Transport is Arranged: A Travelogue

Max Kaplan

“Do we have any 28-year-olds here tonight?” Stephen Malkmus asked the audience in his trademark droll delivery. My neighbor in the Turner Hall crowd had just offered me a swig of beer, which must have lubed me up with enough confidence to chirp back a reply: “I’m eighteen!” The ex-Pavement frontman, then doing his duty with The Jicks, stared at a blank point in the audience and offered up a piece of sage wisdom -- “Drink a lot of beer” -- before he stepped up to the mic and strummed the opening chords of “Forever 28,” the single from his latest album.

Just a year prior, Malkmus passed through Milwaukee, playing the Pabst Theater with Pavement on their 2010 reunion tour. I regrettably missed the show. The band just wasn’t on my radar at the time. But in the long year between Milwaukee gigs, I’d come to adopt them outright as my favorite band; their sardonic slacker anthems became indispensable totems to some collegiate aura I was attempting to assume. Having missed out on their 2010 reunion tour, I was left to conjure an image of the band frozen in time, in contrast to the reality of the graying indie rockers. In both an audio and visual sense, Pavement became a manifestation of the ‘90s for me: a decade I scarcely remembered, gleaning much of what I could through home videos, photo albums, and second-hand exposure to TV-reruns.

Arguments can, will, and should be made otherwise -- but to me, Pavement presides as the quintessential ‘90s rock band. The arbitrariness of ‘the decade’ as a measure of time didn’t even stand a chance against the band, whose recording career neatly spanned from 1989 to 1999, and was suffused with era-defining anthems, scuzzy guitar ballads, angular freakouts, and wistful pop nuggets. Pavement may never have fully penetrated the ‘Alternative Nation’ of their day, but their reign as arbiters of a brand of DIY cool has evidently stood the test of time. In 2019, the video for Gen-Z singer-songwriter beabadoobee’s “I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus” became a modest hit of its own, garnering nearly two million views on YouTube.^[1]

Shortly after I’d graduated high school and was preparing to move away for college, I became entranced by the grainy VHS reverie of the video for “Range Life.” The video for Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain single featured sun-dappled footage of band on the summer festival circuit jamming, clowning around, and sauntering around festival grounds, attired in the kind of loose-fitting, earth-toned threads that are just so thoroughly ‘90s to the bone.^[2] I couldn’t help but share the sentiment of one Baynard Miller, whose top-rated comment on the YouTube video declares: “This song makes me nostalgic for a life I never lived.” In seemingly no time, my wardrobe was filled up with vintage crew neck sweaters and scraggy flannels pulled from the Salvation Army racks, as well as retro sports team snapback hats copped from eBay. By looking at me, it would have been clear that I’d wished I was Stephen Malkmus as well.

In the early 2010s, a nostalgia-wave of 90s youth culture was lapping over the Internet. With Tumblr pages dedicated to zany-90s ephemera, reboots of ‘90s animated series, and a rediscovered fondness for the VHS-shot music video, Millennials (and other self-proclaimed ‘90s Kids) became swept up in the time-halting narcotic of nostalgia. Technology may have brought me to Pavement in the first place, through YouTube and mp3 downloading services, yet when I listened to the band, I envisaged the innocence of a time before smartphones and social media. Connecting the cassette aux adapter into my iPhone in my Honda Accord, I’d habitually play Slanted and Enchanted while driving to work, slipping out of time to a period not so long ago, where lives were lived less online, and technological devices hummed with the staticky warmth of a VHS tape.^[3]

When The Jicks played Turner Hall in October 2011, my Pavement-mania was at its height. I was back home from college for fall break and still years away from getting legally blitzed on watery domestics from the venue bar. Leading up to the show, I’d been keeping tabs on the setlists of the Jicks’ tour and knew full well that no Pavement songs would make it into their set. Yet somehow, at the point of their set when Malkmus teased the audience with the opening riff of “Cut Your Hair,” I felt drunk on the potential of the moment in only the way an eighteen-year-old could.^[4] Even as Malkmus’ guitar riff sputtered out into a tuneless barrage of noise, I still texted the small handful of friends I’d made in college that would care that the band had played “a little bit of Pavement stuff.” The reality was that I probably would’ve shaved my whole head right then and there just to hear a Pavement song played in full.

***

It would be another decade before Pavement followed up their first reunion with yet another reunion tour. While my eighteen-year-old self would have been perched on the edge of my seat during the presale, finger twitching in anticipation over my touchscreen, my twenty-nine-year-old self-took a more blasé approach to pulling the trigger on the hundred-plus dollar tickets. Faithful to Malkmus’ guidance, it would take lying in bed after a night of drinking cheap beers for me to plop my laptop on my stomach, hop online, and snap up a pair of tickets, weeks after they went on sale.

