Stephen Malkmus
Uncut joins the Jicks on the road in the States
“Ilike your socks!” someone yells at Stephen Malkmus just as he and his backing band, the Jicks ,wind down a spirited performance of guitar epic “Shiggy”. All at once the audience at the Record Bar, kansas City, Missouri, crane their necks to check out the footwear. even in this late summer heat, his trousers are tucked into knee-length, red-andyellow socks with an arrowhead on the side. locals and non-locals alike, sports fans and people who would hardly know a football from a soccer ball, they all recognise it as the logo for the local NFl team, the kansas City Chiefs. “The ketchup and mustard is in effect!” Malkmus responds, kicking his foot high in the air for the crowd to catch a glimpse.
Where the socks came from is a mystery not even the Jicks could solve. Did Malkmus just happen to pack them back in Portland, in anticipation of this very moment? Did he buy a pair while sneaking out to visit the studio of Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton this afternoon? Or did they simply materialise on his feet just before he stepped onto the stage? However they got there, he wears those socks the way Prince wore assless chaps or Status Quo wore denim. For a few moments during the show, they become the ultimate Rockstar accessory, a “Hello Cleveland”! in cotton mix. is he pandering to the crowd? Or is there something else at work here? “i’m thinking a lot about my performance vibe – what moves i’m going to make, even if they’re tiny, or if i’m going play a solo behind my back in some silly way,” Malkmus explains later. “Not necessarily silly, but to entertain myself, as the performing of songs over and over is not so entertaining.”
Those socks are a product of his need to entertain himself as well as a clear signal of his recently acquired expertise on all things kansas City. During the hours-long drive from Tulsa, Oklahoma, he was glued to his phone, scrolling through lists of musicians and celebrities from kCMO in his self-assigned role as roadtrip DJ. He played songs both obscure and popular, challenging his bandmates to guess the artist. everybody got Alvin & The Chipmunks, Puddle Of Mudd and Charlie Parker, but had trouble with The Rainmakers and the unimaginatively named Missouri. When he exhausts kansas City acts, he expands to the cover acts from elsewhere in the state. “i’d be happy to be a one-hit wonder if
this was my one hit,” he says as the Ozark Mountain Daredevils’ “Jackie Blue” begins to play.
Name That Tune From The City We’re Playing Tonight is Malkmus’s favourite way to pass the time in the mini-van between gigs. To an extent, he’s a showman who wants to personalise every concert, so he’s always on the lookout for banter or maybe even the occasional stage prop. After learning that local rappers refer to Kansas City as Killa City, he makes sure to open the show with that bit of trivia: “How ya doin’, Killa City! Where can I get some kombucha on tap?”
At each show the band have been playing two Pavement tunes at the start of the encore. In Tulsa it was “Shady Lane” and “Stereo”, both from 1997’s Brighten The Corners; in Kansas City they dug deeper into that catalogue and played “In The Mouth A Desert” and “Box Elder” from 1992’s Slanted & Enchanted. “Those Pavement songs at the end of the show, they’re a nice gift for people, as they like to hear those songs,” he says. “It’s a nice thing to do and good for the viability of the Jicks, I guess. Some people who are on the fence will come back. But it’s tough. You’ve got to use all your assets without completely catering to the market or selling out. We get plenty of time to play our jams and have fun, and then we get to the boring reality…” He pauses a few seconds to let you know he’s kidding. Then he pauses one second longer to make you wonder if he’s kidding at all. But this is Malkmus’ MO these days: a musician startlingly engaged with the world around him. “It’s fun to play those songs,” he says, finally. “People get turned on. We need to do some different ones probably. I’m getting tired of ‘Shady Lane’. It’s showbiz. But it’s tough.”
RELEASED in May, Sparkle Hard is the album that rescued Malkmus’s solo career. In the past 10 years he seemed to fall into a routine with his releases, the most recent of which are all fine but self-entertaining more than anything else. He embraced his status as a cult artist playing to the same ageing and discerning fans, but Sparkle Hard lifted him out of that career quagmire, not only giving him some of his best reviews since Pavement disbanded but also making him freshly relevant to a new generation of listeners.
“I don’t know why that happened,” he says. “Good timing maybe. Or maybe there’s a song that people really like. Or, if you take a little time off, sometimes people miss you. They take you for granted less.”
Could it be that it’s just a good, solid, exciting record? “Maybe. Just because something is good doesn’t mean it’s going to do better. You can put out a mediocre record and if your time is right, it’ll be OK. People will say it’s good.” The Jicks all laugh at this assertion, as though Malkmus is talking about someone in particular, a callback to some inside joke they share. But he’s tight-lipped about who might be making bank on mediocrity. “Not gonna name names.”
Malkmus is ambivalent about the album’s timing and the state of guitar-based indie rock in the late 2010s. On one hand, he knows hip-hop and pop dominate the landscape and that the indie scene that produced Pavement now seems more obsessed with vintage synths than vintage Stratocasters, “It’s not going to ever be fashionable again,” he says. Then he immediately walks that statement back. “Maybe contextually what we do relates to other things that are going on now in millennial and younger bands. Maybe there are other guitar bands now that people are into.”
