As reported by Psychedelic Kimchi last week: "hipsters have infiltrated NBA fandom." And with that in mind, we bring you Dan Filowitz of The Disciples of Clyde with Today’s Man and the first ever NBA playoffs preview song inspired by Slint.
Not only is Polvo my favorite band ever, they're also arguably the biggest sports fans in indie rock history. They're playing the Crocodile in Seattle tonight, and you should see them if you live in my city. Dave Brylawski has done a ton of press lately, but hopefully there's something new in here. Oh, and sorry for the shortage of pictures, I wanted to get this up before tonight!
Bethlehem Shoals: Okay, so I guess we're going to try and do this formal interview now. I'm having trouble not just asking all the random fan questions I've stored up over the years.
Dave Brylawski: Well, ask them.
BS: That would be totally unprofessional. Like, should I ask what the hell the songs were generally about? The Recluse tried to convince me they were all about girls.
DB: Some girls, some mature life stuff. I don't know. Probably a lot of them aren't about much. Abstract feelings. We're not a topical band, songwriting-wise.
BS: Let me try something more journalist-y. How do you feel about now being referred to as, among other things, one of the defining guitar bands of the indie era? No offense, but I never realized Polvo had so much influence.
DB: Actually, we're in this weird zone. A lot of the press that's written about us now is about how small we are, and how we sabotaged ourselves and never really capitalized on [our success]. We're in this netherworld where we're not big, but we're big enough that we're still playing 20 years later.
BS: Do you think you've gotten bigger in death than in life?
DB: I don't know if we've gotten bigger, but we've definitely had some staying power that I never would've predicted when we stopped playing in nineties. The funny thing is, we stopped playing in 1998, and for a couple years, it died a very quick death, and you didn't really hear much about Polvo. But then a few years later, it started to get back to me that people hadn't forgotten Polvo, which was nice, and unexpected, and a little strange, actually.
I don't know why some bands get lost in time and others stay on people's minds, and we're fortunate that we did. There were a lot of good ones from our era, and I don't know why someone would remember us as opposed to, say, Unwound.
BS: It might have something to do with the trouble people have always had figuring out your sound. I always got annoyed when Polvo was described as "math-y."
DB: There’s a lot of math rock bands I really like. I think our umbrage with that descriptor is more that we didn’t feel like we were completely worthy of it. Polvo definitely has a primitive-ness that’s antithetical to math-rock. I think it’s just more like our stopping and starting within a song. Most of our songs are 4/4. Sometimes we slip in some extra some stuff, but we’re pretty straightforward, time-signature wise. We get asked about it all the time, though. I think because it's on our Wikipedia page.
BS: And before that there were the Sonic Youth comparisons.
DB: If you read our very early interviews, early 90s, one of the questions is always "who are your influences?" And it’s like so obvious who are influences are that we would say, “We don’t have any influences.” But it’s so fucking obvious that Husker Du, Meat Puppets, and Sonic Youth are our influences. We became more comfortable later on acknowledging how important they were to us.
The main thing we share with Sonic Youth is that they’re very much a rock band. As experimental as they are, they’re still at the core a rock band that pushes whatever envelopes they push and I think we share that element too. We’re a rock band. It’s not more mystical than that, unfortunately; there’s no mysticism involved. Two guitars, bass, drums.
BS: At some point after Polvo had broken up, I put on "Dancing Days" and was struck by how much it reminded me of Today's Active Lifestyles.
DB: I always sort of felt like Polvo was sort of a classic rock band, even in the early nineties. That was always a touchstone. To me, it was a continuation of the mindset of bands from the sixties who still wanted to rock but feel like we had the freedom to do some other things, other than than writing standard bridges and choruses. I don't like calling it "experimental," but just kind of pushing it a little bit and playing with it. Psychedelic, I guess. But again, to me we are just a rock band, I don’t think we’re that left field. But people seem to think we are. I don't know where that comes from, really.
BS: Seriously?
DB: I think a band like Thinking Fellers or Sun City Girls, they're pretty left-field. Compared to them, Polvo's like a bar band.
BS: Okay, onto sports. So I hear you hate Roy Williams.
DB: No, I don't hate Roy Williams! I have a complicated relationship with Roy Williams. I definitely appreciate what he’s brought to Carolina. The whole Kansas thing two years ago was sort of tough. Like our friends who think about this stuff, we think having to play Kansas, Roy didn’t know how to deal with that. It got into the kids’ heads a little bit. There was a lot of leading up to that, Roy saying he didn’t know how to coach against Kansas, Roy saying, "Half my heart’s still in Kansas." You don’t want to hear that shit as a Heels fan. That game was crazy. That ruined Billy Packer’s career, I think. When Billy Packer said, "it’s over" like four minutes into the game when Kansas got up by like 26 (Carolina did get back in that game). But that left a bad taste in my mouth which was finally sort of cleaned out by last year, of course. I like Roy. There is something John Edwards-y about him though. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it's that "aw-shucks"-ness about them that feels kind of forced.
