Slint's Spiderland (12 page)

“For Dinner . . .” is so unassuming it threatens to pass by unnoticed. Yet when you consider the long gestation of
Spiderland
, its minimalist nuance gives some indication of where Slint might have been headed had they remained together. Consider the order in which these six songs were written: “Nosferatu Man,” “Good Morning, Captain,” and “Breadcrumb Trail” are the
oldest songs on the album, all dating back to 1988–89. These are, not coincidentally, also
Spiderland
’s most sonically similar tracks. In their quiet/loud formats and storyteller lyrics, these are the most definitively “Slint-like” — the sound one has in mind when describing something that “sounds like Slint.” “Washer” was the next to be written; an early live version dates back to early 1989, though it is far less developed than the other three songs which also appear on bootlegs from this era. This early version of “Washer” is much more rudimentary, moving straight from the main riff to a clear-cut build that lacks any of the finesse of the final version. By the fall of 1990 “Washer” had been ironed out into a vastly more accomplished work.

That leaves “For Dinner . . .” and “Don, Aman,” both of which indicate that Slint was ready to move on to less overtly dynamic material. “Don” was the very last song to come along, but it sprang almost entirely from Walford at the eleventh hour. “For Dinner . . .” was also a recent composition; it was the last song to be written during Slint’s summer of intense practices. Unlike “Don,” the instrumental was worked out by all four members of the group, then arranged by McMahan and Walford.

The subtleties of “For Dinner . . .” might have been a destined direction for Slint, if their post-Slint solo work is any indication. For McMahan in particular, it seems a direct forebear to his later work under the moniker the For Carnation. In his three releases, which
at times included contributions from Pajo (1995’s
Fight Songs
) and Walford (2000’s self-titled full-length), McMahan mined to great effect songs whose drama was earned not by dynamic changes but by nuance and repetition. The roots of For Carnation songs like “Get and Stay Get March” or “Preparing to Receive You” (from
Fight Songs
and 1996’s
Marshmallows
, respectively) can be discerned in “For Dinner . . .” Pajo, too, largely abandoned the obvious dynamics of
Spiderland
in his solo material as M, Aerial M, and Papa M. Aside from “Safeless,” from his debut 7”, Pajo’s moody instrumentals rarely scale such dramatic arcs as so many of the songs on
Spiderland
do.

Of course, neither the For Carnation nor Papa M are Slint. Yet there is still evidence that Slint were more attracted to repetition and a kind of rock minimalism than they were to
Spiderland
-esque rises and falls. Walford, McMahan, and Pajo did briefly reform Slint in 1994 (with Walford’s Evergreen bandmate Tim Ruth rounding things out), coinciding with Touch and Go’s release — finally! — of the “Glenn”/“Rhoda” EP. Unfortunately the reunion didn’t last long, as Walford exited the project early on. During this period of renewed activity, however, the trio worked out a new song, “King’s Approach,” which was not officially recorded but did show up during Slint’s reunion tours in 2005 and 2007. The song, as performed on those tours, is a ten-minute epic instrumental with sudden tempo shifts and slowly unfolding motifs. Though it
hardly resembles the graceful “For Dinner . . .,” it is similarly built around repetition — the song’s middle section stretches out for most of the ten minutes before finally picking up into a fast-paced denouement.

In other words, for anyone who wished Slint might have remained together so as to squeeze out one more “Good Morning, Captain,” it arguably wouldn’t have been in the cards. It’s ironic to think how influential
Spiderland
’s dynamics turned out to be, inspiring younger, less imaginative bands to build their sounds around crescendo after crescendo; meanwhile it seems that by the fall of 1990 Slint had already grasped, first, that
Spiderland
needed songs like “For Dinner . . .” and “Don, Aman” so as not to come off as formulaic; and second, that such peaks and valleys were not what interested them the most. No one affiliated with Slint ever bothered to write another song like “Good Morning, Captain.” After writing a handful of songs of that nature, they seem to have tired of the format before they even entered the studio.