The show was on the fourth and final night of the band’s run at Brooklyn’s Kings Theater. My second ticket went to my college friend Marc, a recent Pavement convert, but an enthusiastic concert buddy, nonetheless. We met for drinks at a local bar across the street from the theater, where they were playing a recorded livestream of a recent set Pavement had played at a summer music festival. It reminded me of the sort of scene one would encounter before a major touring act like Dave Matthews Band or Phish came to town -- as the faithful scattered across the bar trading intel on setlists throughout the tour…Man, they played a 25-minute version of “Fluffhead” on the third night at Red Rocks. Un-fucking-real. Only this time, it was something like I just may have shed a tear during the five-second breakdown in “Transport Is Arranged.”^[5]

For a Monday night, I was eager to drink my share. I’d just submitted a final draft of my master’s thesis and was licking my wounds from a romantic fling cut premature by a cross-country move. The ten-dollar beers at the venue were sold out by the time we’d arrived, so we had to settle for the $14 IPA, which Marc covered as part of the package for his priced-down ticket. I made quick work of the beer and headed to the bathroom.

Scanning the urinals was a laugh. I pictured a sort of hidden door game show, where one had to guess which act the audience was seeing solely by the crowd in the Men’s room. It’s no surprise that Brooklyn in 2022 would play host to a hall of mirrors of guys who wanted to be Stephen Malkmus at some point in their life, and who by this point looked like central casting for John Cusack’s part in High Fidelity: The Re-Reboot.

I texted a friend, “The Men’s bathroom at the Pavement show is too much.” I fetched another $14 IPA to have in my hand for when the set began.

I glided across the carpeted floors, without a care in the world that I would have to piss again in another fifteen minutes.

Back at our seats beneath the theater’s ornate dome, Marc had struck up conversation with the very young-looking Pavement fans in the neighboring seats. I gulped my beer, waiting for the $14 buzz to kick in.

When the band finally trotted out to the stage, swigging drinks and waving to friends in the crowd, their affable presence immediately put my expectations at ease. The set opener of Wowee Zowee’s knotty rocker “Grounded” set the tone for the night, with audience members howling and whistling during its instrumental breaks.^[6] “They sound exactly like Pavement should sound,” I affirmed to Marc. “And I think that’s a good thing.”

He nodded his head and eased into a buzzed smile as the band followed their set opener with “Silence Kid” and “Gold Soundz” -- two fuzzy standouts from Crooked Rain.^[7] Mid-way through the set, the pair of high-school kids in front of us began to sit down, but as soon as they took their seats, they sprang back up to the opening chords of a song that I didn’t immediately recognize. “Harness Your Hopes,” has become something of an anomaly in Pavement’s catalogue, while also being an indictment on the ephemeral nature of music discovery in the streaming era.^[8] The 1997 B-Side, due to some kink in the Spotify algorithm, has become the band’s most streamed song, nearly tripling the listens of the band’s biggest hit “Cut Your Hair.” Music critic Jeremy Larson took a shot at the song’s resurgent popularity, suggesting that while “many Pavement songs are oblique, rangy, and noisy, ‘Harness Your Hopes’ is among the most pleasant and inoffensive songs in the band’s catalog.”^[9] But whatever oblique transgression that marked the band’s initial charm seemed to be the last thing on anyone’s mind under the dazzling interior of the Kings Theatre.

Fig. 1. Pavement at Kings Theatre. Photograph by the author.

Originally opened in the 1920s as an opulent movie palace in the baroque tradition, the Kings Theatre reopened in 2015 after shutting its doors for nearly four decades. In the space where the screen must once have been, Pavement projected their own kaleidoscopic visuals that suited their palette: a Basquiat-by-way-of-Brakhage collage of doodles, glyphs, and cryptic scrawlings. The five men timelessly slashing away at their instruments were undoubtedly the same lackadaisical slackers upon whom I’d once projected my own vision of cool. And they sounded great, especially given their one-tour-a-decade schedule.

Still, I couldn’t make sense of what I’d meant when I’d aphoristically told Marc that “they sound exactly like Pavement should sound.” It wasn’t that I was coming from a cynical space of seeing them as a cheap simulation of the band they once were. The sense I had was more one of watching a film I hadn’t seen in a while, feasting on the jolts of nostalgia churned out before me. On screen was a band that had been playing in my imagination for years. If I’d seen them perform a decade prior, I certainly would’ve gotten goosebumps down my arms, and likely lost my voice shouting half-remembered lyrics. For now, I was happy cradling my $14 IPA and singing along with my friend whenever we both knew the words.

Looking around, I saw a grand movie palace populated by three generations of Pavement fans watching a film they loved play out on stage before them. This was less a place for transgression than a decadent cathedral of the memory. What started as nostalgia for a life never lived had become the real soundtrack to a bygone period in my own life and others’ lives.

