courtesy photo
Stephen Malkmus wants you to know: “Rip City is back.”
Malkmus and his band the Jicks take to the Waiting Room stage with Tyvek on Sunday, Feb. 16, in support of their January release Wig Out at Jagbags.
Malkmus, who lives with his wife and two children in Portland, Ore., refers to the city’s basketball team, the Trail Blazers, spontaneously dubbed Rip City by longtime play-by-play commentator Bill Schonely. In 1970, the Blazers trailed the Lakers at home by a seemingly insurmountable deficit when the Blazers were able to rally back to a two-point deficit. Blazers guard Jim Barnett tied the game with a long jumpshot and Schonely famously exclaimed “Rip City! All right!”
The nickname stuck, and Malkmus may be right.
Without a championship since 1977, a conference title since 1992, and a division title since 1999, Trail Blazers have reason for rejuvenated pride in Rip City. With a 36-17 record, Portland has positioned itself as a surprise contender for a conference title, sitting fourth in the Western Conference behind Oklahoma City, San Antonio and the Los Angeles Clippers.
It’s great news for Malkmus, who’s an avid basketball fan, and if the song “Chartjunk” from Jagbags is any indication, isolation from NBA culture didn’t stop him from thinking about it.
While Jagbags was written during Malkmus’ two-year stint in Berlin, where “you can’t watch games from the NBA, except for maybe a Raptors game on Sundays,” “Chartjunk” details a surreal relationship between Milwaukee Bucks former head coach Scott Skiles and former point guard Brandon Jennings.
“It’s archetypical: young man thinks he knows everything and an authority figure with a superego trying to keep him down,” Malkmus said. “Skiles, he’s known for being a good coach, but he’s kind of a hardass. He follows his own rules and kind of yanks players around.”
The lyrics are a convincing argument for Malkmus’s fandom, ripe with basketball jargon like step-back threes, dimes and dipsy-dos, topped off with a reference to a D-League Wichita team.
Malkmus’ reflection on American culture while writing from Germany doesn’t end at a four-minute track about professional basketball. All of Jagbags exists as a sort of tour through American rock music.
On the album’s first single “Lariat,” Malkmus warbles, “We lived on Tennyson and venison and the Grateful Dead,” over summery, noodling guitars to make any Merry Prankster swoon. “Rumble at the Rainbo,” an ironic indictment of counterculture, evokes images of early punk rock shows. “Shibboleth,” with its low-end, bubbling power chords and flittering guitar melodies could have been a Pixies song.
Although Jagbags, rife with horn parts, features more varied and colorful arrangements than past Jicks albums, Malkmus once again lets his guitar speak as much as his own sometimes clever, sometimes nonsensical, always sharp lyrics.
Malkmus compares his interest in Americanism to that of fellow expatriate Henry James, an American-born writer who spent the bulk of his life living in Britain. James’ works, mostly penned in Europe, often explored differences between European and American cultures. Malkmus describes a certain clarity that comes with distance.
“When you go somewhere where you don’t know anybody, you’re on your own. What you see, what you can’t see, it all becomes clearer from across the pond.
In Malkmus’ mind, there’s the music of the British Invasion and British punk. Beyond that, his interest in rock music is purely American.
“I’m not really influenced by Blur or My Bloody Valentine or anything like that,” he said. “Half of those bands are just trying to sound American anyway.”
Rock ‘n’ roll, as Malkmus sees it, with its roots in blues and Deep South culture, is an American tradition.
“One thing we do well here is rock ‘n’ roll. It’s our thing, and I feel entitled to plunder it.”
As the former frontman for one of the nation’s most influential alternative rock bands, Pavement, it’s impossible not to read Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain into Malkmus’ current work. At 47 years old, Malkmus’s voice is as acrobatic and sardonic as it was more than 20 years ago at Pavement’s origins, his lyrics equally acerbic.
“Onward ye Christian sailors / You smooth-talking jack-off jailors / A one-stop shoplifter’s narrow convenience,” he sings with punctuation on “Cinnamon and Lesbians.” The guitar work here could very well be a Crosby, Stills and Nash b-side.
Nearly 15 years after Pavement’s somewhat tumultuous final show (omitting a brief reunion tour in 2010), where Malkmus appeared on stage with handcuffs attached to the microphone as a heavy-handed metaphor, he doesn’t give much time to reflection.
“It doesn’t affect how I work or what I do, how I play music and think about it. I’m just being in this band now.”
As for the reunion tour, the string of shows effectively closed the door on the Pavement chapter of his career.
In 2012, Black Sabbath reunited for a tour and a new album 13, featuring Ozzy Osbourne for the first time since 1978. The band has shows scheduled through June this year. Also in 2012, Beach Boys came together for a slew of shows and a new album. Among Pavement’s contemporaries, Dinosaur Jr. reunited in 2005 and has been active since.
Malkmus didn’t want Pavement’s reunion to be that way.
“Many bands open the door and run with it. To me, it was more compartmentalized. Like a pure recreating of a past event. Like a Civil War reenactment.”
He wants DNA extracted from a mid-’90s tour fossilized in the amber of memory, used to bring what’s gone briefly back to life, for those of us who weren’t there the first time around. In the perfect reunion, he plays the same hits at the same venues through the same amps. He works with the same sound people and the band travels together in a van.
Of course, like a Civil War reenactment, perfect replication is only a goal, not an expectation. Malkmus and other members of Pavement are not the same people that came together for 1995’s Wowee Zowee. They’ve evolved.
Guitarist Scott Kannberg had a few releases with Preston School of Industry and a solo album in 2009. Drummer Steve West leads international music collective Marble Valley, which has released six records since 1997. Bassist Mark Ibold is currently an active member of Sonic Youth. Percussionist and vocalist Bob Nastanovich lives in Des Moines and pursues horse racing as a hobby.
And Malkmus is in the Jicks. His continued pursuit of music is less a choice and more an impulse.
“There’s a compulsion to create and be heard,” he says. “We like to participate and add our two cents on top of the millions of dollars worth of information that has already been said about music.”
He admits that he doesn’t reflect much on the theory behind his music, yet as he’s an artist, his breadth has continually expanded.
Even on Wowee Zowee, Pavement’s most sonically diverse album, instrumentation doesn’t venture outside the standard rock format any further than the appearance of a cello on one track. Malkmus has loosened up since. Wig Out at Jagbags finds prominent use of horns, keys and flutes beside the typical collection of guitars and drums. It builds on the band’s previous release, Mirror Traffic, which went as far as to include French horn.
“There’s some music that back in my past I might have been afraid to touch because I didn’t think it was cool. I don’t foresee that I’ll want to have a big Marshall amp behind me for the next 20 years. Things inevitably get more mid-paced.”
That reception to diversity, his approach shifting with time, extends to his vocal work, as well. Malkmus’ previous solo work still places him somewhere in between a spoken-word poet and singer. On Jagbags, tracks like “J Smoov” have him as close to crooning as he’s ever been. He says he’s been interested in exploring more conventional rock singing, more into the vocal aspect of music performance.
Maybe variation is important for the people who can’t stop working. It keeps things interesting when you don’t know what else to do.
“It’s doing something constructive, contributing. Maybe if I stayed at home, I would work at a homeless shelter. But this is how my life got arranged. I didn’t set anything else up for myself, so it’s important to me to get out there.”
Jacob Zlomke is a Hear Nebraska contributor. He bluffed his way through a basketball conversation for this story. Reach him at jacobz@hearnebraska.org.