Malkmus last played the Commodore in early ’96 while Pavement was promoting their third album, the super-spacey and eclectic Wowee Zowee. This time around, he’s playing alongside a new crack team of rock and roll musicians: Cairo Gang guitar jangler Emmett Kelly, impressionistic Dirty Three drummer Jim White and guitarist Matt Sweeney (Chavez). Their 2024 self-titled debut is an inspired mix of punky rumblers (“Renegade”), psych-blues-mounting weirdness (“Earth Hater”) and bright-coiled power-pop (“Our Hometown Boy”). Live, the Quartet’s chemistry is kinetic — super loose and free-wheeling, yet wholly in tune with each other. Improv has become a big part of their sets as the tour has rolled on. 

“There are little inter-band victories where someone does something and you just happen to lock in,” he explains. “We have three or four songs that are somewhat free for a rock band — a sort of interpretive dance, or something.”

One of these is the Stones-y, Sweeney-sung “Rio’s Song,” which finds he and Malkmus now going extra-long with their epic guitar soloing. Another is the stunningly prismatic ballad “Six Deaf Rats.” Musically, Malkmus suggests the song splits the difference between the simple descending melody of “Three Blind Mice” (hence “Six Deaf Rats”) and the grandiose, quasi-glammy rise of David Bowie’s “Five Years.” Lyrically, he notes the first verse is full of feelings (“I was a galleon for your raging love”), while a free-association experiment led the songwriter towards the image of a fratboy-spanking hazing ritual. Then, he winds back into more sigh-worthy romanticism (“Maybe I’ll geek out on your amazing quirks”). “I thought it might be cheesy to them,” he recalls of presenting “Rats” to the Quartet. “It’s a little bit waltzy. But we fucked it up, you know what I mean?”

It’s now been four decades since Malkmus first got the nerve to show off a song he’d written. Born in SoCal, but raised in Stockton, he explains that he grew up with an “active fantasy life,” which drew him towards creative writing as a youth. Early on, that meant fan-fic short stories about the killer baby from mid-‘70s horror movie It’s Alive. When he first started playing guitar, he was fanning out to the sounds of the Rolling Stones, Devo and KISS, but he got his proper start in songwriting while crafting nihilistic teenaged hardcore with a band called Straw Dogs.

“Some of my skateboarder friends had bands,” he explains. “I got to be the bass player and we needed material. For some reason no one was writing songs…they were just drinking Olde English, skateboarding and getting ready to do harder drugs. But I was like, ‘I’ve got one!’”

Malkmus would contribute “Go to War,” “Murder at the Matinee” and “Suicide,” barre chord-basic punk songs influenced by “second level Southern California bands” like Wasted Youth and Adolescents (“I wasn’t tough enough to do Black Flag”). After moving out East to study at the University of Virginia, he’d go on to get experimental with Ectoslavia, a noise-driven project featuring future Pavement member Bob Nastanovich and David Berman (the three would later regroup as Silver Jews). 

When Malkmus returned to California, he connected with old Stockton friend Kannberg and started recording as Pavement, alongside engineer-turned-drummer Gary Young. It’s here that Malkmus begins to man the mic with a since-signature lax and lyrically-labyrinthine emotiveness, though Kannberg sings lead on several songs, too; Nastanovich screams and ca-caws hype-man style after joining in 1991. Pavement’s initial run heads from the early singles’ spirited brattiness, towards the skewed classic rock-isms of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, to the mind-bending multi-genre splatter of Wowee Zowee and onto the twisted sunniness of Terror Twilight’s final song, “Carrot Rope.” 

The personal moments between those songs are celebrated throughout Pavements, albeit irregularly, sometimes out-of-sequence and occasionally half-fictionalized. While Malkmus and his Pavement bandmates are central to the story, they kept a hands-off approach to the making of the film. 

“I didn’t read the screenplay all that much, I just bought the guy’s spiel,” Malkmus says matter-of-factly of leaving everything with director Perry. “We did want somebody that was not of our generation to tell the story from a different perspective. Maybe not the way we would tell it, because that would be the safe way.”

