Saturday, Jul 19, 2008
Our writer challenges rock's biggest brainiacs to a sharky game of Scrabble.
Jun 16, 1999 | When Pavement singer Stephen Malkmus shakes a stranger's hand he intercepts the incoming palm, raises his eyebrows and emits a quick, nasal, "Stephen." Then he releases and turns to the next stranger. Amid the potted palm trees of a New York Holiday Inn, Malkmus looked as if the handshakes were wearing him out. He and bandmate Bob Nastanovich had spent the afternoon in the hotel lounge meeting journalists, sipping Coke and Perrier and answering questions about their new album, "Terror Twilight." I spent it memorizing a list of words containing the letters Q, X and Z.
That's because instead of interrogating the famously tight-lipped Malkmus about his songs and the state of one of indie rock's most beloved bands, I was challenging him to a game of Scrabble. I'd heard that Pavement plays the game on the road to kill time, just like other bands blow bongs or boff groupies. The intellectual pastime isn't unusual for Pavement, or for Malkmus. Of all the rock singers who emerged in the early '90s, Malkmus is the most unlikely. He's an acerbic observer, a well-read wit and the kind of brainy oddball who actively shuns attention. In one new song he describes himself as "a cold, cold boy with an American heart." Until I met him, I hadn't realized he was singing about the way he plays Scrabble.
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In hindsight, I should have realized I was in trouble during Pavement's first play. My partner, Brian Blanchfield, and I opened with UPSIDE for a respectable 22 points. "Well played," Malkmus and Nastanovich murmured.
They looked at the board for about a half-second, and then dumped all of their tiles, forfeiting their opening turn for seven new letters. Toward the end of a game, when you're stacked up with vowels and the board is tight, dumping tiles is a standard move. But early in the game, when the board is ripe with double-word scores, giving up a turn is a gutsy move that only pros would make. We were frightened.
The score was 38-zip when Pavement started dropping violent single syllables. JAB and BRUNT went down and soon we held the lead by only 10 points. The Pavement brain trust huddled over its rack, whispering and nodding before laying out FAY, the first Scrabble word of the game, on a triple-word square for 34 points.
My partner looked at me imploringly. "Fay?"
"No clue," I said. "What's fay?"
"Well, there's F-E-Y, we know what that is," Malkmus said. "But F-A-Y, I don't know."
"It's up to you," he continued, a note of faux innocence in his voice. "You could challenge it. If you do, you could lose your turn. If you don't, it's 34 points ..."
I was sure that fay was a proper name, like Baby Fay, the infant who got the baboon heart transplant when I was in eighth grade. We took the bait.
According to "Official Scrabble Players Dictionary," fay means "to join closely." We lost the lead, and our turn.
Nasty Nastanovich tried conciliation. "We weren't sure," he said before admitting the truth. "Well, Steve was 90 percent sure. Anyway, we go again."
"I haven't played in a while," Malkmus said. Of course he told us this after he'd already suckered us into the challenge. My head felt hot. What kind of person knows the word fay, anyway?
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Malkmus is well-known for his ambiguity. He doesn't say much about himself, and he says even less about his intriguing songs, which are full of oblique asides and non-linear reminiscences. In "Elevate Me Later," a song off "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain" (1994) about avoiding stardom, Malkmus' money line is, "Because there's 40 different shades of black/So many fortresses and ways to attack."
"Making a song is about trying to create a mood, or make some sort of a game, but not so much a tricking game," Malkmus told me when I asked him about songwriting. "The lyrics aren't planned. Whatever comes out comes out."
Yeah, right, I thought. As if "Summer Babe" and "Silent Kid" -- two early, off-kilter pop gems that perfectly express suburban disaffection -- were written by accident. As if lines like "You're the kinda girl I like/'Cause you're empty and I'm empty/And you can never quarantine the past" doesn't purposefully evoke a young man on permanent rebound.
Some critics still call his lyrics hard to read, neither here nor there. But Malkmus blurted out his worldview on Pavement's first album, "Slanted and Enchanted (1992)," when he shouted, "Between here and there is better than either here or there!"
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