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Glenn / Rhoda single for free. When McMahan and
Walford moved to Chicago he introduced them to many of the
major players in that city s music scene. He arranged for
Walford to record with the Breeders in Scotland, no less!
He was so close to Walford that he let him house-sit while
Albini went on tour (the tale of which is recounted in the
Jesus Lizard song Mouth Breather ). Albini was Slint s
champion as well as their friend. And yet he did not record
Spiderland.
Neither Pajo nor Brashear would answer why the band chose
to go with Paulson over Albini, each claiming that it was a
decision made by Walford and McMahan, both of whom
declined to be interviewed
for this book. It s difficult to say whether they opted for a
different engineer for aesthetic or personal reasons or simply
due to a scheduling conflict Albini was engineering the
Jesus Lizard s second album, Goat, at the exact same time,
literally just a few blocks from River North. Pajo remembers
Albini and the Jesus Lizard guys dropping in to the studio to
see how the session was going. I remember feeling like
Steve was kind of bummed that we didn t have him doing the
record. He was the biggest Slint fan on the planet, and he did
a lot for us. And then we went with somebody else.
Not that Paulson was a slouch. In fact he was an extremely
talented engineer in his own right, as the final product clearly
attests. Albini himself acknowledged to Alternative Press that
they certainly made a better record without me. And Slint s
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friendship with Albini seems not to have suffered; he
continued to champion the band, penning the Melody Maker
review of Spiderland that is widely credited with launching
Spiderland s status as one of the most influential records of
the decade.
* * *
Following the path set by Glenn, Slint had a clear idea of
how they wanted their record to sound. Citing the band s
growing affinity for old folk and delta blues of the 1930s and
1940s, Pajo said the band wanted to capture a similarly
unaffected sound. We had a purist approach to [Spiderland].
We wanted it to be
natural the opposite of Tweez. The blues songs the band
had become so fond of were recorded simply someone put
a microphone up and the performer played live, then it was
done. There were no multiple takes, no studio trickery, no
reverb or compression, no click tracks or punch-ins. All the
beauty of a recording came from the performance.
Approaching the Spiderland session, Slint had spent the
summer putting their songs to tape in a similarly simplified
manner. Using Walford s jam box, they had recorded their
practices so that Walford and McMahan could work on lyrics
and vocals. They had been recording with the jam box for
years, going as far back as the demo Maurice recorded for
Glenn Danzig, and they had grown accustomed to the way
they sounded via those recordings. Brashear went so far as to
claim that there is a version of Glenn recorded on the jam
box that he prefers to the Albini-produced version. We were
all really hot on how this jam box recorded stuff, so maybe
that had something to do with keeping [Spiderland] pretty
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stripped down. We just liked that unadorned sound so much,
Brashear said.
It was fortunate that the band preferred this aesthetic, because
time was not on their side. Had their sound hinged on studio
experimentation, the album likely wouldn t have been
completed. Not that they didn t have ideas, Pajo recounted:
There was a piano in the room that we were thinking of
micing up putting bricks on the pedals, then recording the
strings that
would resonate in response to the drums. We were still up for
trying stuff like we were on Tweez, but there was a lack of
time.
The lack of time weighed on everyone, making for an
incredibly tense session. Pajo claims that Spiderland is only a
snapshot of where Slint was at that exact moment that
even by that point the band did not consider the songs totally
finished. He emphasized that Slint thrived most not in the
studio but in the practice space, crafting their songs finer
points. Speaking to Alternative Press, McMahan also
downplayed the act of recording in regard to Slint s existence
as a band: We tended to refine stuff a lot, but I don t think
we ever thought, Gosh! We ve gotta unload this new batch
of material so we can move on!
Yet it s impossible to believe that finally putting these songs
to tape in such a compressed period of time did not
create massive anxiety among all four members. Whether the
band considered the songs finished or not, this was going to
be the permanent document. And it was going to be released
internationally on a label that everyone in the underground
knew and respected. The members of Slint had made
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life-altering choices because of these six songs. No more
college. No safe career path. Forms filed at the passport office
to enable them to tour their new album on the Continent. Here
were four twenty-year-olds who had put the rest of their lives
on hold so they could be Slint. So they could make
Spiderland. And they had
two weekends. No wonder rumors spread years later that
members of Slint were committed to a mental institution
following the recording of Spiderland.
Adding to the stress were the dueling factors of the band s
sense of perfectionism and their seemingly tenuous
understanding of exactly how McMahan and Walford s
vocals would work. Since the band did not own a PA, they
never rehearsed vocals; and the vocal parts they did have
were too difficult for McMahan to sing while playing his
often elaborate guitar parts during live shows. Going into the
studio, neither Brashear nor Pajo had a firm idea of what
McMahan and Walford had planned.
That s not to say there weren t plans, however. McMahan and
Walford had a vision for how their words would sync up with
the music. The two would privately rehearse using practice
recordings and a four-track. Although they would share some
of these demo recordings with Pajo and Brashear for their
feedback, the lyrics and vocal performances were largely a
private collaboration between the two, and were still a work
in progress when they entered the studio.
In an environment where the band couldn t afford to dwell for
too long on any one song, this complicated matters, as Pajo
described: We were changing the songs even in the studio. I
remember Brian kept changing the lyrics for Good Morning,
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Captain, and the whole arrangement would have to shift in
response to his lyrics. He would say a couple of lines and then
we d do a guitar
break and then he d say some more. So if he changed the
words or if he added or took away a verse we d have to
change how many times we did a section.
Other frustrations arose, adding to the general sense of
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