We’re ready to turn our volume knobs to the max for week No. 19 of our highly selective tour through the past 20 years of local news and arts in C-VILLE. This week, a pair of locally spawned bands that every music fan should be proud to call our own (even if we call ’em by their nicknames). In 1993, a pajama-clad Dave Matthews appeared on page one, a candid moment caught on a tour bus more than a year before his band’s first album, Under the Table and Dreaming, was released. (In fact, that release was the occasion for another Dave Matthews Band cover, the October 4, 1994 issue pictured.) For another local rock act, 1993 was a year of transition: Pavement, a band formed by UVA alum Stephen Malkmus, had released the critically beloved Slanted and Enchanted in 1992, and was working on material for 1994’s Crooken Rain, Crooken Rain between gigs. Songs from both bands get their due as part of our 45-song guide to essential local music here, but if our list and the paths of both bands prove one thing, it’s that our city is prone to changing its tune. Keep your dials set to C-VILLE for more on the soundtrack to your local life.
Paging through the archives
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“We’ve had Stephen Malkmus [lead singer of Pavement] wrong for the last decade, and we’re only now starting to figure it out. He’s no slacker prince. Call him a clever bastard, a savvy manipulator, if those words didn’t carry the baggage of connotation.
“‘You know, Steve was nicknamed “bunny” in college because he’d stand in the window of his first-year dorm and play air guitar along to Echo and the Bunnymen songs,’ remembers Thane Kerner. ‘He has a tremendous attachment to the glamour side of pop, which contrasts the slacker, lo-fi image he projected with Pavement. He’s really a consummate stylist.’
“Consummate and talented. With plenty of years of rock and roll left in him, to boot. Pavement may be gone for good, and they’re solely missed, but I think we might be better off with what’s left.”
—James Graham, April 3, 2001
Getting covered
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“The tape deck is still working at this point, and the conversation revolves around the esoteric jazz which Stefan [Lessard, bassist] has brought along from home. Carter [Beauford, drummer]’s wealth of knowledge about all things musical begins to reveal itself as he recognizes and names the various sidemen on the tape according to their different styles of play. ‘Hey Fonzy (Stefan’s nickname), that sounds like Scofield. And that sounds like Bill Frisell.’ ‘Yeah, it is. Turn this up. Carter, listen to this change right here. I think that’s a really cool change.’”
—Jack Bailey, June 30, 1993