At the end of the night, I asked Marc what his highlights were. He said that “Gold Soundz” was sick, and that he was glad that they played “Range Life” -- I agreed. It was pretty sick.

October 7, 2022

Stereolab at Franklin Music Hall Philadelphia, PA, USA

Buried somewhere in my digital media library exist a handful of videos of my friend Zach and I wandering around Pitchfork Music Festival at Chicago’s Union Park. Fresh out of high school, our teenage voices mumbled sardonic musings, in-references to our hometown, and the sort of leftfield observational humor that would usually find its home on our Twitter timelines. Several months ago, I notified Zach that I’d found a few of the videos on my hard drive. Zach, 32, and happily engaged, said that he’d rather not see them.

For the past year or so, Zach -- kindred spirit in our hometown music nerdom -- had been living in Philadelphia. We’d made tentative plans to see a show some time, but for a while the complications of the pandemic made things difficult. When he’d asked if I wanted to see Stereolab in Philly, it seemed like a good enough occasion to reunite. Seeing as it was a mere four days after seeing Pavement, I’d dubbed the week: My ‘90s Indie Rock Nostalgia Tour of the Northeast Corridor.

Outside the venue, I blithely asked a pack of concertgoers for a smoke -- riding the high of my out-of-towner-ness. They said that I was welcome to roll my own. Out of convenience, I used a gust of wind as an excuse to defer the rolling to them. Zach made sure to let me know that there was something pathetic about having a 20-year-old fix a rollie for me. I ignored him and savored the head rush that would be a welcome companion to Stereolab’s set.

Aside from being the propulsive soundtrack needed for my jaunts writing term papers, my sentimental attachment to Stereolab was minimal on a personal level. Zach and I concurred that seeing a band with no conspicuous ‘hits’ to their name would be something of a relief. Though their career extended into the aughts, Stereolab’s individual members took a backseat to the band’s dedication to the groove. Their aesthetic nods to high-modernist imagery and pop art vibrancy come off as more reminiscent of the German art rock bands of the 1970s -- Can, Kraftwerk, Cluster, and Neu! -- than any of their ‘90s indie rock contemporaries.

The crossing of the those influences with an infatuation for electronic lounge music and ‘60s French pop has put Stereolab on some serious music-nerd shit. But it’s also helped them cultivate a singular, timeless sound through their pastiche of twentieth-century sonic allusions.

Like New York, Philadelphia’s beer prices were distinctly planted in the twenty-first century. Promising myself I wouldn’t glance at the price displayed on the touch screen that swiveled toward me, I tipped the requisite dollar, squiggled off a nonsensical signature, and pivoted the screen to its respectful position. Seconds later I received a receipt via email. My High Life tallboy was $15, plus tax. Zach, clearly the more prudent of the two of us -- and one of the few in the venue sporting an N-95 face mask -- shook his head in horror.

Fig. 2. Stereolab at Philadelphia’s Franklin Music Hall. Photograph by the author.

The band members, now well into their 50s, took the stage and wasted no time laying into their sonically expansive catalogue before a full crowd. Without the preoccupation of waiting for that one song to hit, the audience would be taken on a tour through the back shelves of the Stereolab archive.

When they launched into a song that I later found out was “Harmonium,” I glanced over at Zach, whose head snapping along to the motorik groove.^[10] His eyes, peeking out over his N-95, told me, “This, this is what we came for.” As distinctly Stereolaby as a song could be -- with Laetitia Sadier’s airy French floating over organ squalls and a wind tunnel of feedback -- it simultaneously sated our appetite for all the music that predated it. “For what it’s worth, that’s the closest I’ll ever get to seeing Neu!,” I told Zach after the show.

Stereolab’s ten-year hiatus between 2009 and 2019 gave their recent tour something of a reunion feel. I overheard people in the crowd musing that they thought they’d never see Stereolab live, and that this was a good one to check off the list. Now thirty years into their career, Stereolab had become something of an institution. Despite not releasing any new recordings since 2008, they have managed to put out a steady stream of compilations of early material; yet they appear not to be bent on reclaiming glory, but rather musicians with a curatorial penchant for documenting the evolution of their sound. To my delight, the institution that is Stereolab had eluded the nostalgia trap, eschewing the spectacle in favor of the sheer radiance of noise, and proving that going back into one’s vaults doesn’t always have to be an embarrassing endeavor.

October 13, 2022

Panda Bear and Sonic Boom at B.Leza Lisbon, Portugal

Anyone who has had the pleasure to walk around Lisbon will tell you that there’s no shortage of stunning sights to capture the eye, if you can keep your footing. The labyrinthine streets of Portugal’s capital city are slick with Portuguese cobblestone and often contort themselves into vertiginous angles to accommodate the city’s hilly terrain. On my first evening on a week’s trip, I paused for breath after scaling a hill and caught sight of a poster advertising a show by Panda Bear and Sonic Boom. The childlike balloon letters on the poster transported me to the party supplies stores that one would frequent before an elementary school birthday party. I loved the design, so I snapped a photo -- before I realized that the event was in two nights.

