Slint on Spiderland
The Great Ripple Effect
“There’s not that much good music being made by well-adjusted, happy people”
Words by Jasper Willems
The story of Slint could have been ripped straight out of a Stephen King novel. What… just what triggered four oddball kids from Louisville to create one of the most blood-curdling rock records of the 90s? The mystique of Spiderland has snowballed across generations: the record’s iconic cover photo — taken by Will Oldham — features our four protagonists submerged up to their necks in the Utica Quarry’s murky waters.
It was too deep to stand on the bottom, which meant Oldham had to keep his camera steady and dry while treading the water’s surface. As a powerful analogy for a requiem of the days of being young, wild and free, this would certainly qualify.
“At this point I can step back a bit to say that that’s kind of a weird thing to have on the cover of a record,” bassist Todd Brashear dryly remarks over Zoom, stating that the photo is probably a big part of Spiderland taking a life of its own. “Like four dudes in the water kind of laughing. I mean, people have put a lot of weight on it. But yeah, it is kind of an interesting picture to choose for an album.”
Today, Brashear is a certified Pilates teacher who owns his own studio. Before that, he owned a local video store called Willy & Woolly Video for almost two decades, a business he financed with the money he earned from Spiderland. He still resides in Kentucky with his family, but those who assume his days playing weird rock music in basements is a thing of the past, might have another thing coming. Brashear tells Under The Radar he is currently playing with a Louisville band called Rude Weirdo. “Our shows are known for being kind of crazy,” Brashear, a sober Kentuckian, sparely states. “And we usually wear costumes and the lyrics are by this one guy who pretty much writes all the songs… it’s fairly obscene.”
The sole raison d’être for Brashear to perform again is to simply amuse himself. Which is kind of what his former bandmates in Slint were doing on their debut LP Tweez, before Brashear joined the band to replace Ethan Buckler on bass. There was a lot of proverbial splashing around: from the tea spilling over producer Steve Albini’s mixing desk, mics tossed around the ceiling and a certain lavatory visit by drummer Britt Walford that eventually made it into the recording. Boys being boys, as they say. Brashear, who played with guitarist David Pajo in a hardcore outfit called Solution Unknown, was still just a fan of Slint at that point, as well as Walford and Pajo’s former outfit Maurice.
“I just knew that what Slint was doing was different. I actually recorded a show on my cassette four track, and they used that recording to demo songs for Tweez. Brian (McMahan) borrowed the tap and did some vocal stuff on it, using the recording that I made. It was done when they were playing a show with Big Black at a VFW hall. So I already had that connection to the band.”
Brashear joined Slint as the straight shooter in a hacienda of Midwestern punks on the cusp of their next musical evolution. Like many of the greatest rock bands, Slint’s music is distilled from discordance in both personalities and styles. Guitarists Brian McMahan and David Pajo were pretty much yin-and-yang in their approach: McMahan was an autodidact in his playing, whereas Pajo was a virtuoso who deliberately deconstructed his playing style much like the no wave pioneers of the late 70s. And then there was Walford, the cerebral bespectacled genius whose basement became the scenery for Spiderland’s rigorous rehearsals.
“I’ve read stuff about Captain Beefheart being a dictator when he and his band were recording Trout Mask Replica. And like, everybody basically had PTSD by the time it was over. It wasn’t like that, really,” Brashear, quick to downplay any sort of starry-eyed romanticism. “But I wouldn’t call it a laughing riot either. I mean, for one summer we pretty much practiced four or five days a week. Considering we were only working on five songs [“Don, Aman” became a late addition during the Spiderland-recording sessions, ed] so that’s a lot of playing the same songs over and over. So it was intense in that way. But I would argue, for this kind of music to happen, that’s what you have to do. That’s not music where you are just winging it. That’s probably the reason why Spiderland turned out pretty good; it’s because we put so much time into practicing and arranging everything.”
Spanning just six songs, Spiderland hardly sounds like a product of leisure activity between frisky high-school dropouts. Its bone-rattling, suspense-driven post-rock hallows instill the kind of dread you feel just before a jump scare. The malevolent caterwaul of “Nosferatu Man”, the brittle, anticlimactic “Don, Aman”, and, of course, the blackened bellow of “Good Morning, Captain” give the impression of a post-hardcore rendering of some kind of H.P. Lovecraft or Herman Melville folk tale.
