Pavement should be on in 37 minutes. On a steamy Saturday night in Atlanta, they should headline the Piedmont stage, one of three enormous platforms at the Shaky Knees festival, tucked into the corner of a 200-acre park two miles north of downtown. And the band should play at the same time as the Prodigy, English electronic miscreants that two members confess might have frightened them a tad in the ’90s, or at least made them feel like the nice young indie-rock boys.
Getting here for this one-off gig—the last show of their improbable second reunion, which began in 2022—has been a production: Guitarist Spiral Stairs came in from Australia, where he’s lived for four years, while singer Stephen Malkmus came from Chicago, days after dropping off his youngest daughter, Sunday, at a Philadelphia college. Bob Nastanovich, Pavement’s auxiliary drummer and tireless hypeman onstage and off, drove the hour north from the spot he recently bought in Macon, having shaped a 15-song setlist that scans like a Pavement primer. They are unrehearsed, but Nastanovich exudes the optimism of a man addicted to horse betting for 45 years, just as he has been. “It’s all songs we’ve played a number of times, songs we have a lot of control over,” he tells me of his setlist, his Southern accent so warm and welcoming I’d buy almost anything he was selling.
But what control? At 7:53 p.m., bassist Mark Ibold emerges with a black garbage bag and kneels in front of a refrigerator in one of two backstage trailers. He shovels rows of Modelo and Coors Light inside. The back of his shirt reads “Poachers Bar” in big blue letters, a name almost too perfect for what happens in almost every rock band’s dressing room when the show gets canceled, which just happened to this one—you grab the beer and go.
Thunder shakes the trailer and lightning speckles the sky. Soaked fans scurry toward gates. I find Nastanovich next door, unperturbed and streaming a horse race from Altoona, Iowa, on his laptop. Brinx Job—the second horse he named for a Pavement song, after Range Life—is about to run. When I tell Nastanovich the news, he shrugs, clutches his Coors, and points at his laptop. “The show’s right here, my man.” I put $20 on Brinxy, as Nastanovich calls him, who barely holds on to third. We all lose.
A few minutes later, the band and crew squeeze into a white van and head for the hotel. Over his shoulder, drummer Steve West tells me about the only other canceled Pavement show he remembers, at a Spanish festival in 1997 when a storm blew in so fast the stage almost collapsed on the crew. He’s bummed, but this wasn’t that bad. Up front, after all, Ibold is clutching his bag of beers; the band will walk tonight with their full fee, a few hundred grand according to industry sources, a lot more than they ever made back then.
