Once Upon a Time in Chinatown:
Pavement vs. Andy Richter - (Part 3)
from Raygun, May 1997
Stephen: Yeah, it's not like Lewis Carroll anagrams and stuff. For me, rock shouldn't be that intellectual. It should be fun, it's more of a thing to think about when you're drinking or talking. You don't want people to write dissertations about what we're doing or something.
RG: By making things as complex as you do, don't you sort of open yourself up for that?
Stephen: Well, yeah.
RG: They will be writing term papers on you someday.
Stephen: Yeah, well, it doesn't seem that...
Bob: Yeah, it's not that complex.
Andy: Do you have a little thing in your ear?
Stephen: It's not a piercing, it's for my sore neck.
Andy: Okay, sorry to interrupt.
Stephen: I went to an acupuncturist, she stuck it in there. She says it'll help my back.
Bob: I thought it was a new diamond.
Stephen: I know, that scares me, actually.
Bob: You look like you work in a machine shop, and a flying shard caught in your ear...
Stephen: Or the sociologist is doing a little thing about rockers, and, uh, she's like got me right now. It's hard to get away.
Andy: They're tracking you and Trent Reznor.
Stephen: Exactly.
RG: Do you think what you're doing is comedy, in a way?
Stephen: I think so.
Bob: It's his kind of comedy.
RG: Like you said before, both of you (Bob and Andy) play similar roles, the foil to the comic genius...
Andy: Yeah, I think that part of my job is to, at the most terse moments, say something really rude, you know. Something that borders on sexual harassment, or scatological comments, or just, you know, take my pants of or something. I feel like definitely there needs to be somebody...
Stephen: Like Ed McMahon?
Andy: No, please, no, please god, no. But...
RG: Does that worry you? The curse of the sidekick?
Andy: No, no, no. Not really. I mean, I suppose if I...
Stephen: You don't really seem to like that though. You guys just seem like you're two buddies that are just sort of double-teaming your guests...
Andy: You know, there's all this sort of gross broadcast archivism. People want me to talk about my role in a historical context. Ed McMahon, Hugh Downs, Regis Philbin...
Bob: Ed McMahon would be the one I think in all this that would be the irritating one.
Andy: Well he's not irritating.
Bob: I'm not saying anything against him, but I just, it's so obvious like that, "Oh, he's the Ed McMahon guy on the show."
Andy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, people do say that. And I've even said that to sort of...
Bob:Reference it?
Andy:Yeah. "What do you do on that show?" "I'm sort of like the Ed McMahon."
Stephen: Well, that's what I tell people. We're kind of like Nirvana, you know?
Andy:Yeah, yeah. Like Nirvana, but less trouble.
Bob:Ed McMahon came to one of our shows in Los Angeles one time, this festival that we played...
Stephen: Which one was it?
Bob:The KROQ Weenie Roast thing. He was wearing like white tennis shorts and combat boots, and then he was on David Letterman a few nights later, and Letterman asked him what he'd been doing, and he mentioned that he went to this KROQ Weenie Roast and saw all these great bands, and David asked him who he liked, and he said, " Well, I liked The Pavement..." (laughter)
Andy:It would even be better if it was "The Pavements."
Bob:Steve West and I met him, and he was just, "I really like what you guys do. What band are you in?"
Andy:The Pavement.
Bob:Yeah, it was classic.
Andy:Yeah, the first time he was on the show, the first impression I had was that, here he is, Ed McMahon, dat dat dat dah dah [sings the "Tonight Show" theme] and he walks out, and I held my hand out to shake his hand, and he, sort of almost in his periphery, he hadn't even looked at me, and his hand shot out like it was a pneumatic piston and gave me like the perfect pressure handshake, like the perfect shake. And I was just like, "Oh, that's what you do for a living."
Stephen: That's what he does.
Bob:He's gone a long way with that.
Andy:You've gotta make a living somehow.
Bob:What are your goals in terms of television? Would you ever like to have your own deal? Is that a priority?
Andy:Oh, no. I think about it, but then I really wonder if I'll ever be able to be in charge of anything. Because there's so much bullshit involved with being in charge. Just so many interminable meetings and phone calls and all these people...
Bob:So you're in like an ideal position.
Andy:Sort of. I mean, there's times when it can be frustrating and I feel like there's been this sort of good fortune laid on me, that I would be disrespectful if I didn't devote some energy to seeing how far I could push it.
Bob:It's like I'll never be in another band, I'll never have like my own band.