It has been a good year for indie rock, actually, with solid, exciting, and relevant new albums by Car Seat Headrest, Speedy Ortiz, Snail Mail, Mitski and other young bands. In fact, one of those millennial guitar bands – the Nashville power trio Soccer Mommy – have been opening for the Jicks on this leg of the tour, warming up the crowd with a sound reminiscent of early Pavement, Bettie Serveert and Liz Phair. “I discovered Pavement in high school and have been a fan ever since,” says Sophie Allison, the band’s main creative force, adding that she connects closely with Malkmus’s musicianship, the sound of Pavement and the Jicks. “They’re all amazing players, and it’s been cool to see them play every night.”
And there are more bands on the way. Some are even in the audience in Kansas City. After the show lets out and the crowd assembles on the sidewalk, 23-year-old Kalie Belt is still giddy from seeing her hero. She made the two-hour trip from Lawrence, Kansas, and Belt spent the evening at the side of the stage, singing along with every word of every song, many of which were recorded before she was born. “I’ve been a fan for six years,” she says. “A friend played ‘Gold Soundz’ for me when I was a sophomore in high school. But I’ve only been a hardcore fan for about a year and a half. I just learned ‘Shady Lane’ on guitar, and I really wanted to hear him play that.”
Belt fronts a band called Honeyblush, which she describes as poppy riffs and melodies laid over a bed of guitar distortion. The band is new, with more shows than recordings, but they’ve inherited a sound and a DIY approach from Malkmus and his contemporaries. The irony so often associated with ’90s indie rock doesn’t translate; he’s a highly approachable rockstar. “He really connected with the audience, and that’s amazing,” says Belt. “I don’t think he was up
“Performing songs over and over is not so entertaining” stephen malkmus
there wasted and not caring. It was more like, let’s just have a good time. I felt like I was on the same level as him. He could have been some guy from Wichita.”
Malkmus has become a legitimate indie-rock hero for a new generation, but why him and why now? Perhaps it’s the attitude. A quarter-century ago, he came across like the consummate slacker, an avatar of ’90s irony. In 2018 he is still described in the same terms as he was in 1994: aloof in his demeanour, cold in his intelligence, lax in his work ethic. But irony always had its purpose: it was a defence mechanism deployed by the first generation of Americans who would be worse off than their parents. The world is in even worse shape now, but this new generation’s strategies involve activism over retreat. Malkmus doesn’t know what younger people see in him. “It’s always backwards-pointing,” he says, referring to pop trends, to the need to dig through the detritus of previous generations to find a way forward. “I don’t know what it’s like to be 20 years old or what kind of music I’d want to make, but it would be different. Maybe I’d want to embrace hip-hop more.”
SparklE Hard assembles a dizzying variety of sounds into a fascinating whole, which is nothing new for Malkmus. “This record is much more for listening in your house,” says Malkmus. “It has some chill production, so you don’t have to listen to it loud. You can have it on in the background. Whereas when we play live, it’s not like that. The punk comes out more, there’s more of everything, more cymbals, bass, more yelling. Scorching guitars and shit.” On stage Malkmus vamps and vogues his way through songs from his Jicks catalogue. He gets seriously into his guitar solos, even playing one behind his back. He flops his salt-and-pepper hair around, often singing entire songs with his face obscured by bangs. He’s weirdly magnetic on stage, even in those socks. He is his own audience, more critical than anyone in front of stage. He gets bored easily, which means he’s always looking for ways to shake things up, to ease the tedium of being on the road day in and day out for most of his life. “I like seeing what the people are doing,” he says. “I like to surreptitiously look at the crowd through my hair. I do try to play the solos differently. I also try to play in time and listen to the band, you know, just for fun.” He and the other Jicks – bassist and designated minivan driver Joanna Bolme, drummer and designated bon vivant Jake Morris, keyboard player and quiet guy Mike Clark, who spends much of the trip working on the New York Times crossword in pen – switch the setlist around every night, emphasising new songs from this year’s what-counts-as-a-comeback album Sparkle Hard and peppering them with older solo material. “It’s more fun for all of us to play for people who are excited and yelling,” says Bolme. “We’d rather have people yelling than sitting down and doing nothing.” “When he’s on stage, he’s a hero,” says the comedian Fred Armisen, a long-time fan and friend of Malkmus. “Yet there’s something about him that makes people imagine they could be him. Sometimes you watch somebody and it’s hard to imagine yourself in their place, but part of Stephen’s appeal is that they could be him: ‘Oh, he’s just like me. I could be up there singing those songs too.’ Or maybe I’m the only one who has that fantasy.” That chill production Malkmus mentions is courtesy of producer Chris Funk, guitarist for the Decemberists and its folksy offshoots, Black Prairie and Offa Rex. He’s also worked with seemingly every musician in Portland, Oregon, from Patterson Hood and Laura Veirs to Langhorne Slim and The Minus 5. Neither Funk nor Malkmus is a native Portlander, but as transplants they’ve come to
represent the city’s gentrifying indie-rock scene, to the extent that at least in retrospect it seems inevitable they would work together. “I’m not sure why he picked me,” says Funk, “besides being somewhere he could just skateboard down to. The day he showed up, he pulls up in his busted Subaru and he’s got two guitars in his hands without any cases. Those are guitars he played in Pavement, and they could probably be thrown into a museum. And he’s got the straps ducttaped on. he just walks in, ‘OK, I’m ready to work.’”
