GREAT APES: Ann Don't Cry
💐🚫😪🎸💐
CHRIS: So, Keith, last week you dropped a cover of Erasure’s “A Little Respect” on our readers, and while the recording itself was nothing less than a healing salve that lessened the pain of daily life — with its clownish politicians, terrifying weather, and mankind’s casual saunter toward extermination at the hands of A.I. — the dialog we included with the song raised a few eyebrows. It upset some carts, and frankly, it rattled a few cages. What jostled people, I think, was the little soft shoe we did around the concept of “best,” in the sense of “best song” and “best album,” and specifically how that related to a mostly forgotten 90’s indie rock band called Pavement.
For today’s edition of Great Apes, you decided to cover a tune off of Pavement’s final album, 1999’s Terror Twilight, and one of the first things an observant S.D.I.R. reader will likely notice is that your choice is nowhere to be found in Pavement’s top five Spotify songs, a category that you assigned special significance during that last conversation. Obviously the Great Apes series isn’t now nor has it ever been an assay of popularity — G.A. contains multitudes — but I wonder if you can give us some context for your selection, in particular what makes you gravitate to a song that, at least according to Spotify, is nowhere near Pavement’s best.
KEITH: Well, look, as much as I always want to bring our viewers examples of the very best writing that humankind’s rich songbook offers, I also don’t want to just become one of those wretched souls online who tries to cultivate an audience simply by parroting the most familiar, popular songs in the American Top Forty (our best music). The jukebox cover band is a vermin’s trade, and I’ll leave it to those toiling on TV and radio under the tutelage of the wise and tasteful Simon Cowell.
No, sometimes our job has to be to instruct the audience; to curate. I like to dig around in the bowels of archeological ruins such as Pavement’s Terror Twilight and uncover not only sparkling jewels like “Spit On A Stranger” and “Carrot Rope,” but also the artifacts that have varnished, rusted away, become homes for spiders and scorpions and those centipedes with the outsized mandibles.
So, here’s “Ann Don’t Cry,” a lovely little ditty buried deep in the back half of Pavement’s last act. A cursory glance through Pavement’s career-wide numbers suggests that it is indeed one of Pavement’s worst songs - you have to look to the last few songs on the band’s deliriously overstuffed “Wowee Zowee” to find songs on Pavement’s canon albums with fewer listens. But regardless of his many human failings, Stephen Malkmus is a phenomenal songwriter, and so even his very worst songs can be enjoyed and admired, like a brass handle in the guest bathroom at Angkor Wat.
CHRIS: I forget, do you actually like “Carrot Rope”? It’s got undeniable “last song on the album” energy, but I dig it. It seems to get a bad rap from Pavement fans, even compared to the coinhabitants of Terror Twilight, this band’s least-loved construction. In their review of the 2022 reissue of T.T., which contains like 40 extra tracks, Rollingstone wrote, “‘Carrot Rope,’… remains terrible, and the tossed-off-sounding previously unreleased ‘Be the Hook’ absolutely should have replaced it.” This strikes me as quintessential beef-witted Rollingstone, since “Be the Hook” is a wet fart of a song… but are they getting at something essential about “Carrot Rope”? Does it actually suck? In my nostalgia-soaked memories surrounding Terror Twilight — you purchasing it at San Francisco’s Sony Metreon mall, where we’d hang out almost daily when we first moved to the city and were still couch surfing, then listening to it on repeat in your Nissan Pathfinder, the other place we were allowed to hang out during daylight hours — I remember loving every track. Am I deluded? Was “Carrot Rope” a skipper??
KEITH: Oh, yeah, I love “Carrot Rope.” I guess I can understand why the sort of Pavement heads who revere the early stuff consider it the apotheosis of the band’s fall from grace. It’s got a big old hook for a chorus, catchy sing-song melodies throughout, and a fairly conventional structure , as far as Pavement songs go — verse/pre/chorus/verse/pre/chorus, although they pointedly fade out on a meandering solo, rather than succumb to the puerile third chorus, which they likely think is best left to the likes of Stone Temple Pilots. They’re right, of course, but I mean that as the highest complement to STP.