Sure enough, Pavements isn’t your traditional band film. While it chronicles the act’s regrouping and rehearsal process ahead of their 2022 reunion shows, it simultaneously documents the creation of a traveling “Pavement Museum” preserving artifacts both real and phony — platinum records for Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain? Regrettably fake. A discarded toenail from wildcard drummer Young? Certainly plausible. 

It also chronicles the staging of Slanted! Enchanted!, a gob-smackingly earnest, Broadway-style re-envisioning of the Pavement songbook as performed by classically-trained singers and dancers. Then there’s movie-within-a-movie, Range Life, where Stranger Things actor Joe Keery slips into the Malkmus role amid intentionally over-the-top, Oscar-baiting re-enactments of key moments in Pavement’s history — some, like the group being antagonistically pelted with mud by a bunch of unfriendly Lollapalooza concert-goers, more infamous than others.

“I’m sorry that those things are [what’s remembered], because they’re kind of corny. I don’t think of them as even less than one thousandth of a percent of what the band’s really about,” Malkmus says. Relaying quickly what he does look back on fondly, he continues, “I’m not even being sappy about it, but, really, it’s about going to England for the first time, [or] playing at the Reading Festival. Or being backstage at the London Astoria, shaking in your boots [before playing] to a packed house and being like, ‘It’s on now, boys! We’ve done it!’”

Still, he concedes of Pavements hitting the dramatic, “shitty” things: “If it shows a human side to the band, all the more power to it.”

Amid numerous memorable must-hears, one of Pavement’s most unquestionably famous songs is Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’s “Range Life” — a dust-kicking classic we’ll note is actually the namesake inspiration for RANGE magazine (“It’s not about Alberta, or something,” Malkmus quips when this is brought up).  

Malkmus says he wrote it as “a country lilt, Eagles-style song, but with suburban kids [talking about] what it’s like being on a skateboard instead of a horse.” It’s aching and gorgeous, though its final verse non-sequiturs itself towards unexpected, comical digs at Smashing Pumpkins (“nature kids” who “don’t have no function”) and Stone Temple Pilots (“elegant bachelors”). While it caused controversy at the time, he admits the last lines were just him “fucking around” and letting off some steam while having fun in the studio. “There was some meta on that album about rock and roll, and making it — neuroses about the band having more attention.”

“Hip-hop was on our minds,” he adds. “There was beef and rap battles, so it seemed ironic or funny to do something like that…not even knowing much about the Smashing Pumpkins.” Perhaps adding another layer of irony around the song some 31 years later: Hard Quartet tentpole Sweeney used to play with Billy Corgan in early ‘00s supergroup, Zwan. 

More tenderly, Malkmus later discusses how the Hard Quartet’s recent “Hey” is partially reflective of being wowed by creative partnerships he’s held with other musicians (“Someone like you is into the games that you’re playing,” he sighs in-song).

“Most music is about love and connection,” he notes. “It could be about friends; it doesn’t have to be your significant other. That’s kind of what [“Hey”]’s about. And that’s what playing with other people is about. It’s not that fun by yourself.” Indeed, at various points in his interview, Malkmus praises the interplay of his Hard Quartet companions. He discusses relearning Pavement songs with Kannberg, and says that while he writes the music for the Jicks, the end result relies on the “contributions and feel” of his bandmates. He adds: “Everyone has a motor, and I’m glad to be colored by that.”

Wrapping up the talk, Malkmus discusses his current day-to-day life in his most recent homebase of Chicago: taking his kids to school, playing tennis, “vibing to movies” and writing music. He does the latter from home, but brings up the idea of feeling blessed to be able to record at friends’ studios. RANGE follows this up by asking whether he feels similarly sanctified by the fans that have followed his career — the folks that, to take liberties with the romantic climax of “Six Deaf Rats,” are geeking out on all of Malkmus’ amazing quirks.

“A lot of people have put faith in what I’ve done, so I’m grateful for that to the point of [it being a] blessing…but they’ve gotten something back from that, too,” he says through a smile, a mock-sermon drawl beginning to creep through his voice, “So, we’re just blessing each other back and forth. We’re all blessed! Amen.”

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