guys. His friendship with McMahan and Walford grew as they visited him at his job at a local video store, hanging out for hours watching and talking movies.
Slint spent the summer getting comfortable with Brashear, teaching him the
Tweez
material as well as a couple of new songs, which they named for Brashear’s parents, Pam and Glenn. “I remember the first show I played with the band,” Brashear told me. “My manager from the video store came. I remember warning him, ‘this is going to be short.’ I don’t remember who decided, maybe Britt, that we only knew two songs really well. So we got on stage, played those two songs,then walked off the stage. The people who booked the show were really upset with us.”
It was an indicator of an evolving sense of perfectionism within the band. By the fall of 1988, as all four members set off for college, Slint had entered a new era. The dynamic of the group was about to change.
* * *
When McMahan joined Slint a year earlier, the band’s sound was driven by the songwriting partnership of Pajo and Walford, who by that point had been playing together for three years. Pajo, Walford, and Buckler had been writing songs for a good six months before McMahan entered the equation in the winter of ’86–’87, and they were in the studio within six months of him joining. Vocals aside, a number of the songs on
Tweez
were more or less written before McMahan had a chance to exert much of his own influence.
By the fall of 1988 Slint’s makeup was totally different. As college beckoned, the quartet was ostensibly reduced to a duo. Brashear returned to Bloomington for his sophomore year; Pajo, who had gotten his GED, also moved to Indiana to attend the University of Evansville. That left childhood friends Walford and McMahan, who together moved to Evanston, just outside of Chicago, where they enrolled at Northwestern University. Sharing a dorm room, the two began sketching out the songs that would make up most of
Spiderland
.
Living on their own, away from hometown distractions and surrounded by academia, McMahan and Walford’s sensibility began to evolve away from tweezer fetishes, toward something more highfalutin. “We were just getting out in the world — and we all went to relatively stodgy, conservative colleges,” McMahan told
Alternative Press
. “It was this whole rude awakening period that gave rise to
Spiderland
. We were becoming adults; we were geeking out on mythology and the idea of archetypes.”
For the fall of ’88 and spring of ’89, McMahan and Walford (by now an accomplished guitarist as well as drummer) hashed out the skeletons of songs that would appear on
Spiderland
. These new songs were longer and more complex than before. The instrumentation was also more skeletal, perhaps due to the lack of other players piling on their own ideas. McMahan had come a long way since Squirrel Bait’s “Hammering So Hard.” He was a fan of players like Neil Young and Leonard Cohen — songwriters whose music managed to exude emotion without very many chords or notes. It was a totally different approach compared with Pajo and Walford’s process in Maurice, which was technically difficult and densely packed. Pajo described the partnership that bloomed between McMahan and Walford: “Both Britt and Brian had such strong opinions and ideas about music. Brian was very detail-oriented; a very critical listener. Britt and I thought more alike. If Britt or I had an idea, we usually settled on that idea. Brian took moreconvincing. He and Britt would trade ideas back and forth before finally coming up with a solution.”
* * *
That year the band would get together only sporadically, usually during winter or spring breaks. During that time they squeezed in a couple of shows — one in Bloomington, arranged by Brashear, and another in Chicago in the spring of 1989. The latter was organized by McMahan and Walford, who were folding themselves into the Chicago scene during their
Slint spent the summer getting comfortable with Brashear, teaching him the
Tweez
material as well as a couple of new songs, which they named for Brashear’s parents, Pam and Glenn. “I remember the first show I played with the band,” Brashear told me. “My manager from the video store came. I remember warning him, ‘this is going to be short.’ I don’t remember who decided, maybe Britt, that we only knew two songs really well. So we got on stage, played those two songs,then walked off the stage. The people who booked the show were really upset with us.”
It was an indicator of an evolving sense of perfectionism within the band. By the fall of 1988, as all four members set off for college, Slint had entered a new era. The dynamic of the group was about to change.
* * *
When McMahan joined Slint a year earlier, the band’s sound was driven by the songwriting partnership of Pajo and Walford, who by that point had been playing together for three years. Pajo, Walford, and Buckler had been writing songs for a good six months before McMahan entered the equation in the winter of ’86–’87, and they were in the studio within six months of him joining. Vocals aside, a number of the songs on
Tweez
were more or less written before McMahan had a chance to exert much of his own influence.
By the fall of 1988 Slint’s makeup was totally different. As college beckoned, the quartet was ostensibly reduced to a duo. Brashear returned to Bloomington for his sophomore year; Pajo, who had gotten his GED, also moved to Indiana to attend the University of Evansville. That left childhood friends Walford and McMahan, who together moved to Evanston, just outside of Chicago, where they enrolled at Northwestern University. Sharing a dorm room, the two began sketching out the songs that would make up most of
Spiderland
.
Living on their own, away from hometown distractions and surrounded by academia, McMahan and Walford’s sensibility began to evolve away from tweezer fetishes, toward something more highfalutin. “We were just getting out in the world — and we all went to relatively stodgy, conservative colleges,” McMahan told
Alternative Press
. “It was this whole rude awakening period that gave rise to
Spiderland
. We were becoming adults; we were geeking out on mythology and the idea of archetypes.”
For the fall of ’88 and spring of ’89, McMahan and Walford (by now an accomplished guitarist as well as drummer) hashed out the skeletons of songs that would appear on
Spiderland
. These new songs were longer and more complex than before. The instrumentation was also more skeletal, perhaps due to the lack of other players piling on their own ideas. McMahan had come a long way since Squirrel Bait’s “Hammering So Hard.” He was a fan of players like Neil Young and Leonard Cohen — songwriters whose music managed to exude emotion without very many chords or notes. It was a totally different approach compared with Pajo and Walford’s process in Maurice, which was technically difficult and densely packed. Pajo described the partnership that bloomed between McMahan and Walford: “Both Britt and Brian had such strong opinions and ideas about music. Brian was very detail-oriented; a very critical listener. Britt and I thought more alike. If Britt or I had an idea, we usually settled on that idea. Brian took moreconvincing. He and Britt would trade ideas back and forth before finally coming up with a solution.”
* * *
That year the band would get together only sporadically, usually during winter or spring breaks. During that time they squeezed in a couple of shows — one in Bloomington, arranged by Brashear, and another in Chicago in the spring of 1989. The latter was organized by McMahan and Walford, who were folding themselves into the Chicago scene during their
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