Louder Than You Think:
A Lo-Fi History of Gary Young and Pavement
Independent Project Records
Talk about coloring outside the lines. If anybody embodied the willful disregard for playing by the rules and conforming to expectations, it was the mercurial Gary Young, the original drummer for slacker indie heroes Pavement and a wildly unpredictable character, who helped transform Stockton, California, from a musical wasteland into a weird hotbed of lo-fi, free-thinking, abstract artistry. He had his fingers stuck in many graffiti-splattered, underground pies.
Memorialized in an award-winning 2023 documentary film that paints an unkempt portrait of a stoned, untamed, creative soul and captures his mischievous, roguish charm with nostalgic wonder, Young died that same year. Now comes the eclectic soundtrack to the movie, and Young’s restless life for that matter, as the extravagant Louder Than You Think: A Lo-Fi History of Gary Young and Pavement package — accompanied by witty, insightful liner notes, plus lyrics and other informative ephemera — traces his journey from feral hardcore punk and post-punk drifter to spirit animal for one of alternative-rock’s greatest messes and an unexpected post-Pavement revival with Gary Young’s Hospital.
Young’s Fall of Christianity, which sparked the interest of a young Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg, sets off a punk dirty bomb with “Feed ‘Em to the Lions,” a low, growling, nasty piece of work preceded by The Authorities’ cleaner, more urgent “Achtung!” From Hot Spit Dancers, also Young related, comes the racing “Later Than You Think,” a fast, gloriously trashy anthem setting up the return of The Authorities, whose fat and ominous “LSD” is a deliciously wicked bad trip with a noisy background. Contrast all that with three wrenching, squealing 1992 live cuts from Young’s time with Pavement, starting with the raw, chaotic “Baptist Blacktip” and ambling through squirrelly, typically shambolic versions of “Lions” and “Summer Babe.” They embraced the chaos and had fun with it.
Sprinkled throughout, hypnotic, and sometimes warped, drones and trance pieces, such as Edward W. Dahl’s “Wink & a Nod” and a liquid, softly beating “Glacial Victory” by Noah Georgeson, which flowed throughout the film, set darker moods, as does Georgeson’s zombie walk “Dread in a Dreadful Place.” Everything lightens up considerably, however, with Gary Young’s Hospital’s unlikely hit “Plant Man,” a folky, upbeat strum of rough, trippy busking once championed by MTV, and the multi-hued, desert funk of their warm “Birds in Traffic” dancing through a ghost town with the Meat Puppets. Odder still, another outfit associated with Young, the strange and unsettling CRLLL, checks in with the wailing, repetitive “No Sex,” anchored by a deep, pulling bass line and undulating, otherworldly ruffles with a retro sci-fi vibe to them. As strange as it is, it doesn’t feel out of place.
And that’s because there was always a sense that anything could happen with Young and everything in his orbit. Maybe the most surprising track is “Please Be Happy (For Us),” which reunited Young with Spiral Stairs and Stephen Malkmus as Young & Pavement, the three of them pleasantly lost in psychedelic bliss.
It feels like a hippie wake. Somewhere, Young is smiling and probably wondering what all the fuss is about.