Addressing the four-day recording sessions with producer Brian Paulson at River North studio in Chicago, Brashear prosaically denotes that none of the band members weren’t the least cognizant that they were making a landmark experimental rock album. Slint were “too worried about getting things done as opposed to enjoying it”, as Brashear puts it, feeling the pressure of the album being released by Touch And Go, a flagship indie label which harbored formative Midwestern bands like Butthole Surfers, Big Black and The Jesus Lizard. “People usually say when they make a record, stuff like ‘the clouds parted and the sun came down’”, Brashear emphasizes. “No…it was a high-stress situation: we didn’t have much time in the studio, like we recorded in one weekend, and then mixed it in another weekend. And then Britt and Brian went back and remixed a couple songs. So it’s all pretty quick, you know? So it was definitely more like ‘Can we get this done in the amount of time we have?’”
There were definitely bigger clouds hovering over the band than just the anxiety over recording deadlines. Between Slint’s high-wired creativity and prankster hijinks as friends, there was a lot left unspoken; chalk it up to maybe a remnant of modest Midwestern living where talking about your feelings isn’t habitual. In hindsight, it’s easy how some of that unresolved tension manifested itself into Spiderland’s foreboding landscape. McMahan in particular struggled mentally with the first cracks of his own coming-of-age: dealing with generational trauma, feeling isolated from loved ones (in an interview with Rolling Stone, McMahan confessed his words for “Washer” were informed by him and his girlfriend attending different colleges), and moving away from the safety and security of his upbringing. It’s not at all surprising that McMahan left the band months after recording was finished, mired in depression.
And that was the end of Slint’s run of studio albums, stopping at two, even though the band would reunite for live shows sporadically in other lineups, without Brashear. “I really didn’t want to listen to Spiderland, especially right after it came out. It was just kind of depressing to hear it; like ‘Man, we did this cool thing and it just went nowhere’, you know? And again, I was very young. So I mean, one of my kids is probably the same age as I was when I made that record. So that’s kind of weird, like, Wow, he’s just like a kid. I’m not saying I need to do a Metallica thing and go to a bunch of therapy over it or whatever. Because obviously, their stakes were much higher. But I bet I probably never really dealt with the emotions concerning Spiderland. Probably never have in a lot of ways, I guess.”
It’s important to note that by the time they recorded Spiderland, all of the members of Slint played the live circuit for nearly a decade despite not even being at the legal drinking age. That sounds more or less like a noiser kids’ version of The Wizard of Oz; one would imagine a hard-dosed reality of taxes, mortgages, college tuitions and salaries can burst that bubble real quick. If Spiderland had any kind of monster of sorts lurking within it, it might actually be called adulthood. “I mean, no band is ever 100% fun if you’re doing any good with it, in my opinion,” Brashear notes. “And I argue that there probably aren’t that many good bands who get along really well who are totally mentally healthy. And that there’s not that much good music being made by well-adjusted happy people. For us, it did require some conflict I think.”
We all know the rest of the story, Slint broke up thinking it would fizzle out into the pantheon of other obscure bands that self-destructed. But through the great ripple effect of grassroots testimonial, Spiderland became the cult phenomenon it is today. Slint’s strange but fortuitous career arc does beg the question if these kinds of insular rock records are a thing of the past in the days of streaming and social media, where anyone can become a voyeur inside of an artist’s inner workings. Brashear says he still regularly attends shows with his son and Walford, and he believes the kids will be alright.
“I’ve talked to Britt about it, and maybe it’s just me by being older or whatever,” Brashear remarks, with a hint of enthusiasm through his agreeable drawl. “I told him that I kind of liked some of these shows where it doesn’t really seem like there’s that many like psychotic people around. When we were young, if you went to a punk show, there were some seriously crazy, scary people who were part of that. And some of those people were my friends. But that element — at least at some of these shows I’ve gone to — doesn’t seem to exist anymore. And I think that’s good. I like that since my kids are going to these kinds of things; where there is nobody there who looks like they’re just trying to beat the crap out of somebody for no reason.”