I miss Dean, is what it comes down to. There will never be another coach like Dean. Dean was a god growing up. I was 13 when they won in 1982, but I remember way before that, when they had Walter Davis and Tommy LaGarde and lost to Al Maguire and Marquette. I went to Carmichael to welcome the team home and everything. When you're young and a Carolina fan, those are the best years, even though they didn't win a championship. That's when I used to cry every time they lost. They'd lose to State and I would cry. God, Norm Sloan and those plaid pants.
BS: It was really hard for me to accept that UNC players didn't all go on to become All-Stars.
DB: Well, I'm older than you, so Walter Davis, Bob McAdoo, Phil Ford . . . they had amazing pros.
BS: But see, I thought Chapel Hill was the center of the basketball universe. If I saw Pete Chillcut on the street, I thought I'd had an important life-experience. Then to see guys turn into non-entities at the next level . . . it just didn't make sense to me.
DB: But maybe it's like Polvo. You get these mixed messages. There's Pete Chillcut . . . but there's Phil Ford. There's Pete Butko. . but there's James Worthy. There's always enough reinforcement there. I. When I was a young kid growing up at Carolina, they had the best basketball player to ever play the game and the best defensive football player to ever play the game. Carolina and athletics have always been sort of magical to me. [Polvo's bass player Steve Popson] is going to kill me, because he's a huge State fan and hates Carolina. He's a weird guy, though. His dad played for the Redskins and the Redskins are his least favorite team in the NFL.
I don't know why I'm linking this to Polvo, but it's that same kind of netherworld where there's just enough information to confirm your fantasy that Polvo is special and magical. I'm not saying Polvo is special and magical, but to me I can sit here and say "oh, we're just a rock band," but maybe there's just enough that . . . I'm not going to say transcends that, but lifts it out of it. We're not a bar band, even if I sometimes say we are.
BS: What would say was Polvo's most bar band-y show?
DB: Like our third show, I don’t know how, but we got $300 to play this club in Wilmington, North Carolina. Three hundred dollars at the time was exorbitant. After Cor-Crane Secret came out we would play shows and make $50 a night. I don’t know what they were expecting. We only had five songs and had to play everything twice. It was awful. They didn’t get their money’s worth.
I do have a lot of respect for bar bands. It's just as valid as anything Thinking Fellers does.
BS: Back to what you just said about Polvo and UNC: I'm beginning to think you don't have any perspective on Polvo whatsoever.
DB: I probably don't, because it’s a progression of what I’ve been doing since I was 13 years old, playing in my bedroom. I don’t have that perspective that it’s anything but expressing myself through my guitar and expressing myself with my friends. That’s another thing about Polvo too, is that we were friends for a long time before we played together. I hope that shows.
BS: The music has always been a lot less self-conscious than one would expect. Especially live.
DB: That's the thing about "experimental" that makes me bristle a little bit. I don’t think we see ourselves as wizards concocting magic spells. We really do just get in the van and play. We’re more in that lineages and that’s maybe because I read too many rock bios. But we’re friends that just started playing rock music and have fun.
BS: I've got to say, though, it did kind of creep me out that you were playing this fucked-up music but weren't particularly artsy or eccentric.
DB: I think people do sort of freak out on the fact that we're just normal, sports-loving guys. We're not frat boys, or conservative computer programmers, but I think it is a little head-scratching for some people that we're so normal.
BS: Well, that's why I found you a lot more disturbing than I did Ash. At least he seemed to fit the part.
DB: I think that's probably somewhat conscious. I never bought into the whole art vs. sports dichotomy, like that you can’t be into both because I really think sports is art, sort of. It’s personal expression and it’s very pure. I’ve always been a sports fan and have been able to see the transcendence of sports. How is that different than art? I’m not equating the two necessarily; I'm not saying LeBron James is equal to Michelangelo. But it’s personal expression and there’s a purity to it. I think my experiences with sports are more playing them. I always sort of fancy myself a decent athlete. The two times I’ve felt the freest is playing basketball and playing guitar. That element of mindfulness, that you’re in your head but you’re not actually in your head, analytically.
I do have insight into why that split happened because I think that a lot of people who are into art had bad experiences when they were young with sports. That’s why being from Carolina is so important. They’re basing that on elementary school or middle school being thrown in with a bunch of angry, misanthropic jocks and not being good at sports, having that imprinted like, “Sports is dumb and inelegant”. But growing up in Carolina, all the cool rock bands grew up loving Carolina sports. It was sort of more just something you did, like playing guitar.