Andy:Now, what if the band goes away, and the horsetrack thing doesn't work out? Bus driver?
Bob:Then I'll make do, yeah. I don't know what'll happen, actually.
Andy What about you, Steve?
Stephen: Oh, me? I don't know. I might be dedicated to music in one way, shape, or form.
Bob:I can't imagine that you wouldn't be, really.
Stephen: Because, like you say, you're sort of blessed with an opportunity. We've had to work hard and stuff, but just knowing what my friends have to do to earn a living, it's just like, much more exciting. I mean, one of my cousins is a doctor, and it's like "Oh, I can't see how you can do that, traveling all the time." There's plenty of people who think it's terrible.
Bob:There's plenty of people that think it's like the greatest thing.
Andy:And it's somewhere in between, isn't it?
Bob:Yeah, totally. See, for me, I never at any point even thought about ever being in a band, and never would have been if it wasn't for my talented friends. Pretty much the only reason I ever ended up in the band was because the first little tour that we ever did, I wanted to be like the roadie, just because I'd gone and seen bands for year, and I always wanted to experience what a tour was like.
Stephen: They're boring.
Bob:Yeah. And our drummer at the time was incompetent, I don't know if you ever saw us or know anything about him.
Andy:Last night was the first time I ever saw you guys.
Bob:And he, well, basically he was inconsistent...
Stephen: He was a raging alcoholic.
Bob:...and Stephen mentioned, "Well, why don't you drum?" So it was like, I'll bring a floor tom and a snare, and then when he can't hold his sticks because he's had 23 cocktails, at least there'll be somebody there keeping time. So that's the only reason I'm in the band.
RG: Those were good days.
Stephen: We just don't want to be sort of a down-sized thing anyway. Everything's like - this whole techno thing even - is like, to it's great, some of the music that comes from it, but it's also like this down-sized `90's thing: one guy with this computer. It's so practical and makes sense, it's the most efficient way to do it, blah blah blah. I like this music thing that we do. It's sort of inefficient, it's like blood and guts. And people can see him [points to Bob], or anyone in the band, and say, "What's he doing up there? I could do that."
Andy:You're the audience surrogate. Yeah.
Bob:By default.
Andy:You guard the low rung of expectations.
Bob:I always get the slobby, beer-drinking guys that want to talk to me. They have questions, horse racing questions...
RG: But then you start to answer them.
Bob:Yeah, yeah, and then I punish them. (laughter) They pay the price.
Stephen: How about fans? Do you have any?
Bob:How often do you get stopped?
Stephen: I mean, TV's got to be way more...
Andy:Oh, it's crazy. All the Internet shit, you know, it's flattering, the first wave that you get is flattering, and the second one is kind of like, "Good Lord, people!"
Stephen: Yeah.
RG: "Get a life!"
Andy:Like there's a real sweet guy that keeps a web page of me. And it's weird.
Stephen: Just to talk about what you said every night?
Andy:I think so, yeah. I visit it every once in a while, but...
Stephen: Nothing like that exists for us. We have just a mailbox type thing that I've never seen, and friend of mine occasionally sends me like...
Andy:Printouts of....
Stephen: Yeah, like, relationships that I'm having with men in Ohio, you know, that they've seen me. (laughs) Like that. I would never want to think about it, it just clutters my mind.
Andy:Yeah, and I can't think of anybody that I have had enough admiration for to do that kind of work. And, like I say, it is flattering, but on a certain level it's weird. My mom will say, "Those are you fans," but I don't ask `em to do anything more than watch the show; that's all I expect people to do. (Stephen looks at his watch and explains he's scheduled a massage to get over some kind of ailment picked up in England.)
Andy:The last album was...there was a lot of un-nice things said about it. Do you think this is....
Stephen: Yeah, they're being a little bit....
Bob:...like we've made a comeback.
Stephen: I think our other record was just misunderstood and it got a bad rap.
Bob:I thought it was better than this one, personally, but....
RG: Do you expect that five, six years down the line it becomes the "lost classic" Pavement record?
Stephen: That'd be fine with me.
Bob:I think it'd be a good way to find out what we were like. For kids who
are like, "oh, man, you should check out this band Pavement. They were pretty
good in the '90s."
RG: The thing about Wowee Zowee is that it's just so
all over the place, and this one sort of doesn't have that quality.
Stephen: Yeah, it's in one place.
Andy:You know what? I like that one place, too.
Bob:Yeah, we like it, too.