Bending a Tongue Outwards: Pavement’s Wowee Zowee Turns 30
Bob Nastanovich, Scott Kannberg, Steve West, Mark Ibold, Lance Bangs, Doug Easley, Bryce Goggin, and Steve Keene reflect on the Stockton band’s once-misunderstood but now-beloved third album, which came out on this day in 1995.
On Friday, April 8th, 1994 at the 40 Watt in Athens, Georgia, a crowd shuffles around in those last few moments before a show begins, their sonorous murmurs flowing across the venue. The band stumbles on stage. Stephen Malkmus hunches over the microphone stand; Bob Nastanovich paces back and forth. The crack of a drumstick and a slow, descending riff begins, split in half by Scott Kannberg’s distorted rhythm guitar. Malkmus spits out the words with a staccato rhythm: I won’t let you break down, God damn the guts and the hail. Then, at once, the song picks up speed. The shriek of Nastanovich’s recorder (yes, recorder), matches the immediacy of Kannberg’ guttural yells—“GENERATIONNNNN,” he bellows, letting the last syllable drag out. The song drones on for nearly seven minutes, each member convulsing over their respective instrument, sheer noise ambling and pulsing through the PA. Malkmus’ lyrics are reduced to mere mumblings, unintelligible to the crowd before him. Another crack of the drumstick, and it’s over.
“When they came out on stage to start that set, they played a song called ‘Fight This Generation’ that felt really intense and driving and powerful,” Lance Bangs recalls of that night in Athens. “It felt like a reaction to the news that we were all processing.” Just hours before the show started, Kurt Cobain’s dead body was found at his Seattle home, a ballpoint pen stuck through his suicide note. Describing that moment as a “shock wave,” Cobain’s death was transformative to Bangs, realizing the effects of suicide on an entire community. “These two girls were sitting outside, and I just remember them sobbing,” Nastanovich remembers. “I was like, ‘Are y’all ok?’ and one of them looked at me and said ‘Kurt died.’” It was a reeling moment for those in underground rock, those who saw Nirvana as the next hope for bands who went against the mainstream. For years, the record labels, the media, and “the industry” had championed bands from the indie undergrounds, pushing them into the spotlight.
Pavement was on the cusp of that post-Nirvana wave. Their sophomore album, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, saw the band’s success increase on a massive scale. They leaned away from lo-fi recordings and into fully-formed melodies, the result of which was increased attention from the mainstream (even though their first Gold record didn’t come until 2024). The lead single, “Cut Your Hair” was (and still is) a calling card of ‘90s indie rock, acerbically decrying the importance of image and looks in the mainstream music industry. Rather ironically, it was that same song that got through to the masses. The song peaked at #10 on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart, staying there for 12 weeks, and that spring, “Cut Your Hair” was played on alternative radio stations and MTV alike, garnering references from Beavis and Butthead and an appearance on The Tonight Show. “They showed it on MTV, initially, 120 Minutes,” Kannberg says. “And, you know, it was a time when our kind of music was appealing to them, you know—the masses. There was an opportunity for bands like us who were kind of a little weird and a little different.”
Almost immediately, Pavement hopped on tour, capitalizing on their newfound success in likely and unlikely places. With an almost giddy intensity, Nastanovich rambles off a list of cities, each getting more obscure: Fort Lauderdale, Saskatoon, Helsinki, Sapporo. In fewer words, Pavement went everywhere. The band was 35 days into a nine-month tour when they pulled into Athens. Pavement had been playing “Fight This Generation” in other cities, but at the 40 Watt, something about that opening song became distinctive. “It feels very genuine and sincere, but also lyrically, it could be not so serious or kind of more playful,” Bangs says. “[It was] at some arms distance or some layer of irony. It wasn’t totally straightforward and anthemic, yeah, but it also felt musically anthemic.”