I think what the great Pavement acolytes seem to dislike most about Terror Twilight is that it’s the least bristly of all of the Pavement records. It sounds pleasant, expertly recorded as it was by Nigel Godrich, Radiohead’s go-to producer, back before he followed that band down their own dark path. Malkmus and Spiral Stairs seem to both be trying to sing a little less like injured animals than is usual for them. The jams feel more coherent, as they they’d actually been — gasp! — arranged, beforehand. “Carrot Rope” isn’t my *favorite* song on the album — that’d be “Spit on a Stranger,” or maybe “Major Leagues.” Or it could be “You Are A Light,” or “The Hexx.” Or, maybe it’s good old “Ann Don’t Cry.”
CHRIS: I have a counterfactual for you to consider. As reported in (among other places) Washington Post’s 2022 review of the reissue, Nigel Godrich favored a more difficult track-listing for Terror Twilight, one that would start with “Platform Blues” and “The Hexx,” banish “Spit on a Stranger” all the way to the end, and — coming to the point now — slot “Ann Don’t Cry” in at #5 (“You Are a Light” was 3rd; “Cream of Gold” 4th). Guitarist Scott Kannberg (aka Spiral Stairs) vehemently opposed this version, which he thought was too recondite for a record that had cost the band way more money to record than any previous one, and kinda needed to be a hit. Many years later, though, Kannberg had come around to Godrich’s view, and the producer’s song order is used for the re-issue.
So the question is this: considering how important track placement can be for a song’s longterm popularity — lots of people listen to the first few tunes and then switch to Drake when they get bored — if “A.D.C.” had been track 5, arriving much earlier than the melodic peaks of “Spit on a Stranger” and “Major Leagues,” would it now be a big hit for Pavement? Could it have saved the album?? Might Pavement, encouraged by intoxicating new heights of success, have stuck together, ultimately outlasting even Pearl Jam???
KEITH: That sounds like just the sort of bad idea that Colin Greenwood might have fed to poor, gullible Godrich as a prank. Thank god that Spiral Stairs, a man whose pop acumen was behind such songs as “Hit The Plane Down,” was there to re-direct!
Look, would “Ann Don’t Cry” have more listens if it were higher up in the tracklist? Sure, oh sure. That’s just good ol’ inertia working for you. People could have stumbled upon it two songs earlier and, perhaps, relished it. But the fact of the matter is that it still would have come later than “Platform Blues,” which is the moment when the album begins to shed Spotify audience interest. In fact, the whole ALBUM would have been after “Platform Blues”! Terror Twilight would probably have a total of like 23 listens, if Godrich had had his way with the tracklisting!
We gotta figure out what’s going on with “The Hexx,” though. How does a non-single generate such 11th-hour enthusiasm, bumping listenership by four times what its predecessor “Speak, See, Remember” sports. Was it in a Skittles commercial or something?
CHRIS: Very strange, although the story seems to be about more than just “The Hexx” and “Speak, See, Remember,” since after “The Hexx” (2.4M), “Carrot Rope” jumps all the way up to 2.8M (allaying my fears about that song’s approval rating among Pavement fans, I guess). And the doldrums extend from track 6 (“Platform Blues”) all the way to track 9 (“Speak, See, Remember”), enveloping poor, innocent “Ann Don’t Cry.” Is it possible that “Platform Blues” causes roughly 80% of listeners to spam the “next” button in disgust, resulting in (a weirdly precise) four skipped songs, at which point they pick back up, happy enough, with “The Hexx”? Does this mean that a big percentage of our readers, even the Pavement fans among them, have never heard “Ann Don’t Cry”?? Today’s a big day!
KEITH: Well, “Carrot Rope” was a single, you see, so all bets are off, numbers-wise. It was released as a single in the UK, and was apparently Pavement’s highest-ever charting song (#27 😢).
