In Alex Ross Perry’s enthusiastic dedication to Pavement, Tim He decker has the perfect text to outline what the band was for college oriented encompassing radio stations during the ’90s: “For kids who thought everything was stupid and everything sucked, they were your band.” At a time when real life rock stars were spending hours in a makeup room for their big transition into a potentially big hair and rather just throwing on a shirt that they ‘picked’ from their room, Stephen Mallkus led group where fans’ loyalty and adoration was more apparent than their rockstar heavy image.
“Pavement’s fanatical fervor,” explains Perry, “isn’t how they convey an overwhelming sense of the essence of artistic devotion.” He feels it is up to him to take charge: “They are the most important and influential band in the world” He seems to say this within moments simply to appeal to the audience who have never heard of the band but is just as eager to show the band how they should feel: great. It, however, is possible to be left indifferent by the director’s strategies which eventually incorporate at least four distinct production styles: a rehearsal clip with the band as they get ready for their first concerts in 12 years in the fall of twenty two, a self financed production “Pavements 33-22” featuring the band among its stars, and a mockumentary with band members played by celebrities.
While Perry’s touching gestures of admiration towards Pavement could well be genuine, they also have an ulterior purpose. The filmmaker, whose narrative involvement is limited mostly to fiction, also got some degree of conflict in bringing the audiences behind the screens in his last motion picture ‘Her Smell,’ which explored the break up of a band due to its aggressive lead singer. Still, he understands that many bands comply with ‘boring’ existence. This is exactly how Mallkus apparently is as a performer. Otherwise the only major beef in Pavement history was to replace the first drummer and a disastrous Lollapalooza gig in which the band ended up giving the audience the finger. While they were dissatisfied by the rigid framework of the industry, they entirely disbanded in 1999.
However, Perry and his long time editor Robert Greene can spin the edit like a “Woodstock” style plane, and taking into account the band’s contemporaneous portrayals, aiming the present at the dramatization of the events through fiction, most of the time is spent on the dramatization of the events through fiction and it was a great joy to expose the self heroic view of a biography film, most of them embody creation of a masochistic storyline of artist and its career which is boring in one or another aspect. Perry’s movie depicts all four narrative strands as mostly the rehearsal for the performance. These are the perspectives that Pavement’s work spoke to that are often absent in the more conventional biographies of the band, when Pavement and everyone who had to reconceive Pavement’s work freer into new for themselves things in the body of the band and the body of those who had to reconceive this body.
The use of music in “Pavements” is far from lacking. It has its focus on a band meant to be played loud. It is not uncommon to hear background songs when something is played loud. And while there may be no full performance to be seen on screen, the few times the songs are fully represented are quite stunning. Rather, it can be said that such breaks in the mainstream never lasted long for Pavement, with the success of “Cut Your Hair” pulling them in before they disappeared back to the underground.
In fact, it is so effective that it seems appropriate that this matches the wily spirit of Pavement who’s humor and formal experimentation is prominent. And the same can be said of bands in general as Perry expresses little to no interest looking into the personal aspects of the members from other than their hometown story, who is Steve West, Malkmus, Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg, Mark Ibold and Bob Nastanovich, who came together in Kaminishi and became more than the sum of their parts.
The film seems to strain viewer’s patience when the extravagant parody movie Range Life, much of which is offered as a For Your Consideration tape, comes across as rather smug, a quality that might be either ridiculed or emulated by Perry. The run time is a little over two hours but the director, too, fails to make some of the elegant cuts along the way. Though one always wishes for euphoric excess, when it is caused by what Perry adores about the band, that feeling is justified. He clearly wishes the music to continue and after Pavements, who would not?
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