Pavement, Live at Maxwell’s, 8/12/1990 (Excerpt)
Pavement - Live at Maxwell’s (Aug 12, 1990) by herjazz
I don’t know if this has ever found its way to the web (a cursory search turns up nothing), but here’s one of Pavement’s earliest live shows ever — recorded about three days after their debut at the Court Tavern in New Brunswick, NJ. (Folks who claim nothing cool has ever happened in NJ are also people who know zilch about the state.)
I haven’t had time to scribble out a setlist, but as you may have guessed it’s heavy on their earliest material. When I first heard this, I was surprised by how tight it sounded (if anything intentionally shambolic could be construed as precise/tight), as well as their similarities to the recorded versions.
What I love most about this recording is its ordinariness. There’s nothing particularly outstanding about this tape. It sounds like the owner was keeping the tape recorder in their pocket. This was more a personal document for the listener to tide them over until the band’s singles arrived in the mail.
When you combine the near-celebrity culture of contemporary music with the nostalgia for all 1990s, it’s a little hard to remember that Pavement were just a bunch of dudes in a band. On this recording they sound like any other bunch of average guys making noise; picking up an instrument and playing, talent be damned, is perhaps the most resonant point of the 1990s. The common link between seemingly disparate indie scenes that were popping up all over the country/world/etc was the notion that you could do it, so could everyone else, and you can do it on your own terms. This doesn’t necessarily mean that great art will follow, but there was a freedom to at least give it a shot. That’s what this recording sounds like: the sound of people just giving a go, regardless of the outcome.