Says keyboard player Mike Clark, “It’s the first time we’ve recorded in our hometown since that first record. Normally Steve likes to mix it up: ‘Let’s go somewhere weird where we’re isolated and totally focused.’ We did that one in Belgium, and before that we went down to LA to work with Beck. But this time we had a cool opportunity to work at halfling Studios. It was nice being able to just drop in whenever you wanted and didn’t have to be around if they were doing vocals or guitars or overdubs. That’s when Chris was doing most of his stuff.”
Funk brought a diverse arsenal of instruments and ideas to the Jicks’ sound, though he commends the frontman for his openness to input from anyone and everyone around him. “Working with him in the studio was incredibly collaborative,” says Funk. “he invites his entire band in for their opinions.”
Funk had some wild ideas about how Sparkle Hard might sound. “Let’s do something that’s more beat driven, something that’s sort of Stones Throw
[Records], drum machines and shit. Let’s get him in here and make a krautrock record. Lots of beats and synths.” Malkmus has tapped into that sound on previous records, most notably on 2005’s Face The
Truth, but Funk was thinking of something even more extreme. “he told me, ‘Oh, I’ve already made that record. It’s done. And my label said no.’”
Instead, Funk, Malkmus and the Jicks created something that is much more aligned with a familiar aesthetic, yet it may be the most diverse and quietly adventurous album of his solo career, full of new sounds and twists on old ideas. A string section lends a stateliness to the chamber-folksy “Solid Silk” and helps tug at the seams of the endlessly unravelling “Brethren”. “rattler” is caked in distorted synths and auto-tuned vocals. “Middle America” by contrast is minimalist indie rock reminiscent of those old Pavement songs like “here” and “Stop Breathin’”. Like the jarring transitions in his minivan playlist, Malkmus doesn’t just love all of these different sounds and styles; he loves the collision of them. he enjoys mashing them together in ways that might sound haphazard at first and even second listen, but eventually reveal a skewed logic. For all its chill, conversation-abetting production,
Sparkle Hard is still a guitar album, and perhaps even more than some of the overtly guitar-based albums he’s recorded in the past, it proves what a resourceful, inventive and intuitive instrumentalist Malkmus is, duct-taped straps and all. “he can milk any sound out of anything that’s put in his hand,” says Funk. “he just made the guitar sing. A lot of the solos are one-take jams, warts and all. he feels the music so deeply. he closes his eyes and goes into this zone. Not only does he look like John McLaughlin, he kind of is John McLaughlin. I’m thinking of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, The Inner Mounting Flame.”
Sadie Dupuis, who fronts Massachusetts indie rock band Speedy Ortiz, saw Malkmus’s guitar heroics up close when she toured with the Jicks in 2014. “his lyrics are clever and I get why most people gravitate toward them, but the guitar playing was always foremost for me. It’s emotionally evocative – sometimes silly and playful, sometimes cathartic, sometimes moody. I would get lost listening to the guitars as a teenager, and now years later I’ll hear one of his songs and be like, ‘Those are the words? That’s what it’s about? Awesome.’”
WheTher Malkmus intended it or not, whether he even realised it or not,
Sparkle Hard is perhaps his most engaged, even his most outraged solo album, one that addresses issues of race, gender, politics, civic responsibility. Where often his songs have seemed to exist in a rock-historical vacuum, these new ones confronted the world… well, maybe not head on. More circuitously, as you’d expect from Malkmus.
“Perhaps the overall lyrical vibe of the album is less insular,” he says. “There are still language games and timeless puzzles, but there is some currently relatable stuff as well. Maybe people like to hear a record with current events in it, I don’t know. I don’t think of our fans as really caring about that kind of thing as much. But when you have some of that stuff in there, it signals a current relevance that you’re not totally lost to history and that you’re not just playing music that is only for, you know, I guess… dads.”
Malkmus the interview subject is not always the best spokesman for Malkmus the songwriter. Songs like “Bike Lane” and “Middle America” (with its memorable and sadly applicable refrain: “Men are
scum, I won’t deny”) aren’t about jockeying for relevance or making a calculated stance that might pat listeners on the back. They’re knotty, difficult, angry songs that plumb issues of blame and responsibility, class divides and income gaps. “What is money but potential well-being pressed into a material form,” he poses on “Future Suite”. On opener “Cast Off” he even gives a rallying cry: “Speak out if you know that you are unable to follow.” Ultimately, Sparkle Hard has accomplished something improbable in 2018. It’s an album that demands we devise new ways to think about and write about and listen to its creator. It shirks the mantle of irony, dispels accusation of slackerdom, implores you to update your vocabulary. In other words: Malkmus wants you to sparkle even harder.