By Bob Powers

Preston School of Industry

When you arrive at L.A.’s Troubadour, your first thought is, "Holy shit, Pavement chicks have gotten fucking hot!" And young. Younger even than the tomboy skater girlfriends who were at the show when you were all 19 back in ’93. A gaggle of them are bottlenecked at the entrance, arguing with the doorman over the club’s puzzling "Must be 21 to go outside and smoke cigarettes" rule (strictly enforced).

Inside, the place is crawling with them. Little brown-haired girls with sweatjackets around their waists and sleeveless t’s proffering little brown-haired girl shoulders and underwire-enhanced B-cup bosoms. Some are old enough to go outside and smoke cigarettes. Many more might be old enough to have a fake ID. And a fair number–oh Jesus, she’s 12.

And they’re all here to see Spiral Fucking Stairs?

In Pavement, he was the cute one. You always knew that. The pint-sized kid in the soccer jersey with the fucked-up haircut. On every Pavement disc he’d rattle out the one or two poppy little messes that would provide a nice detour from Steve Malkmus’ look-Ma-no-hands riddling. And you just knew Spiral loved singing his songs.

Spiral (aka Scott Kannberg) cofounded Pavement with Malkmus, who became the band’s star. But Spiral Stairs was the indie-rock heart of Pavement. The punk who was rumored to have kept them off the cover of Rolling Stone when he refused to show up for the interview. You remember back in ’93, when an Irving Plaza bouncer got too rough with a chick who tried to climb onstage? Little Spiral let his guitar swing by his side and he pulled that bouncer three times his size into a headlock, trying to drag him onstage by his neck. If you were one of these little brown-haired girls, you’d want to slide him some just to say thanks.

You remember your last Pavement show. These girls weren’t there. As Pavement aged, the only girls they attracted were girls who were beginning to realize that maybe graduate school was just a big stall (and Deadheads started showing up after Jerry Garcia died, but let’s not get angry). Not that sex ever entered into Pavement at all, though you could sense a kind of schoolyard gay going on. Like kids who hang out after school every day and are kind of into girls but you just know they’ve shown each other their dicks at least once.

But you know why you’re here. You want to root for the underdog. Sure, you dig All This Sounds Gas, Preston School of Industry’s debut album. You can’t go a day without hearing Spiral’s rickety bellow at the end of "Doping For Gold": I’m tryin’ hard to be riii-iii-iii-ight. But that’s not why you feel obligated to be here.

When Pavement broke up, you and everyone else were waiting for Malkmus’ solo album, wondering, "What’s he gonna sound like now?" His disc came out and critics went batshit.

When the PSOI disc was about to come out, you and everyone else thought, "I hope it doesn’t suck." Up until then, you’d probably heard 15 Spiral Stairs songs over the course of 10 years, five LPs and shitloads of B-sides. He’s gonna pull off a whole album?

The album came out to paragraph-long blurbs: "It actually doesn’t suck!" Far from it. And Malkmus is pissing you off, talking about Pavement holding him back, sounding like he finally believes all the praise he’s earned. True or not, you liked it better when he was just a smartass feeding the press lies. At least Spiral didn’t put his girlfriend in the band.

Spiral’s the one to root for. Even back during the Pavement shows, there were the kids who gathered around Spiral on stage right. While everyone waited for Steve to decide what to play next, they’d shout, "You go ’head. You play what you want, Spiral."

But all that’s bullshit. It’s a band, it’s a show and there obviously ain’t no underdog in sight, as evidenced by all the collegiate-style breasts bopping past your spot at the bar. You’re glad there’s a crowd and you’re glad you stayed behind for Thanksgiving instead of joining the wife’s family at a South Carolina Air Force base to visit brother-in-law Sam before he gets shipped out again to wherever the War on Terror sees fit. (He already did a brief tour in Italy, had a steamy fling with a local bella, didn’t want to come home. War is hell.)

When middle act the Shins takes the stage, things are wrong. You discover what the little brown-haired girls are doing here when they go nuts and sing every song as if it were their favorite. If these girls know who the hell Spiral Stairs is, they certainly don’t care. To bring it all home, someone shouts, "Play the Gilmore Girls song!" and the Shins comply. You stuff your bar receipt into your pocket and you know where you stand. These girls and boys are here to see their favorite new band, and they’re going to hold on to their ticket stubs and put them in a safe place so they can brag to their friends that they were here. You, on the other hand, are here to see your now-defunct favorite band’s lesser-known offshoot, and you’re going to hold on to your ticket stub and keep it in a safe place for the same reason you’re holding on to your bar receipts. It’s tax deductible.

The Shins finish a good set of murky XTC pop and you dig it enough to buy their disc. Then you go outside to smoke cigarettes because you’re way fucking old. When you get back inside, you’re not surprised to find that so is everyone else. The kids saw their band and split. The place is half-full of guys like you.

PSOI comes out and Spiral sings all those songs from the album that you’ve been loving. Sings them in that way where you just know he loves to sing them, wishes he could sing them all night. You only wish more people in the room gave a shit. Everyone’s just standing around. In their defense, their 10-year-old Pavement shirts are probably stiff with dried sweat from wearing them gardening with the wife. (You left yours at home, thankfully.)

The guy next to you is one of the few people in the room who seems into it. Then he elbows your side and says, "I like the girl," directing your attention to the female bass player. He wiggles his eyebrows lasciviously. Fucking ex-A&R dick whose bands all got dropped when Seagram bought everything. You step on someone’s toes trying to put distance between you and this guy. You may ogle children, but you at least have the decency not to try to make people talk to you. You are not one of him.

They play that phenomenal centerpiece of the album, "Encyclopedic Knowledge Of." Spiral falls into that climactic refrain: Yeah we know that you like us. You look around at the stiffs who look just like you and for a second you think he’s being contradicted. But back to the man singing the song, and you know all that underdog shit is just you trying to make tonight matter more than it does. Spiral doesn’t care what else is going on. He’s playing what he wants.