Spinning Plates #3

Once a week, Spinning Plates examines an essential “long player,” an album worth listening through from the first note to the last.  

 

“Don’t worry, we’re in no hurry,” Stephen Malkmus calmly croons on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’s centerpiece, “Rangelife.” “School’s out. What did you expect?” If Automatic for the People catches the dread fascination of ascending adulthood, then Crooked Rain perfectly captures the first dizzying buzz of post-adolescence. Seeing as how my own adolescence occurred during the 1990s, I found many of the most popular bands of the era rather un-relatable. For a middle-class kid growing up in the suburban sprawl of 90s middle-America, though, Pavement was a revelation. This shouldn’t be that surprising, considering that the top selling artists of 1994 (the year of Crooked Rain’s release) were Ace of Base, Mariah Carey and Snoop Doggy Dog.

Pavement was the first actual “indie” band that I encountered, at a time when I didn’t even know what “indie” meant (in Junior High, my first assumption was that the term referred to some sort of music scene in, of all places, Indianapolis). Pavement had already experienced mainstream success by the time I found them, which largely explains how I became exposed to them in the first place. Regardless, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain clicked with me in a way that few albums have. Everything I was thinking and feeling, as someone in my late teens and early 20s, could be found on this album. The disillusionment with mainstream media, the uncertainty of life after graduation and the mixed-emotions regarding the indie-rock lifestyle were all things that I was dealing with at the time.

When Malkmus bids “good night to the rock roll era” on album closer “Fillmore Jive,” he means it. For the jam kids, the punks, the rockers and the dance faction, music had become less an artistic statement than a fashion accessory. It’s worth noting that the Fillmore Auditorium, the legendary nexus of San Francisco’s psychedelic music scene in the 1960s, was reopened the same year that Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was released. The band that ushered in the second age of the Fillmore? None other than the Smashing Pumpkins, a band that easily epitomizes everything that Pavement was not.

When the scenesters of “Fillmore Jive” “pull[ed] out their plugs and… snort[ed] up their drugs,” there was nothing left but silence, a song cut-off mid-thought. For Pavement, this album was an eloquently constructed mission statement. Heartbreakingly beautiful in its own oblique way, Crooked, Rain, Crooked Rain depicts a band in top lyrical form, inspiring a generation of musicians one feigned half-assed riff and laconic observation at a time.

— Curt Whitacre