Working in-between those opposing forces has always been Malkmus’ forte. Catharsis and hope. Irony and sincerity. Subtlety and over-indulgence. His lyrics are often cast off as bumbling, meandering, and unpolished, but behind that misguided critique, a fundamental theme emerges. Across Wowee Zowee, Malkmus captures the stifling heat of suburban America, disaffected malaise flowing from its picture-perfect rows of houses. He was 28 when Pavement recorded their third album, yet the album reflects on aging in a way that’s wiser—far more sage than the usual musings of a twenty-something stoner.
Take “We Dance,” the first song of the record, for instance: An acoustic guitar slots into place, a haunting piano echoes into oblivion, and a stray voice mutters. The first words out of Malkmus’ mouth: “There is no castration fear.” What? In 1995, especially given the hooky, anthemic beginnings of Crooked Rain’s “Silence Kid,” that castration lyric seems especially strange, perhaps alienating to some. But, what sounds like a throw-away lyric morphs into something greater than its parts. A father fearful of aging, fearful of death, fearful of losing his identity as he grows older; a daughter, off to get married; one last dance before God knows what happens to either of them, before the world falls down around them. “He was able to come through lyrically and you know, kind of prove his weirdness and his wordsmithery,” Nastanovich says of Malkmus. “You could look down your nose at it, say, ‘Okay, word salad,’ but they turned out to be really clever. I think that was [David] Berman pushing him, if not at times criticizing him. I think he raised his standards.”
Akin to the Silver Jews frontman, Malkmus possessed the ability to twist seemingly random words into poetic phrases, ones that now seem too perfect to have been made up on the spot. Bryce Goggin, who mixed Wowee Zowee and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, often recorded Malkmus’ vocals during post-production, and says “cutting a vocal with him was incredible.” Goggin describes watching Malkmus in the booth, taking a notepad of random, disparate ideas and shaping them into fully formed lyrics, as if pulling new language out of thin air.
These wobbly, stumbling phrases are all over Wowee Zowee in push-pull, twist-turn plot structures and meandering ballads alike. “Grounded” is one of those songs that does both, weaving disjointed elements into a coherent narrative. It’s a song that nearly every member calls astounding for various reasons: the lyrics, the guitar solo, the instrumentation around it. The song describes the misfortunes of a wealthy, suburban doctor, with drunken soliloquies at dinner parties, belaboring his guests on the intricacies of bedside manor. In the country club sauna, he sits acid-hazed, the money pouring in. And yet, outside the world of gated neighborhoods and HOA dues, “boys die out on the streets.”
Often, at the same time as these braided phrases, Malkmus dispels short quips over and over, as if repeating a mantra. In the second verse of “Grounded,” he sings: “He foaled a swollen daughter in a sauna playing contract bridge / they’re soaking up the fauna doing blotters / I don’t know which, which, which.” Each time, the intensity upticks. Other instances are more excessive. On “Rattled By the Rush,” he repeats the title phrase 21 times in three minutes. Like “Fight this Generation,” “Grounded” was one of the many songs Pavement wrote on the road. During soundchecks, the band would speed through the necessary parts, dedicating the rest of the hour to jamming. “There’s just this desire to make new music from playing ‘Summer Babe’ and ‘In the Mouth a Desert’ a hundred times,” Nastanovich says. New songs then got tested on tour stops across the country—perhaps exciting or pissing off fans, depending on how dedicated they were.
Pavement was also influenced by the musicians they toured with, from Stereolab’s krautrock jams to Sun City Girls’ raga deconstructions. That 1995 tour saw the band come closer together than ever before. It was their first outing with drummer Steve West, someone more closely aligned with the band in age and ethos alike. Pavement’s first drummer, Gary Young, was ironically years older than the rest of the band and was someone whose rambunctious, spontaneous, one-take energy spurred from the Stockton punks as much as the lot-ambling Deadheads. “Gary was such a character,” Lance Bangs recalls. “He didn’t look like he fit with the rest of them. [I saw them] in September of 1992 and Gary was shirtless and wandering around the stage and doing handstands to upstage Stephen.”