You’ll recall how on our first couple of albums, we had to write and record a whole hunk of b-sides, because every British single had to have at least two b-sides, and sometimes we released two or three different versions of each single, so they needed to have different b-sides, and then we also RE-released songs as singles with new b-sides, so that, despite having only actually released three individual songs as singles, we easily wound up with enough b-sides for the 15-song compilation Crap Attack? Well, yeah, Pavement did one (ONE, the lasy bastards!) of those for “Carrot Rope,” and guess what song was the lead b-side on that single? “Harness Your Hopes,” Pavement’s best (ie, most-listened-to) song, the one that started this whole Pavement conversation.
CHRIS: 🤯 Mystery solved. Or at least “path followed until it circled back on itself,” which is the lazy TV writer’s equivalent of “mystery solved.” Well, may “This Means War” never get upvoted to the top of our Spotify rankings. I suppose I’d be about as glum as Steven Malkmus seemed when I recently caught a Pavement reunion show.
Having trouble making out the lyrics to “Ann Don’t Cry” when you listen to Keith’s cover version? Steven Malkmus is a famously marble-mouthed singer, so our guy Keith probably had no idea what the original words were. Here’s our best-guess transcription of what he ended up singing in the above recording. This should help you sing along, if that’s your thing.
ANN DON’T CRY, by Pavement
(Keith Murray cover version)
“That damn itch aspen, Don,”
I.M. Gna, half in fun enema
Dude, whatcha doin’?
Ya try whatcha get.
When ya see the lie,
Calm down, aw, Seth
— my ho —
ain’t a wonderful house-builder man
We got Rumsta Liv, Rumta LeVin, Rumta GIF
but no Rumta Givon
“But Geneva hat,” I chants
“Noia ‘neva hat,” I chants
To those are buff
Take a south
Bro us down
Shover south
Wig it down
So-so, hog
Butch, your vocals did play
Ka(me)afka
Cold colt buoy with American hot
Gun runnin’
En la coupe, les chats (again)
But, and: don’t chuck rye
Don’t chuck rye, and…
Don’t chuck rye
Don’t chuck rye
And: don’t chuck rye
Don’t chuck rye, and…
Don’t chuck rye
Don’t chuck rye
Well, my, “hot” is not a wide-opined thing
Ah, no!
They’re a sadly naughty lot, Toussaint
Set the Metter-Inner — fife laws rends
De Gaulle, de Gaulle
Tine-tied tight tooth attracts
Je suis même: Boeur-le-Fax
Re-peat and till your onion-y ground again
But, and: don’t chuck rye
Don’t chuck rye, and…
Don’t chuck rye
Don’t chuck rye
And: don’t chuck rye
Don’t chuck rye, and…
Don’t chuck rye
Don’t chuck rye
Tier N
Don’t chew craw for 7-Eleven
Tape you away
Don’t chew craw for 7-Eleven
Don’t chew craw for 7-Eleven
Don’t chew leaf, fin, what they say, hey hey?
Leaf, fin, what they say, hey hey?
Leaf, fin, what they…
Leaf, fin, what they…
Leaf, fin, what they say
Báhn mì, sweet
Swede aunt
Oi! Mate…
Oi, Nicky Harfield, mate… big, huge thanks, Nicky. Nobody ever needed a beer worse than we did last week after watching the incoherent, asinine Fast X, and your paid subscription footed the bill for a couple of beauties. Three, actually!
Readers of Slow Descent Into Radness will know that we’ve very rarely gated posts in the past, leaving paid subscription to those Samaritans who want to help foot our monstrous monthly bar tab. In the near future we’re going to begin rewarding these kind souls with more than just our inebriation — we’ll be giving them some exclusive fruits of our inebriation. More on that soon.
Cheers to all of you for joining us on this terrifying Descent.
🍺🍺🍺,
Chris & Keith
Waiting on the great apes album...🤞
Steve had a B-side called Sin Taxi, and while it’s not technically Pavement I still consider it my favorite Pavement Song.