Some thoughts on seeing Pavement in 2026
In 1994, I drove down to see the Rolling Stones in Ames, Iowa. I was excited to see the Stones, but also a little nervous; they were SO OLD. Would they still be able to play their guitars and drums with all the arthritis? They opened with “Not Fade Away;” I was honestly, legitimately stunned that they could remember how to play a song that old, or even remember that they’d ever played it, way back in the depths of history.
I was 19 then. Mick Jagger was 51 at that show, the exact age I am now (I, to my great relief, can easily still play guitar and remember lots of songs that I wrote and performed in my 20s). Those ancient Stones were, collectively, all about a decade younger than the members of Pavement were when I saw them playing in St. Paul earlier this week.
As a person interested in rock music and its history, I’m fascinated by the ways the back half of the 20th century is a historical aberration, and by the way we don’t even notice because that aberration is what we just grew up with. But recorded music was an entirely new thing in human history; and if it existed before World War 2, it was in a smaller (if still potent) form. After the war, in the United States, the combination of the mass commercialization of recorded music and the beginning of the cultural hegemony of the baby boomers combined to create a sort of history-warping time estuary where the 1960s are simultaneously the depths of time but also still the dominant source of the music you hear on some radio stations. Call it the Long Rock Era. The Beatles mark the long-ago beginning of history, the Stones the next step forward. Creatures of the past. But also the present; Paul McCartney played a stadium show in Minneapolis last year, and the Rolling Stones released an album last month.*
*This is orthogonal to my main point, but: I was thinking the other day that the cruelest possible thing you could have done to Brian Jones (which he would probably have totally deserved) would have been, as he died, to grant him a true vision of Jagger and Richards still cheerfully making music without him as the Rolling Stones almost 60 years later).
It’s uncanny. Cultural time feels both suspended and sped up; bands that were dinosaurs in the 1980s are still around in some form. An artform that once stood astride the land is now sort of passé, except in sizable pockets where it’s still absolutely the thing. This, in terms of cultural history, isn’t really normal.
But anyway, we’re supposed to be talking about Pavement (who generally would have been toddlers when Brian Jones died). Pavement’s heyday was in the 90s; they were at their zenith when I was seeing the Stones and worrying about 50-year-olds succumbing to onstage dementia. Pavement were certainly not the Stones of the 90s; the entire point of Pavement was to sort of be the inverse of the Stones on every possible axis (it’ll never stop being funny to me that the thing that led to me finally *getting* what Pavement’s whole thing was was Beavis yealling “try harder!” at one of their videos). But they were like the Stones, maybe, in one way: they were positioned as one of the defining exemplars of their era. And also like the Stones, you really got the sense that the pressure of that wore on them. Malkmus hanging a pair of handcuffs from his microphone stand and saying they represented what being in this band was like… that’s not a sign that everyone’s cool with the situation.
The 90s were, of course, the closing phase of rock’s cultural hegemony, its move from the form that dominated the charts to more of a specialist type of music, maybe analogous to jazz but behind it a few decades in the progression (if I noted above that there are currently radio stations where it still sounds like the 60s, it’s important to acknowledge that these stations, while popular, are not the big draws serving the mainstream. They’re specialist stations, albeit pretty big ones). The historical record is easy to follow; if you look at lists of number one songs, rock slowly gets crowded out by other types of music. And we could all feel this happening in the 90s. Pavement were always a very smart band; it’s absolutely not an accident that Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’s “Fillmore Jive” included the lines “See those rockers with their long curly locks? Good night to the rock and roll era.” Malkmus could see the writing on the wall.
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was, by a fun coincidence, the then-current Pavement album when I saw the Stones in 94 (I liked it but didn’t fully get it, not yet having been hepped to the situation by Beavis). The Stones were in Ames touring a new album, Voodoo Lounge (although their set that night skewed heavily towards old faves). As I mentioned earlier, they are somehow still, in 2026, releasing new albums (although for my money they dipped below the Minimum Stones Threshhold when they lost Charlie Watts).
Pavement, on the other hand, weren’t promoting anything when I saw them this week. As far as I know, new Pavement material isn’t on the menu and hasn’t been since they reunited. The show (and the tour, and the band’s whole gestalt now, as far as I can tell) was just “let’s just hang out and be Pavement and play the songs everyone wants to hear, with no pressure and no pretense that this is moving forward.”
And honestly? The lack of pressure seemed to suit them. I’d seen Pavement once before, at First Avenue in the late 90s, and the show had been an immense drag. The band in general, and Malkmus in particular seemed tense and not fully present, entirely phoning it in. The show this week was completely different. The band was loose and generally seemed to be having fun. The only exception to this was drummer/hype man Bob Nastanovich, who was *unambiguously* having a blast.* It was great to see, and great to experience. I was glad that they seemed to be enjoying themselves, and—following the one useful thing I learned in high school band—live music is always a lot easier to enjoy if the band appears to be having fun.
*When I was younger I never noticed that Pavement and Sonic Youth are filed away in my brain as essentially the same band, despite the fact that there are notable musical differences between them and that I’m a pretty big fan of both; and, as part of that, that both bands’ live experience lived or died with the presence of one member onstage who was clearly having a lot more fun than everyone else. Kim Gordon’s gleeful bouncing around onstage absolutely elevated the one Sonic Youth show I saw up into transcendence.
For a long time I thought there was something shameful about the Stones sticking around into and past middle age. I was young when I thought that. Now I actually think it’s kind of endearing. What else are they supposed to do? It’s probably a lot fun being the Stones in “we have nothing left to prove” mode. If you had the chance to keep doing that into your 80s, why wouldn’t you? It’s cooler than sitting around watching tv and just fading away. Not fading away is their thing, after all.
And so I’m glad to have gone through that silliness when I was younger, so I don’t have to relitigate it now. Is Pavement playing a nostalgia circuit? I’m not entirely sure, but I do know that it doesn’t matter. Who cares? They played, they seemed like they enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than they did in the 90s. Again, if you had the chance to keep doing this in your 60s, why wouldn’t you?
My friend’s 20-year-old son came to the show with us, and kept needling his dad about how hard the 60-year-old guys were rocking out, ha dad, you brought me to see some senior citizens with big amplifiers. It was fun watching my friend squirm, but at the same time I was thinking more or less the same thing I think when the Washburn High School Cross Country team whooshes past my 51-year-old ass when I’m running around Lake Harriet: enjoy it while you can, kids, and let’s see how you’re doing when you’re my age.