In November 1994, after nearly nine months of touring, the band rolled into Easley-McCain Studios in Memphis. Malkmus, Nastanovich, and West were there a few months earlier, recording the Silver Jews’ debut Starlite Walker. Amid hazy stories of wooden cabins, long-haul road trips, and ramshackle drum kits, Nastanovich says: “David had probably read about it, found out that it was cool and suitable. David and I had never been in a proper recording studio, and it was such a special place. The guys, Doug [Easley] and Davis [McCain], were really, really welcoming.”
Ask any member of Pavement why they recorded at Easley, and a string of other artists emerges: the Silver Jews, but also the Gories, Grifters, and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Word-of-mouth buzz had reached Pavement, so they headed down to a cavernous white room in the sweltering heat of West Tennessee. It was the first “big space” Pavement had recorded at, Kannberg recalls. Previous albums were made in Young’s garage or cramped Manhattan studios. “You kind of felt like a real rock band,” Kannberg continues. The tape machines, the weird instruments, the huge ceilings, the glass wall with an engineer on the other end—all of it contributed to Wowee Zowee’s distinct sound. The album is both experimental yet glossy: strange, oscillating synths find themselves next to dramatic cello notes on “Fight This Generation,” for instance. More so than any other Pavement record, the band played into their surroundings: disjointed unpredictability filtered through a studio setting.
The first purpose-built studio in the city, Easley-McCain was originally called Onyx, before getting bought out by American Sound Studios, who renamed the space American East. It was here where auxiliary operations were done for the main studio, recording string overdubs among other endeavors. At some point, the Bar-Kays used it as a rehearsal space. But, in 1990, Easley and McCain bought the studio, where it soon became a destination for alternative rock bands. “It was loosey goosey,” Easley recalls, his Southern drawl pouring through the screen. “You know, it was a real, sort of thrift store-decorated joint.” It had lots of character, too, according to West. “I’m comfortable in studios that have a lot of stuff laying around,” he says. “It gets the creative juices going.”
Importantly, Wowee Zowee was the first album made with all five Pavement members in the same room together. Early albums like the Watery, Domestic EP and Slanted and Enchanted were just Malkmus, Kannberg, and Young, while Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain saw the band take shifts in the studio space. Compositions began between West and Malkmus, with other members adding on where they saw fit. But, because of the band’s closeness, making songs had become a more collaborative effort by the end of 1994. “Because we did all that touring from Crooked Rain, we’d become a unit,” Nastanovich says. “We actually felt like a band, as opposed to a project.” That renewed feeling gave everyone an opportunity to record their songs: Kannberg has two songs on the album, both holdovers from previous Pavement eras. “Kennel District” was written during the Crooked Rain days and “Western Homes,” the last song on Wowee Zowee, was one he’d always tinkered with. With a synth-heavy arrangement reminiscent of Roxy Music, the track decries the vapid hopelessness of suburbia.
Pavement had 10 days to record, a comfortable amount of time compared to the quickened sessions of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Days rarely started before noon and ended just in time to grab an evening beer, giving them the luxury of working out every idea that came to mind. When they weren’t recording, the band hung out with Sherman Willmott, owner of Shangri-La Records, whom Nastanovich calls their “Memphis guide.” He showed the band around to all the best local rib joints: Paynes, Cozy Corner, et cetera. “I was excited about going to, like, you know, barbecue places,” bassist Mark Ibold recalls, laughing “Stuff that sticks out to me is going to have ribs and like, discovering that the Coca Cola machine had beers in it.”
“Memphis brought out the country in us,” West says with a grin. In the corner of the studio sat an old, rusted-out pedal steel. “It’s like candy,” Easley adds. “People can’t resist it.” Easley would play the instrument on “Father to a Sister of Thought,” the closest Pavement ever got to sounding like the Flying Burrito Brothers. In the John Kelsey-directed music video, the band find themselves wearing cowboy hats and bolo ties, wandering around parking lots and corn fields. At one point, Malkmus tries to feed a calf and unsurprisingly, it runs away. Complimented by Easley’s swirling and hypnotic pedal steel, Malkmus invokes a depressive tone, singing of religion, lost relationships, dying breaths, and Texas, all themes that punctuate country songs of bygone eras. That same sweltering, dismal spell finds itself across the history of country music, as much in George Strait’s “Amarillo By Morning” as Gram Parsons’ “$1000 Wedding” or Johnny Cash’s “Sunday Mornin’ Coming Down.”
