The shuffler: Guitarist Dave Pajo, a founder of
post-rock legend Slint. His lengthy résumé over the years includes Tortoise, Will
Oldham's Palace, Billy Corgan's short-lived Zwan, and a stack of solo
recordings under the names M, Aerial M, and Papa M. Pajo's new project, Dead
Child, is going to throw many of his longtime fans for a loop; the group's self-titled
debut EP is a set of thundering, ride-into-battle heavy metal, and the new
Quarterstick Records full-length, Attack, is equally mythic. Pajo isn't exactly a
quick draw with his iPod, but he still had plenty of opinions about
music—and a certain bald ex-bandmate—to share with The A.V. Club.
Dave Pajo: I'm kind of embarrassed of what might come
up in my iPod.
The A.V. Club: That's partly the point. We want
some guilty pleasures.
DP: Oh, man, I've got a lot of guilty pleasures. Jimmy
Buffett is one of them. [Laughs.]
AVC: Jimmy Buffett seems like one of those guys
who's due for some kind of critical re-evaluation.
DP: Yeah, totally. If you just like having a beer on
the beach, Jimmy Buffett's your man. He's mastered that vibe. There aren't too
many other people who've made a career out of trying to capture one particular
moment.
AVC: And his songs are really clever. He's kind
of like this beachcombing John Prine.
DP: That's what I like about him. I know Will Oldham
likes him, too, and we'll talk about him when we get together. I don't really
have anyone else to talk to about Jimmy Buffett. [Laughs.] I do think that he
writes good lyrics. But God, the Parrotheads that worship him are unbelievable.
There are certain bands that I don't want to admit that I like, mostly because
their fans are so repulsive. [Laughs.] The Grateful Dead are a perfect example.
I could never get along with the Deadheads, but I actually went to see The
Grateful Dead one time, just to see what the big deal was. It wasn't bad; they
were just jammin' out. But I didn't feel any connection or anything.
AVC: How long ago was that?
DP: Gosh, it must have been the early '90s. It was
back when all the hippies in Louisville drove Saabs and dressed really nice. I
learned a lot from going to that show, because it made me realize that I don't
like music that doesn't have an edge. The Grateful Dead is good if you want to
be coddled by music. [Laughs.] But I like to be prodded a little. I don't like
music that's totally soft around the edges.
AVC: Had Slint broken up by then?
DP: Yeah, I was doing Palace with Will, and I think
exploring stuff like The Grateful Dead fit our whole mentality then. Grunge was
huge at that point, and it seemed like me and my friends went the opposite
route. We went deeper into folk music and country music and blues. When I was
in Zwan, Billy got so mad at me when he found out I didn't know any Smashing
Pumpkins songs. He would say, "You haven't heard '1979'?" But I didn't listen
to any of that shit when it was breaking. Delta blues was way more exciting to
me than the Pumpkins and that whiny voice. [Laughs.] I knew that one "rat in a
cage" lyric, but that was the only Pumpkins I could recognize for the longest
time. But, yeah, Billy would get really mad about that: "How can you not know
'Tonight, Tonight'?" [Laughs.]
AVC: But Zwan didn't even play Smashing
Pumpkins songs, right?
DP: No! But that's one of the reasons I initially
liked the guy—he was so arrogant, it cracked me up. He would constantly
bring up the fact that he sold 25 million records, or that his hit song was
played at the Super Bowl or something. It just made me laugh. You know that
character Alan Partridge, the one Steve Coogan played? Billy reminds me of Alan
Partridge if he'd made a hit record. But after a while, the joke wears off.
Cryptopsy, "Faceless Unknown"
DP: This is off an album called Whisper Supremacy. I get these metal albums
and put them on my iPod in the hopes that I'll listen to them at least once.
Unless they strike me right away, I won't listen to them again. I think Cryptopsy
is one of those bands. They're a death-metal band; I remember being not that
into it.
AVC: Is Dead Child a stab at regaining your
lost metal childhood?
DP: Yeah, exactly. Everybody in the band is going that
direction. We're all ex-metalheads who had the craving to play that way again.
I don't really want to play or listen to anything but metal right now; I don't
know if my attention span is just getting shorter the older I get, but if it's
not metal, I'm super-bored. [Laughs.] I still love drone music and instrumental
music, but except for a band like Sunn O))), I don't hear a lot of new drone
stuff that gets me excited. That's just good music to fall asleep to.
AVC: What's some of the music that's been
keeping you awake?
DP: When I first started embracing metal again a
couple years ago, I pulled out the old records I listened to back in the day.
