Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks: 47/48 - 2003

47
2003?
Elevate me later – Lions – Rattled by the rush

In which Mike, by sheer happenstance (a broken guitar and a request from Charlie on his 21st birthday) gets to fulfill his fantasy of playing in a cruise ship Pavement. Or is that my fantasy?

And so Stephen steps up to the microphone, Mike hits (mostly) the right piano chords (he's been practising for this!) and John (or Joanna?) does some subtle percussion.

There's a reason stuff like this never gets an official release, of course. We all know this is not really up to standard. But when you love an artist or a band, it's these kind of special treats that subjectively are right up there. I love it through all of the fumbles, missed lines and 'jazz' notes.

Makes you think about the parallels between 1995's 'no setlist' disasters (rumoured, cause the shows I've heard were pretty excellent) and 2003's relaxed approach to the setlist. In the Jicks he had a band that could really follow him wherever the moment took him (for better or worse – but in this case definitely better).

I don't know why, but this ends up with a weird band discussion about homemade pot cultivating (in a closet) and rumours of auto-asphyxiation. Thank God I don't practice Freudian analysis or they'd really be in trouble.
48
2003/12/02?
Nervous actors

The missing piece of the 'Face the truth' puzzle? The date on this recording may be a mistake. There's a whole set from that day (up next) and this performance is definitely not from the same tape. But this is Stephen and the Jicks sometime late 2003, formulating more steps toward the difficult third album.

The song 'Nervous actors' would all but disappear after this unique recording, but traces of it lingered, ghosts in the background making up a whisper of a very hard time getting to 'Face the truth'. The lyrics are on the album, but whispered in the coda to 'It kills', buried under solos and guitar noise. The song would turn up one last time after the album's release, at a solo acoustic KCRW session where Stephen lets 'It kills' (again) trail off into an extemporization of the song, by that time no more than half remembered.

And yet here it is - not in the best sound, but listenable enough, not in any kind of definite arrangement yet, but with all the Jicks pitching in and trying to get it to work. It's a minor miracle and it does work, but only just. This is, like 'It kills', ambitious, uncomfortable territory. In the drone like sections, the singsong melody, the very fragile mood, the many twists and turns of the arrangement, the philosophical enquiries of the lyric, you can hear how covers like 'Fisherman's song' and the unknown song from the 14th of april (note 39) lead straight into 'Face the truth'. It didn't fall out of the sky as if by magic. This is awkward (the harmonies) and treacherous stuff. It's hard to say if 'Nervous actors' could've survived into a full fledged Jicks track. There's more than something there, but in the end it was a stepping stone for the breakthrough that would - after much searching - lead to that great, but also awkward and treacherous third album.