Ibold also mentions Fairport Convention as an influence on Pavement, found in the jangling introduction to “Black Out,” or the last moments of “Motion Suggests.” The latter feels like a microcosm of Wowee Zowee itself, shifting from pulsating synth hits to distorted guitars laying just underneath strange percussion, and finishing with a jangly, syrupy guitar solo. Over this shifting instrumentation, the repetitive twang of a guitar keeps the song on steady ground, while Malkmus opines with a deflected trill.
Some songs take influence from country, but others flow from the punk scene. In Pavement’s world, a meandering track is as crucial as a bite-sized one—reminiscent of the Minutemen, Guided by Voices, or Saccharine Trust. “Half A Canyon” sprawls out to nearly seven minutes, combining strange yelps with a krautrock backbeat and fuzzed-out guitar. On the other end, “Brinx Job” clocks in at a blistering 91 seconds. Many of the album’s shorter songs poked fun at Pavement’s recent successes. Malkmus repeating “we got the money” 13 times on “Brinx Job” was rather overt, yet “Serpentine Pad” further rejects the “corporate attitude.” “I think it was the band feeling like we’d strayed from our punk rock roots a little bit,” Nastanovich admits. In some grand gesture, those songs also make reference to the rampant consumer culture of the ‘90s, and the urban sprawl that overtook outer lands.
When it came time to sequence their grab-bag of songs, the band reached a crossroads. Malkmus had recorded some earlier songs in New York, holdovers from the Crooked Rain days, and wanted them on Wowee Zowee. But, Kannberg only wanted songs from the Easley sessions on the record, viewing it as a more cohesive effort. “Steve thought it would be better if it was all over the place and, looking back at it now, I’m really glad we went that route. It’s a record and it’s B-sides,” Kannberg says. “Now, I look back and I go, ‘They’re great songs.’ But at the time, I thought some of the songs were just throwaways.”
When Wowee Zowee was finished, West handed a tape over to Steve Keene—a painter and longtime friend of the band. Like West, Keene had attended Virginia Commonwealth University. But, he ran in adjacent circles with UVA folk like Nastanovich, Malkmus, and Berman. They all had radio shows on WTJU, the freeform station on-campus, and played similar music: “New York stuff like Sonic Youth, lots of the Fall,” Keene remembers. In return for that tape of Wowee Zowee, Keene handed over a hundred small paintings with one to be selected as album art. Likening his art to the DIY philosophy of zines or cassette trading, Keene creates en masse, copying other album covers or magazine images. “I learned that nobody can predict what people will like,” he says. “So, just give them a bunch and show them through it. They have to take a journey.” The finished product, a loose depiction of two women sitting with their dog, came from a 1972 Life Magazine hardcover entitled “The Arab World.”
“We’re used to not having the greatest success with singles,” Malkmus suggested during a 1998 press tour, footage of which is included in Bangs’ Slow Century film. “On Wowee Zowee, when I picked them, we were still a big deal on the major label circuit. There was a thought that we’d be a Nirvana-type band.” He settled on “Rattled By The Rush,” a strange, proggy number, and the alt-country “Father to a Sister of Thought.” “But I don’t know,” Malkmus continued. “I was smoking a lot of grass back then. But to me, they sounded like hits.” The 18 songs that make up Wowee Zowee fill three sides, the last section left blank with a question mark on the cover. “It comes off as really self-indulgent—the double record with the blank side,” Nastanovich says. “But everyone was buying CDs then. You weren’t really conscious of vinyl completists, and we thought they’d think it was a cool novelty.”
