with semi-indegestion, but that’s part of its sluggish charm. At times brilliant but also glib and silly, Malkmus’ discussion with Rolling Stone about the album’s most feverish cut, ‘Half a Canyon’, illustrates the record’s flippant flourish: “This song is pretty sick for a couple reasons. The lyrics are meaningless, so let’s skip the lyrics. In a song like that, they’re just there for decoration.”
Concluding, “But it has a really cool guitar tone that totally blew out the speakers of the Fender Twin reverb — this hideous, over-driven sound that I had never heard in my life. So I take credit for that.”
