best pavement songs ever (10-6)

Getting down to the nitty gritty now: the Top Ten. For the previous choices, go here and here.

Those looking for a really easy way to get started on Pavement, their first three albums are musts: Slanted & Enchanted, Crooked Rain Crooked Rain and Wowee Zowee. You won’t regret it.

xoxoxo

10 “Stop Breathin’” | Crooked Rain Crooked Rain

Sitting here staring into space, I just realized that I have every lyric to this song memorized, and I can recount them sans music. Look who has talent! “Stop Breathin’” is such a beautiful song, so frank and sincere. The guitars shift in and out of each other, flirting like preteen fingers in a darkened movie theatre. “Dad they broke me.” “Stop breathin’ for me now.” I love it when they care.

Live in Germany, 1994:

09 “Range Life” | Crooked Rain Crooked Rain

Freshman year of college, stumbling through Colonial Williamsburg late one night with my two best friends, all of us intoxicated (on life!), the Colonial Cops patrolling through, driving up and down the cobblestone streets, the three of us ducking behind picket fences, mazed gardens and blacksmith shoppes. One friend, perhaps the most intoxicated of all, takes the opportunity during one particularly tense moment to begin singing/yelling, “the PIGS, the FUZZ, the COPS, the HEAT!” (a lyric from “Range Life”) at the top of her longs while we try to shush her. We get off scot-free.

Also, I don’t think Lupe Fiasco’s masterful “Kick Push” could have existed without this song. Just sayin’.

A video.

08 “Here” | Slanted & Enchanted

I’ve gotten to the point where I think I prefer the live version of this song (captured below in a YouTube clip, as well as in their Peel Session, heard here (waaa-waaaaaaaah) in track 24) to the album original. It’s a tough call. The original is introspective and resigned; the live versions are angry and defiant. And yet the lyrics work perfectly for both:

And I’m the only one who laughs
At your jokes when they are so bad
And your jokes are always bad
But they’re not as bad as this

Apropos of nothing, that verse has always reminded me of the opening lyric to Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street:” “You’ve got a lot of nerve/ To call yourself my friend/ When I was down/ You just stood there grinning,” which is the greatest opening lyric ever. FYI.

Anyway, the real key to “Here” is the guitar line. It plays a perfect harmony/counterpoint to the vocal, at times echoing Malkmus’ despair back to him, at others responding to it, as if it were the voice of the unnamed target of the song. Also, that little guitar hitch (dadadaddooooiDOY) sounds like Mario Brothers. Man, I am just full of Top Notch Insight today, aren’t I?

“Here” live in Belgium, 1992. Dudes, what’s with the shorts on stage? Are you the Chili Peppers???

07 “Box Elder” | Westing (By Musket and Sextant)

Because making shit up/half-remembering it is more fun than researching, here’s the history of “Box Elder:” Malkmus wrote the song, and it was released on a cassette called Slay Tracks, which I believe was Pavement’s first-ever release. It came out in ‘89, I think. David Gedge, dude from Cinerama (who suck) and Wedding Present (who were sometimes awesome; buy Seamonsters, pls), heard the song somehow, and covered it on Bizarro, an album of theirs from the early ’90s. Pavement had yet to really put anything out aside Slay Tracks, and yet Wedding Present were moderately big in the UK, and so there was interest generated and then John Peel loved Gedge and loved the song and this transferred over to Peel loving Malkmus and then History Was Made.

Most of this might be false. I dunno. I do think I might like the Wedding Present cover better — they rightly recognized how great the crazy-simple guitar line is while Pavement buries it — but it’s the kinda track that’s awfully hard to screw up. I think a lot of folks consider this when Pavement really started. But who cares what a lotta people think — I gotta lotta good things comin’ my way, and I’m not afraid to say that they’re not some of them. Oh snap!

Also, here’s Malkmus playing this solo a couple years ago in NYC. Killer.

06 “Summer Babe” | Slanted & Enchanted

So I think this is pretty much unanimously considered the best thing Pavement ever did, and for once it’s a conventional wisdom that’s hard to argue with. But I will anyway. “Summer Babe” is spectacular, for sure. It’s totally effortless, feels like it might have been written on the spot, excited sideways glances between the band members, too fearful to wonder if this is it because they don’t want to jinx it, like a pitcher getting too excited in the 8th inning of a no-hitter. It also contains what I am reasonably certain is the first Swisher Sweet reference in song (“mixin’ cocktails with a plastic-tipped cigar”). It also contains a McCartney-worthy bass line. To repeat: it is spectacular. One of my favorite songs ever — by any band — and one you should download if you have never heard. But there are five Pavement songs I think are better. Come back tomorrow to find out which.