Fig. 3. Flyer for Panda Bear and Sonic Boom in Lisbon. Photograph by the author.

As far as European capitals go, Lisbon -- despite being one of the fastest growing tourist destinations in Europe -- doesn’t hold a candle to Rome, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, or London in terms of iconic landmarks, or at least those immortalized through popular culture. Its pastel apartment blocks, serpentine avenues, and yellow trolley cars recall an Iberian-tinged San Francisco, albeit one few are as familiar with -- aside from their friends’ Instagram feeds or Wim Wenders’ 1994 film Lisbon Story.^[11] Years earlier, I’d wandered the city for several hours while on a layover. I was charmed by its ethereal lookout points and tiled facades that glistened in the waning daylight. As it happened, for the whole walk I cycled through albums by Panda Bear on my headphones. The Animal Collective member -- real name Noah Lennox -- has notably called the city his home since 2004.

Just about any feature on Lennox will make known that Portugal bore a subliminal influence upon his sonic world. Back in high school, Lennox’s 2007 opus Person Pitch captured my imagination much the same way as Pavement, the only difference being that unlike Pavement, Person Pitch’s spell was lodged firmly in the present.^[12] It’s a headphone album for the ages, requiring no more than a nice, peaceful space to close your eyes and get lost in the oneiric soundscapes that unfurl across its 45 minutes. On first listen, it was an album that I would’ve written off then as too experimental: soaked in lush reverb, washy textures, and a dizzying array of samples. But underneath its glitchy atmospherics was a sampladelic odyssey that rewarded with each repeated listen. It sounded like Lisbon, insofar as it sounded like no place else I’d previously imagined.

I’d bought a copy of Person Pitch on vinyl before I’d even owned a record player. Its cover remains one of the most striking of its era, featuring a collage of children sitting around an Icelandic hot tub -- taken from a 1960s spread in National Geographic -- joined by various members of the animal kingdom: a tiger, a couple koalas, an elephant seal, and of course, a panda bear. But the inside contents of the record sleeve left a more profound mark on me. After paging through a series of eight subsequent collages which conjure child-like dreamscapes -- and a double-fold panorama of Lisbon rooftops -- you’ll reach the album’s dedication section.

Etched in all-caps, the dedications defied their expectations as rambling lists of shoutouts shoehorned into the margins of a book, album, film. The first sheet rattles off requisite thank you’s to close collaborators and family members, starting with: MOM and DAD, before proceeding to shout out a mélange of artist names that inspired the album, including techno luminaries BASIC CHANNEL and LUOMO. Every corner of the list from there is unexpected. Juxtapositions like SYD BARRETT/JAY-Z, APHEX TWIN/ ARTHUR RUSSELL, CHRIS BELL (of Big Star non-fame)/KYLIE MINOGUE, and METALLICA/WU TANG CLAN index more than just Lennox’s constellation of influences, but the unlikely eclecticism of the musical era he worked in. Person Pitch’s dedications were a roadmap for listening in the early years of the twenty-first century, where one could pull from a set of influences untethered from the specious tribalisms of the past.

If there’s one artist not particularly surprising to find in Lennox’s dedications, it’s Spacemen 3 -- the English neo-psychedelic band fronted by J. Spaceman and Sonic Boom. Following their 1991 breakup, the former would go on to front the acclaimed space-rock project Spiritualized, while Sonic Boom, real name Pete Kember, recorded briefly as Spectrum before retreating behind the scenes as a hired hand across the US/UK indie music scene. As a new generation of artists discovered his talents for channeling the otherworldly, Sonic Boom’s career was revitalized in the 2010s -- called to the studio to work with indie heavyweights like MGMT and Beach House. But his most fruitful collaborative relationship came from working alongside Lennox. Beginning with Tomboy, Panda Bear’s follow-up to Person Pitch, Kember became a mainstay in Lennox’s tight circle of collaborators, eventually moving to Portugal himself in 2018.^[13]

Reset, the first album attributed to Panda Bear & Sonic Boom -- and the one they would front-to-back at their Lisbon show -- was released in August, 2022.^[14] I became aware of it only days before its release; my listening habits have grown less up to date as the years pass. Years back, my music library started to look more like Person Pitch’s dedication section. I stacked together playlists that mixed Caetano Veloso and Cymande, Madlib and Michael Nyman, Leslie Winer and Leonard Cohen, Gang Starr, Gas, and The Go-Betweens. Unexpectedly, Reset quickly became one of the few newer records I returned to throughout the years. It’s hard to say if that was because it’s at once new and a tribute to ‘60s pop. Singing over looped backing tracks of classics by The Drifters, Eddie Cochran, and The Troggs, Sonic Bear (as someone at the show joked) complicate nostalgia by making timeless classics their own, while lamenting the futile task of originality on the frontiers of contemporary music. On “Livin in the After,” Lennox sings, “We're headed back to the drawin' board / Don't like what we're headed for (goin' in circles) / So, I'm strummin' on a chord, Windin' back disaster.”^[15] Far from the backward-looking mess it could have been, Reset is a refreshing burst of new music, and one that could only have been made away from the US-UK scenes that the two had sprung from.