BS: I wonder if there's any other general explanation for sports/indie rock crossover, or if it's sometimes just a function of the individual.
DB: There are so many similarities to music. It's personal expression if you're playing it, but there's also the social function of rooting for a team and going to games. Why wouldn’t you like both? In Chapel Hill, it's not like that. Even the music geeks like Carolina basketball because it's just what you do. But yeah, there is community aspect to it, just like the indie rock thing. You go to the Cradle and hang out and see all your friends, or you watch a Carolina basketball game and see all your friends. It’s like chocolate and peanut butter. They go together.
Periodically, and without any fair warning, FreeDarko turns into a music blog. Like when the Recluse and myself joined hands in celebration of ancestral favorites Polvo. Or today, roughly 24 hours after I became the last person to stand before My Bloody Valentine's reunion tour. What follows is an exchange between myself and Zac Crain, senior editor at D Magazine and author of the forthcoming Dimebag Darrell bio, Black Tooth Grin
Bethlehem Shoals: You know how everyone talks about the new Terminator movie, or The Dark Knight, as a franchise "reboot?" That's what this show was like for me. And others, I think. One friend just said to me "I feel like the band is entirely different to me now." It's true—I tried to listen to Loveless afterward to figure out the setlist, and there was zero familiarity with the music on my part. And this is a record I've listened to thousands of times. I also believe, or want to believe, that the MBVocaust was especially deadly. The sound crew were going nuts, especially some bald guy who appeared to be in charge. They were all taping it, and these dudes had been on the road with them through the whole tour (last date was tonight). I won't go into any great detail over what parts of my body were affected and how, or how satisfying it was to watch "fans" around us who wouldn't shut up before leave after five minutes. Like motherfuckers, what did you think you were getting into? Don't you know shit about their live show?
Zac Crain: Someone offered me what he termed "the best mushrooms ever" pre-show, and I wisely declined. Because I think it might have ended up looking like the opening of the ark scene from Raiders. And I can't imagine playing that shit while intoxicated in any way. I also like the fact that, of a few thousand, maybe a handful of people had seen them before, and maybe one of those people saw them back in the day. So it was totally different than seeing, say, the Pixies, where everyone had a memory to stack it up against, or you really felt you were getting less than you might have back in the day. Totally fresh. I think reboot more or less nails it, because it was new. You weren't seeing the old band, or the the band on the record, but you weren't getting a rehash necessarily either.
BS: A friend of mine feels that Loveless once and for all destroyed the possibility of album-live performance correlation. I'd take it even further—that album's vastly human, but who ever thinks it was made by people with bodies? Even the erotics of them are soft-focus: sleeping, dreaming, bathing in sound without any punk-like penetration. Or emotions that go past the womb or certain altered states. It's like ghosts' wet dreams. Live, though, they're the polar opposite: Rock performance at its most raw and elemental. The ballad-ic songs barely existed in that context (at all, or when they were played). Then the onslaught at the end, which was like stripping their live ethos down to the bare essence. And look what you get. So basically, they're the end of rock on two different extremes of the spectrum.
ZC: I listened to Loveless the next day, and it's sort of like a tape loop of the echo of the show in my head as I was driving home, but not as pejorative as that probably sounds. But, yeah, it's not the same. It's like the difference between a jet stream and an actual jet. The MBVocaust, to me, is sort of the combine harvester of rock shows, separating the people who were there for the music and the people who were there just to be there. I was about maybe 30 feet back. People were streaming past me to leave, but just as many were streaming past me to get closer. I enjoyed that. I can't, even in my mind, completely recreate what it felt/sounded like, but I did notice when I was leaving that I felt it physically way more than anything I can remember.
BS: To me, it wasn't a question of there for the music vs. there for the event, but more "there to hear Loveless really fucking loud" vs. "people who have really spent time with this music."
ZC: Weird thing for me is I grew up in intensely small town Texas. So I had no idea about them until they were well and truly dead, or it seemed so. And then there was so much catching up to do with other stuff, I really didn't listen to MBV until really really late. And then that's all I listened to, for a time. So this wasn't really ancient to me. It was more like a band that hadn't toured in like, maybe, six or seven years. (I kind of did everything backwards or mixed up or something: hip-hop was my high school punk rock, then punk rock was my punk rock, then Britpop, then nothing but Stax/Volt, and somewhere in that game of Twister I spun "left hand, MBV.") So last Wednesday I expected to be monumental, then I was worried it wouldn't be, then it was way more than I thought it would be originally.
BS: One thing I thought halfway through is "wait, what exactly makes for an MBV 'fan'?" There's so little music. Like three CD-R's of rarities. And I don't think your experience with them (which sounds a lot like mine) is uncommon, or somehow lesser than . . . that one guy who saw them in 1991? If anything, there's a way in which you can listen to them as a totally dated band; getting into them later, when they've taken on legendary status, and realizing how easy/essential it is to do so, emphasizes just how colossal they are. Like, who says "you weren't listening to Coltrane in 1965!" God doesn't belong to anyone in particular, does he? Or some people more than others?
