#1151: Pavement – Saganaw

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Stephen Malkmus, Bob Nastanovich and Steve West of Pavement were in a studio one time waiting for their good friend David Berman to arrive so a Silver Jews recording session could take place. At the last minute, Berman became unavailable. Not wanting to waste the studio time, the three guys remaining quickly recorded four songs that went on to be released together in the form of Pacific Trim, an EP made to coincide with Pavement’s Australian tour in January 1996. You can’t get Pacific Trim anywhere these days. Been out of print for ages. But the songs on there made it onto the Sordid Sentinels edition of Wowee Zowee. Alongside ‘Give It a Day’, ‘Gangsters & Pranksters’, and ‘I Love Perth’ came the EP’s longest track, ‘Saganaw’. It’s one that I don’t see any Pavement fan talk about in any great length. So I can at least try.

The song contains one of Stephen Malkmus’s more dramatic vocal performances. There’s nothing to prepare you for it either. He comes straight out of the gate, wailing the word ‘Great’, elongating the vowel sound while putting his descending scales to good use, which then segues into the first full lyric, “Great seekers of violence, go away”. So it seems that the message so far is a massive plea for peace. The rest of the words I think can pretty much be taken at face value, even if they may seem to not be related to one another or connected in any kind of narrative way. Really, what I think the song’s main point comes in its final verse where Malkmus states that he wants to pack up a small bag and go on his merry way to Saganaw, inspired by the country music he listens to. (We’ll assume it’s the Saganaw in Michigan, which is actually spelled ‘Saginaw’).

Trying to think of a way to describe the music that drives this song. Or drags it, depending how you feel. I’m sure I’ve heard a song somewhere that sounds just like this or would have inspired it. There’s a definite country feel behind it. I envision the track playing in the background of a cattle trail scene or something. Malkmus belting out the notes from the top of a high mountain. Helps that his voice reverberates just the right amount to emphasise that effect. After the first chorus comes a guitar solo that is typical Malkmus, very in the moment and relying on feel, before transitioning back to its droning note that buzzes behind the verse again. Each drum strike has a booming tone behind them. The Mellotron strings add a surreal quality to the proceedings. And it closes out with Malkmus howling into the distance as the song fades out. Big, big fan of this one. Very underappreciated, I think.

#1150: Men Without Hats – The Safety Dance

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Looky here. It’s your favourite series. It’s back. And this ‘S’ section might take a while. We’ll get through it together. I can’t wait. And it begins with something a frequent reader here may find unusual or quite left-field. It’s ‘The Safety Dance’ by Men Without Hats. A one-hit wonder of sorts. I’ve not listened to any other song by the group. I don’t really wish to either. And while some might find this song incredibly cheesy in that way that songs from the ’80s tend to be, I think there’s a lot of sincerity to be found here. The music video doesn’t really help emphasise the latter. Singer and songwriter Ivan Doroschuk hams it up in front of the camera alongside a little person and a blond-haired woman who provides the female backing vocals. Neither of the two are part of the actual musical group. But if I’ve got my headphones in and the synthy introduction gets going, I can’t help but bop my head along to it.

The whole meaning behind the song can be found on its Wikipedia page, which I don’t want to regurgitate back to you. But even without looking at it, the song’s message is very clear. Doroschuk sings for the people who just want to dance, have fun, be free to do what they want hand-in-hand/in solidarity with other like-minded individuals. “We can dance if we want to/We can leave your friends behind/’Cause your friends don’t dance/And if they don’t dance, then they’re no friends of mine”. The opening lyrics right there. Rolls of the tongue, and the melodies throughout are memorable to boot. To bring the listeners all together, he calls for us to enact the phrase that makes up the song’s title, as demonstrated in the music video, by seemingly taking both arms and jerking them into the shape of an ‘S’.

Honestly, I can’t recall how I ever got to know this song in the first place. There was a scene in The Simpsons where Homer sings it and changes the lyrics a little, but I thought that was just the character making up a random song rather than it being a reference to an actual thing. Plenty of people will know it in a scene from Scrubs, but between me and you I’ve never watched the show. In fact, I have a clear memory of my sister talking to me about the song for some vague reason and referring to the Simpsons scene. She clearly knew about it more than me. So I guess I have her to thank for properly introducing me to it.

#1149: Soundgarden – Rusty Cage

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You ask Soundgarden fans what their favourite album is and it’s a guarantee that the answer provided will mostly be between Superunknown or Badmotorfinger. At least that’s the feeling I get when I visit the subreddit for the band and see threads that usually praise the two. Down on the Upside is more for me, but that’s getting away from the point. I’ve listened to Badmotorfinger just the once, was a while back, I have to revisit it one day. But from what I remember, it was heavy. Heavy, heavy stuff. Stuff to properly thrash and headbang to in comparison to those other two aforementioned albums. And it all begins with ‘Rusty Cage’, a song that’s come to be one of the band’s most popular and the song that brings this ‘R’ series to an end.

