Free Slint's Spiderland by Scott Tennent

ASS and found Walford in the driver’s seat. He ordered them to remove the sign and escorted them back to the gas station.
    It wasn’t the only memorable run-in the band had while on the road. Pajo recalled that, in the spirit ofkeeping things interesting, the band would pick up any hitchhiker they saw. “I remember picking up this really old man — he must have been eighty. When he got in the van there wasn’t any music playing and we all just talked to him. He was telling stories and he really liked us, and we liked him. Then Britt or Brian put on the first Suicide album at full volume, so loud you couldn’t even talk. The poor guy made it through ‘Frankie Teardrop’ but then he wanted out.”
    The boys had to amuse themselves somehow, because the shows were often depressing. Slint were virtually unknown outside of Louisville and Chicago; their album was not available in stores in advance of their shows, and they didn’t share the bill with any well-known bands at any point on their tour — a far cry from McMahan’s last outing with Squirrel Bait a few years earlier. “I remember Slint played in Madison, Wisconsin,” Pajo told me. “That’s the kind of show that I don’t think would ever be remembered. It was just a shitty bar and the marquee said ‘Flint.’ We drove a long way and didn’t get paid; it was just three old men at the bar with their backs to us the whole time.”
    Brashear recalled that the band would do their best to have fun during their sets, even if no one else in the club was. “We’d throw joke covers together. We used to open with ‘Rise Above’ by Black Flag, with no vocals. When we played in Boston we played this really bad, instrumental version of ‘Roadrunner’ by Jonathan Richman.” If people did show up to see them,it didn’t guarantee a positive reaction. “I remember some feedback from that tour; someone saw us and said we were ‘too young and too clean.’ People were like, ‘What’s up with these guys?’ We weren’t real angry. We were nineteen years old, we were all shy, and they didn’t like it. They didn’t like an indie rock band that was young and clean.”
    It’s worth remembering that in 1989 the trend in underground rock was heavily slanted toward the macho and the abrasive, especially in the so-called pigfuck scene populated by friends of Slint like the Jesus Lizard, Rapeman, and Killdozer. When the four Kentucky kids in Slint took the stage and, standing stock-still for their entire set, played mostly instrumental songs that shifted between technically difficult exercises and slow-building epics, it was totally removed from the sounds their peers and audiences were used to. “All of those bands were taking risks with their music; we were just doing it in a different way,” Pajo said. “It was risky to be a quiet band, especially in that scene. There was a macho element to [the scene]. If you were playing melodic, quieter stuff, you were kind of a pussy.”
    * * *
    With the tour completed, Slint again went on hiatus. Pajo and Brashear returned to their respective schools in Indiana. Walford and McMahan returnedto Chicago, but not to Northwestern. That year they both dropped out and got jobs in the city while rededicating themselves to writing together and continuing to develop friendships with others in the Chicago scene.
    That winter Steve Albini’s affinity for Slint manifested itself again when he introduced Walford to Kim Deal of the Pixies, who with Tanya Donelly of Throwing Muses had put together a new band, the Breeders. They were scheduled to record their debut for 4AD but were in need of a drummer. Walford was game and was soon off to Scotland for two weeks of studio time with the band and Albini.
    Pod
was released six months later, in May 1990. Walford was hardly more than a session player — he appears in the liner notes under a pseudonym, Shannon Doughton — but his stamp is all over the album. Albini recorded the drums with the