ZC: That's a good point. There's really not as much to grab onto, musically, as with other bands that have that stature, though I guess someone like the Stone Roses would have a similar situation should they ever get back together. It's funny looking back -- because that's mostly what I have to do with the bands I really like -- and they 1) weren't together as long as you think and 2) didn't record as much either. The deal with MBV is that part of what they did has been so bastardized -- by bands, and by critics describing those bands -- that until they started playing again, it was less a band than an idea, but an idea no one really remembered anymore, or remembered really imprecisely. Sort of like a scene from a movie you talk about with your friends all the time but never actually watch, and so, the dialogue gets botched, and then screwed up even more, and on and on. When you actually watch the movie, the scene is as great as you remembered, but not anything at all how you remembered it, if that makes any sense.
BS: I would almost say that the "I saw them in 1991" dudes become part of that hazy past. So someone says that to your face and they automatically start to dissipate a little. They become part of the legend: "those fans that heard the sound." Weird that the sheer physicality of their past live shows had become as elusive, as much of an idea, as "Loveless" was the day it was released. As opposed to, say, the time I went to Sonic Youth in 1996 and some middle-aged black dude with a Confusion is Sex tee tucked into acid-washed jeans just kept glaring at everyone.
ZC: Elusive is a good word because I can't remember the last time I went to a show where so many people didn't know exactly what to expect. At best you have someone who went to a show in another city, but they don't give you much. The sense beforehand was more than nervousness, less than fear. "Can I handle this?" was part of it, but more than that it was "How do I want to handle this? What are they/am I capable of?" Can't think of anyone else that can do that. There are bands that are sort of wildly different from record to stage and back, but even those bands, like I suppose people would consider Radiohead to be one, are wildly different in kind of predictable ways. I think MBV is permanently other. It's whatever you want it to be, but it is also none of those things exactly, and probably never will be.
BS: This goes back, as do all things in life, to the MBVocaust. If some noise band had just come out swinging with that, I would've left. But to have that as the culmination of a set that contained so many emotions, and contrasts, and history, made it well-earned. Wait, that's such a dispassionate way of looking at it. It was both laying all that to waste and boiling it down to its essence. Like the world ending so it could start over again. I really have no idea how something so stupid and obvious could be so profound. Actually, I do: If a band of unparalleled artistic excellence did it after a great set that came after almost twenty years of build-up. Catharsis shouldn't be complicated, just the circumstances surrounding it.
As a bonus, here's David Wingo's "Macrophenomenal Anthem," which only really began to take shape when MBV-mania swept New York last fall.
I haven't done the knowledge, but I'm guessing that the FreeDarko Inner Circle is roughly split into two camps on Pavement's musical output, and I'm not even going to attempt to determine the percentages for his solo and Jicks output. I can only speak for myself, and I'm definitely a fan, and if given a few beers, will expound upon his underappreciated guitar-playing and wordsmithing. And, after reading this incredible interview, you cannot deny that the man knows his hoops and has what is arguably a FreeDarkoist take on the League. I present for your consideration the following excerpts, and you may begin the debate in the comments:
"Fact is there are mostly cool dudes in the NBA. Off the top of my head I'd skip Melo, Baron, Garnett, Artest, Yao, Kobe, Pau, Boozer, Vince Carter, Marion, Brad Miller, Zach Randolph and Jason Kidd if at all possible. Those cats are not my bag."
"I'm pulling for Tyrus though - I really want him to make it. "
"I didn't see it [Tyson Chandler's assault on Pryzbilla], but I'm pretty sure Matt Barnes is also capable of such actions. Or he just blows kisses at the Blazer bench. Barnes is the epitome of punk in today's NBA. No more Laimbeers."
"Gotta put bread on the table, within reason. It's like owning Kobe. Sometimes you gotta do it."
Also, if anyone can find a clip of Malkmus's interview on 120 Minutes from the summer of 1994, I will send you a free t-shirt. That is one of my favorite TV moments of all time. The way he said Lewis Largent's name with such contempt........oh man.
-If you have a story about how loud My Bloody Valentine is live, leave it in the comments section. Those are the only conversations I seem to be having these days. Based on hours of YouTube research, I've decided none of you would've lasted five seconds in 1991 (see above). Also, All Things Considered, I'm calling you out: Your Will Hermes feature on ATP was obviously using the studio version of Loveless material. We live in a nation of cowards.
-If you want to hear about basketball, go read my latest TSB column, on the subject of Marbury and Europe.
-This blog is hereby suspended until everyone buys the book, and those who have pay my student loan. Only the one.