In a synthesis of influences, the record shifts and ambles, from punk to kraut to prog to country. It’s that shambolic energy that makes Wowee Zowee so monumental. This was their refusal, whether intentional or not, of any specific genre or style. Wowee Zowee rejects easy categorization, capturing the wide range of Pavement—the complexity, the strangeness, the totality of the record. Each song represents new sonic territory for the band, expanding the meaning of Pavement’s past distorted hooks. The fact that Wowee Zowee had no cohesive throughline and no cohesive sound was as much a blessing as a curse. Compared to the tight tracklist of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, some saw Wowee Zowee as rambly and out of focus, perhaps emphasizing the “slacker” in “slacker rock.” Yet, that categorization couldn’t be further from the truth. Pavement always embodied a loose and playful element in their music, but at the same time, they never once missed a gig.
Pavement took their music seriously and Wowee Zowee was simply the next step in their evolution. In 1995, critics lambasted the record, arguing that the band was trying to self-sabotage its own legacy. The Guardian, in a one-star review, stated “[it] probably helps to be a 15-year-old boy to appreciate Pavement.” Was the band trying to throw off their fans? Were they scared of their own shadow, scared of their success? “They thought it was a band consciously trying to be weird or, even worse, put off their fans and get smaller,” Nastanovich says. “Nobody does that. We were just trying to be Pavement.” Similarly, West contends that the band never went into the studio with a cohesive vision. As simple as songwriting could be, they just made up songs and played them without any external influence. “I don’t think it was a conscious decision by the band,” Kannberg thinks. “But I do think Steve, in the back of his head, maybe was a little worried about stuff. Maybe it was his reaction to a pressure to be something that these people wanted him to be.”
And what exactly was that pressure? Recorded just months after Kurt Cobain’s death, Wowee Zowee arrived like a complete 180 from what was expected of Pavement. The band could’ve fully repeated the formula of Crooked Rain, but, instead, they moved into stranger sonic territories. The messy screams on “Half A Canyon” and the embrittled guitar tone of “Rattled By The Rush” especially represent a breakdown in the typical suburban mundanity of the ‘90s. To Goggin, those moments in particular push the limits of what a pop record could be: “It’s so funny how all that now seems like normal fucked up and distorted [stuff] but, at the time, it was definitely on the fringe.” Whether or not they were consciously doing so, Pavement refused to be pigeon-holed, choosing to instead complicate their artistry with every album. “You always want to try to make your records different, or else you’re just going to be repeating yourself,” West says. “That can be great for making money, if you had a big hit in the previous record. But if you care about the evolution of your group, I think it’s important to try to grow and change for each record.”
With 30 years of hindsight, an album that was once hated is now critically lauded. On Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list, the album clocks in at #265, a good 169 spots ahead of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. On their recent reunion tour, the band took note of the album’s resurgence, playing songs like “Grounded” and “Kennel District” nearly every night. Looking at that 2022-2023 tour as a whole, the band played Wowee Zowee songs more than any other album. Yet, to Pavement fans, the record remains a sleeper hit. After listening to “Silence Kid” and “Cut Your Hair,” they dive into Wowee Zowee and find a trove of strangeness and complexities.
Contemporary artists like beabadoobee and Squirrel Flower have sung its praise, applauding the work’s insistence on catchy melodies while remaining off-kilter. Each song is different from the last, every passing note peeling back a new but different layer of the band. In a way, the record feels like a jukebox, with old country and punk jams spilling out of its speakers. Or, perhaps the record is closer to the food slung out of a dusty dive bar: “It’s the complete picture of Pavement as a band,” Nastanovich reflects. “It’s the perfectly cooked baked potato—you put it in the oven at 325° and you poke it, and you cook it for an hour and 10, and you cut that baby open. It’s all soft and crystallized. I mean, that’s kind of what it is. [Wowee Zowee] is like a big, beautiful baked potato. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is such a hamburger.”
Ben Arthur is a writer based in Nashville. His work has appeared in Bandcamp, BOMB, No Depression, and Aquarium Drunkard.
