GARY: 50/50.
BOB: I think it's a combination yeah.
G: I'd say most people have the record, I talk to everybody and most of them have the record. There's no question there's some who come because their friends told them to.
B: There's been a lot of hype yeah, and it's all been fairly positive, you just sort'a take it in your stride. We're ready for a backlash type thing at any time too, so just take all those things with a grain of salt. If they're saying good things about you then it's probably pretty good for the overall situation. At the same time we don't get really excited when we see what we consider to be excessive praise, or when they're cutting about certain things in the live show' or certain parts of the record we don't get really upset. I think we have a pretty good attitude about praise and criticism.
G: I think any review is a good review. If they want to say stooped things... see I read these reviews in these magazines and they don't mean anything, I read a review of another band I can't tell if it's good, or bad, or what.
M: He can barely read (assorted chuckling). If the reviews contain words that are 6 to 12 letters long then he needs an explanation.
B: Right, well it's the same thing when you go to see a movie that's been hyped for 2 months, you think you're going to be completely, absolutely blown away by everything that goes on in the 2 hour movie. So it does against you to a certain extent, but hopefully people will continue listening to the record and stumble upon it's merits at some point along the way.
The good thing is that if somebody reads something that says "this is it, finally here's an album which we can get really excited about, and bank all our chips on" a lot of people will be hungry to get it; and if they only listen to it a couple of times and if they think "yean this is decent, but it isn't that big a deal" then maybe they'll go back to it a month later and then give it a chance.
B: Well that seems to be the sort of interesting perspective, "would you believe this these guys live 3000 miles apart and their in a band!"
B: It means that for live tours we have to cram rehearsals into a small period of time.
M: But it's pretty much the same if your in a band that just doesn't rehearse very much, if we lived together and rehearsed the same amount, then people wouldn't be asking us those sort of questions.There are other bands that are putting out records, but that aren't every day seeing each other and playing together, it's just the fact that we live in different parts of America and maybe people like to hear about it.
B: There are bands that live in New York city that only practice once a month. It's just sort of an interesting thing that certain parts of the music press thought of a kind of cool little story on Pavement. For us it's fine it doesn't cause many problems, in fact it's better in a lot of ways because we were spending an incredible amount of time, social time together.
M: Steve's responsible for that mostly, because he's the guy that writes the sons and Scott writes some of them. Both Steve and Scott have listened to quite a wide variety of different things, just the same way I have, Gary's listened to a lot of things from a previous generation; I think that might have something to do with it. I don't think it was deliberate.
B: There's a basic desire to have the songs hummable so they can creep into peoples heads, the kind of songs that are irritatingly catchy in a sort of sneaky way.
M: Certain people, from reading the reviews, will mention 3 or 4 songs they like, other people will mention 3 or 4 completely different ones. Which to me is a good sign that depending on who's listening to it, and who's reviewing it, that certain parts of the record appeal to them.
B: Well, if you listen to it you can tell it's the same band. But as far as the songs go I think there's not as much variety as their is on the album. There's only four songs, it's pretty short and there's one song that's pretty hard but mostly they're mid-tempo. Thematically I think they have more to do with Stockton, which is the town that Steven and Scott grew up in, in Northern California, where Gary's lived for seventeen years and where we've spent three weeks.
B: Next time you go over to the States I implore you to spend as much time there as possible.
M: Noooo, noooo, noooo.
B: (Laughs) I'm just kidding, it's the last place in California you'd probably be likely to visit if you went there on vacation.
M: It's real bright. Low trees.
B: Straight. Flat. Lots of mallsters.
M: There's no real character to the place until you get out of town, where your surrounded by orchards and stuff, and there's a different mood out there.
B: It's got extreamly dangerous downtown, kind of ugly. There's a definite gang presence in the town. There's an incredible amount of suburban mall-strips, straight highways, nobody really walks around in Stockton, everybody has a car.
M: Total car culture.
B: The idea of walking around a village doesn't exist. It's an interesting place, I'd never been to California. Personally I preferred it to San Francisco just because it was very odd, it's a creepy place, you like your in a large prison.
B: Yeah, I think it's good. We play at least two of the songs on it every show and they're sounding better live as we get used to playing them more. I haven't listened to the tape in about a month, but the last few times I listened to it I enjoyed it. I feel as confident about it as I did when I first heard Slanted And Enchanted. As a nice positive step, there are some interesting things on it, there are some keyboard interludes, I think it's more distinctively Pavement than anything that's been released to date.
B: It's hard for us to answer questions on.
Does he discuss them with you?
B: If we really care enough for an explanation of what a certain thing means then we feel free to ask.
M: I never really ask him too much about the lyrics, unless there's a specific thing that I don't really understand, but normally I'm pretty happy with the images that the words create, and just the sounds of the words too. I think that has a lot to do with his writing, coming up with words that sound good strung together in a certain way. And those images are pretty great images.
B: We don't really complain to him very much we feel he's pretty good at what he does. One thing I've always pushed for in this band is that, man your lyrics are great make sure they're able to be heard, and I wold definitely include a lyric sheet. A lot of bands don't do that, they sort of hide behind their lyrics, you don't know whether it's because they're ashamed of them or not.
M: On the other hand they put in a lyric sheet and it's like "Oh God, I wish I hadn't seen that."
B: Lyrics upfront will always be a goal of this band, and live sometimes it's a bit of a disappointment if the vocals are low, unless Steve's got a bad cold or something we try to have the vocals real loud.
B: Any time a certain amount of people get on stage yes it is art, as far as arty-ness goes, I would never describe us as artsy.
M: Sometimes people use that word to describe things they don't understand completely, but I don't think that people would have that problem with Pavement. mabye it's because of the cryptic lyrics.
B: Right wasting their time jamming on their guitars.
M: It's funny you should ask us that question, because no-one's really asked us that. They people outside asked me "what do you think of that art fag tag." It's a lame way to describe something, it's like when people describe food and say it's spicy, I think most food has spices in it. what do you mean by artsy, does that mean that your not comfortable with something unusual, or your just not used to hearing something that's at all out of the ordinary.