Bryan Charles - "Wowee Zowee"
Bryan Charles writes like Ernest Hemingway on speed, which was a little disconcerting until he owned up to “reading a lot of Hemingway and saw myself as Jake Barnes” and then I had no problem with the writing style and kind of liked the writer for putting it in there.
The next thing I liked about Wowee Zowee was the author’s remembrance of being in the Virgin Megastore that used to be across from Union Square and finding “a table stacked with little books. They had album covers on the front ….” I’m not sure how I became aware of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series of books – each 4” x 6” book the subject of an album – but his reaction was exactly what mine was: he wanted to write one. I liked the writer even more.
I think Continuum’s 33 1/3 series will be up to 73 books with the release of Pretty Hate Machine later this month and what’s cool – I don’t use that word lightly – is that each one is written by a different author – writers don’t get a second chance – and even each band gets one entry (which is why some of the choices so frustratingly obvious (Led Zeppelin IV for example) or obscurely inspiring (Neutral Milk Hotel), which means that as an author, it’s a big deal what album is the subject of your book proposal to Continuum.
Charles – with one novel notch in his belt but struggling with the second – is aghast no one has done Pavement yet. He immediately wants to write one on Slanted and Enchanted but gives that idea up after concluding - rightly - that that Pavement album gets too much acclaim as it is – my complaint against the Led Zeppelin IV book exactly – and settles finally on his favorite Pavement: Wowee Zowee. (It’s my personal fave too, which is why I wanted to read his book.) But it is a daring choice: Wowee Zowee is the album that was supposed to make Pavement but wound up breaking them … a notion disputed by most band members in Charles’ book – they think it’s the 1995 Lollapalooza tour that did them in.
What’s admirable about the 33 1/3 series is that it doesn’t have a formula. Each author is allowed to write what they will so long as it centered in some way on an album. There’s even a few that are works of fiction such as Kate Schatz’ Rid Of Me. Charles’ Wowee Zowee reads like a diary. We find out how he came across Wowee Zowee in the first place (and his initial disinterest), finding the pile of 33 1/3 books, sending in a book proposal. When Continuum gives him the green light, he fills two yellow pads pondering “the vagaries of Wowee Zowee and the Pavement legacy as a whole. Yet the more (he) think(s) about the record the more elusive it becomes ….”
“Months pass. A year.” Charles finally sets up an interview with Gerard Cosley – the co-founder of Matador Records that released Slanted and Enchanted – and it goes poorly; confirms Charles’ worst fears that label honchos and musicians won’t take seriously a fan trying to write a book about his favorite album. Cosley comes across as a schmuck. “Months pass. A year.”
But interviews with Charles Lombardi – Matador’s other co-founder – and Bob Nastanovich (or The Nast as he was called) – Pavement’s handyman: he played “all kinds of percussion” and Moog too – go well and begins opening doors. Charles interviews all the members of Pavement, producers, engineers, even Steve Keene: the artist who did the Wowee Zowee’s weird cover. Apparently it’s based on photo in a Life World Library book. Malkmus who normally did Pavement’s cover art “didn’t have any good ideas” and Keene’s painting “looked like an album by this band Guru Guru, whose album cover (Malkmus) always liked.” Keene was thrilled. He’d known band members since college. “I felt like I was a friend of The Beatles,” he says. Why am I going on so much on this artist? Because, other than the fact that I’m amazed he’s painted over 230,000 paintings, what comes across is how well the band treats friends, producers and even other band members. As a musician Malkmus is so much better than the others and yet he keeps playing with them because they’re in the band. If anything Charles’ book makes you like where the band is coming from: the purity of their motivations: as sports announcers like to say about certain athletes: they do it for the right reasons.
Malkmus compares it to The Minutemen’s Double Nickels On A Dime and that makes sense. It’s unwieldy, unstable, unreliable, but not uninteresting. It contains tracks from two recording sessions in different studios in different years. There was internal debate about using the earlier session’s tracks but Malkmus – using what sounds a lot like Joe Strummer’s rationale for Sandinista! – wanted to release all Pavement had in the can at the time.
So Wowee Zowee’s a challenging album, especially after the more polished, listener-friendly Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, but worth your time and effort and Charles’ book does a good job of explaining it’s nooks and crannies. Any album whose opening lyric is “There’s no … castration fear.” is no ordinary album. But was it a deliberate attempt to ward off success? You’ll have to read Charles book to find out. The answer to that and dozens of other questions related to Wowee Zowee and Pavement can be found here.