Some of it held up, and some of it didn't. I was way more into that New Wave
Of British Heavy Metal stuff from the early '80s, but now I'm trying to catch
up on all the progressions that metal went through while I was off doing other
things. The Florida death-metal scene, the Gothenburg scene, I missed out on
all that stuff. Metal has evolved a lot and broken into all these subgenres. I
went to see this band Rotting Christ last week; man, some of these fucking
metal shows are too much. I can't sit through all those opening bands. The show
started at 7:30, and there were eight bands. By the time Rotting Christ came on,
I was like, "Fuck, I can't take another blast-beat." [Laughs.] But Rotting
Christ is really interesting. They started out as a black-metal band, then they
became more death-metal-sounding. But they're Greek, so they started adding in
this Greek folk influence. [Laughs.]
AVC: What was it specifically that got you back
into metal?
DP: For the last decade, it seems like I've been
telling all my friends that I wanted to start a metal band. No one took me
seriously. When I was a kid, I learned to shred, but by the time I figured it
out, no one was playing like that any more. [Laughs.] I remember feeling so
proud when I figured out all these fancy arpeggios and stuff. [Slint drummer]
Britt [Walford] would just point at me and laugh in my face when I played like
that. He actually helped me unlearn how to play guitar, to break things down to
their most simple phrases. But I wanted to get back into metal, keep my chops
up. [Laughs.] Then when I was in New York a few years ago, I played bass for
Early Man for a couple months. It was right around the time the Slint reunion
was happening, and I couldn't do both. But playing with them made me decide to
start Dead Child for real. It reminded me of that enthusiasm I had for playing
metal when I was younger. I totally know this is part of my midlife crisis.
AVC: Do you think reverting to metal was also a
reaction against your experience in Zwan?
DP: Yeah. Zwan really did put a sour taste in my
mouth, as far as music goes. I don't want to talk too much shit about Billy,
but… He really does know how to beat the sound and life out of music. I just
wanted to do something that wasn't money-oriented or art-oriented. With Dead
Child, we're not trying to make poetry. We just want to play a party and knock
the windows out. That's the spirit that got me excited about music when I was
younger. Hardcore has that same thing. Hardcore was the whole reason I got out
of metal in the first place: It was so much faster, and it seemed so much more
intelligent in a lot of ways. The band I was in before Slint, Maurice, was kind
of a metal-hardcore crossover band. It seemed to me like a natural shift: First
you listen to metal, then hardcore, then the whole world of music opens up.
Xero, "Cutting Loose"
DP: Shit, another bummer. [Laughs.] Well, it's not
really a bummer. It's from a New Wave Of British Heavy Metal compilation I
have. The band doesn't suck or anything, they're just kind of a one-song
wonder. I don't know what the rest of their stuff sounds like.
AVC: "Cutting Loose" is a pretty good name for
a metal song.
DP: Totally. In '80s metal, there wasn't a lot of
lyrical inspiration beyond "We're psyched to fucking lose our minds!" [Laughs.]
Exodus, "Scar Spangled Banner"
DP: I just saw these guys play the other night, too.
[Laughs.]
AVC: Were you into thrash as a whole in the
'80s?
DP: I was really into the early Metallica stuff, some
Anthrax. I really liked S.O.D. a lot. I didn't know it was called thrash metal
or anything like that. When you're a kid, you just like whatever you like. But
I remember getting [Metallica's] Kill 'Em All when it came out. I was
really young, but I remember thinking, "This is fucking badass!" I played it
for a friend of mine who was really into Dead Kennedys and stuff, and he was
upset with the back cover. He said, "Look how ugly these guys are! Look at the
fucking zits on these guys!" [Laughs.]
AVC: The punk guy calling the metal guys
ugly—that's kind of the pot calling the kettle black.
DP: [Laughs.] Yeah, totally. But that photo on the
back of Kill 'Em All is pretty homely. We kind of aped that idea with the Dead
Child record. On the inside of the booklet, we have a band photo, and I asked
Dave Yow [of The Jesus Lizard and Qui] if he would retouch it. He works as a
graphic designer now, and he's really good at Photoshop and stuff. He did these
really mild distortions on our features so that we look like a really ugly
band: One guy's eyes are too far apart, another's features are too small for
his head. [Laughs.] It's really subtle, though. You'd look at it and think,
"Wow, this Kentucky band is really inbred." I hadn't thought of the back cover
of Kill 'Em All for
a long time, but I'm sure that's where the inspiration came from. That was the
cool thing about Metallica when they started—they didn't even seem like a
metal band. They just looked like fans, the guys that would go to the metal
shows, not be onstage.