Pitchfork: It's kind of a Lindsay Lohan thing where you get more famous for going out drunk than for making Mean Girls.
NW: Well, yeah. It's like the fucking indie TMZ or something. It's like all that I've done now up to this point is condensed into YouTube video that shows me soundchecking. I thought it was blown out of proportion.
Frankly, I completely buy Nathan Williams' a.k.a. Wavves explanation for his breakdown at the Primavera Festival - going from playing Little Rock w/ 25 people in the crowd to playing Euro festivals with thousands would probably put the zap on a lot of people, especially in today's internet-fueled era of fame-cycle hypertelescoping. Indeed, I'm shocked that more of these scuzz rock bandits don't go psycho when they hit the medium-time. Just listen to the music: its lo-fi production values no longer signify as we-couldn't-afford-it DIY; fuck, if you've got a MacBook you've got your hands on the means of production to make a semi-professional-sounding recording. Rather, lo-fi is an aesthetic that appears to symbolize intimacy - the ideal is playing basement shows and having your own little slice of the world, and that value system is deeply embedded within the music these bands make. If it's punk - a term so elastic that it no longer has descriptive value, in my book - it's punk in the way that people who make and sell handicrafts at the Artists & Fleas market are punk. Most of these bands (there are counterexamples, e.g., Times New Viking) seem to be opting out, or more precisely, they're opting in by opting out, consciously forming a subculture whose insularity is not a gesture of defiance, but perhaps not a gesture at all. Thus, while anybody who plays music for a living would be inclined to grab for that brass ring of (relative) fame and (relative) fortune, it's not a given that these bands are fundamentally equipped to make the leap. A lot of this music oxidizes upon emerging from the basement. That its practitioners, many cocooned in climate-controlled scenes until someone starts circulating ripped mp3s of their demo cassette, should go a little batshit when confronted with playing to massive crowds of the yet-to-be-converted, if not actively hostile, should not be particularly surprising. The following exchanges say it all:
Pitchfork: If you had your way, would you prefer to be playing warehouse parties instead of big festivals?
NW: Yeah! But then again, it's not that I don't want to play festivals or do stuff like that. It's just, I think, the realization of how big it is maybe overwhelmed me, and I needed to take a step back and see what was in front of me and try and figure it out. Also, I was extremely fucked up and made a series of really bad decisions.
NW: Yeah! But then again, it's not that I don't want to play festivals or do stuff like that. It's just, I think, the realization of how big it is maybe overwhelmed me, and I needed to take a step back and see what was in front of me and try and figure it out. Also, I was extremely fucked up and made a series of really bad decisions.
Pitchfork: Did you ever consider doing Wavves as something where you just recorded and didn't play live?
NW: In the beginning, that's all it was. And everything happened so fast. Ryan came out to play drums a month before I started touring, or a month before we started touring. And then until the day of Barcelona, we were just touring nonstop. So we practiced for three weeks, me and Ryan, and then we went on tour nonstop, so there was never really any time for me to like transfer the songs from recordings to how they would pan out live. And I still haven't had the chance to do that. It was just kind of: "OK, this is how the songs go. Let's just go play them and have fun." And that's when it was the most fun. It just got kind of... I don't know what it got.
NW: In the beginning, that's all it was. And everything happened so fast. Ryan came out to play drums a month before I started touring, or a month before we started touring. And then until the day of Barcelona, we were just touring nonstop. So we practiced for three weeks, me and Ryan, and then we went on tour nonstop, so there was never really any time for me to like transfer the songs from recordings to how they would pan out live. And I still haven't had the chance to do that. It was just kind of: "OK, this is how the songs go. Let's just go play them and have fun." And that's when it was the most fun. It just got kind of... I don't know what it got.
I don't blame Pitchfork for becoming "the fucking indie TMZ," (a bit of an overstatement) much like I don't blame Marlo Stanfield for killing people and putting them in vacant houses; after all, the game's the game. It's not like Williams' breakdown wasn't what passes for news at the just-above-the-gutter indie rock level - what was Pitchfork going to do, not report on it? Turning around and lending a sympathetic ear is all in the game, too, a symbiotic exercise in public self-laceration that presumably benefits not only Pitchfork, which gets to reinforce its image as a leading news source (indeed, we are informed that this interview represents Williams "breaking his silence," as though he were Deep Throat or some shit) while giving Williams a chance to promote his modest career by flogging an upcoming tour and quasi-announcing a new record. Everybody benefits, even when you suspect, especially from Williams' frail, overawed demeanor, they don't.