Regardless, “Good Morning, Captain” has become the most widely identified and cherished Slint song. This is due in part to its inclusion on the soundtrack to Larry Clark’s controversial 1995 film
Kids
, which depicted the scandalously irresponsible sex lives of a clutch of unsupervised New York City youngsters. Today both the film and the soundtrack are memorable if not especially influential relics of the mid ’90s. Shocking plot points aside, the titular kids in the film,
all non-actors at the time, carried themselves like an authentic subset of teens of that decade — skaters, slackers, goofs. The music permeating the film matched the sensibilities of post-grunge white kids of the era — hip-hop by the likes of the Beastie Boys, Tribe Called Quest, and Jeru the Damaja, shuffled un-self-consciously with (mostly lo-fi) indie rock. The soundtrack was assembled by Lou Barlow, himself a poster child for underground rock in the ’90s (the guy wrote “Gimme Indie Rock,” after all, on Sebadoh’s 1991 album
III
). In contrast to the actual music in the film, the soundtrack leaned much heavier toward indie rock, especially the music of Barlow’s band with John Davis, Folk Implosion. A lone hip-hop track by unknown duo Lo-Down accompanied two tracks by Daniel Johnston, an old Sebadoh song, eight Folk Implosion songs — and “Good Morning, Captain.”

Ever the band to flirt with obscurity, Slint’s song doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the film; you had to buy the soundtrack to be exposed to it. Fortuitously,
Kids
scored one big hit, Folk Implosion’s “Natural One.” The song made it to #29 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and #4 on its Modern Rock chart. Its ubiquity assured that the soundtrack would sell, and thus “Good Morning, Captain” weaseled its way into the stereos of kids across the country, many of whom, in 1995, were likely still unaware of Slint or
Spiderland
’s existence.

It’s the closest Slint ever came to releasing, in a way, a single — an odd proposition for an album as
inaccessible as
Spiderland
seemed. If ever there were a calling card for the album, however, “Good Morning, Captain” is it. It is the quintessential
Spiderland
song, containing all of the album’s archetypal elements — epic structure, short-story lyrics, mountainous dynamics, an unpredictable and sophisticated arrangement — plus the unique bonus of a totally fulfilling climax. “Good Morning, Captain” brings
Spiderland
full circle, returning to the sonic stylings of the first two tracks, wielding the emotional impact of “Washer,” and finally providing a cathartic release for all the tension that had been building to mostly unsettling conclusions for the rest of the album.

The song tells the story of a stranded seaman trying to find shelter after a storm has taken his ship and his crew. The hobbled captain pleads from outside the front door of a house on the coastline, at first to no answer and later to a child who seems to recognize him but does not let him in, leaving the captain to wail in desperation outside. It has been said that McMahan’s lyrics are a riff on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1797–98 poem
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
. It’s possible that’s true, though the connection is tenuous at best. In Coleridge’s poem, the mariner recounts a sea voyage toward the South Pole. Caught in a horrific storm, the ship is forced further south to escape the foul weather. Though safe from the storm, the ship finds itself trapped among ice floes — until a bird, an albatross, appears from the mist to guide the crew to safety. The
bird stays with the ship for nine days as they head to warmer waters — yet in a sudden and senseless act of violence, the mariner casually shoots it dead. With this act, the ship is cursed. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, now under a burning sun, the winds cease and the ship is left adrift. A skeleton ship approaches and as it passes, the mariner’s shipmates — all 200 of them — drop dead. For seven days the mariner is stranded in the still water with his ship of corpses, until he sees and blesses some ocean creatures, thankful just to see a living thing. With that, the dead crew rises and, as zombies, steer the mariner back to his home. He lives his remaining days telling his ghostly tale to any who will listen.

This is clearly not the plot to “Good Morning, Captain.” Still, one might detect the kernel of the idea for the song, though McMahan’s tale goes far afield. As in the poem, a storm wreaks havoc on a ship in icy waters. But in the Slint song the vessel is lost and the action of the story takes place on land. The content of the song is so far removed from Coleridge’s poem that it’s almost laughable to try and connect the two. However, there is one other surface similarity to the poem — “Good Morning, Captain” is a ghost story, as revealed in the last verse of the song:

From behind the edge of the windowsill there appeared the delicate hand of a child. His face was flushed and
timid. He stared at the captain through frightened eyes. The captain reached for something to hold onto. “Help me,” he whispered, as he rose slowly to his feet. The boy’s face went pale. He recognized the sound. Silently, he pulled down the shade against the shadow lost at the doorstep of the empty house.