***

B.Leza sits on the banks of the Tagus River in the warehouse-lined Cais Do Sodre section of Lisbon. For a record release show by two local musicians, you’d think they would have procured a less frustrating venue. B. Leza is a functional nightmare. It features a men’s bathroom with a spacious stall constructed around a single urinal. There’s no patio for fresh air (or a smoke). To get outside, one must repeatedly pass the single entry/exit door jammed in a narrow corridor patrolled by both a bouncer and a ticket checker. On top of that, the only beers served are in mini-glasses of about seven fluid ounces, thus producing a tedious cycle of tasks for the habitual smoker, sipper, and urinator. But as the opening chords to “Getting’ to the Point” chimed out -- of course as I waited at the bar for another tiny beer -- it became apparent that the venue was likely chosen for its crisp soundsystem.^[16]

Once I maneuvered around the massive pillar that stands in the dead center of B.Leza’s dance floor, I finally settled into the rhythm of things. I’ve long abhorred the album-in-full gimmick that coincides with an endless stream of anniversary tours, but there was something satisfying about hearing Reset performed in an intimate, if incompetent, setting. To my surprise, the crowd seemed to be mostly speaking Portuguese -- proof that Lennox and Kember had become something more than artistic emigres residing in one of Western Europe’s most livable cities. In my few nights there, I’d heard much about the recent touristic boom and Airbnbification of Lisbon, bringing all varieties of expats, digital nomads, and vacationers taking advantage of the evanescent affordability of Portugal’s capital. The audience at B. Leza, however, seemed at home in their riverside surroundings. Everyone seemed to carry that European self-assurance and presentness that is rare to come across at American venues, where smartphones flail up and neurotic voices shout at any impulsive observation. There was even dancing, hand singing, and clapping during songs like the Troggs-sampling stomp of “Go On” and “Edge of the Edge,” with its Spector-esque production and toy store sound effects.^[17]

Lennox and Kember bid the crowd a sincere “obrigado” before returning for an encore, wherein they played selections from their respective solo careers. As Sonic Boom sang the refrain of “Just a Little Piece of Me,” it seemed, even if for a brief second, that Spacemen 3 had reunited.^[18] Though it was a recent Sonic Boom song after all, the classic Spacemen 3 elements were there: narcotic nursery rhyme vocals, droning synths, and hypnotically layered drum machines and samplers chattering in conversation with one another. And as eager as I would have been to see a legendary group reform and burn through the classics, I felt consoled by the present circumstances. In our culture of reunions and reissues, full-album tours and anniversaries have instilled in listeners some conception of a golden age lying in wait for its inevitable reprisal. Some things are best laid to rest.

Looking back to the dedication section of Person Pitch, it seems as though Lennox had come full circle. Little did he know when assembling that list of forebears that he’d be sharing a stage years later with one of the artists that was so instrumental in shaping his sound. Yet his work has never been about conforming to a past ideal, but rather carving out a new path, through a running dialogue with influences and inspirations. On Person Pitch’s “Carrots,” Lennox croons, “Get your head out from those mags and websites who try to shape your style. Take a risk just for yourself and wade into the deep end of the ocean.”^[19]

They closed off the set with “Bros” -- his first time playing it in over a decade -- leaving the crowd, at last, with the delectable taste of an old favorite.^[20]

From the privacy of my urinal stall, I heard a familiar accent boom through the small bathroom. “What a show? How about that!” -- to no audible response. It sounded like a parody of an American circa-Leave It to Beaver. I left my stall as my compatriot tried a similar schtick on me. “Man oh man, that was something!” I just smiled, trying to blend into my surroundings.

I shared a cigarette with a couple of Portuguese women around my age in the crowded alley outside B.Leza. The more talkative one told me that Panda Bear and Sonic Boom had become welcome figures in Lisbon’s music scene, and that Lennox had even recently produced music for one of their friends. I asked if she could recommend some venues for me, and as she was typing some spots into the notes app, we were approached by a familiar voice: “Hey there, you wouldn't mind sparing one of those smokes, would you?” I slid one out of my pack of Lucky Strikes and told him he could help himself. He gave me a firm handshake and told me his name was Byron, and that he just moved here. The woman returned my phone and told me that they had to get going and to enjoy Lisbon.

Byron told me that had just arrived last week via Seattle. He worked for a tech startup that was remote, so he could basically live wherever he wanted, and Lisbon is “cheap as hell.” I could only nod and agree. Before he even took a drag, he was spirited away by the sight of some guy who apparently worked at his hostel. I took this as my cue to make my way back to my room in Intendente.

I cut north through the closed luxury shops of the Baixa district, heading past stumbling packs of drunken travelers making their way to Barrio Alto. I reached into my pocket for my headphones, before deciding against it. Years ago, I’d already initiated an imaginary soundtrack for this city; I figured it best to not relive it. Instead, I listened to the hollow clap of my feet against the cobblestones and the distant squawks of seagulls. With each step, the handclaps and melodies of the evening’s performance intermingled with echoes of city noises ricocheting off tiled walls.

October 21, 2022

Iration Steppas at Trinity Centre Bristol, UK

Liverpool is the sort of city that ostensibly caters to music lovers of a certain variety. Unless you’re a football faithful or a student of colonial-era maritime trade, you’re likely to be swept up in Liverpool’s well-honed Beatles industry. And the kitsch will find you, oh yes, it will. Sometimes it presents in sepia-toned Jelly Belly’s arranged in an uncanny likeness of the Fab Four; other times it abounds through the handful of pubs scattered around the city sporting names like McCartney’s, Lennon’s, and Harrison’s (I didn’t come across a Starr’s, but rest assured, it must exist). If the Magical Mystery Tour bus tour experience doesn’t sweep you up, you may opt for a ticket to ride the Yellow Submarine duck boat -- which returned in 2021 after being defunct since a sinking mishap in 2013. But if none of that appeals to you, at the very least you’ll wind up at the Cavern Club, something of a Beatles-themed Applebee’s that is actually a replica of the original namesake that used to be just down the road.

When one plunges the depths of the cavern, they may be lucky enough to catch a certain variety of fedora-ed man rip through an acoustic cover set of Beatles classics. If they’re less fortunate, he may even throw in a few originals. Sweater-vested couples who are old enough to remember the Suez Crisis dance out of step to a cover of “Love Me Do.” Glass showcases lit up brighter than the stage exhibit memorabilia to gander at while you swig away at your stale Carlsberg, hoping it will refill itself automatically. And then there’s the collection of celebrity photos that line the brick walls within which the Fab Four farted once upon a time. One brick pillar alone sees Bo Diddley, Luke Skywalker, and Paris Hilton posing in the quasi-hallowed grounds.

My friend Adam and I dipped out after a few ditties -- we’d both seen Danny Boyle’s Yesterday, so we got the gist.^[21] We headed across the street to one of the legions of karaoke bars that lined the Cavern Quarter. Taking the mic from a thuggish bouncer that looked like a 6’5 Shane Ryder (of Happy Mondays fame), we belted out a cheeky cover of the Counting Crows’ “Mr. Jones” and left before some college kids could queue-up another Ed Sheeran track.^[22] Though it was a Wednesday night, there seemed to be few options for live music, so we settled for a round of haunted mini golf -- or ‘crazy golf’ as they call it over there -- and called it an early night.

I’d originally planned to spend the last weekend of my trip in Manchester -- the famed music city that gave birth to Joy Division, The Smiths, Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, and Oasis, among others -- but decided at the last second that Bristol could bring something a little different to the mix. A Bristolian would later explain that Manchester attracted the indie crowd: Those who were nostalgic for those ‘80s and ‘90s guitar bands, and the whole Hacienda/Factory Records scene. Bristol drew in a crowd more infatuated with the city’s own storied -- and more multicultural -- music scene, which notably spawned the pantheon of trip-hop pioneers Portishead, Massive Attack, and Tricky.

Unlike Wednesday night in Liverpool, Friday night in Bristol offered more than enough options as far as live music: Techno, house, northern soul, and dub reggae nights were all listed on Resident Advisor’s events page. It was just a matter of choosing one. To avoid the small talk of my hostel, I ducked into the first warmly lit bar I could find, which happened to be a spot run by the crew behind Bristol’s Noods Radio, which abides by their motto: “No playlists, no ads, just the people.”

Noods’ control room overlooks the bar, allowing one to glimpse the source behind the slinky house tracks being pumped into the bar’s stereo system. Doing triple duty, the space also acts as a gathering point for the local scene. Due to increasing noise complaints from a new condo across the street, the pub has an 11:00 p.m. closing time, which adds to its clubhouse-ey feel. Between swigs from pint glasses, folks play board games and commune with their friends across the small pub space. As closing time approached, tables converged, conferring over what shows they were checking out that night.

The crew I had been chatting with were heading to the Dub soundsystem night called “Teachings in Dub” at the Trinity Centre, an old church-turned-event space. We squeezed in a small sedan and a spliff was passed around, which lasted exactly the short duration to the venue. I embraced the role of out-of-towner, crammed in the backseat, feeling like I was a character without lines in one of those UK club films like Human Traffic or 24 Hour Party People.^[23]

They told me if I had earplugs, I should bring some -- but I could also probably buy a pair there.

I was vaguely aware of sound system parties through various references in UK music. I could hear Mike Skinner from The Streets’ nasally Cockney accent saying, “Your mother warned ya, it’s a sound system banger,” or Joe Strummer on “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” lamenting that “onstage they ain’t got no roots rock rebel!”^[24] Brought over to the UK from Jamaican immigrants, sound system gatherings are integral facets of dub reggae culture. There’s something undeniably timeless about the sound system, with its stacked wall of speakers and the incinerating bass rumble that it produces.

The Teachings in Dub event description read: “The legendary Leeds soundsystem, Iration Steppas, returns to uplift the masses, this time inviting militant soldier King Alpha to join them in a warrior position. Expect a classic Teachings night of pure energy and vibes from the rootsmen. Featuring Dego Ranks on mic duties, this will be fire start to finish.”

By the time I’d hopped out of the car with my new friends, the hundreds gathered inside the Trinity Centre were already locked deeply into the groove. I grabbed a pint in a plastic mug, itching for the opportunity to drink inside a church. Waiting at the bar, I absorbed the volcanic basslines rippling across the floorboards. I took in the crowd, which was anything but tribal or predictable.

Ravers, dub heads, indie kids, hippies, young, old, black, white, well-dressed and shabby, all bopped around, entrenched in the aural cocoon of the soundsystem. The space may have been well-lit enough to see individual faces, but everyone was in constant motion so that the dancers swelled into a faceless mass of elastic bodies. At center stage, Iration Steppas, armed with turntables and stacks of speakers, piloted the ship, slamming the audience with bass drops that ignited a frenzy of dancing and a tremble of the rafters.

Fig. 4. Leaving Trinity Centre in Bristol, UK. Photograph by the author.

It has often been said about dance music -- and its myriad branches and subgenres -- that a communal sense arises out of anonymity. Existing outside of the rockist notions of singalong choruses, virtuosic solos and throwback hits, dance music distills a liveness rooted in the present tense. Iration Steppas were by no means reinventing the wheel -- as soundsystem culture can be traced back to as early as the 1940s -- but onstage, they were carrying forth a decades-old tradition that lived outside the realm of nostalgia. If nostalgia involves a wistful yearning for a bygone past, no such yearning could be traced anywhere near the rippling speakers inside the Trinity Centre. The earplugged masses bouncing around the hardwood floors were purely engaged in the sound, movement, and sheer release from whatever personal tediums had accumulated throughout their weeks.

As the hours floated by, there was no anticipation of what would be played next, only the shared excitement over the thunderous soundwaves unfurling with each passing second. It was the kind of event I wished I could have experienced at eighteen, when blaring Pavement through my iPod while mowing the lawn was the surest arena of release for my suburban malaise. That very deep, personal attachment that we attribute to the music of our adolescence etches an indelible impression into who we are, and how we experience the world. And as we grow older and continue to engage with those past sounds and memories, we obligingly enter these little theaters of our past, looking to reclaim something that we can only recover in tiny electric pulses of residual wonder.

I’ve been fortunate to have had the freedom to travel the places that I have, even if it’s been on a budget that constrains me to stay in smoky spare rooms in Liverpool council flats and twelve-bed dorms in maze-like hostels in Bristol. Being an adventurous listener will always be more affordable and convenient than being a traveler of any breed. Even as music discovery becomes a more passive activity by the day -- with algorithms that know what we want better than we do -- there’s still no better time to explore new sonic avenues: Tuning into an independent internet radio stream, getting lost on Bandcamp or YouTube, digging through crates at the local record store, or wandering into a neighborhood bar or venue and ordering a beer. Transport can always be arranged.

