The Bob Dylan Center has collected about 6,000 items from musicians' archives at the Oklahoma Museum. Green Day's “American Batty” album fitted into the Broadway show. The Queen's biopic, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” won four Oscars and was nominated for Best Picture.
If these artists could hone their legacy and become part of a wider cultural conversation outside of music, why is Pave, the beloved indie rock band of the 90s, about to reunite at their first concert since 2010?
That's the animation spirit behind “Pavement,” a bold documentary from director Alex Ross Perry about the band opening Friday. In fact, Perry wrote and directed a stage show called “Slant! Enchantment! Pavement Musical” for two nights in Manhattan in 2022. And Perry filmed some of the fictional pavement biopics, including Joe Keely (“Stranger Things”), Jason Schwartzmann and Tim Heidecker, and then performed a “Premiere” in Brooklyn.
In “Pavement,” all this interacts with the history of the band and archival images from footage from rehearsals and performances of the reunion tour. (Multiple titles are very literal.) Overall, the effects are as far from typical rock documentaries as you can get.
“They're told there's nothing traditional,” Perry said in a video interview last month, adding that group frontman Stephen Marks texted him “device legacy rap.” Probably in all capitals. “Perry, at this point in the lifecycle of pavement and other bands, the question goes: Documentaries, series, exhibitions, what? “So for me it became the actual text of the film,” he said.
In a phone interview last week, Marcmus said Perry's pitch was “a little less risky,” which seemed to lead to a more interesting film: “You don't want it to be a perfect, cool hagiography?”
Marcmus, known as Spiral Stairs, and guitarist Scott Kunberg formed pavements in the suburbs Stockton (“Cleveland, California”” in the late 1980s. Gary Young, who ran the recording studio, joined as a drummer and an all-around chaos agent before being replaced by Steve West. The other members of the band are Mark Ibold and Bob Nastanovich of Bass, who offer percussion, keyboards and extreme enthusiasm.
The easiest part of “pavement” tracks the rise of the band. It faces the hopes of “the next big thing” after acclaimed “Slant and Enchanting” which, from mainstream fame, at least gained indie rock fame, opened for Sonic young people, and praised the success of the 1992 breakthrough album and Nirvana's Mecker. They were hopeful that a band like the pavement would probably not meet, but the group either smacked the chance, or at least gained a reputation for being indifferent to them. (After all, it was the Peak Generation X-slacker era.) Even Beavis and Butthead took pot shots. “They need to work harder!”
This anxiety about dynamics forms a dramatic core like “range.” It's the most obvious satire segment of the documentary – Perry says the musical theatre section is a completely serious experiment – it appears to be primarily intended to distort Hollywood reenactments such as “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “The Complete Unknown.” The moment it gets overheated, the melodrama music swells and the “For Your Consideration” title appears on the screen.
“Bob Dylan's films aren't good or fun,” Perry said, “I think if it's 30 minutes you'll be able to watch as much as Joe Keely plays Marcmus. But the problem is often over two hours.”
Keely's scene dreaming of Oscar's talk and preparing for his “range life” role is a scene with deadpan humor. He visits the former home of the Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue for inspiration (Malkmas and West worked as security guards) and sees the vocal coach trying to nail the singer's California accent. “I think I can take a picture of Stephen's tongue,” Keely suggests in the film. “It's going to be very helpful to know what it looks like.”
Marcmus said he found Keely's portrayal interesting, even if many of the biographies pestered him “more than most people feel comfortable.”
“Maybe some of my friends will say I'm trolling a bit, but in the end I have to say that it's because I'm like Rudd,” Marx said with a chuckle.
One real incident, dramatized in “Range,” has a crossover moment at the pavement museum in 1995, when the pavement walked early in Lollapalooza after a crowd in West Virginia painted bands in mud! – It is on display. The entire museum would initially be that type of put-on, Perry said, but the euphoric response to the reunion tour show and the unexpected success of the B-side of the obscure pavement “use your wishes” and “this must be celebrated in a fundamentally authentic way.”
“The real world has become film fiction,” Perry said. And his ironic conceit of being a huge band that everyone knew didn't seem to be conceit. He cited Marcmas' joke from “Barbie” as another example of “you can't make something like this.”
Still, some of the museum's exhibits were not authentic. Pavement never won a VMA and has won an Absolut Vodka Ad. (I hope “Gary Young Toenails” is also a fake.) And not everyone is joking in the world of mischief created by the production. Some attendees at Elsatz's “Range” premiere in Brooklyn were shown to have about 60 minutes of mock footage, screen tests and table readings, and thought they had seen an early cut of “pavement” and pronounced it awful.
“Now is the time to straighten the record and silence all these babies on paved reddit,” Perry said when asked about the confusion.
The reaction to the actual “pavement” was largely positive when we had a round of film festivals last year, including its premiere in Venice and slots at the New York Film Festival. New York Times critic Alyssa Wilkinson called it “awful, weird and funny.” However, some viewers are left more bewildered. A review of The Hollywood Reporter claimed that the film was hardly appealing to non-die hard.
Perry said that “Pavement” focuses on one band, but also explores more universal themes of legacy and musical history. “I think it's the most engaging textbook you can study if you want to study all the music questions in the 1990s,” he said of the band.
When Pavement held a show in Manhattan on the eve of the October film's New York Film Festival debut and delved deep into the back catalogue more than two years after the reunion tour began, it seemed that the release of “Pavement” might mark the end of one of the band's most successful chapters. But Malkmus said it was still open.
“Things live on the pavement,” he said. “We get offers to play shows, we consider them, and that's not difficult.
And Perry said his concept applies to longtime bands (“You can do Weezer musicals”), but it appears perfectly suited to the group who sang “You were extra chosen in the film adaptation of the sequel to Your Life.”
“The pavement is slippery,” he said. “They're a lot to a lot of people.”
