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September 24, 2008
Retrohump: And Then... (Right Now)
When your favorite band is nearly a decade defunct, there are only so many chances to really bask in your fandom. Sure, there's the inevitable reunion, but what until then! You can only scour YouTube for new (old) clips every so often. The records themselves provide familiarity, comfort, pleasure, etc., but they can never really surprise, now can they? Which is why, every two years or so, Matador Records does us sad, nostalgic Pavement enthusiasts of the world the great service of making our old love new again with their comprehensive reissues of the band's five studio albums. Yesterday, another track listing was announced, this time for the expanded Brighten the Corners: Nicene Creedence Ed. of the band's sly 1997 record. And there was much rejoicing.
An odd quirk of that tracklist is the seeming creep of material surrounding the band's fifth and final LP Terror Twilight into the BTC goodie bag. "Spit on a Stranger" b-sides "Harness Your Hopes" and "Roll With the Wind" oddly pop up, and the first disc ends and the second disc begins with versions of Twilight's fulcrum, "the Hexx" under it's original title "...And Then" (and then also as just "Then" in order to be contrary). As a live set staple from the Corners era, at least it's chronologically consistent.
As "And Then," the song excises "The Hexx"'s atmospheric opening riff on the unique physiology of the Capistrano Swallow, as well as it's agile football references ("the secondary stumbles 'cause the cadence of the count has lead them astray..."), skipping straight to the point where Malkmus spies you in a parking lot. The nagging guitar lead maintains and bulks up fearsomely, and the lyrics digress from there to track the the majestic non-sequitur in its natural habitat (substituting the tale of a diplomat's daughter over the eventual recorded versions cold dissing of architecture students). Luckily for you and I, a commenter on Matt Perpetua's Fluxtumblr posted a swell live bootleg of the altered beast in the comments to a post on the reissue. I've re-posted below for ease...
Pavement - "And Then" (live in Germany, 1997)
Pavement - "The Hex" (aka "...And Then")
(I dunno)
The closest thing YouTube currently has to offer by way of video documentation is the above clip, which seems to be excerpted and altered to fit the general "And Then" configuration. The goofy font they throw up in the beginning makes me think it might be from the episode they did of HBO's short-lived alt concert show Reverb but I thought that was recorded during the Terror Twilight tour, when the song had come to resemble its eventual album shape.
The Slow Century clip below shows the song as I remember it played live during my one and only attended Portland concert, a day which I've retroactively declared one of the Halcyon Days of My Youth.
Pavement - "the Hexx"
(live in Seattle, 1999, from the Slow Century DVD)
Of course, this is still none too shabby...
Posted by Jeff Klingman at September 24, 2008 11:10 PM
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