Bibliography

1. 24 Hour Party People. Directed by Michael Winterbottom (Pathé Distribution, 2002)
2. beabadoobee, “I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus.” October 8, 2009. YouTube Video, 3:52.
3. https://youtu.be/RPrw_Nyq88U?si=CJHPHgq7R5SHZUhw\
4. The Clash. The Clash. Sony, 1977.
5. Counting Crows. August and Everything After. Geffen Records, 1993.
6. Human Traffic. Directed by Justin Kerrigan (Metrodome Distribution/Clarence Picture, 1999).
7. Kaplan, Max. Pavement at Kings Theatre. October 3, 2022. Photograph.
8. Kaplan, Max. Stereolab at Philadelphia’s Franklin Music Hall. October 7, 2022. Photograph.
9. Kaplan, Max. Flyer for Panda Bear and Sonic Boom in Lisbon. October 13, 2022. Photograph.
10. Kaplan, Max. Leaving Trinity Centre in Bristol, UK. October 22, 2022. Photograph.
11. Larson, Jeremy D. “The Woes of Being Addicted to Streaming.” Pitchfork. May 23,
12. 2022. https://pitchfork.com/features/article/the-woes-of-being-addicted-to-streaming-services/.
13. Lisbon Story. Directed by Wim Wenders (1994, Atalanta Films).
14. Panda Bear.  Person Pitch. Paw Tracks, 2007.
15. Panda Bear Sonic Boom.  Reset. Domino, 2022.
16. Panda Bear, Tomboy Paw Tracks, 2011.
17. Pavement, “Range Life.” YouTube Video, 4:55. February 19, 2010.
18. https://youtu.be/1VVj1zqbWpU?si=Jks7XF-YJSYdQ0cy
19. Pavement. Brighten the Corners. Matador, 1997.
20. Pavement. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Matador, 1994.
21. Pavement. Slanted and Enchanted. Matador, 1992.
22. Pavement. Spit on a Stranger. Matador, 1999.
23. Pavement. Wowee Zowee. Matador, 1995.
24. Phish. Junta. Phish Inc., 1989.
25. Sonic Boom. All Things Being Equal. Domino, 2022.
26. Stereolab. Refried Ectoplasm [Switched on Volume 2]. Duophonic, 1995.
27. The Streets. Original Pirate Material. Pure Groove, 2002.
28. Yesterday. Directed by Danny Boyle (2019; Universal Pictures).

Notes

1. beabadoobee, “I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus.” YouTube Video, 3:52. October 8, 2009. https://youtu.be/RPrw_Nyq88U?si=CJHPHgq7R5SHZUhw

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2. Pavement, “Range Life,” Track 9 on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Matador, 1994; “Range Life.” YouTube Video, 4:55. February 19, 2010. https://youtu.be/1VVj1zqbWpU?si=Jks7XF-YJSYdQ0cy

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3. Pavement, Slanted and Enchanted, Matador, 1992.

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4. Pavement, “Cut Your Hair,” Track 4 on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Matador, 1994.

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5. Phish, “Fluffhead,” Track 9 on Junta, Phish Inc., 1989; Pavement, “Transport Is Arranged,” Track 3 on Brighten the Corners, Matador, 1997.

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6. Pavement, “Grounded,” Track 5 on Wowee Zowee, Matador, 1995.

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7. Pavement, “Silence Kid,” Track 1; “Gold Soundz,” Track 7 on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Matador, 1997.

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8. Pavement, “Harness Your Hopes,” Track 2 on Spit on a Stranger, Matador, 1999.

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9. Jeremy D. Larson, “The Woes of Being Addicted to Streaming.” Pitchfork. May 23, 2022, https://pitchfork.com/features/article/the-woes-of-being-addicted-to-streaming-services/.

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10. Stereolab, “Harmonium,” Track 1 on Refried Ectoplasm [Switched on Volume 2], Duophonic, 1995.

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11. Lisbon Story, directed by Wim Wenders (1994, Atalanta Films.)

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12. Panda Bear, Person Pitch, Paw Tracks, 2007.

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13. Panda Bear, Tomboy, Paw Tracks, 2011.

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14. Panda Bear, Reset, Domino, 2022.

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15. Panda Bear, “Livin’ in the After,” Track 8 on Reset, Domino, 2022.

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16. Panda Bear, “Getting’ to the Point,” Track 1 on Reset, Domino, 2022.

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17. Panda Bear Sonic Boom, “Go On,” Track 2; “Edge of the Edge,” Track 4 on Reset, Domino, 2022.

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18. Sonic Boom, “Just a Little Piece of Me,” Track 2 on All Things Being Equal, Domino, 2022.

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19. Panda Bear, “Good Girls/Carrots,” Track 5 on Person Pitch, Paw Tracks, 2007.

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20. Panda Bear, “Bros,” Track 3 on Person Pitch, Paw Tracks, 2007.

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21. Yesterday, directed by Danny Boyle (2019, Universal Pictures). ↑

22. Counting Crows, “Mr. Jones,” Track 3 on August and Everything After, Geffen Records, 1993. ↑

23. Human Traffic, directed by Justin Kerrigan (Metrodome Distribution/Clarence Pictures, 1999); 24 Hour Party People, directed by Michael Winterbottom (Pathé Distribution, 2002).

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24. The Streets, “Has It Come to This?,” Track 2 on Original Pirate Material, Pure Groove, 2002; The Clash, “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais,” Track 6 on The Clash, Sony, 1977.

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