‘Rusty Cage’ has been one of my favourites for a while now. Couldn’t even say how long for. I want to say since 2011/2012? Would have to get on the old, old computer to check. Though it was sometime before I got listening to Badmotorfinger, so I was well-acquainted with the track when listening to the full album. It was through watching its music video (above) on either MTV2 or MTV Classic, when that was a channel for a small bit, that I came to know it. Chris Cornell was all grimacing into the camera while lip-syncing the words, and the guitar riffage just never seemed to end. The song’s motion is continuously on the move. It’s like that X-Men scene where Vinnie Jones is Juggernaut and he’s running through the walls without feeling any effect whatsoever. It’s the musical equivalent. But then with a minute and a half left, it suddenly changes direction and trudges to an end through the grimy, nasty breakdown.

Think what the song’s message comes down to is a basic cry for freedom. Its narrator’s been put through the wringer too many times by someone. When they release themselves from this other person’s unforgiving grip, the narrator makes it clear that all hell is going to break loose. We’ll rule the day that their freedom comes. The big implication of the lyrics though is that this day is far, far away in the future. Very unlikely it’s going to happen any time soon. The wish of breaking free is just a dream. It’s a situation left unresolved, which I guess is why the band choose to end it in the unresolved manner it does. Helps to reinforce that lingering sense of yearning and all. Times like these when I think about Chris Cornell and his passing. He’s missed immensely. Too sad.

So that’s it for the R’s. I’ll be back again. Next time with the S’s, which, along with the T’s will probably take me two years to complete. There’s a lot of songs that begin with those two letters, you know.

#1148: Stephen Malkmus – Rushing the Acid Frat

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On a post from a couple months back, I gave a small recap of Stephen Malkmus’s burst of productivity nearing the end of the 2010s. There must have been something in the air because from 2018 to 2020 we got three different albums with the songwriting guitarist’s name on there. Today’s track comes from the record that came around in 2019, Groove Denied. Though his previous self-titled debut and 2005’s Face the Truth were labelled as solo albums, they were still technically Jicks productions as plenty of songs on both contained performances by the whole band. On Groove Denied, Malkmus was properly on his own, making it his first true solo effort after 30 years in the business.

The lead-up to the album’s release was exciting. There had been lore for a while that Malkmus had an electronic record stored in a vault somewhere, and Groove Denied turned out to be it. Turned out that the whole ‘electronic’ bit was just a tad exaggerated. But before I found that out, ‘Viktor Borgia’ was released as the first single a couple months prior. It was certainly different from Malkmus’s usual bag. I liked it though. Reminded me of a rougher LCD Soundsystem. Listeners were left to ponder on it for about a month, and then ‘Rushing the Acid Frat’ came as the next single. The track brought things into more familiar territory, coming along with a trippy video where an animated Malkmus walks toward the camera with a stride in his step while the visuals in the background get all psychedelic.

The song’s lyrics appear to detail types of imagery one might envision while on a heavy acid trip. At least that’s what I’ve always thought. According to Rolling Stone, Malkmus stated that he imagined a fraternity where they just took LSD all the time and attempted to write a song à la The Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’ that these acid takers would hear while tripping,. Thinking of that now, I can see a similarity between the two. Though while ‘Louie’ sticks to that four-chord progression, Malkmus goes into dreamlike choruses where the stereo space opens up and his vocals spreads into the left and right channels with a higher countermelody popping up in the middle. The guitar (or is it a synth?) that comes in at points is wild too, not making any attempt to give a melody, but just providing some straight up noise to add some chaos to the song’s mellow rhythm. Big fan of it. But I’m just a huge Malkmus fan, anyway.

#1147: Hot Hot Heat – Running Out of Time

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Hot Hot Heat were one of the first bands I witnessed when I was really getting into rock music, thanks to the video for ‘Bandages’ being played in the morning one day on MTV2. Not too far from that point, the group came back with their second album Elevator, promoted by singles ‘Goodnight Goodnight’ and ‘Middle of Nowhere’. Both fine, fine songs. And it was those two, along with ‘Island of the Honest Man’, that gave me the urge to download the album years later. This is all a very roundabout way of saying this is how I came to know today’s song ‘Running Out of Time’, which is the first proper track on Elevator following a short little introduction that opens the album.

It’s a slamming start to the track that greets the listener, putting things into high gear before Steve Bays goes in observation mode and dedicates his verses to a bunch of kooky characters. In order of appearance, he sings about: himself, an art history dropout, a screenplay player co-writing a screenplay (a lyric which I’ve never fully realised how clunky it is till now), a Hollywood waiter and a retired ball player. They’re all going through their own situations, all of which seem to freak Bays out in a way and lead him to the conclusion that he’s ‘running out of time’. Maybe these characters are reminding him of his age or something. But he would have been relatively young while writing the lyrics. I don’t know. It’s a guess. I could understand someone not liking Bays’ style of singing. I read the lyrics online and wonder if they’re the words that are actually being said. But he has enough power and melody in his delivery that it wins me over anyway. And also Dante DeCaro’s guitar fills throughout add a little extra eccentricity to the action. It’s all very good stuff.

I’d gotten used to fact that Hot Hot Heat were no longer a band. The Canadian group hadn’t been a functioning unit since 2016, I believe. They released a final self-titled album, called it a day, and that was that. So it was strange to me when maybe a couple weeks ago I read that the band had split up again. Again? When did they reunite? Apparently in November last year. They released a new song and everything, which I completely missed. But the comeback didn’t last long, as vocalist Steve Bays felt he “couldn’t participate”. A fair enough reason not to do something, I guess. There’s probably something more behind that statement, but also probably best not to probe.