The boy is frightened by the captain’s appearance, then is startled to recognize the captain’s voice, at which point he pulls down the window shade and does not open the door. The captain is nothing more than a “shadow” whom the boy fears and rejects. This isn’t the ghost crew of Coleridge’s poem, but a supernatural element is nonetheless implied.

Whether the gloss on
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
is intentional or coincidental, one thing that is clear is how far Slint had come since
Tweez
’s “Darlene,” their first shot at the story-song form. No longer stammering “I knew these two people, a guy and a girl,” Slint were now onto brief encounters, Oedipal vampires, a character study of a paranoid misanthrope, a suicidal lover, and ghostly seafarers. Walford and McMahan had grown confident enough in their writing to introduce multiple characters, subplots, scene-setting, and narrative arcs.

The spoken-word song has a history in rock music that well predates Slint — going back to the Velvet Underground’s story-song “The Gift” from 1968’s
White Light/White Heat
, through (among other examples) Lee Renaldo narrating “In the Kingdom #19” on Sonic Youth’s 1986 album
EVOL
, all the way up to R.E.M.’s “Belong,” from
Out of Time
— released the same month as
Spiderland
in March 1991. In all of those instances the emphasis is weighted toward the words, which aspire to more developed, literary heights than “Breadcrumb Trail”’s undercooked ticket-taker, “Nosferatu Man”’s muddled ending, or the opacity of whatever it is Don “knew what he had to do.” Musically, however, those precedents seem nothing more than cushions on which the words can comfortably rest. “The Gift,” for instance, is basically an eight-minute vamp designed to stay out of the way of the story’s well-crafted build-up and punch line; “In the Kingdom” is noisy and abstract as Renaldo breathlessly narrates; “Belong,” though it contains an identifiable (wordless) chorus, is otherwise monotonous, in service of Michael Stipe’s poem-like lyrics.

Slint’s approach to the relationship between spoken words and music is very different. In the sense that Slint’s songs feel like short stories rather than impressionistic poems, they might be more closely linked to a song like “The Gift.” But there is one crucial difference: Slint’s stories don’t hold up when removed from the music. One could read the words to “The Gift” and get everything that song has to offer, the same way you could choose between pulling a novel from the shelf or downloading an audio book. The
words to “Breadcrumb Trail,” “Nosferatu Man,” and “Good Morning, Captain,” on the other hand, could not be removed from the music of
Spiderland
and feel like well-crafted short stories. Characters are underdeveloped, plots don’t always resolve themselves, even some individual lines that work as shouted lyrics don’t totally make sense as discrete sentences.

Yet the stories on
Spiderland
have the effect of a finely tuned drama. Where songs like “The Gift” or “Belong” are interesting once or twice, they become more and more skippable with subsequent listens due to their monotony. Slint’s fractured storytelling is compelling because the narrative arc is studiously intertwined with music that is anything but monotonous.

The arrangement for “Good Morning, Captain” is Slint at their most confident. Riffs mutate, shuffle, invert, and pound. Unlike many of the other songs on the album, the music is not a manifestation of the words — you don’t intuitively connect “shipwreck” or “stormy weather” to Walford’s rhythms or Pajo and McMahan’s guitars the way “Breadcrumb Trail” mimics its rollercoaster or “Nosferatu Man” implies a gothic creepiness. Rather, the music of “Good Morning, Captain” leads the listener on like a master storyteller. From the quietly picked notes of the intro to the bounding rhythm section in the verses to the following thunderous riffs and oddly paired guitar harmonies, the music teases and distracts all while it lays the foundation for its eventual climax.

More so than any other track, the story of “Good Morning, Captain” is relayed with great patience, which adds to the drama. On each of the first three tracks on
Spiderland
, once the story gets going it really doesn’t stop; whatever musical changes might occur, McMahan or Walford continue to move their plots forward — whispering, speaking, or screaming as needed. In “Good Morning, Captain” McMahan’s words trade off with the music. He metes out a few lines at a time, stepping back to let the guitars flourish for a few bars or for whole passages. These instrumental breaks act as a series of intermissions in McMahan’s story, like the white space on the page at the end of a chapter, allowing you to process what you’ve learned and anticipate what’s to come. Each time McMahan steps back he ends on a line of intrigue that keeps that listener engaged, wondering what will happen next. Take for instance the first verse, in which McMahan sings over just bass and drums: